WhyNot’s ‘Chav’ night is elitist

I’ve come to learn that there are three unavoidable things. Death, taxes and being dragged to WhyNot on a Monday.

Even though it is a mediocre night at best, swarms of resigned students follow their keen promoter friends to George Street’s most famous haunt every Monday night.

Bling and Burberry = Chav apparently…

I too follow the crowds like a lamb to the slaughter, week in, week out.

But this week, I have reservations about going.

Flare have advertised the return of ‘the legendary Chav Night’.

And £100 is being offered for the best dressed chav.

In other words, the upmarket establishment will be handing out serious bucks to anybody who proletarianises themselves.

I have a problem with this.

There’s no avoiding the fact that the University of Edinburgh is an extraordinarily middle-class university.

StudentBeans has placed it in the top 20 ‘poshest’ universities in the UK.

This event will see largely well-off students, many of whom have had very little contact with those less well-off than them in society, upholding nasty stereotypes about the poor.

One of my friends is planning on bringing a fake baby to mock ‘chavs’ for having high teenage pregnancy rates.

Another is putting scars on their face to paint the picture of a ‘chav’ who got into a fight at the footie.

The term ‘chav’ is derogatory and magnifies the worst qualities of a select group of the working class.

Just ask Owen Jones

It’s reductive: it demonises the working class into a group of thuggish degenerates.

Encouraging some out-of-touch students to uphold unfair cliches about those less fortunate than themselves is snobby and elitist.

Last week I saw a man turned away at the door by a WhyNot bouncer for being a “thug”.

If WhyNot don’t want to gain a reputation for being a classist and elitist club, they need to get off their high horse and value people as individuals.

Not as units of a homogenous group.

Thinking of going to WhyNot this Monday?

No. Why Would You?