“Which one is the real issue?”
The temptation when confronting a difficult issue is to find a subsidiary issue, make that primary, resolve it, and be done.
So it is with race and class. These two issues can be conflated but they are different, and the easiest way to show this is that we can move up and down class hierarchies, but we cannot move out of our race. “Race” is used as a distinguishing and exclusionary element in every class.
There are a few interesting stories to illustrate this point—perhaps the most disconcerting is the one where Dr. John H. Franklin, honored by President Clinton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, attended a dinner in an exclusive Washington DC club—where a white member simply handed him a coat check tag and asked him to fetch the coat. As Irving says (and most white people can say this as well), “This has never happened to me or any white people I know.” We white people may serve others in the hospitality industry, but we are almost never assumed by default to be the help.
“White has long stood for normal and better, while black and brown have been considered different and inferior.”
We can sometimes escape our class. In America, we can never escape our race.
Questions
Class is determined by income, wealth (assets), education, and profession. Betsy Leondar-Wright, program director at Class Action, suggests these categories as a way of thinking about class:
- Poverty
- Working Class
- Lower-Middle Class
- Professional Middle Class
- Upper-Middle Class
- Owning Class
How would you characterize your parents’ class? Your grandparents’ class? Your class as a child? Your class now? What messages did you get about race in each?
My parents’ classes were different. My father grew up in a working middle class family in America with two college educated parents (one who worked at University & for the government as a consultant). My mother grew up as a middle class farming family in Eurasia. I’m not sure of her parents’ education. Her mother was highly cultured, and her father was a genius of a mechanical engineer, and given his career and accomplishments, it’s likely he had some college-level classes if not an actual degree.
My own class as a child was middle class by temperament but scraping by by income. We had a large family with one working parent and one stay-at-home parent. For most of the 50s and up through the mid-60s it felt like we had enough, but just barely. By the mid-60s we’d become a more solidly middle-class family by income.
In all my time with my family we lived in nearly all-white neighborhoods, with a few Eastern Asians, and a very few Hispanic families. It wasn’t until junior high that I had Hispanic school peers, and I cannot think of a single black student at my high school. The neighborhood around my high school was working-class poor; after the fall of Saigon and after I graduated it slowly changed to become an area populated mainly by Vietnamese.
We had far more concern about Communists in Orange County of the 60s, and while there were very few examples of reaction to black empowerment there were many attempts to inculcate in us the fear and hatred of Communists. I really didn’t get much about race or racial issues.
I’d say my class now is middle class. I live in the suburbs and I “own” my own home. (Mortgage, but one day it will all be mine!) My spouse and both my children are college-educated; both children are independent and living on their own.
- For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
To follow along with the others, see also:
Di Brown “Nixie” at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter: https://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-chapter-3/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/
hunh. I found myself confronting my own assumptions while reading this entry. Two college educated parents, owned home, university job and “consultant” – I find I can’t picture that as “working class.” So I went to find a definition of it.
Everything I found focused solely on income (ex: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/middle-class-calculator/) – whereas I find the author’s “extended” definition feels more authentic to me. “Genteel poverty” is “genteel” first – still seen as “belonging, having belonged, and/or capable of belonging” to its higher class if income rises again – whereas “nouveau riche” is wielded as an insult – “you may have the income, but you are not of this class.”
Thanks for making me think more on the definition of “class” overall! I haven’t written my answers for this one yet, and I am sure this will impact my thinking.
Yah, “class” is a weird thing. Most of America IIRC thinks they’re “middle class,” when the income cut-off is likely much lower than their salaries and assets.
But I think “class” here is a social description more than assets or income. We think we’re middle class.
“Working class” to me is an attitude as well as an income level. When I was first married we were working class. We both worked, we barely stayed ahead of the bills, and it was a struggle ever two weeks to pay off debts (school, car payment, etc.).
Having kids threw us for a loop. Now we had two more people in our family, but a single income. Back then I was making $2K/month, barely making it in Southern California. Moving to Washington State eased some of that pain–housing was cheaper, and the job paid me slightly more. But gradually I worked myself into better and better jobs, buying our first home 2 years after arriving in Washington, and upgrading to our current home 5 years later.
One thing the book brings out (so far) is the attitude that I can succeed, along with the many models of success in those around me. The attitude is, of course, that anyone can succeed. The actual factual reality is that no, for certain sets of people, the way is usually and largely blocked. It’s not class–I was hardscrabble white, barely outside the “middle class,” but I knew I could join the majority of my fellow tribe of white people in attitude as well as in social position. I had the vague and naive belief that the way was just as open to everyone else, and a vague uncertainty as to why everyone else didn’t just do what I did.
Stephen, I had the same question around Poverty vs Working Class–my family was well below the poverty line for income, but by the time I was in high school, both my parents had jobs (low-paying ones) and had managed to buy a house with the help of a no-interest loan from my grandparents to cover the down-payment. So I put working class for that period of my life.
I was almost the poorest kid in my class. One other friend had to drop out of IB (honors) to get a job after her dad left. I never had to do that.
I mentioned on Di’s blog too: I was consumed by questions of class (how different I was from my friends) and it’s hard even now to look back and see how race played into it. Class was just so…so…BIG for me then.