Class and classism and the meritocratic fantasy
Most people would not agree that it’s okay to cross the street if you are spooked by the race of someone approaching. But fewer people, I suspect, would feel the same way if you cross because you think the person coming toward you is a lot poorer than you are. In that case, you can ascribe a socially sanctified line of reasoning to the situation—rationally, that person has a pretty obvious reason to assault you for your money, thus it makes sense to try to avoid them, and if they feel bad about it, well, they should try harder not to be poor.
The idea is that classism is often tolerated where racism (and sexism and bigotry against gays and so on) is not, because prevailing neoliberalism makes it seem okay to ascribe “rational” incentives to other people and discriminate accordingly. After all cynicism about other people’s motives is a positive common-sense virtue in a society ruled in all aspects by a free market. An ability to think in terms of costs and benefits and find the applicable way of applying such an analysis to any scenario is the mark of a mind thinking at its clearest. At the same time, when we discriminate along those lines and not along the old racist, sexist, etc. lines, we can congratulate ourselves for how far we have come, regard our existing social order as progressive, and assure ourselves that our own advantages are merited, and not the product necessarily of racism. Eschewing bigotry and promoting diversity strengthens our ideological faith in the meritocracy that hardly exists in reality, as Walter Benn Michaels argues in this LRB book review of a collection called Who Cares about the White Working Class?.
My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity.
This is an argument spelled out in his book The Trouble With Diversity. In the LRB piece, he pushes the book’s argument further, detecting a similar mechanism in the worries about classism manifest in Who Cares About the White Working Class?:
It’s thus a relevant fact about Who Cares about the White Working Class? that Ferdinand Mount, who once advised Thatcher, is twice cited and praised here for condemning the middle class’s bad behaviour in displaying its open contempt for ‘working-class cultures’. He represents an improvement over those who seek to blame the poor for their poverty and who regard the culture of poverty rather than the structure of capitalism as the problem. That is the view of what we might call right-wing neoliberalism and, from the standpoint of what we might call left-wing neoliberalism, it’s nothing but the expression of class prejudice. What left neoliberals want is to offer some ‘positive affirmation for the working classes’. They want us to go beyond race to class, but to do so by treating class as if it were race and to start treating the white working class with the same respect we would, say, the Somalis – giving ‘positive value and meaning to both “workingclassness” and ethnic diversity’. Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it.
The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as empty as contempt.
Michaels wants the left to worry more about income inequality and fight for the eradication of the income differences that make for social classes. (I wonder what Will Wilkinson would make of that.)
Built into the idea of meritocracy—an ideal often conflated with the American Dream—is the corollary that the poor deserve contempt. It’s easy to see how people could overrate their own hard work and its relevance to their own success (such as it is) and believe that hating poor people is a way of providing crucial tough love. We can jumble up the causal links and think that hating hte poor will help make the meritocratic dream more real. It serves as a way of voicing our belief in the meritocratic ideal.
Comments
I think it goes beyond classism to, as Barbara Ehrenreich recently pointed out in the Times, outright war. When Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1965 (a war that was nearly as successful as his concurrent war against the poor and huddled masses of indochina) who could have foreseen that forty years later our MBA president would furrow his brow and sigh wearily as he observed the poor of new orleans defiling the superdome from thirty thousand feet. We were all troubled when he announced that Katrina was a problem for the state of New Orleans to handle, but not that troubled. Even given all his flaws, I suspect he would have done more if they had merely been black, rather than poor and black.
Though it is difficult to pinpoint the precise date when the conflict started, our own war against the poor seems to have long passed the offensive and entered the mopping up phase. By my calculations we are somewhere between the pounding artillery barrages of Okinawa and the vinegar stroke of Nagasaki.
Comment by Thomas Noguchi from Los Angeles — August 20, 2009 @ 2:11 am
So the world has run full circle. It was once thought that discrimination was a bad thing, but now we can say that the monarchs of old were right.
While America becomes the nation the founding fathers were escaping from: the rich now become the new kings, and now all people are no longer equal while the poor no longer have unalienable rights.
Comment by BasilTheBrave from Sydney, Australia — August 20, 2009 @ 5:20 am
Of course in the United States (among many other places) where there is a correlation between race and poverty the same reasoning that justifies crossing the street to avoid a “dangerous looking” poor person can be used to justify (and conceal) racism as well as classism
It’s a bit controversial to say it but I sometimes question how many of the grievances African Americans or other minorities perceive as rooted in race are actually rooted in class
Which is not to say racism does not exist or that middle class or wealthy minorities do not experience it as well but I think there is the possibility of over attribution
Comment by Nick — August 20, 2009 @ 6:24 pm
Michaels has been pushing this line of argument for sometime now, and it’s as confused as ever. Notwithstanding many of the thin assumptions he holds up (pyschologizing what the neoliberal left or right thinks about anti-discrimination) at eye level I take his central thesis to be this:
“Racial equality requires respect for racial difference; class equality requires the elimination of class difference.”
Michaels is a Crypto-Marxist. Why he doesn’t come out and say it is a little baffling. Perhaps only on the farthest reaches of Right where that chauvinism still abides, not many people implicitly believe that our advantages, cognitive, social, or capital, are intrinsically merited. Difference and differences exist given any number of extrinsic and intrinsic variables. Competition is a difference.
But Michaels is too clever by half, unwilling to unwind his rhetorical exercise to it’s logical conclusion. Yes, class solidarity beyond racial lines, if not crucial, is an objective goal.
Though what bothers me most about Michaels (I once was a devotee) is this magical notion that the elimination of difference is possible, let alone desirable. There is something incredibly pernicious about this line of thought.
Comment by Ron — August 20, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
Classism has always been a problem in the US. It’s the elephant in the room everyone pretends doesn’t exist. Even in the literary world, authors who have the social class connections to getting published make a fortune speaking FOR the poor, but the poor are denied recognition and the opportunity to tell their stories in their own voices and…::gasp:: maybe make some money for writing and self-publishing their own stories.
Jacqueline S. Homan,
Author: “Classism For Dimwits”
Comment by Jacqueline S. Homan from Erie, Pennsylvania — September 15, 2009 @ 7:12 pm
What the fuck? I cross the street whenever I feel spooked, and I don’t care what anybody thinks about why I did it. It’s called City Radar. Where I come from, those of us without it didn’t live to develop it. Get your categories, and their referent dramas of social justice, out of my self-preserving intuition!
Jacqueline is exactly correct, which is why I left the nonprofit social change sector. In telling stories, multimillionaire corporate grant recipient Amy Goodman is as vile as billionaire-funded Fox News—co-opting local stories, translating them into meme tokens in the power games of the rich. Nobody ever wants to hear from the people themselves.
Actually, many people do. Think of Studs Terkel, or Utah Phillips, or any elder who sits down at the tap room and says, “Well, I knew this guy/grrrrl once….” Experience and life. Not schooling, analysis and theories. That’s what our youth-worshipping culture erases: elderhood, its wisdom and knowledge. Instead we end up with formulas and products and identities all commercialized, not lived and earned. Experience becomes virtual and consumerist.
“Race,” “sex,” “class” and other semiotics of social identity are shortcuts. They are a way of avoiding talking about the deeper questions. Like what a person’s actual experience is, if any, and what it means, if anything. Like how much responsibility a person should take for their lives, and their family’s and community’s, versus how much responsibility “society” should take. Like what it takes to build adult character, and what it takes to fix that when you screw up, or screw others.
These are complicated matters of morality and character, but we lack a common source or language for it in this pluralistic nation. It can’t be based on religion—we don’t all have the same religion, and many of us have moved past religion altogether. It can’t be based on fantastic myths about history.
Also, too many people want to avoid the fact that, at bottom, we don’t know whether we’re shit-heels or altruists. You can never know, till something big happens to you, good or bad. Clinging to outdated morality seems attractive compared to that uncertainty. Worshipping victimhood absolves everyone from having to admit if they were weak, or mean, or deserved what was coming, or didn’t make an effort, or have a lot to learn.
It may be that that morality has to come from somewhere new, and we haven’t yet figured out where except at the individual or the very very local basis. In this, new social movements have been helpful…but also have generated new fascisms of identity.
Some people are trying to slap us all back into the chains of ancient institutions of moral power—nuclear families, government, churches. Some people are going completely in the wackaloon anarchist direction. Most of us I think stagger around the desert of the vast middle ground looking for pebbles to put in our pocket to thumb as we try to stay on course.
But we don’t yet have ways of talking about this, and it’s made harder by the fact that face to face relationships between people of different identity categories have been land-mined by political correctness and, now, a lot of swallowed anger.
I disagree that meritocracy is entirely a fantasy, or always attributable to race, sex, whatever. There are too many of us who battled our way out of the categories we were born into/with, and did so not because of one easy thing (like our skin color or lap-doodles) but because of a long series of very difficult things. Effort plays a role here. The right puts too much emphasis on this, the left puts too little.
Comment by slasha from Chester, PA — November 12, 2009 @ 12:12 pm