‘In the end I just had to take down my hood and just stand with the white people’: indexicalities and intersections of social inequality in young men's narratives about the London Riots

This chapter investigates (meta)discourses about social inequality in spontaneous narratives about the 2011 London Riots in an ethnically mixed group of 25-year-old men from a working-class area in southeast London. Rather than constituting a resource for the construction of tough and anti-institutional masculinities, the young men’s riot narratives foreground a discourse of social injustice which highlights intersections of social class, race, poverty and (lack of) power. The chapter’s analysis of social inequality will be approached from the perspective of ‘class-based intersectionality’ (Block and Corona 2014; Block 2015), highlighting the multidimensionality of social class. The analysis highlights not only the speakers’ awareness of these intersections but also provides insight into why and how ‘subjects mobilise (or choose not to mobilise) particular aspects of their identities in particular circumstances’ (Nash 2008: 11).