Middle class people: do you honestly hold negative bias towards working class individuals?

I was from a mixed family really. My dad was solidly working class, my mum's family lower middle class, but not especially wealthy. We grew up with very little money. Both my parents were poorly educated and in low paying jobs with little chance at progression. Neither were especially ambitious either. They were terrible with money and made awful financial decisions. My siblings and I are all very smarter. Higher than average IQ smart. We all went to uni, we are all middle class. I live in a detached house in suburban London. I have a prestigious job. I went to a red brick uni. My husband is middle class, and his parents were middle class (but born working class). So both myself and my husband have been upwardly socially mobile in our families. That's a bit of context. To answer your question... Do I like being friends with working class people? **It's complicated** My experience is that middle class people tend to be middle class because they are better at thinking strategically. With money, with their world views. They tend to be educated, so even moderately intelligent educated people are able to be discerning and articulate. When interacting with my working class friends and family, I can find it frustrating. Because their views can be very limited and short term. For example, I did very well all through school. I was very academically inclined, very obviously intelligent from a young age. I had ambitions to go to uni from 10 years old. My working class grandfather didn't get it though. He didn't think reading history and classics at a uni was a big deal. It didn't train me for a specific job and it was expensive. He didn't understand that uni attendance was more about _access_. That it was about transferable skills. He told me I should become a hairdresser. Because that would be money straight away and it was a practical, tangible skill. That would've been an objectively terrible choice for me. But his mind couldn't wrap around the abstract concept of uni. He was a clever man, but his lack of education limited him in ways he didn't understand. My best friend was very working class. We stayed close through adulthood. But pretty early on, the differences on our intelligence, education and lifestyle choices. Being smart + educated translates well into emotional intelligence. Going to uni broadened my horizon and cultivated confidence in me. I had an abusive boyfriend, but gaining emotional intelligence meant I didn't repeat that mistake and I identified and broke patterna. As a result, I followed a good career path, and married a good man and I'm married with a baby on the way. By contrasy, my bestie also got into an abusive relationship. But she became stuck in cycles and didn't have the emotional intelligence to break them. She never grew in confidence because she's stayed stuck in the same job, in the same town. She basically stopped speaking to me because our life trajectories were so different. It made her feel shitty to see how far I'd come, when she was stuck naval gazing. And for my part, it was difficult to watch her repeat the same mistakes over and over, to the same outcome. Most of my friends are middle class, I have a few working class ones. The reason is that class is really down to **taste**. We express our class through taste and access to taste. **Do I judge working class people**? Yes, but not for being working class. I'll sometimes judge their choices and decisions. For example, I know a girl struggling to afford to live and has just had a third kid by a third man. I struggle not to judge these objectively poor decisions, but I also recognise that being working class tends to be less money, less choice and less perspective. None of us make choices in a vacuum. I'll sometimes get frustrated with my working class family because of their naval gazing. They'll read the daily mail and become outraged at something, and won't have the education or mental tools to discern the headlines and critically evaluate what they consume. I find this hugely frustrating, because my mind operates on a wholly different level. I never read anything without trying to analyse it. Indeed, I _enjoy_ analysing it because my brain has been trained that way. Similarly a lot of my working class family have a very crab/bucket mentality. They sneered at my academic attainment and don't have the emotional intelligence to understand their own feelings that drive their beliefs. That's frustrating to deal with. **So to summarise... I don't _judge_ working class people for not having money, and I don't judge them for not being educated and not having as much choices as I do.** **But it does create a different a different set of outlooks, priorities, attitudes. And that divide can be hard to traverse at times.**