11 Reader Views on Class Prejudice in America
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week, I asked, “Is there class prejudice in the United States? If so, describe how it works.”
Our first response is from J, an educator who grew up in Texas in a family that was poor at times and middle class at others. At 17, she began living on her own and supporting herself with fast-food jobs. Today, she teaches at an expensive boarding and day school in Europe. She holds some decidedly leftist views––for example, that the logic of every money-making corporation is “exploit, profit, keep the spoils, and send the bill to the public so we won’t have to pay for the clean-up.” She also believes that American progressivism has been captured by classism.
She writes:
The view that American progressivism now takes on societal ills, I believe, is subconsciously aimed at erasing class privilege via class prejudice. Think about it: when conservatives reigned supreme among the wealthy elite, we heard how the poor deserved their status because they were lazy, lacking in a bootstraps mentality, or morally degenerate. Now, wherever progressives gain the upper hand, we hear how it is because the poor are morally degenerate, only now as racists, historically responsible for “white” oppression, or homophobes, Trump supporters, or closet white supremacists.
I see class privilege in a political movement calling itself “the left” in spite of the fact that it does not “call out” class and educational privileges among its elite membership. I see it in how this movement sees “intersectionality” in every entry point for oppression except for wealth, in a vastly unequal society. This is a left with no left left. Marx would be spinning in his grave to hear the righteous elite heap blame for society’s ills on the lower classes.
I see class privilege justify itself with prejudice in the ahistorical way we lately construct and center race. I see it in how we've created a category called “white people,” unimaginable in the age of high racial science, and now, in our discourse, casually attribute evils common to virtually every civilization as byproducts of “whiteness,” a skin color shared by almost a billion people from Sicily to Svalbard—an explanation often proffered, intentionally, I think, , powerful and powerless––offered as if an Irish woman dying of malnutrition and cholera in a workhouse was as responsible for European colonialism as Cecil
