Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self
So why do so many people from privileged class backgrounds misidentify their origins in this way? In this article we probe this apparent contradiction by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile.3 We find that the main source of such misidentification is elaborate ‘origin stories’ that these interviewees tell when asked about their class backgrounds. These accounts tend to downplay important aspects of their own, privileged, upbringings and instead emphasise affinities to working-class extended family histories. Drawing from social psychology, we explain this as the expression of a distinctly ‘intergenerational self’ anchored as much by one’s place in a familial history as their own personal past.
This intergenerational self partially reflects both ‘real’ relational differences in privilege and the experience of multigenerational upward mobility. However, our findings indicate that it also acts as a means to deflect class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we argue that these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their own achievements as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectories.
Interesting article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038038520982225
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