How can we owning class folks who care about enormous horrors going on today initiate a systemic difference by speaking up about the harm that continues in a drastically different manner? For some of us, the origins of today’s enormous inequities are from the source of our wealth. Will you join me in this conversation? Let’s get honest and face some questions and fears about our essential roles in the transformation this celebrating-its-birthday country needs. It’s time to think and act outside the box.
Owning Class Folks – Let’s Explore Some Tough Questions
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011Economists can’t be rapists? Hotel maids are lunatics?
Thursday, May 19th, 2011In rushing to the defense of accused rapist and head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn, well-known conservative commentator Ben Stein has stooped to blatant classist stereotypes. His headline on the American Spectator website, “Presumed Innocent, Anyone?,” implies that he’s just asking for a fair trial before judgment – a reasonable point. But look at why he thinks Strauss-Kahn is probably innocent:
Middle Class Brats?
Saturday, April 9th, 2011I fear I am raising spoiled-rotten, middle-class brats. I fear I am raising the very kind of children I would have hated as a child. Why? Because they are comfortable and cozy and have everything they need in their day-to-day lives.
When you’re rich and when you’re poor
Tuesday, January 25th, 2011When you’re rich and lose money on a leveraged investment, you are a victim of the bad economy and deserved to be bailed out. When you’re poor and lose money on a risky investment, you’re a financially incompetent yahoo who chases get rich quick schemes.
Don’t be a classist anti-racist!
Monday, January 17th, 2011While naming “white privilege” is an important part of exposing and dismantling structural racism, I can see how the term “privilege” is hard to swallow for white folks on the downside of our economic system. Being marginalized in one power system doesn’t mean you can’t be privileged in another. But this particular form of pushback should not be so easily dismissed as generic white resistance to confronting white privilege. Rather, the resistance I experience from poor and working class white people feels like an important opportunity to check my own class privilege and cross-class competence, as well as to develop either different language or perhaps different techniques to help the language resonate more clearly. Force feeding doesn’t work with anyone, and it gets in the way of building cross-race solidarity.
What was the most classist comment of 2010?
Sunday, January 2nd, 2011It was a bumper year for callous, elitist politicians and CEOs spouting off in public. Cast your vote for one of these doozies, or add another 2010 classist comment to this list:
Obstructed Views from the Country Club
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010I was born and raised in New England, half Jewish, half WASP. Went to the same prep school as my grandmother, and the same college as my great-grandfather. I ended up in graduate school for sociology, with a specialization in class + race + gender inequalities. I heard the occasional call for studying the unmarked side of those hierarchies (rich / white / men). I thought, “I could do that – those are my people.”
