Don't Persecute Hope

by Mona Shaw

You can be certain of this. We will never get traction on the road to justice until we address class as a cultural construction in the United States

Classism in this nation is so prevalent and so insidious that we don’t see it for the most part.

It emerges in countless ways. It’s there when a social justice activist adds their Ivy League  or academic credentials to their activist resumes—as if those credentials are germane. It’s present when a parent brags about their child getting into Harvard.  It’s the primary driver in making fun of Country Music or overweight people who wear tight clothes. It takes place every single time stories of “success” are predicated on accomplishments that involve economic gain or status.

The purpose of classism is to identify an “unworthy other.” It selects a population that is worthy of ridicule and contempt. It delights in blaming this population for everything worthy of disdain.  

This is no more apparent than in images and memes that are employed that mock these people. There are entire websites with the sole purpose of humiliating these people. People of Walmart is one.

The past three years it has become tragically popular to construct memes of poor people who support Trump. These memes are almost always Photoshopped by someone who doesn’t the know the person in the meme. They just know the person is missing teeth or overweight or wearing stereotypical underclass clothing.

By choosing these people for these memes, they target anyone for persecution that may resemble these people.  They suggest there is something inherently “bad” about people missing teeth or have other attributes of people who are impoverished.

If this weren’t the intent, we would see more anti-Trump memes featuring the wealthy class playing golf with Trump at Maralago, but that doesn't happen. Of course this plays right into Trumpish hands.  It leads to the condemnation of the poor and takes it away from the abuses of the wealthy where it belongs. Since the poor have no institutional power whatsoever, choosing them as culpable for Trump is astonishingly short-sighted.

To address the obvious classism in these memes leads to a convoluted and exhausting discussion that employs the least creative tactics of apologists of bigotry of all kinds.

“That’s not what I meant by that.”

“I’m poor, and it doesn’t bother me.”

“A lot of poor people are like that.”

“Stop being self-righteous.” Or “condescending,” “purist,” etc.

“You lose any point you may have had by your attitude, how you brought this up, when you brought this up, where you brought this up, etc.”

“This is an example of ‘political correctness’ going too far.”

Just insert “person of color,” “LGBT person,” or “woman,” and this will become familiar.

There is no oppression that is more difficult to discuss than classism. Too many see it as a “detail” rather than a serious and deadly oppression. No one is perfect, after all. And classism is the oppression we are most inclined to give a pass.

Calling out classism is the oppression that incurs accusations of minimizing other oppressions simply by bringing it up. This is a preposterous fear because objecting to any oppression can only serve to diminish any other oppression.  It is self-defeating given that other oppressed groups are more vulnerable to class oppression as well.

In this culture we have constructed a culture in which we base our worth as it compares to the worth of another.  We find it immensely difficult to interact without knowing each other’s social class. We have many social clues for this. How someone talks. How they dress. Where they work. Our ingrained interest in and deference to celebrities. Our admiration of the customs of the affluent from how they set a table, where they vacation, what they eat, or how they decorate their homes.

We don’t know how to have an identity or value unless we can look down on those who do these things “wrong.”

I left an “Occupy” event in Washington D.C. in 2011, after I witnessed two things.

The first was when “core” organizers were protective of Ralph Nader when he visited our camp. His celebrity warranted special treatment and not allowing the proletariat too close for too long.

The second was when “core” organizers determined that we should allow homeless folks in the neighborhood to eat at the camp food tent. 

“We need this food for us.” they said.

I knew then I didn’t belong there. I was not one the “us.”

I agree with Eugene V. Debs.

“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

You don’t build solidarity by mocking the targets of class oppression. They are our hope. The effective justice movement can only be led by the “least of these” in society. It will be led by a toothless fat woman in tight, stained, stretch pants.  I’m ready to follow her. I’m certainly not going to mock her.

Norman Lear Is a Liar

by Mona Shaw

Whether witting or not, Norman Lear is a liar. He has done more damage toward the mobilization of oppressed people than anyone in entertainment.

Had Lear told the truth, Archibald Bunker would have been a Wall Street executive, and Maude would have worked as a hotel maid. After all, the authors of bigotry and the greatest executor of its evil are wealthy.

By making the face of bigotry a working-class man, Lear reinforced class bigotry and effected a lasting and pervasive act of blaming the victim. On the heels of the assassination of Martin Luther King, jr., the U.S. was at a pivotal juncture for acknowledging its racism. Lear exploited that by pointing a large arm at men in hard hats and screaming, “It’s their fault!”

You could write volumes on the damage done by this.  From the endless cartoons that showed some guy in hard hat saying something racist, sexist, or homophobic to portraying the women who loved these men as feckless and dimwitted.

“Right-on” Maude on the other hand was affluent and had her own sassy maid. Her husband and friends were other affluent people and they went to symphony concerts and the thee-ah-ter and made fun of Country music.

In the early 90s, I was a member of group who called ourselves “promo-homos.” We were LGBT people who would go to college classes, Rotary Club meetings and other venues so people could meet a real live queer. One invitation was from the UI College of Medicine. Two gay men in our group were construction workers. Every year an organizer from the College would show a slide of a construction worker making a homophobic joke.  Every year these men would object to that. Every year they were ignored, and the slide was shown again.  The message was obvious. If you’re homophobic, you’re part of the underclass, and no one wants that.

Thanks to Lear making fun of men in hard hats was considered an act of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobic.  It may be a little rude at worst, but hadn’t these men asked for it?  It certainly wasn’t understood to be the egregious class bigotry that it was. My own father wore a hard hat to work. He was a rock crusher in a quarry.

Every aspect of poor and working-class culture became fodder for derisive jokes. Their music, their dancing, their speech, their personalities, their clothes or the fibers of those clothes, their televisions in their living rooms, their food, or their beer. The laugher and ridicule were over the top if they lived in a mobile home. The mores of the poor and working class were suspect as well. It was assumed they were lazy, stupid, more apt to lie and steal, and have sex with their siblings and children.

If you didn’t want to be a bigot or any of these other things attributed to poor and working-class culture. Archie Bunker was not your role model in any kind of way. Maude was. Maude kept her television in the den.  Maude used pretty dishes and flatware that matched, preferably imported from Italy.  Maude wore flowing natural fibers. You certainly never saw her in a windbreaker with a union logo on it, and she spoke in grammatically correct English. She hired interior decorators and didn’t clean her own home.

Internalized oppression is a very real thing. Targets of oppression often come to believe the lies told about them. They believe they’re exception in their own culture. They convinced me for awhile. Like others, I believed that if I educated myself, if I learn how to dress like them, talk like them, went to their events and became fluent in all things upper class, I would be accepted by them. I believed it was my fault I’d been rejected. I simply needed to change my “white trash” ways. I read the dictionary like it was a novel and grew an impressive vocabulary. I memorized the Chicago Manual of Style. My diction and grammar were close to perfect.  I read all the self-help books including “Dress for Success.” I put my television in my bedroom and lined my place with shelves of books that I had actually read. I used to steal the syllabus on the first day of classes at the university that I couldn’t afford to attend, so I would be conversant in those subjects.

You can pass for a while. You have to lie a lot, but you can. At some point, though, you’ll be found out. And you’ll be regarded differently from that point on, or worse you’ll be praised for rejecting your roots. Or, you’ll hear one too many lies about your people to bear, and you’ll never see them the same way again.  Both happened for me.

I remember one such moment for me. I was at a gathering of opera aficionados. A woman said, she saw me the day before having lunch with a woman that looked familiar. I told her I had been having lunch with my mother.

“Well,” she said, “It couldn’t have been the woman I knew. She was a girl I knew in high school. Her name was Marlene. She was totally white trash and ended up having a bunch of kids and working in a factory.”

“You knew my mother,” I told her and waited.

“How did you rise above such a station?!” she exclaimed.

I had had it.

“I didn’t rise above it,” I told her, “I still aspire to it. My mother single-handedly organized a union in that factory and has organized hundreds of factories and workplaces since. I can only hope to be so noble.”

Coming out as working poor is a lot like coming out as a lesbian. It never stops. You are constantly correcting people who make the wrong assumption.  This almost always happens after someone has made a slur about your people.  The reaction is usually much the same as the woman at the opera meeting. After observing that you “don’t look or act like them,” they slink away and go discuss you in a corner.  You never run out of people who’ll make excuses for their slur and explain how we all have difficulty in life. The problem is my inability to see what “they” meant by the dig, not the fact that they made it.  They will become outraged at any suggestion they’ve been a bigot and manipulate the situation to where you owe them an apology for objecting.

Every time I see Norman Lear praised; I think about how much harder he has made life on people like mine. I wish he’d never been given a contract. Someone might want to inform Lear that underclass people have a better chance of winning the lottery than “moving on up to a high-rise apartment in the sky” thanks in no small part to his class bigotry.