Comments on: Middle Klass

By: ester

ester — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 19:22:00 +0000

ha! you should see my hands. i have the defintion of stury peasant fingers, passed down to me faithfully by my lithuanian peasant ancestors.
but i do of course see your point.

By: yami

yami — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:38:00 +0000

I think there’s more to be said, actually, about the relationship between trust and privilege than about personally relating to people and privilege, or frustration and privilege. Because it’s not just is this person trustworthy?, it’s what happens to me if my trust is betrayed? - the privileged will, in general, suffer less from betrayal. Straight-up difficulty relating to people is more symmetric in its consequences.
Maybe if you had sturdy peasant fingers, they wouldn’t bleed so much?

By: ester

ester — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:51:00 +0000

i had the very interesting experience of being in a classless environment once, on a kibbutz in israel where everyone is assigned shitjobs — mine was in the cafeteria — so no one can look down on anyone else.
back in america, however, i have always been of the privileged class. in fact, i worked in the EXACT JOB emma mentions with such disdain, photocopying (and filing) for daddy’s best friend. ouch. my fingers bled from the filing: does that make me a little more trustworthy?
i find it interesting and maybe kind of arbitrary that she chose the issue of trust; it seems to me she could just have easily have said she finds people like me hard to relate to, suspicious, or enraging. but i guess i’m nitpicking because it’s natural, when you feel attacked, even with justification, to want to defend yourself. (i AM trustworthy!) that puts me in the fascinating position of being allied with anti-feminists for the first time in memory …

By: yami

yami — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:06:00 +0000

FAKE TRACKBACK!
Emma Goldman, Bruce Springsteen, et al. - really, if you’re following this discussion and you haven’t read her whole series already… you should.

By: yami

yami — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:17:00 +0000

Des: You have a point there. In the ancestral town, or particularly the ancestral farm town, I could buy a house on my current salary, but the ancestral town doesn’t have many jobs for geologistes. Here, if I leveraged myself to the hilt, I could maybe buy half of a weensy one-bedroom apartment.
Denisdekat: That excuses “Hawkeye” and “Buckeye”, I guess, but as for looking the same, have you seen the silly hats they wear in Wisconsin?
Emma: I feel vindicated As to your overall point, I’ve been trying (and failing) to think of something more interesting than “damn straight” in response…

By: denisdekat

denisdekat — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 13:14:00 +0000

“Why don’t people on the coasts understand the intricacies of college rivalry in the flyover states?!”
Because it is similar to all the tribal disputes in the tropical forests of the Amazons. They all look the same and they all hate each other, and all their names sound the same (just kidding).
Class is and is not baggage. It depends on how you look at it. Someone from lower class backgrounds has a different perspective on wealth than someone from an upper class background. This is due to direct experience with wealth. The outcome can be an anchor, or powerful sails on your sailboat of life… You make it what it is in the end

By: Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 11:14:00 +0000

And I see I have an unclear referent in that comment–what’s true (I think) is what I said the original posts said. I emphatically don’t think people who’ve never held shit jobs or who are privileged are assholes by virtue of those facts about them–they may well be assholes, of course, but that’s pretty much an option available to all of us.

By: Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:07:00 +0000

I don’t believe the original posts said that people who’ve never held shit jobs are assholes or that people who are privileged are assholes; in fact, I’m pretty sure that’s true. Part of what I’ve been trying to explore is how we develop expectations about work, about life, about what we can or should or are able to do. People who are sufficiently privileged such that they’ve never had to hold a shit job have a different path than people who have performed those jobs, and people who will never have anything BUT a shit job have a different path as well. Class is not just about what you earn, or how, which was the point. Apparently that point wasn’t clear.

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 08:19:00 +0000

I earn more in real terms than my parents did at my age, but sadly “real terms” don’t factor in the astonishing rise in property prices over that time. My parents bought their house (on my dad’s salary alone) at about my age and paid it off in a few years: my salary would qualify me for a mortgage on about half it’s value, over thirty (30) years.
Meanwhile, I have always held that inverse snobbery is snobbery too. I’ve been variously dismissed, in my time, as too white, too male, and too middle class, but I am after all very white, male and middle class.
(Ever since I became a social “scientiste” I have noticed that everyone wants to be a social “scientiste”, or that, as we might prefer to say, the social sciences operate in a field where explanatory claims and frameworks are vigorously contested.)

By: yami

yami — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 03:44:00 +0000

Hmm. My parents never insisted I hold a shit job, but on many occasions they jumped right in with the “it builds character” thing.
Wolfangel: We can each happily believe what we like, and I have never particularly believed in supporting my arguments about rhetoric with careful analysis of the source text… but somewhere, a high school English teacher is crying. And I still see a very large gap between “I don’t trust you” and “you are untrustworthy”.
And and, other things to the effect of “yes and no” but I got up at 5 this morning, so it all comes out as zzzzz right now.