My Tram Experience

A Response to the Response to My Tram Experience

This is not a response to the video itself. A response to the video itself would be relatively short and its general message would be along the lines of: “How awful that people like this still exist”, “That poor child” and “She needs to be smacked upside her head.” And it’s a pretty standard response, thank God for that, because I do not want to live in a society where this kind of behaviour and these kinds of views are deemed acceptable.

No, it is not the video itself that I am writing about here; it is another “pretty standard” response which I feel needs to be questioned that I am writing about, and that response’s general message is along the lines of: “Stupid dumb chav”, “Her benefits should be taken away” and “Get back to your council estate, slag.”

First of all, what is a chav? Because I have heard some of my friends being referred to as “chavs” in the past, and I’m sure there have been occasions where the same has been thought of me, with my trainers and pulled-back hair and love of football. So are my friends chavs? Am I chav? If we are, does that make us racist?

Second of all, why is there the assumption that she is on benefits? She states herself in the video that she works. And even if she was on benefits, what does that fact have to do with anything? There are record-breaking levels of unemployment in this country at the moment. Again, I have friends on benefits; this time last year I was on benefits. Does this make us racist? Similarly, why is there the assumption that she lives on a council estate? It is not written into your tenancy agreement you must spout racist remarks on trams or else face eviction.

Thirdly and finally, why use the word “slag” (and yes, I did see this word used on more than one occasion on Twitter in reference to her)? What does her gender and her implied sexual promiscuity have to do with her being a racist? She is a racist. We do not need to attach labels such as “chav” and “slag” to a person, and draw them living in a council flat, “sponging” off the taxpayer in order to make it so.

The ironic part is that this video is a poor representation of working-class people today. Working-class people are far more integrated with other cultural and ethnic groups than middle-class people (who tend to “stick to their own” but might have one trophy black friend or hire a Polish housekeeper), the reason for this being because working-class people and those of an ethnic minority are far more likely to be neighbours, work in similar jobs and generally just have more in common. When Germany was falling to pieces after World War 1, who did Hitler blame? Jews. He said, “They’re the reason you can’t get a job. They’ve taken all of them”, and people were either too stupid or too afraid to question him. The same is true of this woman; someone, at some point in her life, has told her that black people, Polish people and immigrants are to blame for the fact that she can’t get a job or get a council house, and she has swallowed these narrow-minded views and let them shape her into a bigoted arsehole.

The trouble is, there are far too many people out there at risk of swallowing some other narrow-minded views and becoming bigoted arseholes themselves: the view that “chavs” are to blame for this economic recession, and not the banks; the view that there are those who will work, can’t work, or won’t work; the view that there is something intrinsically wrong with working-class people and that it is OK to blame them for every little problem, when in fact society needs working-class people. If it was a black man on a tram starting a fight, it would be considered outrageous to say that his actions were a result of him being black (at least, I like to hope we’d find it outrageous; then again, David Starkey would probably deem it a fair comment), and yet we seem to find it fair to say that this woman is racist, ultimately, because of her class.

She is not racist because of her class. She is simply racist.