White Courtesy Telephone

Rethinking Poverty

A doff of the hat to my colleague Barry Knight for his recent book, Rethinking Poverty: What Makes a Good Society? In the US, we live in a society where few public officials are ever elected for being champions for the poor* (hence all the coded references to “working families”), and in which the art of blaming the poor for their low estate, while widely practiced, is still ugly and unrefined. Nowadays it takes a special kind of person to bring up the subject at all.

Mr. Knight is special in that way. He’s also writing about the UK.

It turns out that the UK had its own “Great Society” experiment in the post-war era and that, like ours, it foundered. The limited success of anti-poverty programs; the ascendancy of free market economics; the stirrings of the “me society”—these and other factors created fresh openings for attacks on Britain’s welfare state, attacks that continue to this day. Mr. Knight uses data from surveys and focus groups to provide a sketch of “the society we want”—a society, not surprisingly, free of poverty—and to suggest a way forward that does not rely heavily on state or philanthropic actors.

Putting differences of context aside, we can draw at least four lessons from his book:

What was achieved can be easily undone.   In the UK, as in the US, hard-won protections for children and others in poverty can evaporate in a single election. How do we shore up gains while we still have them?

Fairness resonates.  In a 2015 YouGov survey of 10,112 adults in England, Scotland, and Wales, “fairness” rated above “freedom,” “equality,” and even “prosperity” as a desired quality of a good society. Ape experiments also suggest that a sense of fairness might be “hard-wired” and thus provide a basis for uniting people across class, gender, race, and other differences.

Good societies—at least better ones—are in plain sight.  Other countries have done and are doing a better job of providing a social safety net, welcoming immigrants, reducing gun violence, conducting fairer elections, reducing health care costs, etc. How do we build the political will to follow their example?

Philanthropy is largely beside the point.   It was refreshing to read a book supported by a philanthropic trust in which so little weight is given to the role philanthropy might play in imagining and ushering in the good society. The next $10 million philanthropic initiative to end poverty will not save us.

In classic Liberalism, the role of the state was to provide a framework of laws under which individuals could prosper by pursuing their own vision of the good. Neoliberals subsequently tilted the playing field in favor of “free market” actors, however significant the damage they might do to social cohesion and other values. In the US, the neoliberal line has now metastasized into a kind of balls-out, post-truth plutocracy that deals with poverty by gleefully shredding the social safety net and jailing its victims. It’s comforting to know that in the UK a book like Mr. Knight’s still has a prayer of a fair hearing.

----

* Close to a word-for-word quote from a former DC Councilmember. Things gets worse as you move from local to state and national politics.

Related articles

Class Struggle in the Third Sector: Still Messing With the Poor

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This post is the second in a series dedicated to raising questions about the role of class in the Third Sector. It was originally published in July of 2009 but feels especially appropriate now in light of Trump’s and the GOP’s savage attacks on working families and the poor. You can find the first article in this series by clicking here.

1.

In an essay titled “Paper Mills,” Heather J. Hicks invites readers to witness her transformation from “rural class” ingénue to career academic.  She writes:

I escaped from the working class not when I first read Shakespeare or Foucault but when I first found others to discuss them with, when I took shelter with a class that insulates its financial vulnerability with a rich fabric of shared ideas.*

Her words moved me to reflect on my own experience of class mobility.  My mother, a Cuban immigrant, began her life in this country as a member of a class that it’s currently fashionable to call “the working poor.”  By the time I was twelve, we were unambiguously in poverty.

Forty years have passsed and now my memory of that time functions less as a mirror than as a lens.  Looking at my work in the nonprofit sector through that lens I see reasons for hope and caution—but mostly caution.

2.

I met recently with a group of funders interested in supporting community organizing in the South, and we started discussing the development of a strategy for our work.  One very wise woman agreed with the idea of developing a strategy but insisted that it come from the communities we aimed to serve.

I understood her caution.  My entire career I’ve struggled with grantmakers who thought they knew better but didn’t—myself included.  I confess to having frequently practiced sociology without a license.

On the other hand, let me assure anybody reading this post that the poor do not know how to change their basic condition any better than we do.  As I was growing up, no one in my immediate family, no one in our circle of friends, discussed systemic change around the dinner table.  I knew my mother was struggling to make ends meet in something between a meritocracy and a bare-knuckled plutocracy, but that’s as far as my analysis went.  Then, as now, it was generally well educated, middle class people earning salaries well above the federal poverty level who had a clearer idea of the ways in which power and privilege were brokered and maintained in this country.

Well educated, middle class people like me know how the system works (or at least we should).  We participate in it; and some of us, for reasons that are not always self-serving, are invested in its preservation.

3.

Moving from poverty to the middle class was like moving through a series of doorways, each leading to a new room with a new vista.  I remember clearly the first time I ordered a meal at a restaurant without feeling a pang of anxiety about its cost.  Further along, there was the time my partner and I lit a fire in our first home together.  I remember how uneasy I felt as I luxuriated in the warmth of that fireplace, watching the flames reflected in the beautiful oak floor of a house decadent enough to have a spare room.

The greater my net worth, the more insulated I became from the tragedies that visited the people I grew up with.  I was not one but many paychecks away from living on the streets.  A bad turn of health would set me back, but it wouldn’t force me to choose between buying my medications and paying my rent.

The more I had, the easier it became for me to accumulate even more.  This seemed to me the most perverse lesson of my movement from poverty to the middle class.

Money bought me confidence.  It bought me good dentition and clearer skin.  It bought me eloquence.  I was more likely to speak up because I knew the right words to use and in the right order.  It bought me an audience that would listen to whatever preposterous thing I had to say.

We tend to focus on the physical condition of the poor.  This is not insignificant.  But poverty is as much an internal prison as an external one.  Those who experience it may sit in their cells long after the doors have been thrown open and the inmates declared free.

4.

I know of a foundation that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on a “listening tour” of the communities it served.   After this significant investment of time and money, it concluded that “the poor were just like us”—that they wanted a good education for their children; decent, affordable housing; quality health care; and meaningful, well-paying jobs.  This foundation drew one additional conclusion: the poor, it appears, also wanted to participate actively in the decisions that affected their lives.  That is, they wanted to join neighborhood councils, serve on commissions, have more time to petition the mayor, and the like.

I never saw the transcripts that supported this last conclusion, but I found it suspect for many reasons.

Thus characterized, these low-income people didn’t seem real to me; they weren’t exhausted after 8, 10, or 12 hours of work.  They were instead super-beings able to work two shifts, go home to cook a meal for four hungry people, give quality time to their children, and then lead the charge at their town council meeting.

Like the “noble savages” of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, they had become screens upon which we projected ideal versions of ourselves.  Under the influence of our most darling theory of social change, the working poor lost their corporeality altogether.

5.

Who speaks for the poor?  We know the poor don’t always speak for themselves.  Recently in my city we hosted a conference titled Stepping Up: Creating a New Social Compact.  A compact, as we all know, is an agreement between two or more parties.  But it will not surprise the reader to learn that the poor, those who most often get the raw deal in these negotiated “agreements,” were nowhere in sight.  Ironically they were being represented by people like me who had struggled all their lives to forget what it was like to go without.

6.

I wish there were more people in the nonprofit and foundation sectors who would speak out about their experiences of having grown up in poverty.  It would be a good tonic.  I and others might be more likely to discard some of our questionable experiments in social engineering.  If I were able to see the poor neither as super-beings nor as eternal victims, I might gain a truer picture of how they sometimes participate in perpetuating their own misery.  I might spend less time feeding my sentimentalism and my self-righteousness, and more time feeding the hungry.

The next step for us is even harder.  It’s to admit that even with our privilege and our education, in spite of all the learned men and women at our beck and call, we typically haven’t the slightest clue about how to transform a system that not only keeps people in poverty but continues to create them in prodigious numbers.

_____

*Appearing in This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law.

Class Struggle in the Third Sector: The Return of the 99 Percent?

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With the election of Donald Trump as president there have been calls on the left to widen the tents of the opposition parties, to connect with the disenfranchised white voters courted so effectively by Republicans. One way to do this, as the election made clear, is to appeal to people’s misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry. An alternative path is to better understand socioeconomic class and the manner in which it shapes people’s life outcomes.

If you were to study the agendas and offerings of mainstream nonprofit and foundation conferences in the US over the past twenty-five years, you would find little mention of class per se.* Why do class-talk and its cognates have so little resonance in the American Third Sector? Are we stepping around an important concept, or are there legitimate reasons for casting it aside? This post is the first in a series dedicated to (re-)raising this and other questions related to class.**

In spite of continuing reminders about the myth of class mobility in this country, and a shared concern for low-income communities, there are significant barriers to invoking the notion of “socioeconomic class” in foundation and nonprofit work. Socioeconomic class, a term used in the social sciences and political theory, is typically some function of income, assets, education, and occupation—these being interrelated in obvious ways. Given the degree to which these factors predict life outcomes, the reasons for resisting class-talk in the American Third Sector are not immediately obvious.

What’s going on? How do we make sense of this reticence? I believe there are three forces at work:

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.

Of course it’s not a zero-sum game: We can keep our traditional identity politics and at the same time deepen our understanding of what it means to be part of the 99%, a term that achieved wide usage during the time of Occupy Wall Street. Instead of heeding misguided calls to “blame the identity apostles” for Trump’s victory, why not take intersectionality seriously and consider the effects of socioeconomic class on racially-defined communities?

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 divide the American public into various income categories. What they deny is that the individuals in these categories share “life-defining experiences” that license our referring to them as members of a distinct, coherent class.

How can we assess this kind of argument?

Recall that during the time of Occupy Wall Street, the division of American society into just two classes—the 1% and the 99%—served several important purposes. First, the name was the message: the moniker “1%” invited questions, reflection, and debate about current and more just distributions of wealth in American society. Second, there was enormous power in the act of self-naming and, by so doing, identifying with others across racial, geographic, and other barriers. Third, this act of self-naming reflected important experiences shared by members of the named class: 99 Percenters were generally required to work for their livings; they were much more likely to depend on Social Security for their retirements; unlike the 1 Percenters, they were not largely immune to the convulsions of financial and labor markets—in general, their life circumstances were much more precarious.

To claim, as Kingston does, that American society is essentially “classless” is to claim that while, in practice, the notion of class can play a powerful social and political role, it can never really work in theory.

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. Recall that in 2003, Bush II effectively silenced the critics of his tax cuts by accusing them of fomenting “class warfare.”

One of the greatest barriers to class talk in the American Third Sector, or around the dinner table, is not its lack of utility, or the sense that class consciousness necessarily leads to confrontation. I suspect it’s the fact that many of us prefer not to field uncomfortable questions about the benefits we ourselves enjoy under current class arrangements. These arrangements ultimately serve the purposes of an elite, an elite we’re loathe to name in part because keeping our jobs will often depend on silent complicity. And yet, how many members of this same elite have themselves called for greater economic justice and inclusiveness?

To introduce and champion class consciousness is to acknowledge that the “structures” we seek to change—if we’re enlightened grantmakers—are often structures put in place to serve the purposes of an economically defined class. Income and other taxes in the US are generally regressive; safety net programs are shredded while corporate welfare remains intact; and, in general, the more you have, the easier it is for you to acquire even more. If you can afford a good lawyer, you can buy your way out of a run-in with the law; if you’re poor and depend on a public defender, your chances are not so good. So while we might wish to remain class-neutral, the structures that keep people in poverty unfortunately will not.

How do we bring the lived experience of the poor and working poor into institutions that, in spite of our best intentions, perpetuate class privilege? How do we incorporate class-talk into nonprofit work in a way that doesn’t elide hundreds of years of racial oppression? I don’t deny these challenges, but I’m convinced that ignoring the effects of class is acting in bad faith. It’s treading water while strong currents continue to carry us and our neighbors further downstream.

_____

* 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.
** A very pared-down version of this post first appeared in July 2007.

How To Manage The Poor: The Bourbon Doctrine of Preemption

In this scene from Monsieur Vincent, the French chancellor summons Vincent de Paul to his well-appointed office to receive a valuable lesson in the management of the underclass.  Challenging the social and political structures that give rise to yawning disparities is out of the question.  But effective managers have many options.  For example, Bottom of Pyramid (BoP) consumers with “severely limited resources” can have their product awareness and demand appropriately “stimulated,” generating market rate returns for Impact Investors. In times of fiscal belt-tighetning, the poor can be persuaded to allow their unused organs to be harvested for the benefit of the more productive classes.  The bracing effect of the market will ultimately separate the winners from the losers, driving the latter to an early demise and thus relieving the strain on public coffers.  If we’re impatient, we can simply “disappear” the poor, putting out of sight a demographic that undermines our faith in the benevolence of market forces.  The goal is an uninterrupted flow of capital and goods, a sustained growth in the GDP.  And for this we need good order.  How to achieve it?  Best not to ask too many questions.

Chancellor:  The poor are multiplying and they’ve become a real threat.  Beggars everywhere!  And nowadays, if you don’t give them anything they threaten you.

 

Vincent de Paul:  They’re hungry.

 

Chancellor:  With my job, I have other kinds of hunger to appease! France is hungry, for safety, for order ... I’ve requested your presence here because I have some good news.  After your life-long dedication to them, you’ll be happy to hear that, in two days, there will be no more poor people!

 

Vincent de Paul:  How?

 

Chancellor:  It’s very simple.  They’re under arrest.

 

Vincent de Paul:  But poverty is not a crime.

Chancellor:  I’m afraid it very surely leads to it.  My job is to anticipate, and that’s what I’m doing.

 

 

The Foundation as Borderland Institution

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I.

How, short of civil war, does a nation typically work through periods of intense social polarization?  In the United States we face persistent racial and ethnic divisions as well as stark income and asset inequalities.  We’re currently experiencing these differences in the context of some very uncivil election year rhetoric and the emergence of a new kind of American class consciousness characterized by the Occupy Movement.

Given these polarizing forces, what is the glue that keeps contemporary American society from spinning apart?  Is it simple inertia, a kind of consumerist satiety?  Do we ever in fact learn to resolve our differences, or do they come into greater or lesser focus depending on the whims of our commentariat?  If we manage somehow to work through our divisions, where does this bridging work happen?

It’s not the first time in recent history that we’ve come to a perceived boiling point.  In a 1995 book titled Beyond Individualism,  Michael Piore wrote about a “social deficit” created in the 1980s and early 90s that eventually led to increased political mobilization and social instability.  A pivotal event of that era, according to Piore, was President Reagan’s crushing of the federal air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981, an action that “galvanized anti-union managerial factions in a whole variety of industries and occupations where union organization had previously been unassailable.”   It was open season on organized labor.  The wealthiest Americans saw a marked increase in their standard of living while the incomes of blue collar workers declined.  The savings and loan crisis and its attendant bailout presaged our contemporary financial market meltdown and moved some commentators to dub the period between 1985 and 1995 the “Looting Decade.”

Political life also took a nasty turn.  The Bush campaign’s Willie Horton ads in 1988 alienated black Americans, while the family values rhetoric of the 1992 campaign targeted single mothers, feminists, and gays and lesbians.  Against this backdrop of political turmoil, identity groups grew in visibility and pressed their claims on American society.  According to Piore, we could not, during this fiscally lean era, opt to settle these claims through massive social spending.  All of this created an atmosphere of tension and instability, perhaps not substantially different in feeling and tone from the one we’re currently experiencing.

To address this increased polarization, Piore suggested that politicians and policymakers champion the borderlands, institutions in which “social claimants” could cross group boundaries and communicate their needs and concerns to society at large.   Through dynamic give-and-take “political conversations” in these borderland institutions, marginalized identity groups could become agents in the creation of a new national culture.  Participants in these discussions would interpret their actions to themselves and others in ways that acknowledge the effects of one community of meaning upon another.  Perhaps on occasion these discussants would even celebrate their inevitable clashes of interpretation.

II.

There’s so much that’s compelling about Piore’s vision of the borderlands, rooted, as it appears to be, in Aristotle’s view of Man as the “political animal.”  Somewhere between Wall Street and the Occupy Movement’s encampments in Zucotti Park there would be a space where both bankers and activists could plead their cases.  Ideally the 1% would get a clearer sense of the effect of their actions on people with modest means, while the 99% would better understand the economic system that for better or for worse implicates us all.

Unfortunately, in twenty years or so of nonprofit work, I’ve known only a handful of organizations* that fit the description of a borderland institution.   First, most civil society organizations are segregated by race, ethnicity, class, and the other divisions that borderland institutions are expected to bridge.  Even when these organizations are not segregated, they seldom make it their mission to champion give-and-take conversations across group boundaries.  From my own experience of participation in diversity trainings, poverty summits, and other intergroup meetings, these bridging conversations are fiendishly difficult to pull off.

Of course the mixing of people from different backgrounds happens outside the context of civil society organizations, in such venues as grocery stores, sports stadiums, parade routes, and popular music concerts.  But these are not typically places consecrated to boundary-crossing deliberation and the forging of a new civic culture.  The fact that Piore dubs his institutions “borderlands” suggests how marginal this kind of discussion has become.  Perhaps in some real or imagined past we talked through our differences in the town square or the agora.  In these nefarious times, however, we’ve pushed these conversations to the edges of civic life, we’ve made them exceptional rather than central to the political and other processes that shape our national character.

Messing With The Poor

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1.

In an essay titled “Paper Mills,” Heather J. Hicks invites readers to witness her transformation from “rural class” ingénue to career academic.  She writes:

I escaped from the working class not when I first read Shakespeare or Foucault but when I first found others to discuss them with, when I took shelter with a class that insulates its financial vulnerability with a rich fabric of shared ideas.*

Her words moved me to reflect on my own experience of class mobility.  My mother, a Cuban immigrant, began her life in this country as a member of a class that it’s currently fashionable to call “the working poor.”  By the time I was twelve, we were unambiguously in poverty.

Forty years have passsed and now my memory of that time functions less as a mirror than as a lens.  Looking at my work in the nonprofit sector through that lens I see reasons for hope and caution—but mostly caution.

2.

I met recently with a group of funders interested in supporting community organizing in the South, and we started discussing the development of a strategy for our work.  One very wise woman agreed with the idea of developing a strategy but insisted that it come from the communities we aimed to serve.

I understood her caution.  My entire career I’ve struggled with grantmakers who thought they knew better but didn’t—myself included.  I confess to having frequently practiced sociology without a license.

On the other hand, let me assure anybody reading this post that the poor do not know how to change their basic condition any better than we do.  As I was growing up, no one in my immediate family, no one in our circle of friends, discussed systemic change around the dinner table.  I knew my mother was struggling to make ends meet in something between a meritocracy and a bare-knuckled plutocracy, but that’s as far as my analysis went.  Then, as now, it was generally well educated, middle class people earning salaries well above the federal poverty level who had a clearer idea of the ways in which power and privilege were brokered and maintained in this country.

Well educated, middle class people like me know how the system works (or at least we should).  We participate in it; and some of us, for reasons that are not always self-serving, are invested in its preservation.

3.

Moving from poverty to the middle class was like moving through a series of doorways, each leading to a new room with a new vista.  I remember clearly the first time I ordered a meal at a restaurant without feeling a pang of anxiety about its cost.  Further along, there was the time my partner and I lit a fire in our first home together.  I remember how uneasy I felt as I luxuriated in the warmth of that fireplace, watching the flames reflected in the beautiful oak floor of a house decadent enough to have a spare room.

The greater my net worth, the more insulated I became from the tragedies that visited the people I grew up with.  I was not one but many paychecks away from living on the streets.  A bad turn of health would set me back, but it wouldn’t force me to choose between buying my medications and paying my rent.

The more I had, the easier it became for me to accumulate even more.  This seemed to me the most perverse lesson of my movement from poverty to the middle class.

Money bought me confidence.  It bought me good dentition and clearer skin.  It bought me eloquence.  I was more likely to speak up because I knew the right words to use and in the right order.  It bought me an audience that would listen to whatever preposterous thing I had to say.

We tend to focus on the physical condition of the poor.  This is not insignificant.  But poverty is as much an internal prison as an external one.  Those who experience it may sit in their cells long after the doors have been thrown open and the inmates declared free.

4.

I know of a foundation that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to go on a “listening tour” of the communities it served.   After this significant investment of time and money, it concluded that “the poor were just like us”—that they wanted a good education for their children; decent, affordable housing; quality health care; and meaningful, well-paying jobs.  This foundation drew one additional conclusion: the poor, it appears, also wanted to participate actively in the decisions that affected their lives.  That is, they wanted to join neighborhood councils, serve on commissions, have more time to petition the mayor, and the like.

I never saw the transcripts that supported this last conclusion, but I found it suspect for many reasons.

Thus characterized, these low-income people didn’t seem real to me; they weren’t exhausted after 8, 10, or 12 hours of work.  They were instead super-beings able to work two shifts, go home to cook a meal for four hungry people, give quality time to their children, and then lead the charge at their town council meeting.

Like the “noble savages” of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, they had become screens upon which we projected ideal versions of ourselves.  Under the influence of our most darling theory of social change, the working poor lost their corporeality altogether.

5.

Who speaks for the poor?  We know the poor don’t always speak for themselves.  Recently in my city we hosted a conference titled Stepping Up: Creating a New Social Compact.  A compact, as we all know, is an agreement between two or more parties.  But it will not surprise the reader to learn that the poor, those who most often get the raw deal in these negotiated “agreements,” were nowhere in sight.  Ironically they were being represented by people like me who had struggled all their lives to forget what it was like to go without.

6.

I wish there were more people in the nonprofit and foundation sectors who would speak out about their experiences of having grown up in poverty.  It would be a good tonic.  I and others might be more likely to discard some of our questionable experiments in social engineering.  If I were able to see the poor neither as super-beings nor as eternal victims, I might gain a truer picture of how they sometimes participate in perpetuating their own misery.  I might spend less time feeding my sentimentalism and my self-righteousness, and more time feeding the hungry.

The next step for us is even harder.  It’s to admit that even with our privilege and our education, in spite of all the learned men and women at our beck and call, we typically haven’t the slightest clue about how to change a system that not only keeps people in poverty but continues to create them in prodigious numbers.

_____

*Appearing in This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law.

Black Courtesy, White Courtesy: The Great ARNOVA Race Debate

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Editor’s note: Two weeks ago an ARNOVA member set off a campfire of controversy by warmly recommending the White Courtesy Telephone blog to his colleagues.  For those of you unfamiliar with the group, ARNOVA is an association of extremely intelligent people who study the nonprofit sector.  WCT investigative reporter Rachel Tension was able to obtain a transcript of the highly charged ARNOVA discussion, parts of which are reproduced below.  (We changed the participants’ names because we were too lazy to ask their permission to use their real names.)  In Washington, DC, it’s dog eat dog.  In academia, it’s the opposite, so we were frankly hesitant to approach the subject without some professional assistance.  We invited WCT semiotician-on-retainer, Monique Nescafé, to help interpret the transcript for us.  Dr. Nescafé’s work for the past several years has focused on neomaterialist narratives in the novels of Jennie Adams.  This is her first guest post with WCT …

I am so very happy to be invited to write for the White Telephone of Courtesy, and especially to comment on the post-capitalist discourse of ARNOVA members.  They say the American mind is closed.  No, my friends, he is wide open, like the pore of some gigantic sweat gland.

Consider this small exchange:

Alas, … I find the name [White Courtesy Telephone] unfortunate. It may indeed be useful but the title is off-putting.
—Betty

I am in the process of considering the title for my upcoming book, so I have titles on my mind.  Can you clarify what it is about the title of the White Courtesy Telephone blog that makes it off-putting? …
—Dorothy

I think the title of “white courtesy” gives the impression that there is something else possible like “black courtesy”—i.e. that there are disparate courtesies for different groups. Or even worse—that there is no other courtesy other than white courtesy.  I have been involved in discussions with other groups who would therefore find the title offensive. Unless of course you mean it ironically (like we don’t have white courtesy).  At the very least, I do not actually understand what “white courtesy” means.
—Betty

In her brilliant rejoinder,  Betty lays bare the racial insensitivity of the White Courtesy Telephone editors.  This is not in dispute: these editors often make light of subjects that would be better treated with reverential silence.  I applaud Betty.  Her act of problematization, of affirming a posttextual paradigm of reality—the impression of a racialized there-for-me—is, in my view, an intellectual tour de force.

How does she do it?  She describes herself as being in a superposition of affective eigenstates: while it’s true that she feels “put off,” she simultaneously postpones her feelings of offense as she considers an ironic reading of “white courtesy.”  She is put off, but she is not quite yet put off.  (A monk asks Dongshan Shouchu, “What is Buddha?” Dongshan answers, “Three pounds of flax.”)  And although Betty does not actually understand what “white courtesy” means, she complains about the phrase anyway.  If confusion is the first step to knowledge, then Betty is clearly very knowledgeable.

Betty also brilliantly presences the elided contextuality of the ARNOVA discourse by referring to “other groups” that would find the blog’s name offensive.  This kind of offense-by-proxy is the mark of a generous individual, willing to be offended not only for herself but on behalf of others as well.

And so, what is it ultimately that puts the “white” in White Courtesy Telephone?  Another ARNOVA commentator chimes in:

… we know words make a difference, so what I’m interested in is: why did the creators of white courtesy telephone pick that name, rather than, say, ‘black courtesy telephone,’ or just plain old ‘courtesy telephone’?

Was it in order to prompt this very discussion?

Or do white courtesy telephones have a special connotation not shared with courtesy telephones of other colours?

I may be exposing my ignorance here—but that’s because I’m ignorant.
—Nigel

Did Monsieur Ruesga, when he chose the name White Courtesy Telephone, choose it in order to “prompt this very discussion”?  It is possible, n’est-ce pas?  He might very well have anticipated the ARNOVA exchange as a sommelier anticipates a Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.  How delicious, to inquire after coloured telephones through the fog of a fine wine.  While these coloured telephones may have a special significance, we will henceforth, in deference to our subject, refer to them as telephones of colour.

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.

Department of New Lows: Reality TV Goes Slumming

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Two new British reality shows transform the lived experience of poverty into a spectacle we can all enjoy in prime time:

On ITV’s “Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway,” needy—and sometimes not-so-needy—supplicants have 60 seconds to persuade a panel of five wealthy panelists to give them money. The other show, “The Secret Millionaire” … features self-made millionaires who go undercover and spend 10 days in a poor neighborhood looking for people who could use their charity.  At the end of the show, the millionaire reveals him- or herself and writes checks to the winners.*

Neither of these shows would, I believe, require much adjustment for American television audiences already fed on a steady diet of loutishness and self-abasement.  An American version of “The Secret Millionaire” would be especially appealing to some, leaving unchallenged the larger forces that drive people into poverty, and celebrating the playful beneficence of the more fortunate among us.

So grab a bowl of popcorn.  There are valuable lessons for the whole family in the humiliation of the poor.

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*“Philanthropy TV” by Robert Frank in the April 13, 2007, issue of the Wall Street Journal Online.