Class-Talk in the Third Sector

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Via Gift Hub : The American Ruling Class, a new documentary from Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham, will air July 30 and 31 on the Sundance Channel.  What follows is a reworking of an earlier post on the subject.

Discussions of socioeconomic class are rare and fleeting in the nonprofit sector.*  This is a great shame.  Thirty years ago, the powerful images and texts of American Pictures taught me the meaning of the word “underclass.”  I didn’t hear the word used again with any frequency until Hurricane Katrina blew ashore.

Nobody talks about the underclass anymore.

Foundations are fortunate to do their work largely independent of government and corporations (including the media).  They have a good chance of introducing the topic of class and sustaining the conversation.  Yet despite continuing reminders about the myth of class mobility in this country, and an oft-stated concern for low-income communities, there are significant barriers to engaging the topic:

1.  Race, not class, structures the primary American narrative of oppression   In their book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s,  Omi and Winant write that

Historically speaking, the call for “class” unity across racial lines has amounted in practice to an argument that non-whites give up their racially based demands in favor of “class” unity on white terms.  This will not be achieved by appeals to “class unity” or by reliance on “bargaining power theory,” which merely offer an abstraction to minorities confronted by racial inequities in the workplace.

Likewise in the nonprofit world, class-talk is sometimes seen as a distraction from issues that are more clearly rooted in racial antipathy.

2.  Class-talk produces in some a mental cramp   Paul Kingston and his intellectual heirs have argued that American society is essentially classless.  These authors don’t deny that sociologists, political scientists, and others can usefully divide the American public into various income categories.  What they deny is the notion that the members of these categories share “life-defining experiences” that license our referring to them as members of a distinct, coherent class.  Make of this kind of argument what you will.  It reminds me of Bill Clinton’s narrow definition of “sexual relations.”

3.  Class-talk is impolite   Few topics will more quickly cast a pall over middle class dinner parties than the history of class struggle in the United States.  In 2003, the President effectively silenced the critics of his tax cuts by accusing them of fomenting “class warfare.”

How do we incorporate class-talk into nonprofit work in a way that doesn’t elide hundreds of years of racial oppression?  How do we bring the lived experience of the poor and working poor into institutions governed by middle class values and norms?  How do we dispel the myth that America is essentially a classless society?

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* Based on recent data from the White Courtesy Telephone Department of Armchair Sociology that conducted a mental survey on this subject approximately 45 minutes ago.

Comments

[erasmus]

I hear you but it still baffles me why we're so reticent to take up the subject. Seems to me we have a lot to gain from the conversation.

[Phil]

In corporations in which the top person makes 500 times what the person makes on the shop floor, all may still go by first names. The illusion that we are all just folks must be maintained. C.f. Bush at NASCAR rallies.

[Sally Wilde]

If I hear another de Tocqueville quote at a philanthropy conference I will run in front of a (moving) truck. Nevertheless, I think he got it essentially right in Democracy in America. Every colonist who arrived in the New World could own land and, through hard work, live an independent life. De Tocqueville observed that New World values—those that celebrated hard work and money-making—quickly trumped values mired in the aristocratic class systems of the Old World.

Over time, I believe, we simply replaced the old class system with a new, more complex, system based on race, ethnicity, religion, income, education level, and other factors. As I understand his argument, Paul Kingston would say that poor people in the U.S. simply don’t see themselves as belonging to the class of poor people, in the same way that members of the working class in England, say, see themselves as belonging to that class. This is likely true, and even the Wal-Mart greeter doesn’t expect to stay poor forever, but I don’t think it would take much for poor people in this country to begin to see how many “life-determining experiences” they share, and how four-squaredly fucked they really are as a class.

[klaus]

Rather than saying that they are blinkered, I would attribute an intelligence to the poor which intuits that an act of observation changes that which is observed, and that the category "class" - which is intended to describe an individual's relation to the means of production - will tend to get reified as describing an actual and inescapable state of being, which will then serve to reinforce and reproduce this state and its designated subjects, which/who will then be available as a commodity to those individuals and institutions - base or noble - who wish to trade on their value as such. Poor people probably understand, in their charmingly colloquial manner, that although history, custom and law have conspired to place them within this "class," so too does the analysis of this process, especially when said analysis is tendered from above.

That's why bringing class up as an issue in a context which is liberal rather than radical probably won't work.

A liberal audience of a class proposition may have its own subset of reasons for not wanting to hear about it.

[Stuart Johnson]

I grew up poor, surrounded by poor people of all races and descriptions, but I never experienced or encountered the “intuition” you describe. And I don’t believe poor people are “blinkered.” Africans Americans have generally understand their oppression in racial, not class, terms. The traditional class categories we would have inherited from Great Britain didn’t stick, and as immigrants we were unlikely to import the class divisions of our countries of origin. We simply have no common language of class in this country. And we’re under the spell of multiple myths—myths about class mobility, about equal access to opportunity, about American meritocracy. Even after witnessing the spectacles of Scooter Libby and Paris Hilton, we labor under the illusion that there’s one set of laws governing both rich and poor.

Moving from poverty to the middle class I was most struck by the sheer luck that enabled me to climb the income ladder. It became obvious to me how much The System favored those to whom already much had been given. The more assets you had, the easier it was for you to acquire more assets—it was as simple as that, the game was completely rigged. And the system didn’t just abet the accumulation of assets for people who had assets; it also made them more resilient, more able to buy their way out of just about any problem they might encounter—an accident,a spate of bad health, a messy divorce, an unwise investment.

That’s the kind of class consciousness I believe we need to acquire. It’s not a call to class struggle, but a call to a common struggle for a more just system.

[klaus]

I suppose, Stuart, that averting the stridency of class struggle in favor of a less fractious "common language" is what some people are disposed to do, as they audit their experience against the dictatorial interference of their diverse traditions; but I wonder if such a goal would meet the unmitigated approval of the radical Marx, or the liberal Mill - perhaps they'd both suspect an unacceptable clinging to the present?

[Libby Handros]

Hi:

The film reference above, The American Ruling Class, we are please to annouce is now available for sale on ourwebsite, theamericanrulingclass.org.

Thank you!