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Class is not simply about dollars and cents, says Langston, it is also about race and gender: "The experience of Black, Latino, American Indian or Asian-American working classes will differ significantly from the white working classes, which have traditionally been able to rely on white privilege to provide a more elite position within the working class." White workers received better, unionized jobs, for example, and even white working class children can more easily blend in with the elites than their African-American counterparts. This is one reason, perhaps, that the working class has struggled to find unity in America -- the racial divides within the nation have often pitted members of the so-called lower classes against one another in a non-productive fashion, and women or men within specific ethnic groups may be the target of particular forms of social injustice that limit their advancement.
Non-middle class people must speak two languages -- in some cases, Spanish and English, but in other instances the language of their parents and the language of the schools and elite institutions. This communicates the message that the child's true self is not...
If this bi-cultural class fluency is not achieved, then a lack of success or 'tracking' into lower-wage, lower-skilled jobs (that are often more unstable than white collar jobs because of their ability to be replaced by technology) is a worker's fate. However, because it is rationalized that to work at a blue collar job means that a worker is less intelligent, this is not seen as an injustice.
All forms of class privilege are rationalized as a function of meritocracy in America -- if someone is smart enough, theoretically it does not matter where they came from. The parental money that gives the student a good education and makes life less psychologically and logistically difficult is concealed, as are the many connections that lead the middle class individual through school and the workplace. Without unity and an honest evaluation of the realities of American society and the 'bankruptcy' of American capitalist ideals, the members of the working class will be trapped in an unfair game of Monopoly money, forever mired in rules that do not favor their advancement, says Langston.
For example, in discussing his childhood in "Southie" a poor neighborhood in Boston, Patrick MacDonald talks about the willful ignorance of the people in the neighborhood when he was a child. "They were all here now, all of my neighbors and friends who had died young from violence, drugs, and from the other deadly things we'd been taught didn't happen in Southie" (MacDonald, 1999, p.2). In other words, the
Marxist Perspective for Understanding Society Although the United States and other Western nations fought a cold war against Communism for a significant part of the twentieth century, Western nations were not immune to the influence of Karl Marx, an intellectual and ideological founder of Communism. Even during the Cold War, Marxism entered disciplines in social sciences in the United States and students of sociology, history, political science, and a few
SOCIAL CLASS SYSTEM IN THE U.S. Classism' refers to distribution of national wealth is such a manner that it benefits the highest social class, the elites, and leads to the creation of social hierarchy. "Classism is made up of falsehoods about the frugality and seriousness of the upper class and the profligacy and frivolity of the lower" (Dugger, 1998). While in the Britain and other imperial countries, social classes took birth
Marxist ideas have also provided as a starting point for many of the modern feminist theorists. Despite these applications, Marxism of any variety is still a minority position among American sociologists (Conflict Theory, 2000). Marx's sociology state that: 1. Particular forms of property, slavery, feudal landholding, and capital are upheld by the coercive power of the state. Thus classes formed by property divisions, slaves and slave-owners, serfs and lords, capitalists and
This construction gave credence to the concept of class consciousness. Class consciousness is really class identity; it is the way entire groups of people conceive themselves as belonging to a whole. This understanding permeates the corpus and unites the initiated into a common group think. This group or class view is reinforced through the economic determinants that are at the foundation of the group's position. These determinants reinforce inequalities
American Culture and Values American culture highly regards individuality compared to many other cultures. For this reason, it is more difficult to distinguish the dominant values, beliefs, and traditions of American life, because the lives of Americans differ so much, depending on their race, class and beliefs. Tracy Ore, John Langston Gwaltney and Lillian Rubin each add a unique perspective to the values that dominate our culture. Ore makes an excellent point