A Conversation between Janett Walker CEO of Anti Racist Cumbria and Nell, Creator of Class Therapy.
At ARC we know that we have to take an intersectional approach to anti-racism. We can’t liberate all Black and Brown people if we don’t also address the other forms of oppression which are intersecting with racism. A Black woman is not just experiencing racism, she is also experiencing misogynoir, a racialised form of sexism. A Brown, muslim person who is deaf is not just experiencing racism, they’re facing islamophobia, racism, and ableism too. We know these things to be true and yet we know that we aren’t always managing to do this well for many reasons, including having to distill things down to tiny clips and word counts for the sake of social media. It can be hard to have nuanced conversations.
One area where we, and many other social justice activists, struggle to bridge the gap is when it comes to class. Despite the fact that class is famously one of the most stark forms of oppression in Britain, many in the anti-racist space (including us) have too-often failed to form relationships with working class people and the working class struggle, and have failed to push back on the narrative that anti-racism is not for the working class. There is no more important time to act on this when we continue to see politicians and billionaires who oppress working class people selling them the lie that migrants, refugees, people seeking asylum, and Black and Brown people are the problem. All whilst they continue to hoard wealth and exploit working class people’s labour.
As part of our commitment to do better, our CEO Janett sat down with Nell, founder and creator of the brilliant instagram page Class Therapy to talk. Janett is speaking here not only as the CEO of an anti racism charity, but as a Black woman from working class roots, a first generation windrush descendant and someone with decades of experience navigating the oppressive traps of the corporate world. Nell is coming to the conversations as a working‑class therapist and creative, whose work centres on developing relational and therapeutic tools to understand how class shapes people’s emotional lives.
It turned into a beautiful, nuanced and meandering conversation (75 pages of transcript!), so we’ve brought together the highlights into bite sized pieces so you can be a fly on the wall in this real-life, messy, conversation.
Covering identity, whataboutery, divide and rule, the tools of the oppressor and more: this is a meaty conversation aimed at those already in the activist space who may be upholding classism in their activism and we can’t wait to hear what it sparked in you.
Please get in touch 💛
Episode 1: Identity, labels and shared oppression
Nell: I don’t really see class as an identity, it’s a condition you’re put into. Material deprivation doesn’t sit alongside other oppressions; it intensifies them. If you’re Black and working class or Asian and working class or you’re a migrant, that material deprivation is going to oppress you more. You’ve already got oppression, now you’ve got more on top of that and the cost is more and the proximity to harm is more. So from the outset I’m trying to decentralise and definitely bring those voices in. It needs that representation and recognition.
Janett: Quite often we know that all of us get put into these little boxes, Black people (I’m talking about global majority, people of colour, migrants, people seeking asylum), all those who are Black and Brown, we don’t get seen as working class people because of the way whiteness works. Working-class people are seen as white and then there’s “all of us”.
Nell: Yes everyone lumps all “others” together, because there’s a dominant idea there that everybody seems to buy into. For white working class people I question why are you buying into this thing that oppresses you? It doesn’t make sense.
Janett: I think it’s the system doing what the system does well. You said our identities are born out of deprivation. So we’ve actually got that in common, whether that deprivation is financial, emotional, mental, ability to have choice, it’s all those things. But actually, what happens is the working class white people get given the label that they’re working class and poor. Actually, so is everybody else. But because of a different label for instance, ‘you’re Black so your issue is racism’, which is not the same as [my] issue as a white working-class person. If they carve us all up and slice us all into different groupings, we spend time fighting amongst each other.
Nell: It is divide and conquer in terms of politics. It’s so we don’t recognise the shared oppression as being the same. It is not a colonial struggle….but there’s almost an oppressor’s toolkit, there’s different pushes and different falls. I think there’s a shared aspect we must come together and recognise, it’s not saying the experiences are exactly the same but they are connected. Class is the great unequaliser, the deal breaker that amplifies every other oppression. Even those amplifications are different. When you’re Black, Brown, migrant, or racialised, the state hands you an identity that becomes symbolic. Class intensifies the material cost of that.
Janett: I agree and I think there’s something about the oppressors’ toolkit. They use the same tools on all of us and obviously they adapt them to work for us differently. I think our problem as the oppressed, let’s put it that way, regardless of whatever identity is being thrown on us, is that (a), we’ve fallen for it, they’ve done a very good job on us and (b), when we’re talking about these systems, we often talk about it in a way that doesn’t bring us together. We ourselves have been enabling division because we don’t spend enough time talking about the things that bring us together. We spend too much time doing exactly what the oppressor wants us to do, talking about the things that keep us apart and I find it really challenging to change the dial on that, because it’s so ingrained, it’s so steeped. If I go and speak to a white working-class person, what I’ll probably get a lot of is whataboutery. They will say to me, but what about this and what about that and what about the other? But we need to rewind and just focus on the fact that we’re both being treated badly. We shouldn’t be treating each other badly, because we’re already being treated badly by those that have all the power and all the money. Shall we just put aside all the other whataboutery and turn around and point the finger at the oppressors. I find that it’s really hard to get us to work together.
Nell: There’s the media which is an instrument of power, social media as well as whataboutery and ‘what about me’… so people are centring themselves. I think therapy holds that up, we’ve got to examine ourselves and we’ve got to cast a critical eye over where things have sprouted up from and what power ideology they’ve brought with them, because a lot of it is unexamined. You mentioned the dominant ideology and then you’ve got all the global majority put together. We’ve fallen for it, the status quo isn’t examined.
Janett: But that’s part of the oppressors tool, to not let us examine the status quo. One of the things that we have to get better at is curiosity and questioning. At the beginning you said, “you know, sometimes I think, I’m a bit brassy and I ask too many questions”. No! Never let that hold us back.
It’s exactly what we’re not doing enough of because of those tools of oppression. When you think about schools and our education system, it’s basically said, all you have to do is remember all of this information for 20 examinations and get through your GCSEs (and A levels) and then you can just forget all of that information. You don’t have to question it, you don’t have to analyse it, you don’t have to unpick it. You just have to remember it all and get the highest grade you can get. Don’t ask me any questions about it, don’t decide that you don’t like it, or that you love it, don’t decide that you want to explain it in a way that deals with Marxism or socialism or conservativism or anything, just remember it and then chuck it out. So we literally stopped generations and generations from being critical thinkers. If we can’t think critically, then we’re not curious and a big part of the oppressors’ tools is stopping us from thinking critically and being curious and making sure that we’re individualistic.
Nell: Yes!
Janett: We think about whataboutery and what about me? How do I benefit? What do I get from this?
Nell: Because in whataboutery, it’s my experience, it’s rooted in ‘what about me?’. I think, for working-class people, because they haven’t necessarily got the language of class consciousness, they buy into ideas that harm their understanding of others and themselves. I’m going to be doing some work on something I’m calling “supremacy stories” and how people buy into them. Supremacy stories are the narratives people absorb and repeat about who is ‘above’ and who is ‘below’ them.
Sometimes with survival, particularly for white working-class people, when they’re surviving [and I’m not saying that their survival is more important, this is not a what-about-me story] because they haven’t examined the structures that have kept them there: they don’t have a class consciousness.
They’re in survival, so they don’t have the distance. When I was growing up we weren’t handed Franz Fanon, I was getting information about liberation from people like Tupac. That’s where the level of class entered my consciousness.
So it’s about accessibility as well. I think people don’t have the distance or the resources, it’s not given to them. The responsibility of that relies on education, that’s where we’ve got to really look at bringing those ideas in and then we’ve got to then think “what is happening here?”. Because the mirrors that they’re getting back are the white experience so therefore, they don’t need to question it.
Janett: When your experience is looking back at you, you’re not going to be thinking about anybody else. That’s why you’re in that whataboutery mode, you’re not able to question it. You’re only thinking about what’s impacting you and not who is impacting you. All I can see is my experience is showing me it’s the migrants, it’s the people seeking asylum. I’m hearing it from all quarters. And I’ve not been given the tools. This is another tool of the oppressor, to hold back the tools that will help you. I’ve not been given the tools that will help me to think about this in any other way than the way the oppressor wants me to think about it. What deprivation does is it keeps you in the moment.
Nell: Yes.
Janett: It keeps you surviving, it keeps you keeping on to just keep going. You’ve not got much space for anything else. Your basic needs of food, shelter, warmth, probably companionship and love – things like that, in whatever form they take – are the only things that you are able to focus on. So, if our education system doesn’t give you the space to examine those structures, which it doesn’t, then we end up in that ‘getting by’ mentality. And if our getting by enables us to buy a nice car, buy a nice house, go on holidays, eat out in nice restaurants, we see that getting by as success, as happiness unlocked.
Nell: It’s safe for people to buy into that aspiration. Aspiration has a colonial edge, I’m not saying it’s entirely that but enough to matter. The messaging we get is, buy into the ideal of wealthier people. Telling working-class people do what it takes to be The Rich White Man. It steals your imagination, replacing it with an aspiration just to be close to power. The message othered people get is “this is your personal responsibility and if you don’t then you’re not doing enough and it’s your fault.”
Janett: That’s individualism again. We’ve seen that Thatcherism has said you should be aspiring to own a property, buy a house – that’s success, and you don’t worry about your neighbour, worry about yourself. So part of those tools of oppression are about breaking down those communities and getting people to, as you just literally said, aspire to something else, something that’s perceived to be better. It’s just another way of keeping us all down and not to question. You’re right about the safety, it’s gone beyond keeping up with the Joneses, at one stage, it was well I want it because they’ve got it. But now, even if you start to get curious and question a thing, the fear of change has become another tool against us. I think one really good example is reparations. People see reparations as turning the tables, and if Britain and the rest of Europe say sorry for what happened to the enslavement of African people, because of the way it has been peddled by those with power; “if we do that, they’re going to make us into slaves, and they’re going to treat us really badly and there’s more of them than us”.
Nell: It’s going to threaten your safety, they know how to get to people. And we know that this is not the case.
Episode 2: What does critical theory look like in REAL life
Nell: I love Black liberation authors because they’re so clear about how domination and dehumanisation work. I’m thinking about Sylvia Wynter and how she wrote about society over‑representing one narrow idea of ‘the human’ – usually the wealthy, white, Western ideal – and how everyone outside that gets measured against it.
I see echoes of that for working‑class people, and it’s where my idea of relational imagination stems from. Across generations of working‑class survival, we learn to locate personal responsibility within a person’s material reality. Everyday language, grassroots community work and history back this up. When I think about deindustrialisation, Thatcherism, and the rise of individualistic values in places like my region – Teesside, the North East and elsewhere – places once built on steel, iron and mining, it’s clear that oppression lands differently depending on who you are, where you were born, and what resources you have. We know this in our heart and bones, even when the stories told to us by power dominate that – the stories that try to explain away structural violence and neglect – they ask us to blame ourselves and our neighbours.
Working‑class people, especially, need to free ourselves from the idea that everyone has the same amount of personal responsibility. When we measure others against ideals, we can’t imagine what life is like in someone else’s shoes unless we’re asking them to tie their laces tighter and run faster.
Being relational means meeting people human‑to‑human. We’re not being abstract, squashing someone into tidy theory or a framework that we’ve never examined to see whether it includes diverse ways of being human. Practising relational imagination means we can zoom in on how oppression affects individual people and their circumstances, and zoom out to see the shared patterns – usually uneven, connected, and deeply nuanced.
And for people like me, it means using our voices, leaning into discomfort, and refusing to keep our hands clean while talking about harm from a distance.
Janett: Actually, talking abstractly doesn’t actually help us, because we’re not reaching, I don’t want to stereotype anybody, but when we think about our different communities, let’s say, for example, I’m going to use a few so that I don’t stereotype any groups, or try not to; a migrant community, a Windrush Caribbean community, a working-class community in Teesside, women and girls experiencing violence – those abstract contexts are neither use nor ornament. They’re not listening to those abstracts, they’re not hearing those abstracts, they’re not landing with them.
They’re great to understand, if you can, but everybody on the ground, the majority, hasn’t got space or time for that. They’re literally in survival mode and the way that oppression works is to keep them in that mode. They haven’t got time to read Malcolm X. But they’ve bought into individualism because it looks better! That looks nice over there, look what you’ve got!
Nell: It reminds me of performative allyship, it’s easy to post a slogan, or wear a cute badge, but real solidarity happens with your neighbours, in your community. And if you’ve got time, space, a bit more wealth, or you look like the white ideal, it doesn’t cost you as much to show up. Your social status and the way you look can cushion you from harm. That links directly to our relationship with the state.
Once you start looking at who institutions protect, who they target, and who they ignore, you can see how power actually operates. And with class, especially, people often flatten it into ‘some are billionaires and some aren’t,’ when in reality class is stratified by proximity to harm. Power sits inside institutions and how they maintain the status quo – policing, social services, the courts, therapy, health – not just in extreme wealth.
I call these people clipboards – people who don’t examine who might be harmed by dominant messaging because their own cushioned position has never been questioned. Someone who treats a piece of policy, theory or ideology as more important than the people who live it. It’s coercive, too. It squashes someone into unexamined perspectives and it dehumanises. I see it in therapy culture, the way we therapise each other now as a tool to blame. That’s travelled into the way we relate to each other, online and offline. Conversations like this matter so much. What we’re doing here is relational, we’re meeting each other as humans, and we’re trying to understand context, where our experiences echo and where they differ.
And when we talk about how power lands on the body, I use a tool I developed called soft strings and tight strings. I use it to map out people’s relationships with others and with the state in therapy. We feel the uneven pulls in our bodies and get it down on paper to analyse how power operates and how we might loosen it for ourselves.
It came out of work with domestic violence survivors. Ideally, in a relationship or whenever we talk to people, your experience is valid. You can be as expansive as you can, and that won’t impact on my ego, and I can be as expansive as I can, and if we had a piece of string between us, it would be loose. But quite often there’s a string in our personal relationships where there are tugs on that string, and if one person wants power over the other, the string is tight. We can feel that – we become bound by someone else.
The reason that came about was because I noticed that the oppressor’s toolkit is also used by abusive partners and abusive systems. Social services or the police can pull on people just as hard – and it’s uneven depending on how they symbolise you. You’re entering that dynamic without consent, simply because of who you are, which is maddening.
Oppression happens every day. We need to recognise that online discourse can flatten people’s experiences when it focuses only on billionaires, as if harm only exists at the very top. But harm happens everywhere power is abused – it’s often institutional and systemic, and it travels into how we view each other. What matters is how material reality becomes unsafe for everyday people when policy shifts or media‑manufactured panic shapes who is considered human. Sometimes they scapegoat one group, then switch to another – always those already closest to harm. It’s confusing how easily someone’s humanity can be cast aside; it doesn’t make sense to me, but I think it’s engineered in that way – manufactured.
Janett: If we listed the tools it would be a very long list. Confusion is a massive part of one of the oppressors’ tools, to throw so many things at us. One minute we’re blaming you, the next minute it’s about this, the next minute it’s about that and it’s all about confusing us. So we don’t know what to react to, what to respond to, what to strategise in advance of, because we don’t know what’s coming at us from what direction. If all else fails, just throw another dead cat on the table so that whatever else is happening over there that we should be focusing on, all our attention’s been turned to over here, because someone threw a dead cat on the table! And we’re like, there’s a dead cat on the table! And we’ve forgotten to focus our energy on what’s really going on over there. It’s a massive tactic to just confuse us as much as possible.
But I really want to go back to your relational imagination, because I think a massive tool in the oppressor’s box is we don’t have space or time to imagine. We don’t have space or time to dream, because we’re just on the treadmill of keep on moving forward. And that time has been taken away from us. It’s a very capitalist move that time is money, sleep when you’re dead!
So we’re told that if we want all these things, the nice house, the nice car, the nice holiday, then we need to keep on earning more, getting more, aspiring for more, more, more, more, more. So we don’t get time to have that imagination. You don’t get time to sit down and have these conversations and I think that’s one of the things that is a real threat to power.
In the Black Liberation Movement, there are two forms of resistance I don’t hear in many other places; space to imagine and rest. We also talk about self-determination, which is almost the opposite side of the coin to individualism. We are saying that we are going to help ourselves, but I’m bringing my brothers and my sisters with me. Whereas individualism is saying every person for themselves, the survival of the fittest. Self determination is a huge threat to power and why they work so hard at keeping us all apart.
Let’s take the police. A good example is the racist, violent riots, over on your side of the country last year and how they were policed, compared to how Black people uprisings and miners strikes in the 1980s were policed. What the police did in relation to the racist violence last year was to stand with them and although on the face of it, it looked like they were coming down hard, actually, it was all just very performative so, it looks worse than it was.
Nell: That’s the different push but even the comparison between something of joy, like Notting Hill Carnival and say a fascist march it’s almost absurd.
Janett: That’s a really good example, Notting Hill Carnival, because you’ve got the institutions across the board, you’ve got the media saying two arrests at Notting Hill Carnival in massive headlines and then we get to Glastonbury, and they’ll go, Glastonbury went really, well, apart from the 72 arrests you fail to mention. It’s that kind of comparison and I know somebody will now read this conversation when it’s transcribed and they’ll go, well, that’s not true, there weren’t 72 arrests, but actually, what you’ve done is you’ve just thrown that dead cat, because that isn’t a statistic. I’ve made that up as an example of what we do, but what you’re going to do is focus on that, rather than, oh yeah, they do treat those two massive events really, differently. Ask the question why, reader? Why?
Nell: Exactly. And it’s all about statistics being thrown around. I’m dyslexic and I’ve got ADHD, so I’ve got no hope of remembering statistics. It’s almost like the supremacy story that people have. There’s intelligence assumptions as well with the working-class. Are they going to be intelligent enough to understand? If I come in like a saviour with statistics or from a scientific angle… There’s a pattern here: you don’t need to bring in unrelated issues to prove a point.
What’s interesting, especially in terms of legibility, is that we’re talking not only about the oppressor’s toolkit but also about this idea of an idealised norm. And it’s when those ideas brush up against each other- so when you’re not quite fitting into that- you can be disregarded and dehumanised and then you become a symbol. But, relational imagination is saying the opposite of that, saying, within context. And just, literally listening to people to understand, not to try and put your own little impressive point across, something that makes you look fantastic, because you can always reel off loads of statistics but what changes?
Janett: I hear that and I think as the oppressed, we’ve got to move away from using the oppressor’s tools to create change, because actually I consider myself to be part of the Black Liberation Movement and I don’t want to replicate this system. I don’t want to live in this system. This system is neither use nor ornament to me and it’s neither use nor ornament to you, in terms of a working class person. We should not be using the oppressors’ tools in order to create change. What does the oppressor do well with statistics? They confuse us and make things look better than they are? And actually if we just instead say, forget the statistics. The point is, Glastonbury is reported very differently than Notting Hill Carnival, I don’t need to give you the numbers, but just think about that and why is that happening? And why do I believe that that’s an okay thing to do? Why do I think that Notting Hill needs to be more policed? Who’s told me that? What have I seen that has made me think that is correct? What am I not looking at? Why haven’t I peeked behind the curtain to see what’s going on in there?
Nell: Why aren’t you listening to people’s lived experience as well? Why isn’t that held up as “I believe you” rather than it being zoomed out on as ‘hmmm… does it fit my understanding because this is the way that society has taught me to think’. It reminds me of one of my favourites, Audre Lorde and the master’s tools.
Janett: That is literally what Audre is saying. It’s not going to help us if we use the masters tools, they’re never going to change the dial. But the other great quote that goes with that, is “until the lion is the one who is able to tell the story, the hunter will always be glorified” by Chinua Achebe. Which takes us right back to education. Actually the story is told always through the hunter’s eyes. Unless we can get curious about that and start questioning – why did you do it like that? What is this question that you’ve given me to answer that says ‘name all the good things about enslavement of African people’ or ‘explain why colonialism was a good thing’ – genuine questions from schools that we’ve heard about. They are not questions!
Nell: It’s about flipping the perspective: instead of letting that viewpoint dominate, we look for the human truth underneath it. That’s why I like relational imagination, I think it is a muscle memory. I think we’ve needed it to rely on communities before. It is being erased by capitalism. It is being erased by social media and how things are reported. How we see things in our community and how we can assume a homeless person brought it on themselves.
It’s always distracting from the structural perspective. Therapy holds hands with that in my mind. As it always asks you about your personal responsibility, so you put that onto other people, but personal responsibility is located within context. Sometimes, if you are in a relationship with the state, for whatever reason, there’s been mistakes made or crises’ have happened around you or you’re a carer, all these different things. If you are in a relationship with the state, you’re bound by what they want you to do. You’re jumping through hoops. Also, it’s about our preparation as humans, for instance disability, it’s never talked about as something that could potentially happen to you? We’re all precarious on that, we should have solidarity for each other because of this. I think it’s something that we all have within us, because it’s humanity.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this fascinating conversation between Nell and Janett.
ARC are always looking for contributors with a range of experiences.We’re particularly interested in hearing from you if you’re Black or Brown and working class. If you have something to say, we want to hear it!
Get in touch via email: meg@antiracistcumbria.org
