Read on Twitter
Did I just see what I saw? There is now a *White Working Class Writers Guild* group on Twitter?
I think we all need to talk. You see many of us ordinary folks, and many academics have been trying to shout down lie that has been told that the working class experience in UK is singularly White. It is a lie so ingrained in the arts that we’ve not challenged or interrogated it.
Mostly I’m sad. It s lie that has been at heart of racial and cultural divides in this country for too long. The poorest and most neglected areas of of this country also tend to boast the most diversity. Families of immigrants and refugees are almost entirely working class.
So many people in industry talk about working classes and conflate that with Whiteness, and everyone just nods. So much of the time, Black working class people are simply left out of the conversation, and if their poverty can’t be directly linked to crime, it doesn’t matter.
This is not how so much of country operates outside of arts. There is so much solidarity in communities of working class people, and although so much of that commonality had been destroyed by right wing press, there is still people working, living, loving against the same odds.
Immigrant class, working class, care system class, spent most adult life on benefits class, accruing debt class, no chance of owning a home class - and Black. Are our imaginations so limited that we can’t imagine that? Of course this is anger distorted - again - but at what cost?
And yes there are many of Black community that aren’t working class - that convo needs to be had too. But really? Your Whiteness is not what makes your experience unique. It is the inability to see how successive gov’ts have used that to beat you and beat Black people same way.
And frankly for this country to accept Black middle-classes, it would have to see Black wealth and success as viable and possible beyond the famous and extraordinary...I digress...
I am sad but not surprised. Please writers, creatives, workers in theatre let’s have the conversation. This is not about agreeing on what particular barriers we all might face, or shutting it down, this is about not buying into the hate hype. Truly divide and conquer vibes. Fark!
So will all artists or work callouts be followed by posts like this?...
The other day I asked a room zoom of people a difficult question about who gains from current system - now I ask how people have made insinuations, if not clear statements, that people have got work/commissions because they’re Black? Or questioned their class status? Honestly...
When I was invited to be on a panel last year to talk about being a working class artist, I truly cried after. It was the first time I had ever been invited to anything to do with class in theatre. It was the first time someone bothered to look beyond how I speak. First time.
