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 […]
Class cultures
Aging in Place: Junk Cars in Economically Diverse Neighborhoods
“We’ve got to get those junk cars out of people’s yards!” This was the challenge raised by a roomful of community organizers in a course I recently taught. The majority worked in community-based organizations focused on improving low-income neighborhoods. My course was an advanced seminar on values conflicts in community organizing. The junk car conflict […]
Silver Linings Playbook: Class themes in Oscar nominees #3
Movies about mental illness are a favorite of the Oscars. The nominees are often serious affairs with sad endings and a key point: it sucks to have a mental illness. Underlying that key point is the idea that having a mental illness creates an outsider status of not being normal where one lacks access to […]
Santa Claus, Imagination, and Class
I must have been around seven, living in far northern Wisconsin—not classy Minoqua and other Chicago playgrounds, but the dregs of the timber industry, the swamps reserved for Natives, and rocky farmland left to the last immigrants, a place where the last snow might surprise you on the last day of school—when my dad sat […]
The Anthropologist in the Organic Store
The drive on I-90 on the way to the Organic Store is picturesque. That’s the only word that can quantify the margarine yellow and red zebra stripes of the majestic trees and leaves painted across the landscape. You’re an anthropologist, you see. It’s a fancy term you’ve started calling yourself because the word “immigrant” is […]
Cross-class College Interactions
College, they tell us, is the great middle class-making machine. When I think back on my own cross-class interactions at college, I mostly feel gratitude for the worlds my wealthier friends opened up to me and the way they included and shared with me. My closer friends were solidly middle (including comfortable working-class) and upper […]
Shame, School Lunch, and Passing
When I was in sixth grade, my family was eligible for free school lunches. I attended a small country school, without much class diversity, mostly farmers, some without indoor toilets in their homes. Even so, when I gave my lunch ticket to the student appointed to collect them, I noticed and she noticed that there […]
“Jumping the Broom”: African American class divide
When you were a young child, did you think about getting married? We may plan our wedding and visualize the person of our dreams, but we never stop to think that our class backgrounds and family values could possibly clash with theirs. In the movie Jumping the Broom, Sabrina Watson and Jason Taylor come from […]
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 […]
Exploring Classism
Just recently I attended a Class Action workshop. This was my first workshop ever dealing on the issues of classism. Heading into it, I didn’t know what to expect. I had an open mind and was willing to work with others I hadn’t met. It was definitely a big step to go outside my comfort […]
Ubuntu and The Self-Made Myth
We’ve all heard rags-to-riches stories about successful individuals who “pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.” Certainly, many successful business people owe their good fortune to hard work and innovative thinking. But, to describe those people as “self-made” would be to dismiss a big piece of reality—the role of the commons. Would Bill Gates have enjoyed […]
An interesting class culture question
To what extent is a person’s class culture determined by the environment they are raised in, and to what extent is it determined by their parents’ class culture? What do I mean? I have noticed an interesting phenomenon: In owning-class old money families eventually the money runs out and people are forced to raise the […]
