Class Action

Transactions between those who obtain cleaning services and those who perform them are laden with class issues. I have often been unpleasantly surprised by comments coming from people who I thought were progressive feminists or humanists: “My place is such a mess, I’m so glad the ‘cleaning lady’ is coming,” they declare, apparently without consideration of the human implications.

The Facebook post showed a 1950’s cartoon businessman: blonde hair, suit and tie, saying, “No, you can’t ‘axe’ me a question. I don’t speak Walmart.”  A snotty enough putdown if it came from racial and class privilege. But it wasn’t posted by an upper-class or even a middle-class person, but a person who has struggled in and out of a series of working class jobs and never been able to go to college.

Grama says I’m Indian.

Mama says my dad was “a Mexican” and that if he really loved me

We obviously hit a nerve with the two recent stories about cars and class. Besides the long and intense comments under the posts, I received two more moving stories submitted to Classism Exposed.

I wrote a paper on the classism I experienced as a poverty-class single mother in the feminist movement, and it was selected for inclusion in a prestigious anthology.

1. A Casino is legally required to post the odds of each bet. Corporate workplaces can lie about your chances of rising to the top.

“We’ve got to get those junk cars out of people’s yards!”

I was shocked when a well-known environmentalist criticized my students’ campaign to make drivers education accessible to low-income students. The campaign ran into a lot of classism, but that was the low point.

I’m entranced with the White Privilege Conference’s culture and community.

I’m concerned about classism in the new age, self help and spiritual movements. Oprah Winfrey’s show and “lifeclass,” which many people study religiously, promote individualistic “create your own reality” ideas, including the philosophy of guru Eckhart Tolle. “Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it,” Tolle writes. These ideas can be very harmful, in particular to people struggling with financial hardship.

Barack Obama’s election represented a triumph for African Americans who suffered years of race- and class-based oppression. Electing a black president was definitely a plus for African Americans and society as a whole. Among his opponents in 2008 were working class whites who were attracted to Sarah Palin.

Ross Douthat’s opinion piece in last week’s New York Times summarized the results of a study arguing for “delayed marriage” as an economic boon to a select population of men and women. But studies that publish the socioeconomic statistical average of a certain population largely ignore the realities of the study’s outliers, like me.

I’ve been interviewing people and carrying out research lately on housing affordability in San Jose, and what I’ve found has been both heartbreaking and enraging. In a city and area where housing is jaw-droppingly expensive, some of the wealthy exploit the poor, or worse, take for themselves public goods intended for the needy.

My own experiences related to classism are set in the administrative world of work. Frankie Valli once crooned, “If you go for your diploma, you can join the steno pool.” As I suspect many would agree, the administrative dimension of the work world is indeed a “pool,” where undercurrents of classism swirl quietly even when the waters on the surface are apparently calm. I want to share my anecdotes for administrative workers everywhere.

At least two cities make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of class, and we’re determined to add one more.

For two and a half days, a cross-class, multi-racial group of folks from all across the gender spectrum and the country met in Oakland to talk about class and learn tools for dismantling classism. The Class Action Training of Trainers gave us the chance to explore our own and each other’s class experiences. Through exercises facilitated by a team that also reflected class, race and gender diversity we were able to bring our ideas and experiences into the room.

A darling of the film award season this year, the American fantasy drama film Beasts of the Southern Wild (BOTSW) has been nominated for numerous prestigious awards, including a Best Actress nomination in the 85th Academy Awards for the youngest ever nominee, Quvenzhané Wallis, at nine years old.

The poverty in the Les Miserables movie seems more realistic than most poverty portrayed in fiction in one crucial aspect: the way desperately poor people in Les Miz are preyed upon.

Movies about mental illness are a favorite of the Oscars. The nominees are often serious affairs with sad endings and a key point: it sucks to have a mental illness. Underlying that key point is the idea that having a mental illness creates an outsider status of not being normal where one lacks access to the goodies inherent in the American Dream. This year’s multi-nominated Silver Linings Playbook has all that, and it’s a comedy to boot.

President Obama celebrated the inauguration of his second term on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this January. Just a few weeks later, he delivered his first State of the Union address in the middle of Black History Month. Despite the symbolic and substantive reasons to confront race in the State of the Union Address, the President chose not to mention it. The closest he came was to say:

Emily Dickinson once wrote, “why not have a big life?” These are the words I kept close to heart when I joined the Seattle Education Access (SEA) staff and my fellow members of the SEA Student Advisory Board Council for the SEA Lobby Day.

It should come as no surprise that President Obama focused on the “middle class” in his State of the Union speech. He mentioned that term six times, even calling it “our generation’s task…to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.” What the president didn’t mention was the critical role that a powerful labor movement played in birthing the growing middle class that came out of World War II and maintained its status through the 1950s and ‘60s. No, the term “labor” or “labor union” didn’t make it into the speech.

You would think from watching “Downton Abbey” that the only reason enormous estates existed was to provide jobs. Every time a change comes up, the lord of the manor bemoans its possible deleterious effect on his tenants and servants. And a remarkably high proportion of those servants seem happy to live their entire lives in the basement and the attic, never getting married, never having kids. Life as a servant is just such a meaningful identity, it seems.

If you ain’t poor (by America’s low poverty standards), you are “middle class.” That is the current political and pundit mode of understanding the USA. Those below the middle class income standards have no claim to a class appellation—they are just “poor.” The president’s speech was largely about improving the situations of those already in that desirable middle class way of life; it was also concerned to lift the non-middle class.

As the economic inequality gap continues to widen, students at Grand Valley State University in Traverse City, Michigan, started saying that they were tired of “talking” about economic inequality; they wanted to “do” something.

Labor law is in reality “play nice” law.  The law – much of which was set up in the 1930s – recognized that bosses would not “play nice” with workers unless forced to do so.  Tellingly, the law is centered on compelled “recognition” of unions, the elected workplace representatives of workers.  In other words, the law realized that in the absence of state coercion bosses would not recognize workers – they would not even acknowledge workers’ existence.  In light of recent Bureau of Labor statistics disclosing further declines in rates of union membership – it seems appropriate to reexamine some class dynamics at play in discussions of unionism and labor law.

The psychology of the “Anti-Lance Armstrong Brigade” illustrates exactly why socioeconomic inequality is increasing so much in this country. While Lance Armstrong is privileged by his race and class, the nature of the attacks against him illustrate what is wrong with society today. To clarify, I do not condone cheating in sports. However, I do think that the hatred shown to him is overblown.

How can a physician easily work with the poor and earn their respect, trust, and affection?  The key is feeling genuine respect.

Within the past two decades, the American professional and business world has begun to develop into a caste system based on the college that one attended. It seems that across industries from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, having an Ivy League degree has become the litmus test for intelligence and competence.

I don’t want to sound like a Paul Simon song, but in my little town I grew up believing in the rule of law. I wanted to work for a unionized company because there, I was told, I would experience justice in the workplace; I would be protected. Well, now that I am a Harvard-educated law professor, I have learned how little I knew back then. I was the first in my family to graduate from college and therefore the first to attend law school.

Throughout my life, when my holiday traditions have changed, for financial or family reasons, I have found myself yearning for what used to happen.

In my last essay, I spoke of my experiences of the disdain I receive as a working-class woman walking among the denizens of the middle-class world.  Just yesterday I received another cool reception – in my old neighborhood, of all places.

I must have been around seven, living in far northern Wisconsin—not classy Minoqua and other Chicago playgrounds, but the dregs of the timber industry, the swamps reserved for Natives, and rocky farmland left to the last immigrants, a place where the last snow might surprise you on the last day of school—when my dad sat us down and told us there was no Santa.  It was very near Christmas, and the reason given was that there was no money for presents. Dad added, of course, that the true meaning of Christmas was Jesus’ birth, but that was no consolation at all. Santa was colored lights, glittering paper, frosted cookies, quick-step songs, and ornaments. Jesus was straw, barnyards, and bare poverty. We knew enough about that already.

One of my greatest privileges of my high school and college education was not the fact that I went to accredited institutions, nor the fact that I was simply educated, (though the latter privilege is certainly noteworthy.) It was the fact that despite being restricted to schools that were by design socially exclusive at-face, (my public high school being from a wealthy suburb and my private college carrying a tuition cost of over $50K a year), I was able to share my education experiences with students whose backgrounds lay outside the wealthy suburbs: from within the city.

I was born and raised in working-class Philadelphia.  Growing up I did not see myself as an underrepresented and repressed segment of society.  Certainly I saw that there were those who had more money and material goods than I did, but it was not something I dwelled on.  This was because everyone I knew was working class, and none of us had any more or any less than the next person.

The holidays can be hard times. With all the hopes and expectations of the season up, disappointments have more room to play. And when we most want our attention to be on loving and giving, it can easily slide toward getting, proving and comparing.  The pervasive materialism of the season, and the expectation that we deploy our money to show our love, can be hard on all of us, particularly when money is scarce or unevenly divided.

One of my pet peeves on The Left or other Progressive organizations is that when asking for donations, PLEASE tell me WHY it is okay to reward those that have more money by giving gifts according to how much is given? I understand totally that the money is needed, even deserved, but honestly it irks me to no end because I would like some of those gifts, I want some of those rewards too, but I can’t have them because I can’t contribute as much as I may want. It is then both frustrating, sets up feelings of humiliation for working and poor folks. I cannot see any justification for this. You know that saying, let it begin with us……and so it should.

I regularly facilitate a Stressed Out! workshop for Job Seekers in a non-profit organization serving a wide range of customers and clients in search of meaningful and self-sustaining work. The clients I typically present to are college educated adults who have had some work experience, and are accustomed to the everyday stressors one experiences in the American workplace.

We all know what it’s like to appreciate a rare event–a fine restaurant dinner, a vacation to a far-away place, even an evening at home without the children.  We savor them.  We talk about the pleasures and hold them in a special place in our memories.  These times are part of what makes our lives rich and good.

The election and reelection of Obama is a historical milestone in race relations. It is a definitely an achievement we should be proud of. We truly have came along way since, the days of reconstruction, when it was unusual for an African American to even visit the white house. While Obama’s election and reelection truly is great in and of itself and genuinely does indicate a greater change in race relations, a few cautionary notes are in order.

In the past decade unions have greatly improved the way they do electoral politics, and if they hadn’t, Barack Obama would probably never have been our president.

On the one hand, it is difficult to believe that Romney did not win.  After all, when you think about it, we are in the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression.  He certainly kept repeating the fact that there are 23 million people out of work.  Yet at the end of the day Obama not only won, but did better than initially thought.  He not only decisively defeated Romney in electoral votes but also secured the popular vote.  So, it was not a tie and it did not raise any legitimacy questions.

The drive on I-90 on the way to the Organic Store is picturesque. That’s the only word that can quantify the margarine yellow and red zebra stripes of the majestic trees and leaves painted across the landscape. You’re an anthropologist, you see. It’s a fancy term you’ve started calling yourself because the word “immigrant” is so tinged with malice and filth you might as well forget calling yourself that word. You’re a female too. You’ve heard enough bad words hurled in your general direction you don’t want another bad word attaching itself to you.

As this election nears, I find myself passionate about a local issue: San Jose, following the stronger leads of San Francisco, Seattle, and Albuquerque, is proposing to raise the minimum wage from $8 to $10 per hour. I will be precinct walking on Saturday to help make this happen.

Last summer I was hired as an intern for an education advocacy group in Seattle. It was my first time working as an intern and it took me several months to secure one for the summer. I have a year left before graduating from college. Facing a competitive job market after graduation, I decided to join the ranks of the burgeoning intern market to give a shot of protein to my resume.

Class representations are present in many aspects of contemporary culture. Think about the latest TV sitcoms, five star movies, and literary novels. Sure, the word “class” may not be used always, but hints of class or class indicators, such as income, education, occupation, and power, certainly appear in one form or another. Cross-class relationships in particular are proving more and more to be a popular feature in contemporary literature, as I soon discovered from a very revealing novel I recently came across.

Junior year of high school, I was informed, was the most crucial one in laying out the roadway towards college. As one who was raised to never even consider not going to college, I was looking forward to engaging in the preparation for higher education.

Years before I met Class Action’s co-founder Jenny Ladd, I met her mother, Helen Pratt Ladd, who passed away last week. Our first encounter revealed what a great cross-class ally she was.

At Brooklyn College, part of the City of New York’s public higher education system, I began to be acutely aware of class.  I asked a co-ed for a date, she agreed and gave me her address to pick her up on Saturday.  I noted that her address was in Flatbush, a middle income community unlike Brownsville, a poor and working class sector where I lived.  But I did not think much about the difference in location.
 
Her apartment was in a nice building.  When I entered her apartment, I was in a very large reception room with many decorations and displays.  Her father invited me to move into the living room.  I immediately noticed that there was a two-step drop to the living room, a sign of opulence in those days. As I stepped down, I said to myself this relationship cannot work because of our differences in money. I never dated her again. Class was evident.  
 
I then dated co-eds who were closer to me in their class situations.

College, they tell us, is the great middle class-making machine. When I think back on my own cross-class interactions at college, I mostly feel gratitude for the worlds my wealthier friends opened up to me and the way they included and shared with me. My closer friends were solidly middle (including comfortable working-class) and upper middle-class folks, and they influenced me in numerous ways.