Nov 12, 2016 09:00 PM
Classism from our Mouths
By Betsy Leondar-Wright
"We've all learned classist prejudices, and none of us has completely eradicated them from our minds, or from our speech.
Few middle-class people would say we have prejudices against working class or low-income people, of course. Our classism is often disguised in the form of disdain for southerners or midwesterners, religious people, patriotic people, employees of big corporations, fat or non-athletic people, straight people with conventional gender presentation (feminine women wearing make-up, tough burly guys), country music fans, or gun users.
And we all make mistakes. There's not a middle-class person alive who hasn't said dumb, insensitive things that step on working-class toes. Hiding our classist mistakes or defending ourselves ("I didn't mean it that way") doesn't do any good. The only thing for it is to 'fess up, apologize, laugh at ourselves, and commit to learning how do better in the future.
As we talk, working-class people notice how oblivious or how aware of class issues we seem, and make decisions about how much to collaborate with us based on those evaluations, among other factors. The goal of reducing the classism in our speech is not to keep ourselves out of trouble by avoiding angering working-class people, and it's not to reach some kind of perfect non-classist purity. The goal is to make ourselves more trustworthy and to alienate working-class people less, so that we can work together for economic justice and other common goals.
As I interviewed people about the classism they had seen in the movement, it began to seem like all the examples could be summed up in these two phrases: overlooking intelligence, and overlooking necessity. Here are some examples of each:
Overlooking intelligence
"As our [peace] group started growing, more college-educated men came in ... .I remember feeling that I was slowly becoming invisible. In a discussion about who should be the speakers in community churches ... I volunteered to speak ... Someone said, "Well, you know, I think Ken might be a better person to speak to this group because people will listen to a doctor more." I felt I wanted to crawl inside myself and disappear. Before this incident, I had been afraid to speak but I had thought I had a lot to contribute to the peace movement. Afterwards I thought I had nothing to say that anyone would want to hear."
—Linda Stout, Bridging the Class Divide
"Growing up, I attached 'stupid' to workers and 'smart' to executives. This didn't happen because of a weird personal quirk. It resulted from force-fed images and words of TV shows, newspapers, magazines, and movies. Any TV show with working-class characters, first The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, the All in the Family, covertly and overtly highlighted the stupidity of bus drivers, factory workers, and plumbers. Movies, books, and comics followed suit. At school, middle-class kids called us stupid; we hurled back 'stuck up', but never 'stupid'.
—Joanna Kadi, Thinking Class"
http://www.classmatters.org/2004_11/from_our_mouths.php
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Needful introspection is pressing also for internalized classism in which one has adopted the surrounding prejudice against your class or income level as a sense of shame and an avoidance of public situations. After so much innuendo and marginalization one internalizes the sense of one's perceived inferiority as part of who you are. You adopt submissive behaviors and a fatalist resignation to being stereotyped due to your dress, the kind of car you drive, your family, where you live, your accent, your political positions, your weight, or even the places you shop or dine at. Paranoia and social anxiety ensue as one navigates a society entrenched in superficial snap judgments and subliminally-sensed subtle devaluations of one's worth as a human being.
By Betsy Leondar-Wright
"We've all learned classist prejudices, and none of us has completely eradicated them from our minds, or from our speech.
Few middle-class people would say we have prejudices against working class or low-income people, of course. Our classism is often disguised in the form of disdain for southerners or midwesterners, religious people, patriotic people, employees of big corporations, fat or non-athletic people, straight people with conventional gender presentation (feminine women wearing make-up, tough burly guys), country music fans, or gun users.
And we all make mistakes. There's not a middle-class person alive who hasn't said dumb, insensitive things that step on working-class toes. Hiding our classist mistakes or defending ourselves ("I didn't mean it that way") doesn't do any good. The only thing for it is to 'fess up, apologize, laugh at ourselves, and commit to learning how do better in the future.
As we talk, working-class people notice how oblivious or how aware of class issues we seem, and make decisions about how much to collaborate with us based on those evaluations, among other factors. The goal of reducing the classism in our speech is not to keep ourselves out of trouble by avoiding angering working-class people, and it's not to reach some kind of perfect non-classist purity. The goal is to make ourselves more trustworthy and to alienate working-class people less, so that we can work together for economic justice and other common goals.
As I interviewed people about the classism they had seen in the movement, it began to seem like all the examples could be summed up in these two phrases: overlooking intelligence, and overlooking necessity. Here are some examples of each:
Overlooking intelligence
"As our [peace] group started growing, more college-educated men came in ... .I remember feeling that I was slowly becoming invisible. In a discussion about who should be the speakers in community churches ... I volunteered to speak ... Someone said, "Well, you know, I think Ken might be a better person to speak to this group because people will listen to a doctor more." I felt I wanted to crawl inside myself and disappear. Before this incident, I had been afraid to speak but I had thought I had a lot to contribute to the peace movement. Afterwards I thought I had nothing to say that anyone would want to hear."
—Linda Stout, Bridging the Class Divide
"Growing up, I attached 'stupid' to workers and 'smart' to executives. This didn't happen because of a weird personal quirk. It resulted from force-fed images and words of TV shows, newspapers, magazines, and movies. Any TV show with working-class characters, first The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, the All in the Family, covertly and overtly highlighted the stupidity of bus drivers, factory workers, and plumbers. Movies, books, and comics followed suit. At school, middle-class kids called us stupid; we hurled back 'stuck up', but never 'stupid'.
—Joanna Kadi, Thinking Class"
http://www.classmatters.org/2004_11/from_our_mouths.php
===============================================================
Needful introspection is pressing also for internalized classism in which one has adopted the surrounding prejudice against your class or income level as a sense of shame and an avoidance of public situations. After so much innuendo and marginalization one internalizes the sense of one's perceived inferiority as part of who you are. You adopt submissive behaviors and a fatalist resignation to being stereotyped due to your dress, the kind of car you drive, your family, where you live, your accent, your political positions, your weight, or even the places you shop or dine at. Paranoia and social anxiety ensue as one navigates a society entrenched in superficial snap judgments and subliminally-sensed subtle devaluations of one's worth as a human being.