Definitely Diversity

I’m looking for recommendations please - who's doing exciting things about 'the class problem'? Diversity is ethnicity, gender/s, and sexual preference/s… right? But what about socioeconomic background? I'm fascinated by this question and need to fuel my curiosity, by interviewing someone/s with specialist knowledge.

Here in England, we still have a family that ‘the people’ agree to call ‘royal highness’ (ha!). It feels very different to the flat management structure of my home, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Yes, Kiwis have some private schools, and an old boys’ network, but my experience is that they are viewed as dinosaurs, ‘a bit silly really’.

We have poverty (boy, do we have poverty) including the intergenerational inheritance of colonisation*. But we also have social mobility, big time.

In 2010 I caught comedian, Stuart Lee perform live. He talked about the English class system, and I will paraphrase it, from memory, thus: “there is a gap, between us and the elite, and you will never cross it”.

Now, good-keen-Kiwi-iconoclast that I am, I despise the word “elite” when it’s used to mean “very wealthy”. When we make socioeconomic background a qualifier for elite status, we say, to each other, damagingly, ‘yes, they are better than us’.

What happens when we include socioeconomics and family background in our definition of diversity?

What is being done now, to address, and bulldoze, those barriers?

Image of Grayson Perry, because he's produced the most interesting work I've seen on the subject. Actually... perhaps I ought to start with him.

*As an aside, Aotearoa NZ is now many decades into a difficult-but-awesome process of addressing the horrors of colonisation, which is backed by most “Tauiwi”, or non Māori, like me. Right now, my people are dealing with teething problems, which I believe are related to the shedding of the out-dated ways, and the bringing forth of new ones, but that’s another story. Let’s just say, bring on the tooth fairy.

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