Thread by @MarkOneinFour

I think there's a couple of things here. If your history goes working class, then parents not, then you not, it doesn't necessarily follow you are more secure than your parents. Or that you have joined a settled, middle class world. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

I'll be the first to say that I don't really 'get' middle class people. I really don't. So I'm just guessing about their motivations. Access to capital is for me one of the big things where class is a divider when young, but sometimes less so when people are my parents age

When I was in my 20s I couldn't understand where people of a similar ages money came from. There was a similar perplexity at my lack of it. I went from working in social care to university with no saving and stuff. But even then my dad, who was unemployed paid my rent for a year

Friends of my dad had things like caravans after working their lives in the brewery. Nice houses, too. But that wasn't the same as middle class people's houses.

The things I really don't get about middle class people are my own little bag of prejudices: the idea that sex and drugs and drink and hedonism are somehow daring and a path to personal discovery. The idea everyone knows a bit of French. Idea there is a common corpus of knowledge

I think the biggest thing I don't get is the middle class thing of assuming that there is a safe, honest, respectable world and a dangerous, murky, disturbing world and that those worlds are easily divisible and any experience of the murky world is an incursion

I always say 'we're only ever a couple of bad days away from being on Jeremy Kyle' and I mean it. The family, friendship and where you grew up links with the side of life that middle class people cast judgement upon is a real thing. And it's not exceptional, or often noteworthy

I think the the thing that I most don't get is the lack of stories about an extended community. That middle class people didn't grow up knowing who the local families were, didn't grow up knowing who was such and suches mam or cousin. That they do gossip wrong.

And if you're working class, you know what 'families' mean. And it's not what you've just assumed if you're a middle class person reading this.

And the biggest thing I've noticed is that middle class people never ask me what it was like growing up but working class people do. And then we tell stories about school and work and places we've lived and people we knew and knew of.

The other big thing I've noticed is that anything I say about the relationship between me and being working class is always taken as an analysis of class relations and thus open to debate, rather than my own perspective from within a set of experiences and relations

Allied to that is the assumption that 'growing up working class' just means 'growing up in a working class family' rather than growing up in a working class world. I'm not just talking about me and my family. It's the whole sum of place, time, people, economic and social life

What I mean when I say 'I don't understand middle class people' is I don't understand the world you grew up in and internal world it shaped for you. I don't understand how the world around you shaped how you feel in the world. I get hints from books and reading, but it's opaque

I come from a different place and a different way of being in the world. I won't grow into an middle class person if you just nurture me. But when I suggest I don't understand middle class people it's like I have revealed a prejudice or am just showing off.

Also, whenever I say working class, it's assumed I am deploying a blunt, lumpen rhetorical device, and that any thinking about class from someone who is working class must be blinkered and rough hewn. My understanding of working class is intersectional, does include diversity

Me being working class isn't a political position, it's a description of a particular set of social and economic conditions that create a cultural identity of breath taking range and diversity. Why would you assume I don't know people differ from each other?