Class, Privilege, and Social Markers

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by Martina

Class is determinative in ways that people constantly underestimate. Two and three generations in the upper middle class does not really turn you into a member of the upper middle class. It takes a long time to learn and unlearn the way of looking at the world that your social class created in you.


This so powerfully part of my experience and so much a part of the lens I look through. I sometimes have a good chuckle with the theory of upward mobility.

Often, I think of sayings like ... you can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl....

Or, you can give the working-poor class immigrant garbage man's daughter an education and upward social mobility, but can't take the immigrant garbage man's working-poor class out of the daughter. I don't know if this always serves me well. I do know, I am stuck with it. Yet, there is more for my family generations to work through.


Class is, IMO, the primary prism through which we see the world.

Yup, the primary prism.

[JustJo]

Originally Posted by Martina

Class is very real. It's not just in our heads. It's who you know, who your parents know. It's the assumptions and categories you were taught as a child. There are things they know exist in the world for them, realities they accept as stable, that i have a hard time even believing in.

There are some things they don't have that my African American friend from Flint, Michigan has. My friend's family never ever disowns or cuts out a family member. They may be in jail. They may be queer (which is not approved of), but they are always welcome home. Their behavior is less important than the fact that they are family. They do not have to prove anything to anyone to be accepted. i have not found that to be true sometimes for people raised in the upper middle classes.

We enact class all the time. It's impossible to think outside of class without doing lots and lots of work. And we injure ourselves and others with assumptions and fears about class. Not necessarily brutally. i know lots of proud working class people. i think that if people are not desperately poor and they fit in with the people around them, they are as likely to be happy as anyone else.

Class does not determine happiness or satisfaction with life. But it is ever-present. It is relentless. Much harder to see outside of than racism, sexism, and homophobia -- although those are tough.

Class is determinative in ways that people constantly underestimate. Two and three generations in the upper middle class does not really turn you into a member of the upper middle class. It takes a long time to learn and unlearn the way of looking at the world that your social class created in you.

My parents came from world that distrusted outsiders. Outsiders were likely to despise you. We were vigilant about that in ways that have much more to do with living in poverty among a less respected class of people than any reality i lived on a daily basis. In fact, i was very privileged in my home town. i lived in a small house in the nicest suburb. i had educated parents doing a job that gave them some recognition -- for a while my dad was the high school basketball coach -- the town's only high school. i was an only child and felt pretty safe. i wandered around the neighborhood and the woods freely (it was the sixties). i had a good good life.

But i have had to tame that reaction to other people "mugging" me that causes my inner city students to get in fights with one another all the time. i have a lot of those same assumptions in my bones -- about the world looking down on me and mine.

i know that my friend whose parents worked their way up to great security and wealth from relatively lower middle class roots -- that their family is riddled with anxiety about losing it all. The people she went to college with -- at an elite college -- were not raised that way.

Class is, IMO, the primary prism through which we see the world.

As much as I might wish that what you say isn't true...I am inclined to agree with you.

I grew up somewhere below working class. We were that "deserving poor" family that was the recipient of the basket of food from the PTA ladies at Thanksgiving. Yes, my mother worked but haphazardly...because she was more focused on other enterprises that were important to her, but that left us unsupervised and dependent on the salvation army for clothes and the kindness of the parents of friends for normal "kid things" like trips to the movies or other outings.

I lived most of my childhood in a one-bedroom apartment...we lived 6 months without any living room furniture (until we found a rather startling orange couch at the curb one evening)...we were evicted a few times. We didn't own a TV. I never owned new clothes until I could buy them myself. My mother was also "too proud" (her words) to accept the "charity" of food stamps or welfare...so we just did without. Friends whose mothers collected welfare lived much better than we did. I don't say this as a "pity me"...just to illustrate the root of my perspective.

What I did learn, very young, was to work. To work hard, and to work long hours. I got my first babysitting jobs at age 10, my first "real" job at 15. I had a full time job by the time I was 16...and have worked ever since. I have always supported myself (and then my son), without assistance...even from husbands.

I also figured out that education was the only pathway that I could see out of poverty. I worked full time and went to college... getting a BA. That helped. I kept working. Other stuff intervened...and it was 20 years before I could go back to school for my masters. I got my MBA and things changed again, for the better.

I am now a little cog in a medium-sized corporate wheel and I love it. I like my work. I like the appreciation of my boss. I like my teammates. I love that I work from home.

But...here's the deal. I may have advanced degrees and all of the technical credentials for the job, but I will still never be senior mangement. I don't come from the same place those folks come from. I don't see the world the same way. I don't know the things and the people they do. They appreciate my creativity and my work...but they know I am not one of them, just as I know it.

Technically, I am middle class. My income puts me in that quartile. I have a college education. I live in a relatively affluent suburb in a top-rated school district. I drive a newer car. We go on a vacation every year.

I don't feel middle class though. I feel like a poor person with some money.

I tried to find the post and couldn't....but someone posted here about their food issues. Empty cupboards or a bare refrigerator will send me into an emotional tail spin. I will and can budget anywhere...except at the grocery store. I buy the expensive stuff there....fresh berries, dry-aged beef, the really good olive oil. These are the things that hold my old poverty mentality at bay. Doesn't make sense...but it's what's real for me.

The primary difference that I see is that the people I know who grew up middle or upper class appear to feel secure in their place in the world. They, at least appear, to have the sense that things will always be okay. If things go wrong for them, they have backup in family. It's not entitlement exactly....but just a feeling of mastery or rightness. Not sure if I'm putting that well...

What I feel is nothing like that. It comes from having lived on the edge for my entire youth...and of having only myself to depend on ever since. I feel like my survival (and my son's) is dependent on my education, my work, my vigilance. If I falter, we are screwed. I trust my own ability to survive almost anything (short of nuclear war) because I know how to work, how to get along, and how to make a living no matter what comes. That's a weird kind of security of its own....but it's different from the security that comes from growing up with enough.

[Greyson]

Speaking of Class, Privilege and Socail Markers.....


______________________________________________

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/op...outhat.html?hp

NY Times

July 11, 2010

The Class War We Need

By ROSS DOUTHAT

The rich are different from you and me. They know how to game the system.

That’s one interpretation, at least, of last week’s news that Americans with million-dollar mortgages are defaulting at almost twice the rate of the typical homeowner. It suggests an infuriating scenario in which the average American slaves away to keep Wells Fargo or Bank of America off his back, while fat cats and high fliers cut their losses and sail off to the next investment opportunity.

That isn’t exactly what’s happening, most likely. Just because you have a million-dollar mortgage doesn’t make you a millionaire, and a lot of the fat-cat defaulters probably aren’t that fat anymore. Chances are they’re more like Teresa and Joe Giudice from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” tacky reality-TV climbers who recently filed for bankruptcy after their decadent lifestyle turned out to be a debt-enabled fantasy.

Still, watching the Giudices sashay through their onyx-encrusted mansion, and knowing that thousands of similarly profligate homeowners are simply walking away from their debts, it’s easy to succumb to a little class-warrior fantasizing. (Pitchforks, tar, feathers ... that sort of thing.)

The trick is to channel those impulses in a constructive direction. The left-wing instinct, when faced with high-rolling irresponsibility, is usually to call for tax increases on the rich. But the problem, here and elsewhere, isn’t exactly that we tax high rollers’ incomes too lightly. It’s that we subsidize their irresponsibility too heavily — underwriting their bad bets and bailing out their follies. The class warfare we need is a conservative class warfare, which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out.

Consider the spread that the Giudices currently occupy (pending potential foreclosure proceedings, of course). The first million of its reported $1.7 million price tag is presumably covered by the federal mortgage-interest tax deduction. Intended to boost middle-class homebuyers, this deduction has gradually turned into a huge tax break for the affluent, with most of the benefits flowing to homeowners with cash income over $100,000. In much of the country, it’s a McMansion subsidy, whose costs to the federal Treasury are covered by the tax dollars of Americans who either rent or own more modest homes.

This policy is typical of the way the federal government does business. In case after case, Washington’s web of subsidies and tax breaks effectively takes money from the middle class and hands it out to speculators and have-mores. We subsidize drug companies, oil companies, agribusinesses disguised as “family farms” and “clean energy” firms that aren’t energy-efficient at all. We give tax breaks to immensely profitable corporations that don’t need the money and boondoggles that wouldn’t exist without government favoritism.

And we do more of it every day. Take Barack Obama’s initiative to double U.S. exports in the next five years. As The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney points out, it involves the purest sort of corporate welfare: We’re lending money to foreign governments or companies so that they’ll buy from Boeing and Pfizer and Archer Daniels Midland. That’s good news for those companies’ stockholders and C.E.O.’s. But the money to pay for it ultimately comes out of middle-class pocketbooks.

This isn’t just a corporate welfare problem. The same pattern is at work in our entitlement system, which is lurching toward bankruptcy in part because of how much Medicare and Social Security pay to seniors who could get along without assistance. Instead of a safety net that protects the elderly from poverty, we have a system in which the American taxpayer is effectively underwriting cruises and tee times.

All of this ought to be grist for a kind of “small-government egalitarianism,” in the economist Edward Glaeser’s useful phrase, that seeks to shrink government by attacking Washington’s wasteful spending on the well-connected. And sometimes conservative politicians make moves in this direction. President George W. Bush’s Tax Reform Commission proposed sharply reducing the mortgage-interest deduction. House Minority Leader John Boehner, to his great credit, recently floated the possibility of means-testing Social Security. Many Republican senators have been staunch critics of corporate welfare.

In the age of Barack Obama, many rank-and-file conservatives have been more upset about redistribution of a different sort — the kind that takes money from the prosperous and “spreads the wealth” (as Obama put it, in his famous confrontation with Joe the Plumber) down the income ladder.

This kind of spending can be problematic. But conservatives need to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn’t from the successful to the poor. It’s from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich.

[AtLast]

Yes, I was listening to some reporting about this over the weekend. Makes one give pause!

Originally Posted by Greyson

Speaking of Class, Privilege and Socail Markers.....


______________________________________________

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/op...outhat.html?hp

NY Times

July 11, 2010

The Class War We Need

By ROSS DOUTHAT

The rich are different from you and me. They know how to game the system.

That’s one interpretation, at least, of last week’s news that Americans with million-dollar mortgages are defaulting at almost twice the rate of the typical homeowner. It suggests an infuriating scenario in which the average American slaves away to keep Wells Fargo or Bank of America off his back, while fat cats and high fliers cut their losses and sail off to the next investment opportunity.

That isn’t exactly what’s happening, most likely. Just because you have a million-dollar mortgage doesn’t make you a millionaire, and a lot of the fat-cat defaulters probably aren’t that fat anymore. Chances are they’re more like Teresa and Joe Giudice from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” tacky reality-TV climbers who recently filed for bankruptcy after their decadent lifestyle turned out to be a debt-enabled fantasy.

Still, watching the Giudices sashay through their onyx-encrusted mansion, and knowing that thousands of similarly profligate homeowners are simply walking away from their debts, it’s easy to succumb to a little class-warrior fantasizing. (Pitchforks, tar, feathers ... that sort of thing.)

The trick is to channel those impulses in a constructive direction. The left-wing instinct, when faced with high-rolling irresponsibility, is usually to call for tax increases on the rich. But the problem, here and elsewhere, isn’t exactly that we tax high rollers’ incomes too lightly. It’s that we subsidize their irresponsibility too heavily — underwriting their bad bets and bailing out their follies. The class warfare we need is a conservative class warfare, which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out.

Consider the spread that the Giudices currently occupy (pending potential foreclosure proceedings, of course). The first million of its reported $1.7 million price tag is presumably covered by the federal mortgage-interest tax deduction. Intended to boost middle-class homebuyers, this deduction has gradually turned into a huge tax break for the affluent, with most of the benefits flowing to homeowners with cash income over $100,000. In much of the country, it’s a McMansion subsidy, whose costs to the federal Treasury are covered by the tax dollars of Americans who either rent or own more modest homes.

This policy is typical of the way the federal government does business. In case after case, Washington’s web of subsidies and tax breaks effectively takes money from the middle class and hands it out to speculators and have-mores. We subsidize drug companies, oil companies, agribusinesses disguised as “family farms” and “clean energy” firms that aren’t energy-efficient at all. We give tax breaks to immensely profitable corporations that don’t need the money and boondoggles that wouldn’t exist without government favoritism.

And we do more of it every day. Take Barack Obama’s initiative to double U.S. exports in the next five years. As The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney points out, it involves the purest sort of corporate welfare: We’re lending money to foreign governments or companies so that they’ll buy from Boeing and Pfizer and Archer Daniels Midland. That’s good news for those companies’ stockholders and C.E.O.’s. But the money to pay for it ultimately comes out of middle-class pocketbooks.

This isn’t just a corporate welfare problem. The same pattern is at work in our entitlement system, which is lurching toward bankruptcy in part because of how much Medicare and Social Security pay to seniors who could get along without assistance. Instead of a safety net that protects the elderly from poverty, we have a system in which the American taxpayer is effectively underwriting cruises and tee times.

All of this ought to be grist for a kind of “small-government egalitarianism,” in the economist Edward Glaeser’s useful phrase, that seeks to shrink government by attacking Washington’s wasteful spending on the well-connected. And sometimes conservative politicians make moves in this direction. President George W. Bush’s Tax Reform Commission proposed sharply reducing the mortgage-interest deduction. House Minority Leader John Boehner, to his great credit, recently floated the possibility of means-testing Social Security. Many Republican senators have been staunch critics of corporate welfare.

In the age of Barack Obama, many rank-and-file conservatives have been more upset about redistribution of a different sort — the kind that takes money from the prosperous and “spreads the wealth” (as Obama put it, in his famous confrontation with Joe the Plumber) down the income ladder.

This kind of spending can be problematic. But conservatives need to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn’t from the successful to the poor. It’s from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich.

[asphaltcowboi]

this is just my opinion and my thoughts.
being raised wanting for nothing but expected to work and make something of ourselfs. just balrey got my GED i managed to retire comfertable from a union back breaking job.
i feel class has to do with more with a persons morals then a persons check book.
also touching on the privlages of the rich.. i know right now because our country is struggling financialy many that do have money are being audited and dinged by the IRS in many ways that were never an issue in the past.
just random thought.

[Corkey]

Originally Posted by AtLastHome

Yes, I was listening to some reporting about this over the weekend. Makes one give pause!

Anyone see me taking a cruse, or having tea time? Gives me pause alright, like if they do take away medicare and reduce my social security, just how am I going to pay my way in the world, or how am I going to pay for the prescriptions I need, or that next surgery that is coming down the line. Keep your hands off social security and medicare and stop paying for 2 wars. That is the friggen answer.

[Venus007]

I grew up very poor, not just my generation but for many extending back to our country of origin, Ireland, where my great grandpa was a worker in a coal mine and before that were tenant farmers on English land. I always heard “Just because you are poor doesn’t mean you can’t be clean” like a mantra growing up. I know it is cliché (lace curtain Irish) but we ALWAYS had beautiful curtains and it was practically a moral obligation to keep up appearances. Oddly enough one of the worst insults that could be heaped on someone’s head was that they had gone “Above their raising”, meaning that someone was putting on airs or acting as if they belonged to a higher social class than they did. Education and physicians were viewed with GREAT suspicion. Education because it would get you nowhere since a good woman just needs to be able to raise good god fearing children anyway and education pulls you away from god. Physicians were suspect because not only were they expensive but also they didn’t know what the heck they were doing and made too much money to be trusted.

Money was fleeting and to be spent while you had it and it was irresponsible and absolutely selfish to save since there was never enough to cover basic expenses and bills. Needless to say one of my core struggles is with money and my relationship to it. Also money and assets were to be shared with your family, period. No matter what you had it wasn’t yours it was ours, everyone was expected to throw whatever assets into the family pot (literally and figuratively).

The only acceptable way to get more money was to marry well, and even then you were expected to behave yourself appropriately and not get trapped into that higher class better-than-everyone-else behavior and of course marrying well also meant that the new wealth needed to be used to help the other people in the family.

I was shown not to be too flashy, not to dream unrealistically, not to save, not to dress too well, not to have too many books, that women only got ahead by aligning themselves with desirable husbands, family matters above all and the wealthy are NOT to be trusted because they are inherently different from the “salt of the earth” regular people and that god was the ultimate source of everything from food to healing.

I, personally, don't subscribe to these ideas any longer, but it has taken A LOT of work and way too much money in therapy to get to the heart of it and move beyond it. Even so, my base position is still reflective of my class, even after all that work.

Alright I am rambling here, I think. I have a lot of ideas bouncing around about this but I thought I would get started somewhere and voila.

[Nat]

[rlin]

damn... twice i have written really long and heartfelt posts and had to erase them because they were just too revealing...

i need to say something to address this topic... it has impacted my life this year more than ever in my existence...

i should mention that i dont think class has anything to do with money... or income...

class and the distinctions that are very real related to it are extremely painful when you are on the lesser end...

it has an amazing ability to make your entire self worth go right out the fukn window...

i have learned my place i think... and that pisses me off more than anything else... i never would have believed that i could imagine that there was a 'place' that i couldnt rise above...

wtf.... its a process...

[Nat]

[AmazonWoman1]

Congratulations on your promotion.I think what is really going on is people were raised with the Bible.In it there are references to the money changers in the temple as well as the eye of the needle comment about the rich entering heaven.This all was done to make for more compliant sheep like people.The eye comment actually refers to a very small gate used in forts for entries at night of people.The camel would have to crawl to enter.The shame about money stems from this.It was portrayed as a bad thing to have money.Our fables & myths control what behavior we want to see continue or stop.

[Venus007]

You can't imagine how many time I heard:
"The love of money is the root of all evil" 1st Timothy 6:10
The story of Ananias and Sapphira was a huge one too.*(link to the story if you don't know it)

It was assumed a way that you would show your gratitude to (and deflect the coming catastrophe (rare gift without curse)) was to give a gift to the church if you had a windfall or married well.

I need to think about this more

Originally Posted by AmazonWoman1

Congratulations on your promotion.I think what is really going on is people were raised with the Bible.In it there are references to the money changers in the temple as well as the eye of the needle comment about the rich entering heaven.This all was done to make for more compliant sheep like people.The eye comment actually refers to a very small gate used in forts for entries at night of people.The camel would have to crawl to enter.The shame about money stems from this.It was portrayed as a bad thing to have money.Our fables & myths control what behavior we want to see continue or stop.