In the time that I’ve spent writing and publicly speaking about race, I’ve become familiar with one particular question. ‘What about class?’ It’s a question that follows me everywhere I go. In it is an implication that it’s class, not race, that is the true battle to be fought in Britain – and that we have to choose between one or the other. I totally reject this assumption. But I’m going to try and answer the question. What about class? And how does it relate to race – if it does at all?
In Britain, class is integral to how we understand our own position in society. Since the Victorian times, we have confined ourselves to one of three categories – working class, middle class, or upper class. We’ve understood class in a Marxist fashion, using a person’s relationship to the means of production as a defining factor. The saying goes that if you’re paid by the hour and you rent your home, then you’re working class, and if you’re paid monthly and you own your home, you’re middle class. But we no longer have a country full of factories, mines and mills with rigid structures of workers and bosses. I grew up in a generation defined by watching people older than me benefit from seemingly endless credit, so the demarcation between rich and poor was hard to spot. By the time I was twelve, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he wanted to see 50 per cent of young adults in higher education by the year 2010. Going to university was no longer a clear indication of class. In my generation, your first job was likely to be on a shop floor, in catering, or in a call centre. The language of blue-collar and white-collar workers never really resonated. Post-2008 recession, these categories have become even more blurred as job security for most became a dream rather than a reality.
Because we are a nation that loves to think of itself as the underdog, it wasn’t surprising that a 2016 British Social Attitudes survey found that 60 per cent of the British public identifies as working class. The most interesting part of the survey was that 47 per cent of those who considered themselves working class were actually in managerial and professional jobs – hardly working class at all. In its analysis of the numbers, the survey called this identification the ‘working class of the mind’. And although there was no breakdown of survey respondents by racial demographics, those who identified as working class but were in middle-class jobs were more likely to have anti-immigrant politics.1 When people ask me ‘what about class?’ when I talk about race, I can’t help but wonder if they’re not really talking about money, but instead a particular mindset.
One of the most successful and vigorous studies on class in recent years was the Great British Class Survey, commissioned by the BBC. Around 160,000 people took part. The results, published in 2013, revealed there were not just three classes, but seven. The elite are the wealthiest people in the country, scoring highest economically, socially and culturally. The established middle class are the next wealthiest. They love culture. They’re followed by the technical middle class, who have money, but are not very social. New affluent workers score middle-wise on income but high on socialising and culture. They’re coming from working-class backgrounds, and are less likely to have gone to university. The traditional working class are, on average, the oldest group. Emergent service workers lag behind them in terms of financial security. Lastly, there’s the precariat – the most deprived group.2
Unlike many other class surveys, the BBC’s collected information on the race of its participants. You’ll find most people of colour in the emergent service workers’ group, making up 21 per cent of it. We’re also over twice as likely to be found in the emergent service workers’ group than in the traditional working-class group. And materially, we are actually poorer. I say ‘we’, because according to the calculator, I am an emergent service worker, along with 19 per cent of the population. We tend to be young, and we live in urban areas. A lot of us aren’t white. We have high cultural and social capital, but barely any economic capital. Our income averages at around ￡21,000. That’s higher than the traditional working class, who tend to be living in post-industrial areas of England. They are much more likely to own their own home, and have more money in savings than my group. The Great British Class Survey report concluded that emergent service workers – arts and humanities graduates doing bar work, or working in call centres – are the children of the traditional working class. My guess is that they’re also the children of immigrants.
This information suggests that it’s not as simple or binary as choosing between race and class when thinking about structural inequalities. Not only does the three-tiered class hierarchy no longer really exist, but it looks like existing race inequalities are compounded rather than erased by class inequalities. In the wake of the 2015 summer budget, analysis from race equality think tank the Runnymede Trust found that 4 million black and minority ethnic people would be worse off as a result of it, that BME people were over-represented in areas hit by the budget, and that race inequality will worsen over time because of it. The reality is, if you are born not white in this country, you probably haven’t been born into wealth. Research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that black and minority ethnic people are much more likely to live in income poverty than their white counterparts. At the time of their research, the foundation found that just 20 per cent of white Brits were living in income poverty, in drastic comparison to 30 per cent of black Caribbeans, 45 per cent of black Africans, 55 per cent of Pakistanis and 65 per cent of Bangladeshis. The report also found that a disturbing 50 per cent of black and minority ethnic children were living in poverty.3
But that Joseph Rowntree report was published in 2007. Looking at census data provides a more long-term analysis of race and poverty in Britain. Published in 2014, analysis from the 2011 census focused on race and the labour market found that black men aged between 16 to 64 have the highest unemployment rates in the country, and that black women are more likely to be unemployed than white women. When it comes to the type of work that people in Britain are doing, the evidence again correlates along race lines. Pakistani, black African and Bangladeshi men are the most likely to work in low-skilled (and low-paid) jobs. According to the census, low-skilled jobs include admin, care work, sales and customer service, and operating machines. Asian people are concentrated in sectors like accommodation, food and retail, whereas BME women are concentrated in health and social work (meaning that when these public services face government cuts, black women feel it especially hard). Pakistani and Indian men can be found in the wholesale, retail and mechanics sectors.4 These are not exactly middle-class jobs.
These are the objective figures. They suggest that many consider their class to be about their preferred culture and politics, rather than their relationship to assets and wealth. Unlike race and racism, it is generally accepted in Britain your class can either positively or negatively affect your lot in life. But race is rarely brought into the analysis. Instead, when we think about inequality, we are encouraged to think of both race and class as distinct and separate. They’re not.