Content Note: discussion of class-identity and being racialisd.
This is the first year I have watched and begun to follow The Great British Bake Off. Whilst some people have seen this as a travesty in terms of how late it is in the day; others have laughed at my entering the ranks of the white middle-classes.
I get that a competitive baking challenge suggests all the frivolity, pricey-ness and spare time/money of a John Lewis window display; but what exactly about baking is white and middle-class? What about pouring energy into creating food is “white”?
On watching the second episode of this year’s series my mother remarked: “where’s the show about all the Asian women who spent their lives doing this?” And that’s just it.
What is white and middle-class about GBBO is that it’s made baking “trendy” because predominantly white people are doing it. It’s made baking a fun activity because it’s a competition for goodness sake. But when you begin to take that tenet too far and suggest that “baking” itself is a middle-class pursuit I’m afraid you’re in dubious waters. Moreover, to suggest that watching a show like GBBO puts you into the ranks of the white middle-classes really ticks me off.
It ticks me off because it happens a lot. Being “classed” by others assessing you. From the University I attend, the hobbies I have, our newly renovated kitchen and my watching of GBBO you could easily assume I’m middle-class. But I want to talk about class and it’s intersection with race. In many ways, “class” in Britain is a racialised concept. Historically, migrants and non-white people would only ever enter the class-system at the lowest level, just components of the “working class”; but the middle-class was something else, something uniquely untouchable and British in its whiteness.
The added factor of being the grandchild of immigrants to Britain makes full entry into the middle-classes nigh-on impossible. Sure, there are rich brown people – but we see them as gaudy, materially-obsessed, obnoxious, arrogant, greasy, fast-car-and-rolex brown people. They are not middle-class brown people. Middle-classness allows a degree of invisibility; a cloak of accepted Britishness. For a South Asian who lives on the same street as or earns the same income as a white middle-class counter-part; there is still something that separates them.
That is where, even with my piano lessons, tennis-playing and watered down Yorkshire accent; I have never felt middle-class. Sure, the history of my family as migrant workers in northern textiles factories; my mother’s childhood, her lifestyle etc – have always made me feel less-than-middle-class. Even in my own childhood, whilst I wouldn’t think of myself as working-class, I only realised buying clothes from the charity-shop was “cool” when I came to Uni, when before this I’d always had to “forget where I bought it from” for shame. Even in my own childhood the places we shopped and the way we spent our weekends felt to me a far-cry from middle-class luxury. But on top of this personal feeling of ambiguity is the fact that brown bodies are not accepted into the middle-class. Especially openly brown or Muslim brown bodies.
I feel clumsy in John Lewis; people stare if I go to Ilkley; it’s all disbelief if I touch a piano and I feel loud even if I just sit still in the theatre. British “class” is unnervingly racial. GBBO may be “middle-class” in its superfluous values, but it is also middle-class because white middle-class people enjoy it. As my mum well questioned, it wouldn’t be a “middle-class” thing if it was a show about Asian women cooking… it’s middle-classness lies in its whiteness. “White” is pretty much a void prefix to “white middle-class” because middle-class-ness is racialised as white.
I continue to feel inconclusive about my class identity for these reasons then. My brownness and my Muslimness seem to forfeit my class-identity, and it is for this reason that I remain forever in the limbo of being “accused” of being middle-class whilst simultaneously refused entry.