I'm sitting here weighing the idea that you could get rid of a lot of what's toxic about the word "working-class" (as well as misleading, hypocritical, inconsistent, etc.) in ordinary discourse by just committing to saying "poor" instead
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It's just really grating hearing about "the working class" to refer to people who own giant ranch houses and huge pickup trucks and a whole arsenal and so forth, and who turn out to own businesses and have employees Over and over and over again
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I understand that nowadays what a lot of people mean by "working-class" is just a set of cultural stereotypes, nothing more So just say "poor" instead -- if you actually care about helping people then "poor" is the important thing
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("Middle-class" is a million times worse but we've already beaten that conversation to death)
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(The worst thing about Chris Arnade's "front-row-kids vs back-row-kids" thing is anything actually worthwhile about this discourse could be completely replaced by "rich vs poor" To the extent "FRK vs BRK" means anything *more* than "rich vs poor", it is garbage)
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(And like Arnade is actually trying to stretch the bullshit cultural connotation stuff BEYOND where it was with "working-class" Few people could possibly defend the idea that Donald Trump has ever actually been working-class but he "feels working-class" as a "back-row kid")
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End of conversation
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Working class has a pretty specific meaning in the context of UK society as well. I’m not sure it maps well to other English-speaking localities.
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Like, in the UK it really doesn’t mean Poor (though is often correlated with it), but rather it’s an actual cultural subdivision which people will and are actively prejudiced over.
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