Class, consumption and prejudice: contemporary representations of

‘the social scum’

Dr Tracy Shildrick, Prof. Robert MacDonald

(University of Teesside) & Dr. Colin Webster (Leeds Metropolitan University)T.A.Shildrick@tees.ac.uk(Work in progress)

Aims

To think critically about contemporary representations of the poor – particularly the young & poor – in popular media & social science

To argue that talk of ‘chavs’ & ‘charvers’ is a loud, late modern echo of age-old rhetorics of the undeserving poor

To interrogate this talk & reflect on the meaning & consequence of this form of class prejudice

[Work in progress!]

A clamour of hostile words…

Explosion of mass media reference to ‘chavs’; since the early 2000s

Hayward and Yar (2006): ‘virtually zero’ references in UK national newspapers 1995-2003, yet 946 during 2004-5 alone.

‘Chav’ now a familiar & ‘amusing’ cultural

common-place in everyday parlance (middle-class dinner parties, sociological conference conversations)

www.chavscum.com

(Notorious) champion & purveyor of talk/ imagery about ‘chavs’ (followed by ‘chav towns’, ‘chav test’, ‘top ten chavs’ web-sites etc.)

Documents ‘the burgeoning peasant underclass’; foul-mouthed vitriol; photographs of strangers posted for the disgusted vilification of blog participants

The polar opposite of the mutual Respect called for by Sennett (2003)

What does it mean?

Offensive, discriminatory language depicting poor people……defined as/ targeted on: Appearance/ stylistic consumption (tracksuits, trainers,

hoodies, ‘bling’ jewellery, cosmetics, branded drinks, etc)

Council housing Welfare dependency/ criminality/ irresponsible

parenting Youth

Popular, very new labelling of young, white, working-class people at the social/ economic margins (…with more to follow on the ‘racial’ aspects of representation)

Etymology & usage

(Non-definitive); Romany roots – ‘child’ (or ‘friend’?), also local/ regional counter-explanations, synonyms (‘pikey’, ‘ned’, ‘scally’) & variations

‘Charver’ (Tyneside/ NE England) & ‘Chore’ (Hartlepool/ Teesside) longer-standing & more prevalent usage (than ‘Chav’)

A history of respectable fears

Obviously, clear echoes of historic, recurrent designations of ‘undeserving poor’, back to 19th C. and before.

‘The “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of society…’ (Marx and Engels, 1977:47).

Consumption & (classed) identities

Hayward and Yar (2006): ‘chav represents a popular reconfiguration of the underclass idea’

‘Excessive participation’ in ‘aesthetically

impoverished’ consumption - not marginality to production (work) – becomes the target for class ire

[Not in absolute agreement]

Hayward and Yar (2006)

‘…the chav phenomenon partakes of a social process in which consumption, identity, marginality & social control converge; consumption practices now serve as the locus around which exclusion is configured and the excluded are classified, identified and subjected to (increasingly intense) regimes of management’.

‘…regimes of management’: an example

Policing the ‘usual suspects’ (McAra and McVie, 2005); policing the ‘irrelevant’ (Loftus, 2007)

Stops, arrests & conviction rates reflect ‘form’ & availability for arrest

But also subjective, class-based distinctions (by officers) between the ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’

(Possibly) on the basis of dress, demeanour, embodied, physical appearance.

Researching & representing ‘chavs/ charvers’

Common self-censuring of discriminatory language & general avoidance of ‘victim-blaming’ in contemporary UK academia

…in respect of ‘race’/ ethnicity, gender, sexuality, dis-ability

Yet some apparent willingness to employ ‘classist’ terminology & representations…

Examples from youth studies…

McCulloch et al, 2006Journal of Youth Studies Qualitative research: youth cultural divisions in

Edinburgh & Newcastle (45 interviews). 4 categories: ‘Goths’, ‘Skaters’, ‘Chavs/ Charvas/ Neds’, ‘Others’

‘Chav, Ned and Charva are uniquely…& interchangeably used as “othering” labels & only rarely as a self-identifying label…[they] did not associate themselves with the name and did not feel they were one homogeneous group’ (p.547-8).

McCulloch et al (cont): charvas… i.e. quite different epistemological status to

this one category

‘Tony (Charva):[referring to charva] It’s what more posh people use to try and describe thugs and that’ (p.552).

Rather, highly localised, neighbourhood-based names, territoriality & rivalries within this externally labelled ‘sub-culture’ (cf: MacDonald & Marsh, 2005).

McCulloch et al (cont): charvas… Street leisure & neighbourhood-based

socialising Predominantly unemployed Lower social class (by parental occupation) Council estate housing/ labelled

neighbourhoods Strongly social division between Charvas &

all other categories Impossibility of young person electing for this

strongly-class based identity, from outside class base (unlike other groups)

Shildrick (2006) Young

Youth cultural divisions & illicit drug use Hartlepool, NE England Qualitative interviews, 76 16-26 year olds 3 ‘youth cultural groupings’:

‘Spectaculars’: i.e. clearly expressed/ named sub-cultural styles, Goths & Punks

‘Ordinary youth’: self-defined, ‘normal’ majority

‘Trackers’: defined by others as ‘chores’, Hartlepool-specific (?) variant of charver

Shildrick (cont)

Very similar to McCulloch et al’s findings (about form & content of youth cultural division);

Shildrick adds differences in drug-using behaviour as further typological element

But politics/ ethics of academic representation: why persist with universally pejorative labelling?

‘Chores’ renamed neutrally by Shildrick (as ‘trackers’)

Anoop Nayak Race, Place & Globalization (2004)

Strong, sophisticated contribution to contemporary youth studies

Valuably situating questions of cultural (& ethnic) identity in historic context of unequal life conditions & youth transitions in a post-industrial city in NE England

Three main youth cultural forms: [‘Real Geordies’] [‘White Wannabes’] ‘Charver Kids’…

Nayak: the symbolic violence of class Economically marginal, socially excluded Again, street-based & neighbourhood

socialising, plus illegal rave/ techno scene But, claims some self-identification with label Embodied styles/ habitus of ‘hard

masculinity’ & association with criminality, violence, disorder, the underclass

Nayak clearly identifies symbolic violence of class prejudice in popular, discursive representations of this group

Nayak: blurring representations with reality?

‘Like many minority ethnic groups before them, charvers were associated with street crime, disease, drugs, over-breeding (many came from large families) and the seedy underbelly of the “black economy”’(2006:824).

i.e., associated with in the narratives of other young people (we think), but, difficult to identify where discursive analysis/ critique finishes & ethnographic description starts

Nayak: charvers from a distance

‘If the postures of Charver Kids are “ape-like” and pronounced, other body-reflexive practices such as smoking, spitting, wearing loudly and drinking alcohol from bottles and cans in public further served to authenticate their “roughness”’ (2006: 823).

Much on how they are seen & what they allegedly do but (virtually) nothing of what they say, or think, directly.

‘White trash’, poor places & the new snobbery

The tools & targets of moral censure may have changed since the 19th C. – ASBOs & council estate residents – but similar themes show themselves (Hughes, 2007) e.g. the prejudice that character can be

read from appearance; facial (and racial) features

‘Stigmata of degeneration’ define the poor, ‘the social scum’, ‘the unfit’ & ‘criminals’ as belonging to an inferior race (Webster, 2007).

The racialisation of poor whites Poor whites as repositories of racism – but

also themselves racialised (Collins, 2004: Webster, 2007).

US & UK ethnographies show white intra-ethnic fears about maintaining ‘respectability’

Council estates as ‘dumping grounds’ for ‘the social scum’: key signifier of poverty

Hanley, Estates (2007:14-15)

‘Estates are dangerous, they imply: don’t visit them, and whatever you do, work as hard as you can so you don’t have to live on them. All the people who live on estates are failures, and failure is not only contagious but morally repugnant… …that’s what they’re for: to contain the undeserving, un-useful poor. If the feckless poor did not exist, neither would council estates’.

Summary & conclusions ‘Chav’ & ‘charver’ examples of age-old

vilifications of the ‘undeserving’ poor

‘…though the term chav/a now circulates widely in Britain as a term of disgust and contempt, it is imposed on people rather than being claimed by them’ (Lawler, 2005:802)

Recent youth studies identify currency of terminology and existence of some sorts of cultural/ social phenomena to which this refers

Summary & conclusions In otherwise sophisticated analyses, some

come close to repeating/reinforcing moral, class stereotyping

…partly because of the comparative paucity in youth cultural studies of ethnographic ‘thick description’ of poor(est) white young people (Shildrick & MacDonald, 2007)

(see Archer et al, 2007, for a more careful analysis of ‘working-class young people’s style, identity & educational engagement’)

To finish… Youth & the burden of representations (Ball

et al, 2000; Griffin, 1993; Pearson, 1983)

Lister (2004:115): ‘the responsibility of those who research and write about poverty to use language that is respectful and “less distancing”’.

In other words, to paraphrase Sennett (2003:3), to treat people though they matter, with respect

References Archer, L., Hollingworth, S., and Halsall, A. (2007)’”University's not for me – I’m a

Nike person”: urban, working-class young people’s negotiation of “style”, identity and educational engagement’, Sociology, 41, 2: 219-238.

Ball, S., Maguire, M. and Macrae, S. (2000) Choice, Pathways and Transitions Post-16: New Youth, New Economies in the Global City, London: Routledge/ Falmer.

Bromley, S. (2002) ‘In the name of the Charver’, Leeds University, Department of English, www.sarahbromley.co.uk/scally/academic.html (accessed 19/03/07):

Collins, M (2004) The Likes of Us: A biography of the white working class, London: Granta

Griffin, C. (1993) Representations of Youth, Cambridge: Polity Press. Harris, J. (2007) ‘So now we’ve finally got our very own white trash’, The Guardian,

6th March. Hayward, K. and Yar, M (2006) ‘The ‘Chav’ Phenomenon: Consumption, Media and

the Construction of a New Underclass’ in Crime, Media, Culture Hanley, L. (2007) Estates Hughes, G. The Politics of Crime and Community Basingstoke: Palgrave Lawler, S. (2005) ‘Introduction’, special issue on Class, Culture & Identity, Sociology,

39, 5: 797-806.

References Lister, R. (2004) Poverty Oxford: Polity. Loftus, B (2007) ‘Policing the “irrelevant”: class, diversity and

contemporary police culture’, in O’Neill, M. et al (eds.) Police and Occupational Culture, Oxford: Elsevier.

MacDonald, R., and Marsh, J. (2005) Disconnected Youth? Growing up in Britain’s Poor Neighbourhoods, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Marx. K. & Engels, F. (1977/ 1848) Manifesto of the Communist Party, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

McAra, L., and McVie, S. (2005) ‘The usual suspects? Street-life, young people and the police’ in Criminal Justice, 5, 1: 5-36.

McCulloch, K., Stewart, A., and Lovegreen, N. (2006) ‘“We just hang out together: youth cultures and social class’, in Journal of Youth Studies, 9, 5: 539-556.

Morris, L. (1994) ‘The Dangerous Classes: the ‘underclass and social citizenship’ London, Routledge.

Nayak, A. (2004) Race, Place and Globalization, Oxford: Berg. -- (2006) ‘Displaced Masculinities: Chavs, Youth and Class in the

Post-industrial City’, in Sociology, 40, 5: 813-831.

References Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, London:

Macmillan. Sennett, R. and Cobb, J. ‘The Hidden Injuries of Class’ Cambridge

University Press. Sennett, R. (2003) Respect: the formation of character in an age of inequality, London: Penguin

Shildrick, T. (2006) ‘Youth Culture, Subculture and the Importance of Neighbourhood’ in Young Vol. 14, no. 1.

Shildrick, T. and MacDonald, R. (2006) ‘In defence of subculture: young people, leisure and social divisions’, Journal of Youth Studies, Vol 9, No. 2.

Webster, C. (2007) Understanding Race and Crime, Buckinghamshire, Open University Press.

Webster, C., Simpson, D., MacDonald, R., Abbas, A., Cieslik, M., Shildrick, T., and Simpson, M., (2004) Poor Transitions, Bristol: Policy Press.