Vic Crain raises an important issue:
“I really don’t understand why people so firmly resist the idea that economics, not race, is the fundamental dimension of discrimination.”
This happens because there were concerted and extremely successful efforts to substitute the terminology of class war with the terminology of inherent, inborn, inescapable identities.
The goal was to support the “end of history” line of thought that goes as follows:
the only real divisions among humans are those of “identities”
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“identities” are the source of all problems that we experience today
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“identities” are “hard-wired” and can’t be changed
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ergo, nothing can be changed and we live in the best of all possible worlds.
It’s a nifty little trick of manipulation aimed at ensuring that everybody is so dedicated to the endless repetition of trivialities (without which no identity can exist) that economic exploitation does not even get mentioned.
As the great Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes observes, the word “class” is used today solely to signal that one is not adhering to the values of consumerism well enough. We all know what “She has so much class!” and “What a classy guy!” mean, don’t we? These expressions point to the sad, empty space where the concept of class as a social and economic category used to sit.
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“I really don’t understand why people so firmly resist the idea that economics, not race, is the fundamental dimension of discrimination.”
Race is still a major factor, regardless of class. Have you seen the video of Oprah’s being refused a chance to inspect a handbag (in a store in Switzerland, I think) because the clerk “knew” a black woman could not afford a handbag with a $35000 price tag?
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// Race is still a major factor, regardless of class.
David, I think your example about Oprah doesn’t truly disapprove the post’s point. That clerk (wrongly) used her race to gain information about her class. I suppose, the seller hasn’t had black clients before? At least, not many.
Would the clerk have given the handbag to a white woman with a Russian accent, for instance? I am unsure.
In the case of “we don’t sell pizza to gays,” it is regardless of class, while “I think you are poor because of your skin” does seem to be connected to class too.
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As instances of oppression go, this is really not a very major one. I’ve seen Oprah on TV and she doesn’t look very deprived of handbags.
Nobody is denying that racism exists. But it is also true that there was a concerted campaign to set poor whites against poor blacks in order to prevent them from making a peep while they were being robbed.
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Now began thinking, how many stereotypes about blacks in USA are, in fact, (also) stereotypes about poor people? For instance, the welfare queen idea. Or ‘Fried chicken’ stereotype – chicken is the cheapest meat, much cheaper than beef.
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I don’t think it’s fruitful to talk about class and race as if they’re orthogonal, unrelated factors.
We’re talking about a country that built its wealth on the back of free slave labor. How do we not link economic class and race here? We’ve all read the Ta nehisi Coates’ Reparations article, right? Black people being denied home loans based upon their race for decades, having not one single penny to hand down to their children, and now we’re talking about economic class as if it’s unrelated to race? I don’t get it.
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So, asking ‘was this person oppressed because of their race or their class?’ is ultimately meaningless because race and class are intimately linked. In the US, at least.
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What bothers me is that class solidarity is a concept that is dead among those who most need it. We are allowing ourselves to be distracted by the entirely trivial melodramas of Oprahs, Ellen Paos, etc. The argument of “if even they suffer from discrimination” is wiping out any chance for a realization of how different their reality is from that of the people who pity the ultra rich in order not to notice how they are being robbed by these very “poor” billionaires.
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A hundred times YES to this!
By the way, don’t you love it when a post just sits there for days or weeks and one comment ignites a fantastic discussion?
Thank you, David. I was feeling too lazy to respond when the post first came out but after looking at your comment I had to jump in. Solidarity and all that.
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The point is that nobody is talking about class at all. It’s a category that is meaningless to most people. Nobody is even likely to admit that they are anything but the “middle-class” which is supposed to sit in the middle of something nobody wants to name.
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How American. 🙂
Meanwhile, we have underclass solidarity in the form of choosing the manner of conspicuous consumption …
I have an American friend who wanted a football jersey until he realised that he’d be festooned with a prominently placed major bank logo as part of wearing it.
“So you want your sport? Never forget who’s really paying for it.”
Anyway, I think of “middle class” in the same way I think of beer vats — the Marmite’s on the bottom, the beer’s in the middle, and the people who make the beer are on the top. Since what’s on the bottom came from the beer-making process, you may as well say there’s the “beer class” and the “beer making class”, to extend the concept just a bit.
This isn’t too different from Hal Foster’s “Design and Crime” premise, in which he points out the same essential problem, but instead of involving beer vats it involves elite architecture and how it’s foisted upon the public …
What madness is this middle class of which you speak?
It’s clearly a commercial product, but not nearly as interesting as Marmite. 🙂
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“It’s clearly a commercial product, but not nearly as interesting as Marmite.”
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“The point is that nobody is talking about class at all.”
Ah, ok. I was responding to vic’s comment there.
You’re absolutely correct. The only people talking about class in america get told ‘What are you, a commie?’ and it’s not accidental, either. The word ‘class’ simply has no place in the mythology of this country. It just doesn’t belong.
“But it is also true that there was a concerted campaign to set poor whites against poor blacks in order to prevent them from making a peep while they were being robbed.”
And this is how you do it. Not only pitting poor blacks against poor whites, but pitting different immigrant groups against each other. Hence the pernicious ‘model minority’ myth. ‘Why can’t black people be more like the hard-working, industrious asian immigrants?’
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\ The word ‘class’ simply has no place in the mythology of this country. It just doesn’t belong.
It does have a prominent place in American literary canon: “The Great Gatsby,” “Martin Eden,” “American Tragedy,” etc.
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The great Socialist writers of the early XXth century have been displaced from the American canon and I believe it was done precisely to serve this purpose.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was the writer of the glittering classes, so he’s out of place here. But Jack London and Theodore Dreiser are not even known to American readers today, especially the readers who are younger than 40.
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Class has always been a thing in the US that operated within racial groups (often robustly) rather than across them.
Within the US South, it was not the upper classes that were the driving force of segregation but the lower classes (it was clear to them that blacks were all that kept them from the bottom).
This created an acute (if mostly not overtly acknowledged) feeling of class and it’s why the South has always had a quality folks hangup and lots of ways to refer to class without actually talking about it: common, garfish, pinkeye, queerbait, snakebit, trash, trailer trash, river people and others are all ways of refering (in various places and times) to the lower classes (common could be dignified working class but all the rest were sub-working class).
And within the black community there are similar divisions (a lot of Chris Rock’s humor is about the disdain that middle and upper class blacks feel toward the lower classes).
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The interesectionality approach was useful, or had the potential to be useful, before it turned from analyzing groups and trends to nitpicking the shades of oppression in everybody’s individual experience.
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I just got done teaching a book that has strong critiques of our society’s class and race structures — Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus. It’s not one of his famous novels (like Slaughter-House 5 or Breakfast of Champions), but it is probably one of his most important. Because it talks about really big issues like class, race, and (gasp!) Vietnam, it is frequently ignored. But in my view, it is TREMENDOUS. Very cynical, satirical, and poignant. Of course, I would get my throat cut by ‘real’ feminists for trumpeting Vonnegut when his portrayal of women isn’t very interesting (or kind) one way or another in this book, but he isn’t exactly interested in women’s issues as a writer. For what its worth for this conversation, re: race/class, this book is important and very critical of our society.
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I don’t know if anybody is interested, but wanted to mention:
“A Fire in Their Hearts. Yiddish Socialists in New York” – by Tony Michels
In a compelling history of the Jewish community in New York during four decades of mass immigration, Tony Michels examines the defining role of the Yiddish socialist movement in the American Jewish experience.
The movement, founded in the 1880s, was dominated by Russian-speaking intellectuals […]
Arguing against the view that socialism and Yiddish culture arrived as Old World holdovers, Michels demonstrates that they arose in New York in response to local conditions and thrived not despite Americanization, but because of it. And the influence of the movement swirled far beyond the Lower East Side, to a transnational culture in which individuals, ideas, and institutions crossed the Atlantic. New York Jews, in the beginning, exported Yiddish socialism to Russia, not the other way around.
The Yiddish socialist movement shaped Jewish communities across the United States well into the twentieth century and left an important political legacy that extends to the rise of neoconservatism. A story of hopeful successes and bitter disappointments, A Fire in Their Hearts brings to vivid life this formative period for American Jews and the American left.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674032439
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