During semester break I saw a magazine advertisement that showed a very elegant model who had been popular in the 1950s and '60s. The ad copy said, "Class is forever." Now, I thought, there is a statement begging for deconstruction.
The first surface read, that class position is forever, would seem to belie the promise of class mobility at the heart of the American dream.
The second reading, indicating that class position is an issue, is puzzling, since Americans seem to have decided that we are a classless society, or perhaps only a "middle-class" society, whether we earn $25,000 or $250,000.
Finally, there is the intended reading, in which class has been stripped of its meaning in a socio-economic sense and instead become synonymous with style, grace, elegance. Taste, perhaps, but only a taste for the finer things in life. Class in this context clearly means "high class." It is not clear whether it is one of those traits that one simply possesses or does not, akin perhaps to natural, physical beauty. Or whether it can be acquired — for a price, that is.
But, hey, in the United States, isn't the ability to pay the price attainable by all? Isn't that what we stand for?
The word class in its socio-economic sense seems to be disappearing from our vocabulary. I used to lead campus discussions about class. But a couple of years ago, I was asked to lead a campus discussion on "economic diversity." I found the phrase unnerving. But when I raised that point to the discussion participants, it seemed that I was the only one nonplussed by the expression.
What do we mean by economic diversity? Isn't diversity a good thing? As a community, we celebrate diversity. We embrace difference. We welcome people of different cultures to our campus. And we are enthusiastic about sampling these "rich" — ironically that is always the preferred phrasing — "rich" cultures.
But let's be honest.
Economic diversity is a euphemism for socio-economic class. And if there's an upper class, there's also a lower class.
But how can we celebrate class?
How can we even talk about it?
The first step, of course, is to recognize that "economic diversity" means inequality.
It does not mean cultural or ethnic difference, all of which is equal.
It literally means that some people have more than others — more money, more health insurance, more things, more travel opportunities…
Some people have access to dance and music lessons, summer camps and symphonies. Some people have tutors and special classes to prepare them to take their SATs.
And some people don't.
Actually, most people don't.
And that's the nasty truth that no one really wants to talk about.
In 2006, median household income was $48,201, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The bottom 20 percent of the population received 3.4 percent of national income; the top 20 percent received 50.5 percent. That amounts to at most an income of about $20,000 for the bottom 20 percent, while the lowest income for the top 20 percent was around $97,000.1 The top 1 percent controls about 20 percent of the country's income.2
Even more important, however, than income is the control of wealth, encompassing privately held stock, financial securities and business equity. In 2001, the top 1 percent of households owned 44.1 percent of all privately held stock, 58 percent of financial securities and 57.3 percent of business equity. The top 10 percent owned 85 to 90 percent of stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity and more than 75 percent of non-home real estate.
Sociologist G. William Domhoff of UC Santa Cruz puts it succinctly: "Since financial wealth is what counts as far as the control of income-producing assets, we can say that just 10% of the people own the United States of America."
Meanwhile, in 2006, the percentage of people living in poverty was 12.3 percent, which translates to 36.5 million people. While the percentage would seem to be an improvement over the 23 percent estimated in 1960, the numbers have changed little: some 40 million people lived in poverty then.3
What do we mean by poverty? One definition is a family of four with an income of a little over $20,000 a year. It is a level of poverty so dire that one can qualify for aid programs at 125 percent of the poverty level.
Furthermore, the disparity between the top and the bottom has been growing. In 2005, "Real after-tax incomes jumped by an average of nearly $180,000 for the top 1 percent of households…4
Income is now more concentrated at the top than at any time since 1929. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it, "The $180,000 average income gain for [the top 1% of]…households in 2005 is more than three times the average middle-income household's total income".5
In 1979, the richest households made 22 times as much as the poorest; in 2005, they made 70 times as much. Average after-tax income of the top 1 percent rose from an average of $326,000 to more than $1 million, an increase of 228 percent. The middle fifth, meanwhile, saw its income rise 21 percent to $50,200; and the poorest fifth rose a mere 6 percent to $15,300.6
Such redistribution of wealth does not merely happen. It is the result of tax policy, low minimum wages, job insecurity and the movement of jobs out of the country. Conscious policies have made life better for some, worse for others.
We need to keep these data in mind when we think about using the euphemism "economic diversity," as if economic difference is just another identity served up at the multicultural banquet.
Walter Benn Michaels, author of the provocative book The Trouble with Diversity, contends that we have embraced the concepts of diversity and identity because they are much less threatening than the concept of class. As Michaels puts it, "Racism requires a commitment to the inequality of the races; antiracism requires a commitment to their equality. And here obviously is one key to the attraction of cultural diversity. It gives us a vision of difference without inequality. For our core conception of culture involved the idea that cultures are essentially and in principle equal, and so it makes no sense to think of a society organized into cultures as hierarchical. When we imagine, in other words, that we live in a world divided into different cultures, what we're imagining is that the political commitment to equality involves not creating it (by, say, redistributing wealth) but just insisting that it's already there. The problem, in this account, is that people have for various reasons (e.g. racism) failed to recognize their essential equality; the solution is to get them to recognize it.
"The great advantage of culture, then, is that it gives us a model of differences we can love, like those between Asian Americans and Caucasians, rather than differences (like the ones between…rich people and poor people) that are not so obviously appealing."7
We all like to believe that we earn our places in the world through a fair competition on an even playing field. Racial and ethnic discrimination has kept entire groups of people out of the game. Affirmative action programs have helped substantially to level that playing field. But eliminating racial and ethnic barriers offers limited help if financial barriers are not eliminated. And even then, it will take more than scholarships and tuition waivers to truly change the landscape of educational opportunity in the United States. Harvard announced in 2004 that it would not ask families earning less than $40,000 a year to contribute to their children's tuition. As Michaels puts it, "While this is no doubt great news to those financially pressed students who have gone to top high schools, taken college-prep courses and scored well on their SATs, it's bound to seem a little beside the point to the great majority of the poor, since what's keeping them out of elite universities is not their inability to pay the bill but their inability to qualify for admission in the first place."8
Primary and secondary education in this country is paid for by property taxes. If you live in an elite area, the high property taxes pay for excellent schools. If you live in a poor area, your schools are equally poor. If you do not have the right training in high school, it is extremely difficult to qualify for admission to college.
Presumably, every one in this room believes in the importance of a college education, whether as an intrinsic good, or as a stepping stone to a good job and a pleasant life.
I would also guess that for most people in this room, college attendance is the norm for family and friends.
Yet, consider the statistics for educational achievement in the United States in 2007 for adults 25 years and older: Only 29 percent have a bachelor's degree. Nine percent have an associate's degree. Thirteen percent are high school dropouts.
The barriers that working-class and poverty-class students have to overcome to attend college at all are enormous. To end up at a college like Whitman is even more amazing.
When they get here, they will find discomfiting situations both in and out of the classroom.
Outside, fellow students will think nothing of spending money to go to concerts, go skiing, or even just to go out to lunch or buy a latte. When working-class students profess that they cannot afford to come along, they are frequently met with uncomprehending looks and the suggestion that they just call their parents and ask that more money be put into their accounts.
In the classroom, students might find that some material that was covered in elite high schools was never covered in theirs. Or that their classmates have traveled extensively, been exposed to fine art and music, and have a basic vocabulary that comes from growing up in a home where their parents were college-educated. Pierre Bourdieu calls it "cultural capital," a bank of knowledge provided in your home. And it is most easily purchased when one has material capital as well.
Together, the working class and poverty class constitute a majority of the U.S. population. But on college campuses such as ours, these groups are clearly minorities. And so, the enlightened and self-aware on campuses are beginning to see that it is as important to address class as it is to address racial and ethnic identities. But how do we do that?
That brings me back to the title of this talk — How do we celebrate class?
The prevailing model today, not just at Whitman but at campuses across the country, is to celebrate diversity. Celebration often entails performance — folk dances, colorful costumes, delicious food, fabulous music, exotic languages.
How shall we perform class? At the Working and Poverty Class Academics Conference, some suggested that the delicacy could be the government-surplus cheese they grew up on.
Shall we have a special interest house? What would it look like? How about special costumes or music?
This year Whitman's First-Generation and Working-Class Student group was invited to participate in the Festival of Lights. They ended up choosing not to. "What would we do?" one student asked. "How about a Christmas tree with nothing under it?"
When we celebrate identity, we usually celebrate a part of ourselves that will not change, certainly one that we do not want to change. If you are African-American, Latino, Asian, you expect to leave Whitman and continue to celebrate those identities. But working-class and poor people are hoping to leave poverty and lower-class status behind.
We may certainly feel that rich people are not better than poor people. But few would argue that poverty is better than wealth.
When we celebrate diversity, we call for its retention. Do we want to retain poverty and the relative deprivation of the working-class? If we care about poor and working-class people, shouldn't we really want to change their lives?
Celebration of multicultural identity does not really ask us to do anything to create change. All you have to do is join the celebration.
But if poverty and lower-class limitations need to be changed, then we are called on not just to celebrate, but to take action. That action might include some cost as well. And that's not nearly as much fun as eating Asian delicacies or dancing to a salsa band.
This is the point at which people, especially people with privilege, start to get uncomfortable. We talk a good game at places like Whitman about the need for faculty and students to move, sometimes even to be pushed, outside our comfort zones. But the problem with moving outside our comfort zones is that it's… well… uncomfortable. And we don't really like to be uncomfortable. It's hard to be the happiest campus in the country when we're uncomfortable.
But this is not Disneyland — it is not the happiest place on earth. Whitman, like all elite colleges, is a place of profound inequality. We need to talk about that, even if it makes us uncomfortable; maybe especially because it makes us uncomfortable.
We need to seek solutions to the inequality of the nation that is replicated in our most elite centers of higher education.
So let's start with conversations, and move on to political action.
And that brings me to Martin Luther King Jr.
On Martin Luther King day, everyone wants to go to the mountain. Everyone wants to repeat King's stirring words at the March on Washington. And for good reason. Dr. King was an amazing orator, and his words still have riveting power. But the famous "I Have a Dream Speech" was delivered in 1963. Dr. King was killed in 1968. Why do we reach back five years to commemorate Dr. King? What was he working on during his last years?
In 1968, Rev. King's last project was to organize the Poor People's Campaign. It was to culminate in an encampment of 500,000 poor people in a tent city near the Washington Memorial. The plan was for these poor people to lobby their representatives to end the war in Vietnam and to instead spend the money on helping the poor. His last act, of course, was to stand in solidarity with the striking sanitation workers of Memphis, and it was there that he was assassinated.
After Dr. King's murder, the Poor People's Campaign was carried on by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King's successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The march failed to result in any meaningful legislation, and Abernathy has often been blamed for poor organization. Historian Robert T. Chase argues convincingly, however, that the blame lies elsewhere.
"The failure of the Poor People's Campaign extended beyond questions of leadership and tactics," Chase writes. "Ultimately, the PPC failed because the traditional constituency of the Civil Rights movement — the white, middle-class, liberals — was repulsed by the goals of the campaign itself. Bringing the poor together as a racial amalgamation of similar interests and goals heightened the issue of class in America and, consequently, Americans came to view the Civil Rights movement as an instrument questioning the legitimacy of America's economic system and its capitalistic 'way of life.'"3
And that was exactly what Martin Luther King had in mind. Dr. King's last book, published in 1967, was entitled, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? In this book he wrote:
"In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.
"…I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income…
"John Kenneth Galbraith has estimated that $20 billion a year would effect a guaranteed income, which he describes as 'not much more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy and religious liberty as these are defined by 'experts' in Vietnam.'"
Substitute Iraq, and a much larger figure than $20 billion, and the same argument could be made today.
Dr. King wrote, "The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking."
In 1967, Dr. King told the New York Times: "In a sense, you could say we are engaged in a class struggle, yes. It will be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls for a redistribution of economic power. Yet this isn't a purely materialistic or class concern. I feel that this movement in behalf of the poor is the most moral thing--it is saying that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth."
The interviewer, José Yglesias, noted the inclusion of other minorities and said to King, "You can't say you're in civil rights any longer." Dr. King responded with a smile, "But you can say I am in human rights."
And that's a legacy we should follow.
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