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Artículo viejito, pero súper ilustrativo sobre el clasismo.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/mar/06/socialexclusion

So now we've finally got our very own 'white trash'

The demonisation of 'chavs' as a way of writing off those at the bottom of the social ladder has reached epidemic levels

John Harris

The Guardian, Tuesday 6 March 2007

For 20-odd years my mum has taught chemistry at a Catholic sixth-form college in Manchester. I did my A-levels at the same place: Loreto, a state-funded institution with a multiracial, multifaith roll, in inner-city Hulme. Since the early 90s, the area has been outwardly transformed, though its social indicators still speak volumes: at the last count, 65% of Hulme's residents lived in rented social housing. Set against that backdrop, Loreto is a beacon of Tony Blair's beloved opportunity society - two years ago, it was awarded the Queen's anniversary prize for higher and further education, thanks to "Educational provision in an urban context [and] raising achievement and aspiration".

It seemed a good a place to do an experiment: getting my mum to write "chav" on the whiteboard, and seeing what came back - from GCSE retake students, and a class taking its weekly dose of A-level general studies. And out it all came: many preferred the specifically north-western epithet "scally", though the distinguishing features of both archetypes were apparently the same - clothing brands Nike TN, Rockport, Paul & Shark, and racial profile (the unanimous answer came back in a flash) white. Chavs, the students said, are in the habit of "causing trouble, hanging round the streets, drinking and taking drugs". They are "working class, they live in council houses". Their parents "don't care, and they don't work".

"Some might change and go to uni," said one girl. "But not many. They're the exception." So how might they go up in the world? The only options were "theft, robbery, drug money or the lottery". In terms of background, these kids seemed as diverse as any opinion-poller could wish for - but what was fascinating was a shared indifference to the people they were talking about: neither threatening nor deserving of sympathy, chavs and scallies were simply a distant other.

Here, then, is a modern folk devil maligned just about everywhere, from schoolyards to the offices of upscale newspapers. The Daily Telegraph's venerable Simon Heffer, for example, almost exactly echoed the students' responses back in January: "Our underclass has been allowed to get out of control ... They and their children regard school as optional. Drug dealing and theft are the main careers, nicely supplementing the old staple of benefit fraud." He might loudly harrumph; millions crystallise the same sentiments in the habitual use of a single word.

Just lately, it's become unfashionable to worry about all this. A spurt of unease last year momentarily recast chav baiting as "nu-snobbery". This year hand-wringing about the bullying on Celebrity Big Brother - led, of course, by "queen chav" Jade Goody - found even the Sun appearing to call time on the term.

A couple of months on, the issue lies somewhere between passe and closed down, but scan the news wires, and the continued ubiquity of the chav is revealed. The Sun still uses the word with glee ("the transformation of Coleen McLoughlin from chip shop chav to catwalk queen has amazed critics," it marvelled last week). Elsewhere, the references pile up: "Bar bans 'chav' clothes," reports Blackpool Today; " 'Chav culture' crooks jailed," says the York Press; "A storm is raging this week, over claims made on a website that Burnham is a 'chav' town," reckons the Burnham and Highbridge Weekly News. The concept seems so ingrained as to be immovable.

What that says about modern Britain seems pretty straightforward. How else to understand it than as more evidence of our embrace of an increasingly American social model, in which there is opportunity for all - apart from the undeserving rump too feckless to seize it? In short, we've finally acquired our own equivalent of that dread term "white trash". As Lynsey Hanley's superb book Estates - superficially about council housing, but actually addressing much more - points out, at the bottom of the social ladder, class has been supplanted by caste, thanks to a con trick whereby successive governments have "hived off poorer working-class people from affluent society ... when, all the while, they have claimed that we are progressing inexorably towards a state of classlessness".

Given that Alan Milburn has again crashlanded in the news, this may be an apposite moment to recall one of his key contributions to the last election campaign: a call to allow "more people the opportunity to join the middle class" - such are the affectedly aspirational politics, running across all three main parties, that start out well intentioned but end up looking hopelessly crass; and there is something particularly depressing about leading members of the Labour party presenting the essential solution to poverty as individual escape. But that argument is for another time. What's relevant here is the way that the rhetoric dovetails with the "c" word, and where the latter sits in the culture: as a signifier used by millions for some of the unfortunates who have absolutely no chance of making that imagined leap.

As proved by the views of those young Mancunians, they're occasionally prodded and demonised, but largely left alone. The rest of us - in theory, anyway - can join the meritocracy and acquire the trappings of at least modest success; to paraphrase George Orwell's 1984, chavs and animals are free.

john.harris@guardian.co.uk