Author: Shoshone Johnson
For a nation that prides itself on upward mobility, it is odd that the term “class” is almost always left out of polite conversation. Our media, instead of “the poor” or “the working class,” prefers sugarcoated phrases like “under-privileged” or “less fortunate.” Yet these latter terms imply something strange; that all people can and should be rich, if they simply believe in themselves and try their hardest. It is the idea that everyone can be the exception to the rule, the rule being poverty. It runs alongside the idea that because of the crumbling of all traditions and prejudices, “class” is merely a demographic accident, a convenient sociological notion with little bearing on everyday life.
If you do not believe in class, if you smirk to yourself when you hear the word, it means that you think of class, as the author Michael Parenti has pointed out, as a simple demographic trait. What is class? Well, many people would say it is a category that relates to the status and wealth of individuals.
This statement is not exactly incorrect, but it is ideologically misleading because it obscures a much wider, more profound truth: that class is a dynamic power relationship. There is no lack of privilege without a surplus of privilege and an exploitative relationship which creates such a situation. The same is true for race, gender, and other identity categories, and this dynamic character is what connects them. Arguments over which group is the “most oppressed” (Jews, women, blacks, gays) should be dismissed, because not only is it impossible to discern whose oppression is “worse,” it is often difficult to understand the force of oppression itself.
This summer for example, during a heated argument about race, a friend asked me “What does it mean to be black or white?” Feeling defensive, I immediately began to recall platitudes I had read in some sociology text: “Umm . . . it’s a social construct which groups people based on certain characteristics . . .” My friend said something that was unforgettable: “It’s slavery,” he said. “It’s the master-slave relationship.” And I realized that this really was the heart of the matter, and to deny it would be to deny not only the truth of “racial minorities,” but the truth of who I am as a citizen of a country built on slavery. This may be what TV on the Radio means when they sing about living “in the shadow of the gallows of your family tree.”
A Reuters article published this month titled “U.S. School Segregation on the Rise” reports that “blacks and Hispanics are more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement.” Even though Coretta Scott King received the “Presidential Medal of Freedom,” implying that her late husband’s work had been integrated into the fabric of American society, racism is alive and well. This is in large part due to the increasing lockdown of the culture, from the proliferation of gated communities to the shocking increase in incarceration rates. More than ever, racism is tied up with class oppression, and therefore ignored by the media and academia, classified as turns of “bad fortune.”
At the same time, films like The Pursuit of Happyness both admirably spread the good news that it is possible to “make it” financially from a situation of dire poverty and obscure the fact that stories of individual success are increasingly rare. The real Chris Gardner, portrayed by Will Smith in the film, was unable to attend the premiere . . . because he was working.
Remsen DuBois Bird, the former President of our school whose name is attached to so many aspects of Oxy life, never achieved more than a bachelor’s degree, but even that achievement was amazing due to the abject poverty in which he was raised. Today no person with a bachelor’s degree could become president of Oxy, no matter how charismatic. I would even go further and say that it is unlikely that we will see, after John Slaughter, another Occidental president who was not raised wealthy, until there is a massive overhaul in the education system and the economy of this country.
During this year’s Black History month, we should remember how Martin Luther King Jr. talked about class as inseparable from racial oppression. In his very last speech before his assassination, given to Memphis sanitation workers who were on strike, he ended on a dangerously anti-capitalist note:
“Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.”
Shoshone Johnson is a senior CTSJ major. He can be reached at shoshone@oxy.edu.
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