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One thing I noticed during the years I lived in the USA was how unaware people seem to be of social class. In older societies, everyone is aware of their class

• specialist 4y ago
  Yes and... > I see it a lot in American racism as well. TIL the notion of races is an American invention. The origin was to justify the subjection of enslaved peoples, to impose a class society. During the apocalypse, I've been binging history and biographies. The (more) recent scholarship about America has been both challenging and illuminating. As a gen-x white guy, mostly I'm embarrassed. I've always "punched up", so feel a natural affinity for minorities, working class, etc. But I just didn't get it. Even though I considered myself an ally, my understanding of racism, class struggle, justice, and so forth was really shallow. My diet consisted of Zinn, Chomsky, Rachel Maddow, Thom Hartmann, etc. For whatever reason, aside from MLK and Gandhi, I don't recall reading much from non-white authors. Highest recommendation to these books, probably in this order: Jill Lepore's These Truths, The 1619 Project, Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us, Caro's LBJ biographies (passing the Civil Rights Act). I think I needed These Truths to prepare me for 1619 Project, to provide context, set the stage. > when it's actually classism born of racist roots Yup. There's two books in my queue about this specifically. I'll update with cites as able. -- Another big cultural topic which I totally misunderstood was Liberalism and by extension Neoliberalism. Specifically, the (American) reactionary origins of "free enterprise". Being a nerd, of course all my friends growing up were self-identified libertarians. So I thought I had a good grasp of that mindset. And I always assumed the grand struggle in the USA has always been wealth vs democracy, per Kevin Phillips' books and maybe a few others. (FWIW, I always assumed I was a left-libertarian -- anti-state, anti-corporation, rabidly pro people -- but noob me had no idea had no idea how to talk about it.) But I just wasn't aware of the doublespeak. Nor how the intuitive sounding phrases obscure and obfuscate what's really going on. To the elites pushing this stuff, "free enterprise" is pro property, anti-democracy, anti-competition, freedom to act without consequences. It is explicitly against the rule of law, against accountability, against competition. Growing up in a "Lincoln Republican" area, "socially liberal fiscally conservative", none of these concepts would have jived with my notions of fairness and civics. To really see the disconnect between the elite and folk understandings, I had to chew thru the podcasts Know Your Enemy, 5-4 "How the Supreme Court Sucks", and Strict Scrutiny. Also, the books Democracy in Chains and Dark Money connected a lot of the dots for me. Specifically, the connection between pro segregation, anti-civil rights, anti-labor reactionaries and the modern movement conservatives.
  • zozbot234 4y ago
    > TIL the notion of races is an American invention. The origin was to justify the subjection of enslaved peoples, to impose a class society. An "American" invention for sure, but not one from North America. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta - this is where that whole bunch of toxicity and prejudice first showed up, in its most concentrated form.
• PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  > how unaware people seem to be of social class Is that not a manifestation of "the american dream", where "if you work enough, you too can be a millionaire"? It appears to me that too many people believe they are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, blissfully unaware that by design the deck is stacked against them.
  • WJW 4y ago
    That's exactly one of the types of unawareness that GP talks about: just acquiring a lot of money will not get you to a higher class all by itself. The idea that a blue collar worker who wins the lottery would suddenly become a higher class would be laughable in (let's say) Britain. You would still be lacking all the mannerisms, connections, skills, etc that serve as the true barrier to moving between classes. It typically takes a generation or two between for a family that has acquired money to actually become "upper class", often longer.
    • mmarq 4y ago
      In my experience Britain is an odd case. The school system’s main purpose seems to be to segregate people by class and to perpetuate the class system. One of the results is that “working class” people develop different accents and manners from people with other backgrounds. It takes ages to relearn how to speak and how to behave.
      • thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > Britain is an odd case. The school system’s main purpose seems to be to segregate people by class and to perpetuate the class system. One of the results is that “working class” people develop different accents and manners from people with other backgrounds. That's not a result of the school system. It's how things naturally occur everywhere.
        • zozbot234 4y ago
          The British school system is explicitly classist. To the point that what they call "public schools" are actually among the most private and exclusive by any reasonable standard.
• jonnybgood 4y ago
  You’re correct about the connection of classism and racism. I believe outside of that class largely doesn’t matter due to the many geographical cultural differences. Coastal classism will be different than southern classism, etc. and it’s just too much of headache to keep check of this and care. You think a rancher in Wyoming who owns a ranch with acres of land cares about Wall Street bankers? How do you measure class here? Or maybe it’s just that Americans believe they are all temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.
• pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I think this is because in the U.S., everyone is operating under the (false) assumption that the American Dream ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream ) is still alive. Maybe it was true at one point that anyone could move upwards in class with enough determination, but it seems to be really rare now. Regardless, in social settings people still act as if it's a thing. In other cultures people seem to be less oblivious to the idea that upward social mobility is incredibly difficult.
  • seydor 4y ago
    Everyone says that american dream is not true, yet america keeps attracting the world's most ambitious people. Those people can't be all stupid - it's not an illusion.
    • refactor_master 4y ago
      The American dream is that you can supposedly just “work very hard” and move up in society, which is demonstrably false compared to many other countries with similar levels of wealth. Being of a somewhat established middle class background before moving to the US to “make it big” is not the American dream. So in that sense it’s most definitely an illusion.
      • primax 4y ago
        Honestly it's a bit ironic posting your arguments on this forum. I somewhat agree, but technology has taken people all around the world to the top 0.1% of wealth in America and does so every day
        • angrais 4y ago
          Yes, but only a small portion of people are working in tech, and those who are tend to be middle class white males anyway.
          • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• jasode 4y ago
  >In older societies, everyone is aware of their class [...], but in America they seem to pretend that class doesn't exist there Americans aren't pretending because unlike England, the country itself was created without a monarchy handing out titles of nobility[1]. Europeans can trace deep historical bloodlines -- which further reinforces class distinctions and self-awareness across generations. However, America was built on immigrants arriving on ships where family records were lost. So if one still insists on overlaying the word "classes" on top of America, it is very different from "class" in Europe. Therefore, social class in America is more about wealth rather than hereditary titles. The ability for money (e.g. become a millionaire/billionaire) to change your status in society means social class in the USA is fluid and can change. Maybe a loose USA version of hereditary class might be families like Kennedys, Bushes, etc where the media nicknames the Kennedys "Camelot". Even so, a bricklayer who was the son of an Austrian village policeman and had a bloodline tainted by a bastard great-grandfather -- was able to marry into the Kennedy family. Why? Because Arnold Schwarzenegger became a successful multi-millionaire. The European-version of "lower class" in Arnold's family background wasn't a barrier in the USA. >Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots I think many do have pure and simple racism based on skin color. E.g. they don't care for black billionaires like Michael Jordan and they think it's wrong that a black judge sits on the Supreme Court. Yes, racism for some people may be (subconsciously) intertwined with class as you point out ... but for others, it's a simple dislike of black people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingdom
  • daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Paul Hill also married a Kennedy. I saw a movie about him, In the Name of the Father. To summarize its about a man who just because he was Irish got accused of terrorism and the police frame him, largely because they wanted to look like they caught the culprit of a bombing to save face. A halfway-martyr, lost decades of his life to imprisonment. It had artistic merit. So with the Kennedy's remember they're Irish, so the Irish nobility was disintegrated by the English, all Irish are Irish nobility. And it has the most welcoming laws of returning, because it is actually far below it's peak population in the 19th century, when people were starving and escaping, the lowest point of poverty. Like if you want a title do an online class, fuck. And it didn't work the same way, it was Celtic not Germanic nor Roman, much less conquest, Bronze Age traditions to this day. So what you get instead is the origin of nobility, which are heroines and heroes. The Irish who made it in America attained worth, the whole premise of America is its the place to which people leave to come back--if they even feel like coming back--with reknown. Nobody gives a shit whom Beowulf's father was either. I'm not sure it's addressed in the tale, it doesn't matter. What matters is Beowulf, the hero. And in fact the monsters he fought were descended from Cain, that's like nobility, Beowulf ripped the monster's fucking arm off with his own masculine strength, declining to use a sword because he considered himself his equal. . I think the additional question is one of History. You go to a new place, what happens to your History? It's very tied to place, time originally comes from the idea of wanting to understand the heavenly spheres, that was time. "When" comes from "where".
• deleted 4y ago
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• seydor 4y ago
  > In older societies, Which ones? England and some north europe maybe. It's not an important thing really in most old societies. In fact british classism looks outdated and cringe to me.
  • burntoutfire 4y ago
    The classes got wiped out in all Central and Eastern Europe countries which went through communism. Pretty much all of their wealth was confiscated and they were persecuted to a various degree. From society's perspective, it's actually one of the positives of going through the horror of communism - the societies were reset to be much more egalitarian. Even to this day, wealth disparity in post-communist countries is lower than in Western Europe - there wasn't enough time yet for the true billionaire elite class to emerge from the egalitarian soup.
    • mikhmha 4y ago
      Aren’t the new elites just the party elites? The ones who are not seen publicly and elect the party leader? It seems to me like they get full reign on economic development projects - which they loot to enrich their families. And once the country goes post-communist these same elites remain in control of the institutions and industries they helped set up.
      • burntoutfire 4y ago
        At least in Poland, for whatever reason, the communist apparatchicks mostly didn't get rich off of their power. They had a higher standard of living - but that meant a house and a car, and not a small flat and a bus pass, like most of the population. I think the ideology was still strong enough to make such behaviours completely non-palatable and would mean exclusion from the party. Only in the eighties, when it was clear that the system is broken beyond repair, the communist values crumbled and the elites started to accumulate wealth. Even with that, there are very few if any former high party official on contemporary Poland's top 100 wealthiest people list. Of course, if the system continued to reign, as is in China's case, the people at the top of the party would probably amass giant wealth.
• bell-cot 4y ago
  In some ways yes. In other ways - I suspect that a fair amount of the "unaware" is a "learn to publicly pretend that it doesn't exist" behavior. Think about the "polite & socially correct" ways of talking about Santa Claus, and how easily people follow those rules. (Yes, for social class, there's a creepy 1984 atmosphere around this.) My own "behind closed door" experience with a small circle of older, middle-class whites is that people are very aware of social class. Associating with it, achieving it, maintaining it, displaying it, and/or faking it are very high, long-term priorities. Both for themselves and their children. You just can't say it.
  • bbarn 4y ago
    My wife's mother told her fairly young Santa didn't exist after much questioning the practicality of it with her. After confirming her suspicions, my wife told all of her classmates, which prompted an angry call to her mother. The conversation went something like Teacher - "I am going to have to discipline her if she keeps telling the other children Santa isn't real." Her mother - "Well, he's not, right?" Teacher - "Well yes but she can't say that" Her mother - "Well, why don't you talk to the principal, discuss this conversation, and call me back" That was the end of the story.
    • grog454 4y ago
      There's something to be said for respecting others' beliefs, no matter how incredible. I wonder if your wife's mother would be singing a different tune if we replaced Santa Clause with God in your example.
      • Mezzie 4y ago
        To me, it's about respecting others as parents. It's not about 'lying to your kid', it's about realizing that treating other parents to a random meltdown after school because Susie said Santa isn't real isn't ideal.
        • jstanley 4y ago
• varispeed 4y ago
  In my country (the UK) the wage stagnation, increasing progressive taxes and rising living costs, anti small business legislation mean that there is no longer a distinction between e.g. working class and middle class. Everyone is struggling (of course the middle class still less so). You have majority of people just about managing and then 0.1% the rich, who don't pay taxes and live in parallel universe.
  • burntoutfire 4y ago
    There's struggling, and there's "grab Starbucks on the way to work" struggling...
• twayt 4y ago
  When you’re an immigrant, you might have been a certain class in your old country but you are the lowest class in your new country. You still have some elements of refinement, have resources and don’t subscribe to the attitudes of the lower class. So you naturally find yourself back into those circles and the diversity alone blurs the lines. There is still an underlying attitude to wealth, work and life that is preserved across cultures. A person born into a low class sometimes can adopt those attitudes but it usually doesn’t come naturally
• tayo42 4y ago
  White trash is a way of behaving though, not really a class of people. Is it not possible to be poor and not trashy? Every poor person needs to set off fire works and have an untrained pit bull?
  • newsclues 4y ago
    I think your confusion on this issue proves OP correct that class in America is a silent issue.
    • tayo42 4y ago
      Explain what I'm getting wrong? Acting trashy isn't exclusive to poor people. Remember paris Hilton in her 20s?
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        Sure, but she wasn't white trash, she was rich and famous and got invited to all the cool rich and famous parties. She was being eccentric, and perhaps sometimes went slumming, but that didn't change her social class.
        • tayo42 4y ago
          she was wealthy and trashy. how is a description of behavior a class in society? anyone at any moment can stop being white trash, just stop acting trashy. Youll still be poor, sure, but not white trash.
          • tsimionescu 4y ago
            You don't understand the point. An important aspect of class is what you like to do, what you consider ok, what you appreciate or accept in others. People who would be catalogued by others as "white trash" do not consider their behavior to be "trashy" in this sense, they don't think there's anything wrong with it. You saying "just stop being trashy" is exactly proof that you view them as lower class than yourself. It's similar to people who think saying "ain't" is somehow less correct than "isn't", or that rap music is uncultured. All class markers.
• igorkraw 4y ago
  Even in Germany don't like to explicitly talk about class, and I think it might be for the same reason the US doesn't like to: the most cogent notion of class isn't nobility vs commoners anymore, it's patricians vs plebeians, or the bourgeoisie vs workers. And while the old school Marxist analysis might be partially or completely wrong when it comes to finding solutions, the concepts of workers, workers aristocracy,lumpen proletatiat, petty bourgeoise vs grand bourgeoise etc. are very very applicable in analysis today. The small store owner struggling to make ends meet and potentially "exploiting" their workers because otherwise they can't compete with Walmart is the modern petty bourgeoise, programmers sitting on golden cages complaining about meaningless jobs are the workers aristocracy etc. You can also further refine this analysis and remove the last I'll fitting things. There isn't really a good fit for the worker aristocracy owning stocks but not really wielding influence. But what all of these (attempted) analyses of class have in common is that the are leftist, which in the US doesn't fly as easily culturally as it might in Europe - and even then, people avoid placing themselves in a lineage with Marx for historical reasons.
• tyjen 4y ago
  America's vieux riche spend exorbitant resources to muddy the waters of classicism and racism to prevent collective action. Look at the parent companies that own large swathes of media assets and look at what they push for information. Class issues are often reframed as race issues to disrupt collective action. This isn't to suggest there isn't residual overlap from historical racism, but there is a clear intention to prime Americans to believe most issues stem from racism rather than classism. Which leads to the issue you point out, Americans lack knowledge of classism, and I would suggest that they're overexposed to framed racism to avoid acknowledging classism. The unfortunate consequence is developing political policy solutions that do not solve the underlying problems, which create additional problems. This seems ideal for vieux riche, who are insulated from the problems. Not to mention, that you generally require significant amounts of money to successfully run for public office. The rich are the gatekeepers of American society and want to maintain it that way, even if it causes chaos for people lower on the social hierarchy.
  • renonce 4y ago
    > Class issues are often reframed as race issues to disrupt collective action. How does reframing class issues as race issues disrupt collective action? Race issues lead to protests like Black Lives Matter, for example.
  • prirun 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • WJW 4y ago
      I like a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but is it really so hard to believe that people could object to abortion on religious grounds? I agree that anyone rich would have little problem flying to a state where abortion is legal though.
      • zoolily 4y ago
        The time period in the article is too short. However, when I grew up, abortion wasn't an issue for Protestants, which was the dominant religion where I lived. They considered it a Catholic issue. Abortion became an issue after Republicans began to implement their southern strategy, raising it as an issue to bring evangelists and fundamentalists into their religious right coalition. They created pamphlets, movies, meetings, etc. to make abortion a religious issue. As their propaganda campaign developed, you could watch abortion spread as an issue in Protestant churches through the 1980s and finally become an issue for the majority of white evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant by the early 1990s.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  "Trading Places" is still the best movie about class in America.
  • djkivi 4y ago
    Eyes Wide Shut is a very good movie about class in America as well.
    • burntoutfire 4y ago
      I agree. Tom Cruise was also well-cast for that. He typically plays hot-shots, and here he again is a hot-shot upper-class doctor, but one who by happenstance brushes with forces in the society that are way out of his league and whose existence he didn't even suspect. He comes out of it thoroughly humbled.
• VictorPath 4y ago
  > Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots Americans will easily hand the mantle of national oppression over to Ukrainians, but even though the US Supreme Court recently attacked indigenous communities, which barely made a blip in US corporate media, you don't hear much about America's national oppression of the Sioux or the Cherokee. You hear instead about "racism". While Africans in the US face class oppression, they also face national oppression.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  One thing I’ve noticed about middlebrow online commenters is that they think that poor people are unaware that they are poor and that there exist people that are of median and rich means. That they themselves (the middlebrow online commenters) are somehow more aware of the plight of the poor—many of them from a distance since many of the commenters are middle class—than the poor people themselves.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    The "white savior" is still alive, and the more the unwashed masses resist the obvious good the more it grows. You see it publicly and more vociferously after an election.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    It is objective fact that the overwhelming majority of underclass people in the US consider themselves "middle class". They are very successfully manipulated to vote for people who will deny benefit to people like themselves in the (sincere, induced) belief that it would mean taking from themselves to give to people even lower. It is the bedrock principle of "conservative" politics, that successfully keeps the upper class from ever needing to pay their fare share. The underclass have been taught to carry them on their shoulders, and like it.
    • avgcorrection 4y ago
      Socially liberal middle class Democrats on the other hand—the would-be saviors of the “underclass”[1]—are convinced that they are voting for the progressive party and not merely the more socially liberal business party which is more interested in maintaining the duopoly than they are in winning against the Rs. No brainwashing going on there. [1] Half of eligible voters don’t even vote in federal elections. And propensity to vote correlates with socioeconomic class. You say “underclass”. Well, is someone from the underclass more likely to vote R? Or not vote at all?
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        Sure, the Democratic Party is captured by corporate interests. It is the only way to stay in the game. Lots of sincere people involved would like for it to better represent actual people. But politics is called "the art of the possible" for reasons. 95+% of Americans are underclass. (Between 1945 and ~1975 there was a pretty strong middle class. By 1990 it was gone.) Of those of them who vote, about half vote for each party. The rest, who knows?
• uncomputation 4y ago
  > Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots I am very tired of non-Americans comments about America. We don’t “pretend” that racism is racism, racism is racism in America and attempts to skirt around it with the Marxism-lite “actually everything is classism” are unhelpful. Yes, Black people have largely been kept in the lower classes from slavery to sharecropping to Jim Crow to now, but even those who managed to become “middle class” financially still found themselves unable to get mortgages, loans, or jobs at the same rate as white people. Just using a Black-sounding name on paper will lower your odds of all of these. Even the very site we are on now has a less than proportionate (in America) Black audience because the software/computing industry has a less than proportionate Black makeup. This cannot be explained by simple “classism.” An Ivy League educated, middle class Black man even became president and was still subject to attacks from all classes of white America, not because he was middle class, but because he was Black. This includes lower class white people too, who are some of the most discriminatory against other races in America. Even the phrase you used “white trash” was originated by Black slaves against white servants, not upper class white people like you claim. America is not Europe or Asia. The white colonizers to America that arrived, yes, were mostly lower classes in Europe but in the “New” World of Native Americans, that was not the biggest distinguishing factor any longer.
• verisimi 4y ago
  It's exactly as you say, imo, it's class and wealth, not a race issue. But how to talk meaningfully about resolving a class/wealth issue, when it is framed as a race issue? You can't. First you need to correctly diagnose the problem. And so many talking heads etc are invested in a race problem.. I tend to think mis-framing the issue is intentional. It is a divide and conquer strategy, that keeps the oi polloi arguing amongst themselves.
• Tycho 4y ago
  Class is basically the cluster of attributes that emerge around people with different levels of wealth. In Europe, those attributes have been entrenched and reinforced and undisturbed for much longer than they have been in American society.
• rayiner 4y ago
  “White trash” is effectively an ethnic slur. Ordinary poor white people aren’t “white trash.” When people say it, they’re specifically referring to the stereotypical southern or Appalachian American (usually Scots-Irish) or Midwestern American (usually German).
• fairity 4y ago
  > And since it's extremely difficult to escape your class. This idea that it's 'extremely' difficult to escape your income class is commonly spread and factually incorrect. It's true that upward economic mobility is lower in the USA than many other developed countries, but it's not 'extremely' difficult. In fact, of people born in the poorest quintile, more than 50% rise out of that quintile, and ~10% climb to the top quintile. Not only is this idea incorrect, I think it's pernicious because it robs people of their sense of agency/control to improve their lot in life, and turns them into victims. Source: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_economic_mobility_sawhill_ch3.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...