[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_80

Know your place, Dr Faiza Shaheen,

“Working-class people include Black people, white people, old and young, people in social housing, people in private rented accommodation, migrants and many others. What unifies them is their life experiences. They live precarious lives, face prejudice, and have very little power and voice in their day-to-day interactions with work or the state. Those in frequent contact with public services also spoke of being “dehumanized” by impersonal and judgemental housing and benefits officers. They also showed real pride in the places where they lived […]. We summarised their experiences under the four ‘P’s: precariousness, power, prejudice, and place. Being working-class isn’t just an economic condition, but a broader struggle of respect, having a say and that voice counts.”

My mom and dad never talked to me about money when I was little. Instead, they spoke to me about the importance of having a strong character and defending one's personality, whatever it was; to help those in difficulty; not to look at the appearance of things but at the substance; of what dignity was and how work was central to guaranteeing it; of how working honestly guaranteed people's autonomy; of how essential it was to make sacrifices to achieve results, "because nothing in this world is free" said dad, "you have to earn things." And usually, when he said this, he wasn't referring to the things you buy but those you obtain through practice and perseverance. They also explained to me that there were richer and poorer people, that the differences had always existed, but that there was no need to resent those who had more money because even wealth, like poverty, was not a fault. They taught me respect for myself and others. And also pride in who you are, especially when you are nobody.

My parents, avoiding talking about money and railing against those who had it, raised me without letting me know that ours was a low-income family. I reached the age of twenty, convinced that the poor were the others; “Our family lacks nothing,” Mum said, and I wondered why she always said it: it was clear that we were rich! The altruism and generosity that Mum and Dad had towards me, together with the education they gave me based on self-discipline rather than desire, had given me the perception that I lacked nothing. Growing up, I felt extreme differences between me and others, but I explained them to myself in terms of character, different experiences, and education; that is, on a socio-cultural and not class basis.

The policy of weakening economic prestige that had always been carried out in the family as a bulwark against adversity had penetrated me so much that it prevented me from seeing how, in reality, money was the basis of most inequalities. However, it prevented me from realizing how inadequate economic and human support had been at the root of my many professional failures. My mother and father had made enormous sacrifices to make me feel like other children, to give me everything I needed so as not to make me experience what they had to experience: the humiliation of being marginalized and judged because they were poor. Yet it hadn't been enough; something hadn't worked. Why?

My family was formed after a series of national (South and North of Italy) and international (Switzerland, France, Germany, Argentina, Australia) migrations; all these migrations, like every migration, were driven by the desire for better living conditions, that is, my entire family had been children of Hunger, for generations. I call Hunger both the memory of the extreme poverty that we have experienced - and that we have been told about - and the terror of losing the slight advantage

that we have gained over time, but I also consider Hunger the extremely pragmatic attitude towards life, the direct relationship with Necessity (in the Greek sense of the term, ἀνάγκη, that which cannot be avoided), the ontology of hard work, working to survive, surviving instead of living.

In my family, there were farmers, workers on sugar cane plantations, factory workers, bricklayers, and miners—there was no other kind of work in any direction, whichever way you look. My grandparents started working around the age of eight. None of the women could write, and my mother and my aunts still had difficulty understanding what they read because, at 13, they were sent to work in a factory.

I was the first in the family to have nice clothes and toys and to go to the seaside and the mountains. I was the first person to go to high school, the only one to have left the family early and to have done so without having married first, and the only one to have a degree.

When we talk about the working class, we are not just talking about money (little money) and routine- work; we are also, and above all, about a universe of memories and values that have been shaped by generations of hardship, ignorance, fears, insecurity, humiliations, battles for one's dignity and the hope of a better future. When we talk about the working class, we are not just talking about social class but about a wealth of shared knowledge, values, and experiences unrelated to the knowledge, values, and experiences shared by other social classes.

I underline this point because I have often heard friends from the middle-class reply that workers now complain for nothing, that their salary is like that of a teacher, and that if they remain disadvantaged, it is because they want it.

Western meritocratic culture has raised all of us—rich and poor—to think that when we work hard, even if we start from scratch, we necessarily continue in a linear and positive way: +1, +2, +3. But it's not like that. Those who start from rock bottom very often proceed linearly, yes, but negative: -1, -2, -3.

Starting from scratch means having no units to add to get to ten, no units from which to begin to build something. It's like building a house without the land and bricks and without even knowing what a house is! You don't have the means to understand how to improve your condition, how to help your loved ones, and which strategies are most functional to your needs because, in many cases, those who are at scratch don't know what is good or bad, not even for themselves.

If you start from scratch, having foresight makes no sense: What future can there be if you don't know how to make a living today? The future, with all the strategies to build it, is very often a luxurious place reserved for the few who don't have to worry about today. If you start from scratch, the only clear idea you have in your mind is Hunger or its very recent memory.

For this reason, instead of continuing linearly in a positive direction, those who start from scratch often continue negatively through stratifications of errors and short-sighted choices that root them even further in poverty.

This is why when I was little, I was told that culture was useless: because of the world of Hunger I came from, it was unthinkable to believe that culture would ever give me food; my relatives themselves had never had contact with it. This is why I was told that being good at drawing, playing music, or writing was a dangerous waste of time: it distracted me from the essential things: finding a permanent job that would give me a good income. For this reason, I was told that resting and idling were shameful behaviors because only by working strenuously could I obtain what I deserved- what most other people had by right. This is why I was told that I had to get married early: because men find work more efficiently than women, they earn more money, and because, as a couple, it is easier to pay rent and support living expenses.

But what guarantees the survival of today and ensures the next day is not always what responds to our most intimate needs and our expectation of happiness; at least, it's not what puts us in a longer-term perspective where we can genuinely self-determine. This is why I made life choices that were very different from family expectations choices - such as going to live alone in the city, working as a bartender, and then enrolling in the Academy of Fine Arts - which my family defined as "reckless,”

“shameful” and “self-destructive,” for which I paid the costs for almost 10 years, both in terms of professional and economic difficulties and in terms of heavy and constant criticism from those close to me. I just wanted to be happy. And I knew that staying home with my family, waiting for Prince Charming to take me to another house and building another family, wouldn't make me happy.

Not seeing the class problem when you come from a disadvantaged class means starting from scratch without knowing that you are starting from scratch. It means digging a hole when you think you're building a trampoline. It means experiencing guilt, a condition that does not depend on you. Not knowing my class "problem," I read all my professional failures as personal mistakes and shortcomings. I felt wrong when I simply didn't have adequate economic and human support; I felt stupid and incompetent when I simply couldn't access the services I needed.

I had grown up with a sense of social justice inherited from the cartoons about Robin Hood and Zorro, thinking that the rich were abstract and distant entities, that money did not bring happiness, and that the substance of things came before their appearance. Then, I was faced with reality, and when it happened, I was completely alone and disarmed.

The Academy of Fine Arts was a great training ground for life from this point of view. None of the people I met and hung out with came from working-class families, which I didn't notice at the time. What struck me instead was how different everyone around me was from me and how this difference was pointed out to me and weighed on almost every day. There was something incredibly naive about me that caused a form of contempt in those around me:

People avoided me or treated me with indifference; many in my Atelier did not greet me, not even when I greeted them, and those I used to hang out with made fun of me, sometimes with tenderness, sometimes with a hint of disdain. I soon realized that I was a silly and embarrassing person, that this side of me was the only one that stood out, and I began to work on my behavior - hiding it - in the hope of being accepted. I couldn't. As much as I worked hard, I remained a freak: even if I made a few real friends, those friends often told me, "You're strange, Roby."

I wasn't strange; I was a twenty-year-old growing up in the provincial countryside and scared of the city. I only spoke Italian because I hadn’t studied abroad or taken private language courses; I had never taken a plane; I didn't have all the free time that others had because I used to work full-time to pay the rent; I didn't know what it meant to think only of myself, because my family had raised me to be responsible towards others; I wasn't strange, I was simply working-class.

It is interesting how often the cliché about the relationship between rich and poor leads us to think that the poor develop envy towards the possibilities of the rich and that the rich are rich because they exploit poor people. When you are all mixed up, this is not what you perceive. I don't believe the rich feel rich, just as the poor don't feel inadequate. We think differently and have little common ground to build a dialogue.

At the Academy of Fine Arts, those with more culture looked down on those who had none, as if they found them ridiculous or guilty of their shortcomings. Perhaps because they thought that in a democratic world like our contemporary Western culture, where the factory worker earns the same salary as a teacher, and the public university does not have unaffordable prices, everyone had the same access to knowledge. Faiza Shaheen dismantles this belief:

“Despite these facts, we persistently believe that education can solve it all and be a great social leveler. But how can an education system, with its hierarchies based on private, selective, non-selective schools and elite universities, possibly provide equal opportunities? The simple answer – is it can’t”.

Those who had more culture, inside and outside the academy, were those who had had more opportunities: They had traveled more, they had been in contact with more realities, they had taken private courses, they had studied outside their own State, and they had a family that had introduced them early to everything that constituted knowledge.

On the other hand, those who didn't have culture often didn't know they didn't have any; they relied only on a scholastic preparation they considered more than decent and tended to look down on those who had more financial resources just based on how they were dressed or how they behaved. Those from less fortunate classes often tried to hide their origins in clothing, taking great care of it and sometimes opting for expensive brands. However, they maintained an open, genuine, and helpful attitude towards others, which was often missing among those who came from better economic situations and who appeared incredibly focused on themselves.

I learned this strong contrast by seeing the reactions my friends from the countryside – who had a similar background to mine - had when they met my Academy Fine Arts colleagues. "They all look like dickheads" my friends told me. "What stingy bums! They never offer a drink".

Once, a customer of the bar where I worked told me that he immediately recognized the rich by how they were dressed: "They are always the most bedraggled in the room." According to him, those who had money didn't need clothes to defend their dignity. “Even the poor you recognize immediately,” he added while paying for the round of beers for his friends, “they always have their wallet in their hand.” The percentages of working-class people in the art world speak for themselves:

“Analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4% of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but that had fallen to just 7.9% for those born four decades later. […] People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37% of the workforce in 1981, but by 2011, that had fallen to about 21%” (James Tapper, December 10, 2022, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/dec/10/huge-decline-working-class-people-arts-reflects-society)

Surviving in the artistic environment, coming from a background like mine, is difficult for several reasons: it requires a lot of free time, does not give the security of finding a job, takes a long time to guarantee some secure income (and most of the time, it doesn't guarantee it), and requires constant expenses for materials, exhibitions, and self-promotion.

It is difficult not only economically but also humanly. The people I met at the Academy of Fine Arts are those I continue to meet at art exhibitions, inaugurations, and cultural circles. The same ones organize art competitions, buy artworks, and teach art in universities. They are the same who populate all private and independent artistic environments. They have the same way of dressing and the same attitude of superiority, that of studying each other up and down, the same affected reference towards what is contemplative and not utilitarian. They have the same tendency to surround themselves only with people who are similar to them. Over the years, I understood what were some of the elements that made me a freak: the excess of enthusiasm towards social situations, which showed how being in contact with people was a new experience for me; the tendency to dress too elegantly for regular outings, which showed how I was used to keeping “nice” clothes for “special occasions”; the habit of talking so much for the pleasure

of talking, which took away any mystery from me, especially after the interlocutor understood that I was a penniless barmaid from the countryside. Above all, what made me an uninteresting and freakish person was the fact that I didn't immediately list all my skills and display my knowledge, which was instead what all my colleagues at the Academy constantly did, which is what all the artists I know still do today and which, now I can say it, is instead typical of those who have little skills and little knowledge. Contrary to my family's teachings, the artistic environment is not an environment that looks at substance but at appearance.

Over the years, I have learned to modulate my attitude depending on the situations and people around me. I talk less and never about my private life; I listen often and dress well without being flashy. The life experience and cultural background that I have built with enormous sacrifices have led me to move in entirely different contexts without seeming out of place in the eyes of others and remaining at ease with myself.

Now, when I meet the exact prototype of people who snubbed me fifteen years ago, they no longer recognize me as a freak; on the contrary. They approach me and show me fascination, curiosity, and attention: they think I'm one of them. But I still feel the difference. I still think I have the mark of Hunger written on my forehead. I found the same feelings of outsider and exclusion in an interview with a working-class background woman who has a job in the artistic field in England:

“I felt like there were no people like me in the sector,” said Michelle McGrath, who has spent over a decade working at organizations including the British Museum and Royal Museums Greenwich. “There are financial barriers,” she said—but she also noted many ways to feel out of place as someone working class, especially in the U.K., where class is still deeply entrenched and measured by many more metrics than income. “People assume shared experiences. They assume you went on holiday as a child when I didn’t.” (Jo Lawson-Tancred, August 18, 2024, Artnet https://news.artnet.com/art-world/uk-working-class-art-2523393)

Faiza Shaheen also covers the same topic. Reading her book was like hearing a scream of justice coming from my stomach and gradually growing more muscular page after page; a feeling of revolt and relief at the same time, a desire for camaraderie, which is often what I feel when I find my own story in the words of others and suddenly realize that I wasn't alone and I wasn't strange.

“The problem is that perception is an amorphous enemy to fight. In 2015, a study from the London School of Economics examined how class affected pay. […] What they found was revealing. […] Essentially, regardless of other factors, you will get paid less than your peers doing the same job if you are from a working-class background. […] The authors chalk this difference to several factors, particularly class codes. These include knowing when to wear trainers and when not, being able to talk about the fancy things people do in the evening, and being fluent in middle-class culture. As such, the people who can “make it” are those able to switch class codes and act more middle class when they need to.”

Faiza Shaheen's book, “Know Your Place,” reminds us how our socio-economic origins influence, and often determine, our destinies; how meritocracy is a harmful myth; how school and education do not level out social and economic differences and how, on the contrary, such hierarchical differences profoundly undermine our sense of community and make relations between different classes within the same community difficult, if not hostile.