Afterword

Abstract

In some ways it feels strange to be completing a book on identity, at a time when (late September 2008) political leaders in the US, the UK and elsewhere talk of whole economies on the brink of financial and economic meltdown. Yet we have covered a period that stretches back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, heard older people remember the poverty and struggles of those times, and seen the significant, though shifting, role of self-identification then and in subsequent decades. We have also shown, through archival sources, the important consequences of the diverse, contested and changing categorizations used by state officials and others regarding the residents of social housing estates. While we’ve been writing the book, some journalists in particular seem to have upped the ante in the use of ‘white working class’ as a fixed, apparently ‘indigenous’, cultural category, and in the process have themselves contributed to anti-immigration and racist sentiment, while ignoring expressions of white middle class racism and xenophobia (Rogaly and Taylor, 2009). High society has simultaneously adopted the racializing language of ‘chav’.¹