As a man I find this hard to admit, but I'm going to watch Oprah today.
It's not that they're aren't good shows, it's that I think that I'm not the key demographic. Today though is different, and I await to see whether Ms. Winfrey delivers the goods or disappoints. Today on the Oprah Show.
It's rarely talked about. What class are you? Lower? Middle? Upper? The three unspoken things that reveal your class? Why should class matter? Why should you care? Uncovering the truth about America's taboo topic?
Pyramid Scheme
It seems awfully simple to break class down to simple graph that lays things by income. What about cost of living differences. $30,000 in Muncie, IN is a lot more money that it would be in Miami, FL or Monterrey, CA. And how many mouths does that have to feed? And is a person living of a "fixed income", that derives from the investment income really in the same dire straits as someone who earns income from a job, and can watch that job be shipped away?
Can I be a Frenchman for the night?
I once took a class in Western European philosophy, I remember being forced to read the work of Pierre Bourdieu. I remember resenting reading Bordieau, and then I did (read him). I'm not much a fan of the Gallic style, I guess it's the kitsch association of Americans who have more money than sense trying to ride that hobby horse to act better than everyone else in the room that makes me resent the French. Bourdieu, the clever bastard that he was, would have probably enjoyed this immensely. For Bourdieu, class wasn't a matter of money, it was something more complex than that.
Bourdieu was both completely empirical and a master theorist, a rare if not unique combination in sociology. His key terms were habitus, field, and symbolic violence. He extended the idea of capital to categories such as social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital. For Bourdieu an individual occupies a position in their social space and is defined not by social class, but by the amount of all kinds of capital they possess, and by the relative amounts symbolic, social, economic and cultural capital account for.
He was also known as a politically engaged and active leftist intellectual, supporting workers against the influences of political elites and neoliberal capitalism. He was even considered the left's enemy of itself: the French Socialist party used to talk of "la gauche bourdieusienne", their enemies on the left.
Some examples of his empirical results include:
* showing that despite the apparent freedom of choice in the arts, people's artistic preferences (e.g. classical music, rock, traditional music) strongly correlate with their social position
* showing that subtleties of language such as accent, grammar, spelling and style -- all part of cultural capital -- are a major factor in social mobility (e.g. getting a higher paid, higher status job).
Pierre Bourdieu's work emphasized how social classes, especially the ruling and intellectual classes, reproduce themselves even under the pretence that society fosters social mobility - particularly through education.
Why is this ok?
In the end, we all are Frenchmen (and women) for the night. Hip hop, country, Eight Mile. American dreams..... broken. Biological racism (the idea that people are inferior because of the color of their skin) is for the most part frowned upon, particularly here in the left blogosphere, but class discrimination, the mocking and demeaning of poor folks (particlularly poor white folks, formerly the base of Democratic party) is acceptable. even here. Excuse me, but why the fuck did this merit 70 recommends? If this were a picture of black folks eating fried chicken and watermelon with the requisite bile associated with that, would this be acceptable? I think not, or at least I hope not.
One of the reason's that the Democratic party is in decline has been the near total inability of the national party to working class white and blacks in a way that is not condescending. For all the harm done between the two of them to the working class, the secret to George W. Bush's and Bill Clinton's success, is that they able to relate to the identity of poor (particularly poor white) folks. The Republican party has mastered the art of white working class blackface so that they can embrace them while stabbing them in the back. By using the unsavory stereotypes lobbed at poor white folks everyday as a way to attack President Bush, you only strengthen the power of the bullshit working class blackface that Bush et al have put on, ie. cutting brush, pretending to like NASCAR, and pretending to have worked for a living.
I'm going to ask you all an uncomfortable question, where are the working class politicians in the Democratic Party? How many of the people who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2004 came from working class backgrounds? How many of the people who will run in 2008 will have ever known what it means to have been lower class, and to be looked down upon for it? What does it say about America that there's a strong possibility that by 2016 it will have been 28 years since someone not named Bush or Clinton sat in the White House? At what point does wealth become an aristocracy, and at what point will Americans be willing to question the role of class in the life of their nation?
"When I rise it will be with the ranks and not from the ranks."
When I was in high school, I was told that I was not college material. There was no place for the son of a divorced mother working for minimum wage in the Ivory tower, or so I was told. Have you considered shop class, they can teach you the skills you'll need in the type of work that will be available to you without a college degree. Shop class wasn't for me, and it's not that you can't make a good living and love you work as a factory worker or a firefighter. The best men I know, the guys who taught me what it means to be an honest and decent man, were these things. It's that I was told that I couldn't go to college because of who I was. It kicks you down, and it most be something like what it's like being told you can't do this or that because you're just a lazy ... I think you get the idea, and I'm not going to finish that off they way it normally would be by the type of people who look down on others. What matters in life is not whether you are wealthy or white, but rather if you are a decent human being.
Some kind of American dream that they had for me, but because of the support from those factory workers and that firefighter, I overcame. This fall I'm going to start a graduate program, to become Dr. ManfromMiddletown. Part of the American dream is rising up, and being a master of you own destiny. The belief that this is the right and possibility for anyone is a large part of the reason why Americans for the most part don't believe in class as the product of being the luckiest tadpole as Europeans often do. Maybe that's what makes it easier for the people who rise from the ranks to trickle down on those below them. I know that for the hard work I've done, my eventual success will be as much do to those who helped me along the way as my own efforts.
The hordes trying to save face in surburbia didn't spring from the Earth like turnips, the successful suburbs are rarely if ever the product of their local community, they are the recipient of those who have risen from the inner cities, and the rural towns that have been left behind in this money makes all America. They, like me, have been the beneficiaries of the helping hand of others, and this brings burden as well as benefit. It's like Eugene Debs, one of the Hoosier state's native sons and thrice the presidential candidate of the Socialist party, said, "When I rise it will be with the ranks and not from the ranks." Amen to that, Brother Debs.
I get the feeling that the people who are the worst offenders when it comes to looking down on the working class are those who have risen from it, and now look down in shame from whence they came. I'm all for forgiveness when it comes to letting the errors of the past, in condoning the trailer trash jokes and like, go, but I think that we all need to recognize that class in America is real, and not something that should be acceptable to demean people for. For their fake embrace of working people and their denial of the existence and importance of class, the Republican party has made the existence and importance of class all the more evident over the past 6 years as the fruits of the global economy have accrued to those who have, while those who have not get screwed.
It ain't right, but the Republicans have tried to turn any serious discussion of class in America into "class warfare" (in which case I suppose Republican polices are "genocide", or at least ethnic cleansing, see New Orleans. Which I think had as much to due with class as race.) If you talk seriously about class, you get tagged as a "Socialist". I wonder whether Oprah will turn out to be a socialist, and I think it's time to stand firm and force a discussion on class in this country. They will call us socialist, and we should call them anti-social, because that's what their policies are. We need Social Democrats to combat the Anti-Social Republicans.