Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 35

Class has become an increasingly marginalized explanation for inequality. Social policy is more likely to use concepts like ‘social exclusion’ in preference to ‘class’ to describe the persistence of intergenerational poverty. Social exclusion implies that inequality is not structural and persistent, woven into the very fabric of society, but personal and redeemable. Social exclusion can be overcome by increasing social networks or getting back to work (no matter how poorly paid and tedious); governments can do things to encourage social inclusion – like forcing people to go to work by cutting welfare benefits – but ultimately it is the personal responsibility of excluded individuals to take the initiative and become socially included, or so the argument goes.

In this post-class discourse, class is reduced to an economic category and is talked about in terms of ‘poverty’ or ‘income levels’, both terms that elide the structures that produce class. Despite their limitations, documenting the impact of poverty on children’s lives is important to establishing the continued salience of class to life chances in every country in the world. In developing countries over eight million children under the age of 5 die each year from preventable causes including malnutrition, pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles and malaria (Pemberton et al. 2012: 19). These deaths are directly linked to poverty. One third of children globally live in houses with more than five people per room and with mud floors. Just over one in four (27 per cent) have no toilet facilities and nearly one in five (19 per cent) only have access to unsafe, open water sources (Pemberton et al. 2012).

Class clearly structures life chances, as the statistics cited above show, but explanations for class inequality and the effects of class inequality are lived out in the lives of racialized and gendered subjects (Bettie 2003). Clearly class does not always map onto race, and certainly it does not map onto gender: to put it simply, not all working-class people are Black and not all whites are middle class. Nonetheless, the exclusion of a racialized or ethnicized group from access to material and symbolic resources has the effect of making all struggles over resources racialized struggles.

Race is not understood here as having a reality outside the social; it is not that races exist and then they are mobilized in order to naturalize class divisions. It is rather the case that race as a social fact is brought into existence through the praxis of capitalism.

How race–class signifiers are experienced is also shaped by gender: the experience of being a white middle-class girl/woman is different from being a white middle-class boy/man. However, this difference of gendered experiences within a race–class nexus does not mean that shared gender identities make the lifeworlds of, say, Black boys/men and white boys/ men interchangeable. While people might make political alliances across race–class lines on the basis of gender – as with feminism – these alliances cannot erase the material inequalities and symbolic differences between Black people and white people or between working classes and middle classes.

These points about the social construction of race, about the ways that racialized inequality and class inequality reinforce one another and are expressed through racialized and gendered identities, are perhaps uncontroversial, at least within a particular tradition of social theory, when we are speaking of adults. However, when we speak about children’s race–class and gendered identities, the picture is different. The classed experience of children is hidden from view. This is partly because class is widely understood as being related to waged labour – particularly manual and factory work. Even those analyses that accept that bureaucratic, mental or intellectual labour is also work often attribute the class position derived from work only to the worker and not to his or her dependants. In other words, if a man works for a wage and his family are dependent on that wage he is recognized as having a class position but they are not. Nor is it only being in work that identifies a working man’s class but not his dependants. It is also to do with a presumption that men derive identity from work in a way that women do not; that women’s identity is defined in relation to family, children and neighbourhood. If women’s relation to class is perceived as derivative and tenuous, so much more is this the case for children.