Summary Of Beyond The Pale By Anhon Nayak

In the following section I will critically analyse and evaluate Anoop Nayak’s use of “race” in class analysis in his article Beyond the Pale: Chavs, Youth and Social Class (2009). Nayak’s article contends that some white working-class subcultural groups have been othered to the extent that these subcultural groups could be termed as “raced”; in other words, media and political discourses “racialised” groups such as “Football ‘Hooligans’, Skinheads, Teds and Hell’s Angels” (2009: 28). Nayak’s article continues by arguing that white working-class subcultures have appropriated aspects of black and ethnic minority culture since the 1960s, and concludes his article by arguing that white working-class children in Britain now feel a sense of ‘victimisation’

The majority of the article is arguing how there is a historic significance – the result of transnational migrations and globalisation, Nayak argues – pertaining to current discourses around white-working class subcultures being othered and raced. Pupils’ perception of “reverse racism” from ethnic minority pupils is alluding a broader issue of economic deprivation and the subsequent racial division of working classes that has emerged in these economically deprived areas. Therefore, the following critique of Nayak will focus on the first two thirds of the

Nayak points to how the British poor, historically speaking, were compared to Africans in order to demean and belittle them. Because of the manual labour jobs white working-class people had, historically speaking, their appearance would be described as dirty and non-white; this being the case, Nayak argues that “nothing whitens more than money” (2009: 29). The question here becomes: does the comparison of white working-class individuals to ethnic minorities pass as racism? The answer should be “no”. Racism, as mentioned before, is based on the systematic, institutionalised oppression of ethnic groups, and how the dehumanisation of oppressed groups reduces mobility and the accumulation of symbolic capital. This is also known as the concept of power in racism. Calling a member of an ethnically dominant group a racial slur does not affect the life course of the individual. Is Nayak trying to say that the white working-class once faced the same systematic, institutionalised oppression due to the symbolic violence of the dominant white working-class? If so, this point was not explicitly stated throughout the article, as coming to this conclusion would require a reinterpretation and a different reading of his theory. By highlighting how the white working-class was historically demeaned for adopting cultural and aesthetic attributes from ethnic minorities,