I guess you could call me a liar. Back when I had fundraising responsibilities at several small nonprofit organizations, I lied to foundations all the time. I assumed, often correctly, that funders wanted to believe that their money would directly bring about specific program impacts, so I told them it would. That meant hiding some […]
About Betsy Leondar-Wright
College Amplifies Advantages & Disadvantages
Here’s some bad news for all of us who strive to get more working-class first-generation students into and through college: college is not an effective leveller. Class inequalities persist even among graduates of ‘good’ colleges. Expanding opportunities for higher education is ineffective if advantaged students graduate with even greater advantages, and if disadvantaged graduates still […]
Crummy nonprofit jobs – and solutions
by Betsy Leondar-Wright Some of the worst pay I ever got was from progressive social justice organizations. No health benefits at one job; no raise for 4 years at another; once a salary so low I qualified for Food Stamps. In an irony of the nonprofit world, their external missions of equity and economic opportunity […]
Untold Stories: Bringing Class into the Classroom
By: Adj Marshal and Betsy Leondar-Wright Students often respond with confusion to questions about social class—not surprising given the common assumption that the US is a “classless society.” The fog surrounding class stratification makes it difficult to teach about economic inequality. Why is class so challenging to teach about? Compared with race or gender, class […]
Trump Supporters: Why Our Attitude Towards Them Matters
Not Stupid. Not Crazy. Those are the two most important things for progressives to remember about rightwing people, says Chip Berlet. He has tracked U.S. far-right populist movements for the past 30 years, including going to the events of white nationalist groups and the Tea Party. If you want to understand them, and even more […]
Resistance Is Critical
The election outcome was a shock – but wasn’t something new. Throughout U.S. history we’ve had waves of right-wing populism, when people bought into explanations of their economic hardships that scapegoat other marginalized groups and reject traditional elites. This election was a right-wing populist upsurge that few of us saw coming. We underestimated the number […]
How the non-homeless talk about homeless people
I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad! I had a chance to ask over 500 people to write down the most classist comment they had ever heard. Because the host was Real Change, Seattle’s wonderful street paper, which is sold by homeless and formerly homeless vendors, lots of the […]
Class identity is different for black professionals
Why would someone not identify as middle class? Many high-income African American professional homeowners respond to pollsters who ask for class self-identification by not choosing “middle class” or “upper class,” the identities usually chosen by their white counterparts. Why? University of Maryland professor Rashawn Ray explained some reasons in his plenary talk today at the […]
A surprising class culture pattern
When I was studying 25 social justice groups for Missing Class, one of my biggest surprises was a class category I hadn’t even thought to look for: lower professionals. Activists of that class had such unique ways of speaking, participating, and especially dealing with conflict that they had a notable impact on their groups. By […]
Pioneering Black Class-Analysts
Black History Month got me thinking about some of the African-American thinkers who have taught me the most about class/race intersections: 1) W.E.B. DuBois, author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), was many decades ahead of his time in connecting the subjective experience of racism with its institutional dimensions. He had a global view of […]
Wondering how to respond to a classist guy
Is there any point to engaging with someone who’s rigidly dug in to their classism, or other oppressive attitudes? I had to think hard about that question after a difficult conversation over breakfast at a B&B. One of the guests was beyond oblivious, into the realm of deliberately offensive. As I tell the story, I […]
Orange is the Newest Redneck Bashing
I’m eager to talk with someone who has both read Piper Kerman’s memoir “Orange is the New Black” and seen the Netflix series based on it. I want to discuss the class and race implications of how the story was fictionalized – and in particular, one poor white character who is turned into the most […]
Arrested Development & the pitfalls of the wealthy
Why do so many TV watchers love Arrested Development (whose latest season was released on Netflix last night)? Is it just another sit-com in the cringe-inducing comedy genre, like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm? I think there’s another factor: the show accurately illustrates some common maladaptive life paths of people who grow up in […]
Two more cars & class stories
We obviously hit a nerve with the two recent stories about cars and class. Besides the long and intense comments under the posts, I received two more moving stories submitted to Classism Exposed. The first writer shared this story anonymously: “My husband is about to sell his car so we can save some money. He […]
Exhilarating discoveries at anti-racist conference
I’m entranced with the White Privilege Conference’s culture and community. I was a first-time attender at the 14th annual conference in Seattle last week, and the experience was a series of exhilarating discoveries. What most buoyed my spirits seemed to buoy others too: seeing about 1,500 white people who are so committed to ending racism […]
Les Miz: Class themes in Oscar nominees #2
The poverty in the Les Miserables movie seems more realistic than most poverty portrayed in fiction in one crucial aspect: the way desperately poor people in Les Miz are preyed upon. Fantine is deceived and ripped off by the Thénardiers, who try to extort as much money as possible from fostering her daughter. Then as […]
A memory of Helen Ladd, 1924-2012
Years before I met Class Action’s co-founder Jenny Ladd, I met her mother, Helen Pratt Ladd, who passed away last week. Our first encounter revealed what a great cross-class ally she was. In 1989 I was a tenant organizer at a very small affordable housing group – so small, in fact, that I was the […]
New classism book holds the keys to movement-building
Barb Jensen was a rebellious teenager. When she tells her own stories in her new book Reading Classes, readers can vicariously enjoy her mouthing off to teachers, flouting school rules and delighting at turning a classroom into a circus. And unlike most writers about kids disengaged from school, who focus on their deficits and fret […]
What’s needed at this political moment? 5 well-known leftists, 5 strong opinions
At the Working-Class Studies conference last weekend, I heard an amazing dialogue about class, race and movement-building by five progressive journalists and activist scholars: Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now!, Frances Fox Piven, Bill Fletcher Jr. of Blackcommentator.com, and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert of Demos, with conference organizer Michael Zweig, author of The […]
Upsides of sky-high youth unemployment
Posting Class Action internships gives me a window into the massive under-use of young adults’ energy in this lousy economy. Even for unpaid internships, we get dozens of bright, motivated students, and even college graduates. And whenever we can afford to offer internships with small stipends, the applications come in by the hundreds. These applicants […]
