Class This Ass

We're stubborn about class in this country. Stubborn in not wanting to talk about it. Stubborn about not wanting to do much about it. Conservatives mostly want to believe class doesn't matter, because opportunity abounds for everyone, right, and Houdini-like we can just slip our bonds and swim free, surfacing with a big happy breath in the big time. Progressives on the other hand will occasionally talk about class, but prefer talking gender and race, mostly I think because they've tasted at least some success against the forces of injustice there. But class seems more like a messy hurricane. It overwhelms us with its almost continental hugeness and complexity. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, there are a lot of pretty well-heeled progressives. It's hard pointing out your own advantages.

Here's a challenge for progressives. Who would you welcome more as a neighbor? A black middle class professional couple, with two kids in college? Or a law-abiding, but NASCAR watching, white family that has country music going in the garage on Saturday afternoons and keeps broken tricycles on their lawn? I'm assuming it's no contest.

I'm not trying to be cynical. I'm trying to be truthful. Because I see this every day in myself: a tendency to make the people I least want to talk to, invisible. Dismissible. Even laughable. I think money talks, and lack of money smells, at an uncanny distance, like its unmistakable self. I may not wish this to be the case, but it is. And I want to fight its implications.

Even at my church, which is full of kind, concerned, activist, progressive types, we tend to focus our discussions about social justice on what makes us look hip and up-to-date in our lack of prejudice. This focus may be unconscious, may be accidental, but it's real, and the upshot is that we welcome the young lesbian with the nose ring, ply her with lots of questions about her new spouse. A good thing. But when it comes to the quiet working class guy with a paunch, who works as a mechanic or a seasonal carpenter, we don't even sit down to coffee with him. Ask him how things are going with his Mom's lumpectomy. Not a good thing.

The problem of poverty is far less black and urban than it is rural and white. Do we ever admit this? How many of us even know this to be a fact?

We're spending a lot of energy nowadays castigating the leaders of Flint about their poisonous water system. And good. They deserve it. But does the fact that coal miners in West Virginia and Kentucky die of black lung all the time, cause anything like the same outrage? Would it ever? Listen to the accent of those miners, and you'll know the answer.

I believe we need to look straight at the problem of inequality wherever it shows itself. I think that thoughtful, feeling people will agree with me.

Finally, a question that might help bring this topic of class to a focus, along with our visceral reactions to class-markers. Though crude, it's a real question. Not an ironic one. And again, it's meant especially for progressives. Here it is: When it comes to pants riding a little low on a male, which would you MOST rather not see: a white ass-crack, or a black one?

What does this mean?

HB