The Truth About British Class That Americans Completely Misunderstand | American Reacts

Indexed: 2026-05-22

[00:00:22]Everything in Britain is a coded message about class.

[00:00:27]The accent, the biscuits, the curtains, the dog, the pronunciation of scone, the way you arrange your cushions, the garden gnome you may or may not have in your garden.

[00:00:41]Every single thing.

[00:00:45]After about a year and some change of living here, I figured out exactly one thing, just one, and it's that there is no actual British culture.

[00:00:58]There is only one enormous elaborate system for determining within seconds of meeting someone where they rank.

[00:01:10]Spot it once and suddenly it is everywhere you look.

[00:01:15]It's in those curtains. It's when you see those little dogs and you can even tell by the way that someone holds their teaspoon.

[00:01:23]It is an operating system this country runs on. Yet, no one says it out loud because mentioning it out loud would be uh terribly common of someone to do.

[00:01:37]This is the British class system and it controls everything.

[00:01:44]The first thing you need to know is the British will tell you with a straight face that the class system is over. They will say, "Oh, we're all middle class now. Our class doesn't really matter anymore." And this is, I have to tell you, the funniest thing that British people will do because they say it while standing in a kitchen that telegraphs their exact social position from 12t away.

[00:02:14]They say they say it in an accent that took six generations to perfect.

[00:02:23]They say it on a sofa that is doing more sociological work than the entire department of sociology at Cambridge.

[00:02:32]Saying class doesn't matter in Britain is like saying the weather doesn't matter in Britain um just does.

[00:02:43]It's a thing they have to say because the alternative is admitting the only thing anyone has talked about for a thousand years.

[00:02:52]Now in America, we pretend that class doesn't exist. But in Britain, they pretend it stopped existing.

[00:03:02]And they have some little lies about that. I think each have their own lies, honestly. But I think uh we're going to try to unpack that today for both.

[00:03:14]Apparently, the British class system used to be pretty simple. There were three boxes. There was working class, middle class, and upper class.

[00:03:25]This is what they teach in school, or at least so I'm told. I didn't go to school here, clearly. I went to school in Kentucky where we learned about the Civil War and uh ran tornado drills.

[00:03:37]Very important to actually do the tornado drill. Anywh who, but the three box system is a lie. The actual British class system, as best as I can map it, after over a year here, is a fieldwork of pubs, has approximately 37 boxes. And many of them are nested inside of other boxes. Kind of like a a Russian doll, except inside the dolls is just pure resentment.

[00:04:08]Now, you have upper class, just upper upper upper. you have the aristocracy uh royalty god um but only the church of England god uh Catholic god ranks probably somewhere around lower middle class then we get to middle class uh as class so subdivided I have to believe there's a different middle class for every post code really there's lower middle class um middle class uh upp upper middle class and the upper upper middle who are pretending to be working class because they read the guardian. I don't know how that qualifies but that's what they'd think. And then there's a whole other category from that last one and I think you could call it Hamstead class.

[00:05:03]Then there's true working class with its own tiers as well. Uh they're respectable, they're skilled, and they're a category that tabloids back in 2003 were unusually mean about.

[00:05:21]But underneath all of that, doing more work than you could possibly believe is the question of new money versus old money. New money is what you get when you've worked really hard and you've earned a fortune. Now, old money is what you get from your great greatgrandfather who stole a fortune from someone in another country in 1782.

[00:05:47]Somehow, old money is better. I don't make the rules here. The rules were made by people whose names are on the street signs that you see.

[00:05:57]But how do they sort each other?

[00:06:00]Well, because they just do constantly.

[00:06:04]It is a national pastime. I feel like here football was invented as a cover I think for the class sport there are more four main signals I think to how you can identify class when you're here and I think number one would be obvious the accent the British have invented more accents per square mile than any other nation on earth it feels like and each one will tell you exactly where on the ladder, the social ladder, each person stands.

[00:06:43]There's the posh accent, um the slightly less posh accent, the accent that's trying to sound less posh than it is, and the accent trying to sound more posh than it truly is.

[00:06:59]In America, accents just tell you what state someone is from. Here, an accent tells you what kind of person you are.

[00:07:09]Whether your great-grandfather employed someone who also employed someone else um is basically a biometric scan through words.

[00:07:21]And then two, next on the accent, it would be vocabulary.

[00:07:27]Toilet lou, which I thought everyone would say when I got here. They don't say lou as much as I thought. Lavatory, water closet, or bathroom. Now, these words are not synonyms. Not here. No, it's different. These are flags. Cuz if you say Lou, congratulations. You're uh middle class, but trying. If you say the throne room, you've probably been around some upper class people too long and they're definitely going to be laughing at you.

[00:07:58]Oh, another word that is incredibly confusing as an American, the word pudding.

[00:08:04]In America, pudding is a thing in a cup.

[00:08:07]That's it. In Britain, pudding is the name of a dessert, but also a specific dessert, but also in some households, uh, it's a savory course.

[00:08:19]The word pudding is doing five jobs and the entire class system is encoded in which job you assign it to be doing.

[00:08:30]I have started using all words wrong on purpose honestly just to be a little spicy and to watch British people's faces twitch. This is my only taking the piss. Let me take the piss there.

[00:08:44]Now three I think even down which was a crazy one to learn the dog. Yes, even how you refer to your dog. Labrador upper class. Spaniel upper class.

[00:08:55]Whippbit working class, unless you're designer and shortage.

[00:09:00]Terrier is regional. Cockapoo, you have an Instagram. Greyhound rescue, you probably teach at a university.

[00:09:09]Now, I observed a man at a pub identify another man's entire family tree based on the breed of his dog.

[00:09:19]This is not a country. This is um a forensic investigation that just never ends.

[00:09:26]And the fourth comes to the house, the address, the postcode, the interior.

[00:09:34]A British person can drive down the street and read the social class of every single house based from the curtains alone, the curtains. Now, they have curtain options here. They have feelings, strong feelings about Nets.

[00:09:50]Um, warm feelings about V. I think the word twitch curtain that describes an entire personality type defined by the words that you observe your neighbors through the window.

[00:10:04]The window itself is also a class marker. Are you a sash? Are you a UPVC?

[00:10:12]Uh are you the original Georgian? H you might be thinking, all right, this is like kind of fun trivia, right? But does it actually matter in a real way? Yes.

[00:10:25]Yeah, it does actually very much.

[00:10:28]Imagine if you're in a zip code determined your accent and which school you went to were based on that zip code and that determined whether the next school would let you in after your primary school. And that would also determine which university you're able to get into, which will determine which job you're able to get into, which will determine the post code that you can afford after all of that. And that's where it gets a little bit out of hand.

[00:11:00]Imagine all of that was already mostly predetermined by the post code you were grandfathered in to live in. You didn't really have a choice as a baby.

[00:11:11]That is essentially the British class system summed up. It's not a ladder.

[00:11:15]It's more of a conveyor belt. And the British schools would be the engine room. Now, the British have private schools that have existed for 600 years roughly. The school that Boris Johnson went to, it was founded back in 1440 and 40 years before Columbus even got lost out on the ocean. That's how long the schools existed.

[00:11:42]It's still feeding people directly into parliament.

[00:11:47]7% of British children go to private school. 65% of senior judges, they went to private school. Kind of see the connection now. About half of the cabinet private school. Most of the broadcasters private school. A terrifying percentage of people deciding what counts as common sense in this country were taught that what counts as common sense is the same as 14 institutions.

[00:12:22]In America we do have something similar.

[00:12:24]We have legacy admissions uh places like Yale and Harvard and we are correctly horrified that this exists and they are trying to remove some of these which basically meant your dad went here you got an easier way to get in. But in Britain the entire system is established structurally on legacy admission by a different name. And no one seems to be horrified by this um because no one mentions it as we were saying earlier because again mentioning this would be terribly common of someone to do.

[00:12:58]I think housing would be another thing.

[00:13:01]This would be the engine to the beast.

[00:13:04]Britain has not built a serious amount of housing since the late 1970s. And the homes that do exist belong to people who already had homes.

[00:13:17]If your parents owned, you'll own. If your parents rented, you'll rent forever.

[00:13:23]And possibly their children and your grandchildren.

[00:13:27]Property here is not so much a thing you buy like in the States. It's something you inherit. And so one time I met this girl at pub in London because that's where I'm always at. You know, I freaking love the pubs here. And she owned a four bedroomedroom flat outright.

[00:13:45]I assume she must be some sort of tech billionaire, but no, she was a yoga teacher. But her grandmother had bought the building back in 1954.

[00:13:56]That's the system. That's the whole game.

[00:14:00]But let's bring it back to where I'm from. Kentucky. Let's compare class with Kentucky. Now, Kentucky has a class system.

[00:14:08]it kind of the same way that a swamp has alligators. I suppose it's there. It is very dangerous. You don't see it right away, but you have to know where to look. The signals are a bit different than here. It's all about which church you go to, uh, which family name you have, whose granddad worked at the mine, um, do you have a lakehouse, do you have a boat on the lakehouse, does your mother go to derby every year?

[00:14:38]But that's the difference I think in in Kentucky in America the official story is that anyone can become anything.

[00:14:48]Meritocracy that the American dream this is statistically not very true.

[00:14:57]And then before I came here if you want to talk about crazy class systems I lived in Los Angeles for 15 years.

[00:15:03]LA has one of the most insane class systems in America.

[00:15:09]There's above a line, below the line industry terms. Um, did you go to cross world crossroads of school for kids? Um, are you in the industry? And um, but again, officially there's no class structure.

[00:15:24]The story is that they hustled, they worked hard, it's meritocracy, it's manifesting, it's your green juice and getting up early for your yoga class and you earned it. You did this and you used a vision board while you got there.

[00:15:40]So, I grew up with a lie essentially.

[00:15:44]That lie is that class is something you can outrun, that you can hustle far away from your parents' postcode, that your accent doesn't matter because if you don't have an accent, then even though we do have an accent, and mine is um oddly comforting to British people, which I I enjoy because I was made fun of in California for my southern accent, which I have worked down a lot. Um, but I can bring it out as needed. It doesn't come as naturally now after so long, but it's nice to have it be welcomed for a change. So, there is some accent. You know, if you're from a poor state, your accent gives your state away.

[00:16:27]But America pretends there isn't a class system, but the British know there is a class system.

[00:16:34]It they know it is very real and it is very much everywhere you look here.

[00:16:40]you just refuse to address it directly.

[00:16:44]So instead of discussing the curtains um or the fact that Americans don't know things or we pretend we don't know things um we instead discuss success in America. We discuss those old famous bootstraps. Pull pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

[00:17:02]And then we ended up in a country that is so rich and getting richer that we tell each other that it's because they worked hard. And when they actually just do the same three private schools in the States as their cousins, which is similar to here, the British have aristocracy and they call it aristocracy.

[00:17:22]The Americans have aristocracy, but we call it the Forbes list.

[00:17:28]I honestly don't know which one is worse. I I think what's really strange is that because the class system doesn't stop at obvious signals.

[00:17:40]It it seeps into your behavior into things that look like personality but are intrinsically coded behaviors.

[00:17:52]Queuing, I think that's a good example, too. The British love queuing. The Q is sacred.

[00:18:00]But the way you cue also gives away your class.

[00:18:06]Do you complain loudly when you're in a queue?

[00:18:09]Do you sigh once and say nothing? Do you do the tut?

[00:18:15]The tut is also a class marker. The different tuts mean different things.

[00:18:23]How am I supposed to know all of this?

[00:18:25]There's so much to absorb to make sure I don't make a faux paw.

[00:18:33]Now, in the States, we do things not even subtly different.

[00:18:39]We complain.

[00:18:41]Americans complain freely. We complain to the managers. Uh we say this is unacceptable with a confident American smile.

[00:18:52]The British complain in the way that you're writing furious letters, but they're all in your head, and you just say to the person, "That was actually really lovely. Thank you so much out loud, never actually writing that letter or complaining."

[00:19:10]The working class complain in person.

[00:19:13]The middle class complain on Trip Adviser. And the upper class complained by simply ceasing to exist in your establishment forever. And you will never know why.

[00:19:28]Another one that's hard to wrap my head around here is that class is wrapped up in laughter.

[00:19:33]Even the way you laugh is wrapped up in class.

[00:19:38]Posh people just say, "Huh?" once.

[00:19:42]That's the whole laugh. That's it.

[00:19:45]A working class might sound more like a car backfiring with a full belly laugh.

[00:19:52]I, as an American, laugh by snorting and then apologizing for snorting because I really like laughing and I get real into it. I think you should just naturally laugh. It's like laughing makes you happy and by default, you know, makes everything better. But anyway, I'm in a class world now. I need to learn to not laugh.

[00:20:11]But why am I going on about this? Well, because in America, we have a huge freaking problem. We have a class system that is doing all of the same things, but we do not have the vocabulary to see it. We have private schools feeding into the same 10 universities feeding into the same boardrooms. We have inherited wealth. We have post codes that determine outcomes. We have accents and vocabularies.

[00:20:41]We have all of it.

[00:20:43]But we don't see it. We can't see it because we've been told from childhood that we don't have class. We live in a meritocracy where you pull your bootstraps up and anyone can make it there. And if you don't make it, it's because you didn't try hard enough. even when that comes to Alcine and healthcare and cancer and everything.

[00:21:09]But living here now has basically handed me a pair of new glasses.

[00:21:17]I didn't know I needed them, but suddenly all of the structural lines and visible and invisible architecture of class, the conveyor belts, I can see them. And looking back at America, the same architecture is is there. The same conveyor belts are there. They're just hidden with different words.

[00:21:40]Britain has a class system you cannot escape. And America has a class system you can't even acknowledge.

[00:21:47]I'm not sure again which is worse, but at least the Brits are honest about the dishonesty of class.

[00:21:59]And I know private school and public school have different meanings here.

[00:22:04]I'm well aware. Again, another word I'm trying to flip around.

[00:22:09]But long story short, that has been my class report on class. Um, I'm off to make a cup of tea now because my throat is dry from rambling, which again is a signal of class. A builder's tea, a mug, no sugar, no sauce, sir. Maybe a biscuit. No sauce. What am I talking about? Anyway, if you liked this video and you find it interesting, like, subscribe.

[00:22:39]I am so confused by class. What is a time that you see class here in Britain that is uh an understated thing I may not know about yet that please give me a pointer that could help? And what is a a class trigger you see in America that they all pretend doesn't exist? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks for watching. Please like, subscribe, do all that stuff. And I'm going to go to class.

[00:23:04]>> Bless his heart.

[00:23:06]>> If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe and leave a comment below.

[00:23:11]And as always, a special thanks to my members.