Here’s a thought exercise you can use to test yourself for the dreaded Nonprofit Inferiority Complex, the internalized idea that nonprofit work is inherently less valuable than other forms of wage labor. How do you feel about the following statements with respect to community-based nonprofits? 1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = maybe; […]
Classism in Progressive Movement Groups
Breaking the Silence about Class in One Liberal Denomination
In 2012, I was lucky enough to attend a remarkable weekend-long Class Action Train-the-Trainers mega-workshop. I did not attend to learn techniques to raise awareness about class and classism but instead to improve my skills as a trainer on the topic of communications and marketing. While the focus of the Class Action workshop was, of course, on social class […]
Four Ways Nonprofits Can Address the Classism Within
Several years ago, I was sitting in a diversity training of a nonprofit I helped manage. We’d spent the morning talking about inequality within the organization around the issues of race, sexual orientation, gender and even political leanings. All of a sudden tears began to roll down one woman’s face. Despite obviously trying to hold […]
Class Diversity Improves Your Nonprofit Board
Nonprofit organizations, which are legal entities that must be approved by state governments, allow people to join together and combine resources to achieve common goals. Most often nonprofits are started by people who are passionate about addressing social problems or responding to needs in their communities. So why do so many nonprofits fail to address […]
Was the International Women’s Day Strike Classist?
What did you do for International Women’s Day? Did you strike? Well, I’m currently unemployed, and my partner has been supporting us while I’ve been more-or-less taking care of our home. We had a conversation in the morning about the kind of day-to-day work I do around the house, how a lot of it is unbalanced background […]
Five Classist Pitfalls to #Resist in Your Activism
In a moment of potentially revolutionary activism and mobilization, don’t let classism undermine your efforts. The past few weeks have been both terrifying and inspiring. In the midst of ascending totalitarianism and the drastic, likely unconstitutional roll-backs of basic rights, we are also seeing a swift mobilization from both new and established activists. Organizations and […]
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 […]
Beyond Trump: Creating Class-Race Alliances
Part of the White, Working Class, and Worried about Trump (#WhiteWorkingClassVsTrump) Campaign*: I grew up in economically depressed, though beautiful, northeastern Vermont. My family was on and off welfare throughout my childhood, and we were always poor. As a child, I was acutely aware of the ways poverty set me apart from other people. As I […]
Beyond Trump: Building a Coalition for Change
Part of the White, Working Class, and Worried about Trump (#WhiteWorkingClassVsTrump) Campaign*: I grew up in South St. Louis City in a multi-racial, working-class neighborhood. My dad was a union carpenter, and my mom worked part-time at various jobs while maintaining the home. I’m the oldest of seven children. I remember the constant anxiety in our […]
Mother Jones in Philadelphia – 1903 and 2016?
I first met Cheri Honkala a couple of years ago at a Philadelphia protest against the Keystone XL Pipeline. Not knowing what she looked like, I had locked arms with her and two or three others trying to block an entrance to the Federal building. We managed to keep the door closed despite the first […]
Poor Little “Not-So-Rich” Girls
It wasn’t until I began to write about class from the perspective of the 19th century women about whom I’ve written two biographies that I realized how much issues of class lie at the heart of my attraction to these women. Class Action asked me to explore the constraints that even upper class white women […]
Class and the Labor-Environmental Divide
How do we address the deep class and culture divide that has opened up between workers and environmental activists? We are heading to a potentially severe clash between green advocates who advocate for reducing carbon emissions and labor-community activists concerned about jobs, racial equity and reducing extreme wealth inequality. Both the climate crisis and 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 […]
Climate Justice Work Must Include Marginalized People
Late last year, I attended a 350.org divestment rally for climate justice at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Although the organizers made no claims to work intersectionally, and made no promise cross-class organizing, I left feeling deflated and angry at what seemed to be an effort to pander to wealthy white men at the […]
A classist comment from a feminist publisher
I wrote a paper on the classism I experienced as a poverty-class single mother in the feminist movement, and it was selected for inclusion in a prestigious anthology. When I asked the editor about payment for my chapter, she said that all proceeds from book sales would be contributed to a charity. “None of our […]
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 […]
Roadblocks and Detours: Classism En Route to Drivers Ed
I was shocked when a well-known environmentalist criticized my students’ campaign to make drivers education accessible to low-income students. The campaign ran into a lot of classism, but that was the low point. When I was in high school, drivers training was part of the public school curriculum. Obtaining one’s drivers permit and license were […]
Classism Exposed: Contradictions on the left
One of my pet peeves on The Left or other Progressive organizations is that when asking for donations, PLEASE tell me WHY it is okay to reward those that have more money by giving gifts according to how much is given? I understand totally that the money is needed, even deserved, but honestly it irks […]
Poverty and Disability: the Vicious Circle
I first started to look at disability as a class issue when 18 of our members from Piedmont Peace Project and I attended a national peace movement conference in Atlanta. Six of us were disabled and three in wheelchairs, including me. No other group had visibly disabled people present, although I’m sure some hidden disabilities […]
No-degree social movement thinkers
Who do you think of when you think of a social movement theorist? A professor? Two of the authors who have taught me the most about social movement strategy have only high school degrees: Linda Stout and the late Bill Moyer. I very rarely see either of them cited in the social movement literature. I […]
