Bill Haley and Elvis Presley at the Brooklyn High School Auditorium, Cleveland, Ohio, October 20, 1955. Wikicommons/Disc Jockey Tommy Edwards.Some rights reserved.“We tend to associate racist and sexist attitudes with uneducated, low-income working class people”
I was shocked to find this statement in the printed version of an LSE seminar paper by a London University Academic. I should not have been. The view it expresses has preoccupied Left commentary on the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as US President.
In the British case, the working class – here the “uneducated low-income working class people” – whose conduct is to be explained is normally implicitly white while, in the American case, commentators refer explicitly to the white working class. After a flurry of efforts to explain Britain's Brexit vote and Trump's election in terms of working class disaffection from mainstream politics, and particularly from what many commentators still view as “progressive” political parties, more-informed commentators pointed out that the LEAVE victory was not simply down to the working class while others (eg Hsia-Hung-Pai openDemocracy 11 July 2016) insisted that the British working class was not entirely white.
