Gender inequality is socially constructed

Classless society gender inequality is SOCIALLY constructed

The myth of the classless society: Donna Langston's "Tired of playing monopoly"

The myth of the classless society: Donna Langston's "Tired of playing monopoly"

"In the myth of the classless society, ambition and intelligence alone are responsible for success," writes Donna Langston in her essay "Tired of playing monopoly." Yet American society is highly stratified by class markers and class assumptions, often in invisible ways that can advance or prove to be a barrier to success. People of color, single women, and other individuals who face obstacles to social mobility are characterized as being insufficiently industrious if they do not pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. To do so, says Langston, is a physical impossibility.

Class markers divide and define American society; all the while America proclaims itself a meritocracy. "As a result of the class you are born into and raised in, class is your understanding of the world and where you fit in; it's composed of ideas, behavior, attitudes, values, and language; class is how you think, feel, act, look, dress, talk, move, walk; class is what stores you shop at, restaurants you eat in; class is the schools you attend, the education you attain; class is the very jobs you will work at throughout your adult life. Class even determines when we marry and become mothers; Working class women become mothers long before middle class women receive their bachelor's degrees." If there was no class, then the clear distinction between 'shopping at Nordstrom' versus 'shopping at K-Mart' would not be obvious. These choices are seen as inherently different activities, done by different kinds of people -- the upper class have 'taste' and 'style' says Langston, while working class people merely eat and make their purchases to survive. This is mocked, even if shopping at K-Mart is an economic necessity.

Langston characterizes her own inability to transcend class barriers not simply as economic but also a failure of vision -- class can be such a narrowing influence that the idea one could move away from home to go to college, or visit Europe, seems like impossibility. The difficulties of the poor and the reason why lower-income students flounder in college are partially due to the challenges of working full-time and attending school, yet Langston also suggests that students have a kind of fear or incomprehension of what their lives as college graduates might resemble, because such a future is so different than the lives of the students' parents. Also, the refusal of society to ignore the economic and psychological problems faced by individuals seeking to better themselves frequently causes people like Langston -- and people of color, single mothers, and members of other historically disenfranchised groups -- to blame themselves for their lack of mobility and success in America, rather than to turn their rage against the conditions they are suffering.

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 worthy of success, or that he or she must reject his or her family and culture to succeed. 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.