Decentring Race? Class, Place and Shared Hardship Among Working-Class Youth

This article intervenes in debates questioning the analytic centrality of race within sociological research. Set up against class-blind arguments that regard race as central analytic, and against ethnonationalist arguments that put forward a ‘left behind’, exclusively white working-class victim, the article seeks to foreground the importance of thinking about class and place, as well as race, gender and other factors, when trying to theorise the specific ways that disadvantage is shaped and produced. It does this through offering qualitative insights into how working-class young people of all racial backgrounds in London, Rochdale and Morecambe interpret their racial identities and their experiences of marginality and class-suffering. Broadly, it argues that a primary focus on race can obscure the significance of class-based hardship and place-based marginality. Across fieldsites, common experiences of insecurity, limited mobility and constrained horizons were more salient than racial difference. Ultimately, the article argues that sociologists must challenge the tendency to treat race and class as competing explanations for inequality. Instead, it shows how social suffering is produced through their uneven articulation and argues for a sociology grounded in empirical observation rather than assumptions about the universal primacy of race.