Whores and their mongers are very low class, although their economic status tends to be middling … I manage rental units catering to the widows and orphans in the community which doesn’t pay worth a damn, but I get invited to the Mayor’s birthday party every year … plus I get to use the Upper Class tax forms which is a BIG savings on tax liability …
The discrimination comes from the people who choose to live a low class lifestyle … we offered good paying jobs to these folks with the “will work for food” signs … they all declined “too much work, I make half that just sitting here with my sign” … occasionally we’d get someone in even worse financial shape come into the office looking for work and they generally worked very hard and quickly progressed through the apprenticeship …
Does the opportunity for a beggar to take a regular job depend on their skin color? … it shouldn’t, but I’m afraid it still does in some places …
Do you define classism as hating someone because they are poor? That’s an odd construction. Saying that someone’s class, wealth, income, etc. are out of their control is to excuse anyone who is unsuccessful and denigrate the accomplishments of those that are.
Yep, I often go to athetics events and kick the guy who came last in the nuts. What a jerk!
Ironically it’s countries like the US, where social mobility is relatively low, where people seem to most cling to the idea that people are poor out of choice or just laziness.
Some people favor policies to help the poor. Some people favor policies to help the rich, but state that they will help the poor. I hear much more antagonism towards the rich, the bankers, the establishment. I don’t hear people maligning the poor Do many people really hate “the poor” the way some hate Jews, minorities, etc.? Maybe I don’t get out enough, but I’m not seeing “classism” in modern America.
Even to those who are vehemently critical of the notion that the existing economic systems are even remotely meritocracies, or that the wealthy have earned their wealth and the poor are poor due to their lack of effort and initiative, it still remains true that classism isn’t a denigration of people for who they are but rather a denigration of people for the status that they occupy.
A moderately good comparison is ageism. One can point to age-specific attitudes and policies and reject them as horribly discriminatory, but a person isn’t intrinsically a child or a senior or whatever, but only situationally so.
I think you find more intense condemnation of classism in societies with the least social mobility, environments where class is more deeply inculcated as a sense of intrinsic identity, more like caste than American socio-economic status or plain old net worth. Literature (e.g., Dickens) from the old UK for instance describes attitudes towards class that are rife with overt and covert beliefs about intrinsic differences between people of different classes, in a way that seems quite foreign to me as an American.
I hope this is sarcasm. On this board, one never can tell.
But of course that misses the point, presumably deliberately: if the successful are admirable, then the unsuccessful are not, by definition. Two sides to the same coin.
No nut-kicking is necessary for this to be true.
The US is a country where the mythology of social mobility is strong. As already stated, it is only rational to assign praise to success if success is earned.
Yes. I’ve seen it on this very messageboard. The people involved would not, of course, classify it as “hating the poor” but there have certainly been plenty of people who do ascribe the plight of impoverished people to mere insufficient gumption. The “Just World” worldview is a seductive one.
Yeah, I have no problem with classisim working against the rich. And there is a huge percentage of the population of this country (not to mention the world) that considers me rich. I don’t mind though, I have been far less than rich before, I remember what it’s like.
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The US is a country where the mythology of social mobility is strong. As already stated, it is only rational to assign praise to success if success is earned.
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Mijin is trying to get some conservative to say ‘cite!’ so that s/he can trot out all of the data showing that the US is poorer at social mobility than, say, Denmark. Of course, not everyone agrees with the studies demonstrating this for a variety of reasons, most of which boil down to the apples to oranges comparison of the US to countries like Denmark. I think that social mobility in the US is what it’s always been…it’s not quite a myth, but it’s not as easy as some make it out to be either. But it’s real enough…a large percentage of people born into poverty can, indeed, move up from where their parents started. It’s harder, today, for the unskilled middle class to do better than their unskilled parents did, and it’s probably in the center where the most stagnation has happened.
In any event, I think you are right that people tend to assign praise on those who are successful and condemnation on those who aren’t, whether this is rightful or not. I think that’s human nature and something that goes across cultures and across time and maybe even hardwired into us to a certain degree.
Exactly my point.
You asked the question, that if success is admirable (in some cases), then what is failure? The implication, I guess, is that it’s OK to dislike or condemn failure? Otherwise I don’t see what you were angling for.
But to answer the rhetorical question, I’d say “not-admirable”: where not-admirable is simply nothing, neutrality. I don’t feel anything about the guy who comes last in a race. Maybe a little pity?
I’d obviously agree that it’s fine to assign praise to success. I’d go more with “natural” than “rational” but potato potatoe.
I have a half baked theory people need something to be bigoted against.
First, it was the blacks. Then when that became unacceptable, it was women. Then when that became unacceptable, it was the gays. Then when that became unacceptable, it was (or still is) the Muslims. There is a lot of overlap in these groups of course.
I guess the only “acceptable” people left to be bigoted against are the poor.
(FTR: I don’t actually put a lot of credence in this theory)
Wouldn’t, based on some of the responses in this thread, it really be the rich that it’s ‘acceptable’ for people to be bigoted against? Or, maybe it depends on your world view and political leanings as to which is ‘acceptable’?
And, actually, there are still plenty of folks who think it’s ‘acceptable’ to still be prejudiced against all those others groups anyway.
Eh, I think bigotry becomes a little harder to define when you have a disadvantaged group of people being “bigoted” against a class of people who are in a position of wealth and power.
True, there’s always going to be these sorts of bigots. But when I say acceptable, I mean it more in terms of media and public consensus.
Once upon a time, certain jokes about women or blacks used to be acceptable on prime time sitcoms. These jokes are no longer acceptable and rightly so.
See also The Son Also Rises by Gregory Clark, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HNF5Z96/ , who argues mobility is similarly low across the board, regardless of country and social policy. At least over the half a dozen or so countries he analyzed.
Well, sometimes. It’s certainly not the case that everybody can climb to the top.
It’s one thing to say that there any of a thousand people could have got the one available big break, but it’s absurd to expect each of them to have gotten it. Scarcity enforces failure, to such a degree that it’s not reasonable to criticize anyone simply for not being on the top of the pile.
Even if class mobility is equally bad across the board, that’s just all the more reason to argue it’s not actually something you can change.
I would also argue that success and class aren’t really that related. The only way it is is with entrepreneurs who are the first generation with significant wealth, and they are usually lower upper class at most. Not upper upper class, which is really just luck of being born rich and not being an idiot who loses money. You know. Gatsby vs. Tom/Daisy and all that.
Still, it seems the OP is actually concerned with wealth-based, not class-based, discrimination. In that case, I argue it’s because of one difference that hasn’t been mentioned: the rich and poor are inherently not on a level playing field.
There’s no inherent reason why different races couldn’t have the same freedoms. But there is with classes. So there is actually a reason to feel that being discriminatory towards the rich isn’t as bad as towards the poor. As a counterbalance, the rich would want to fight this, and, unlike other minorities, have the power to do so, so they offset this with the idea that it’s okay to hate the poor. They have ever interest in pushing a just world fallacy that they deserve their wealth.
Still, you could argue that a majority has a lot of power compared to a minority. So why isn’t there a bigger push towards hating non-white people, since white people are the minority? And I’d argue that rich people, despite being a minority, have more power than a typical majority. A better way to evaluate power would be to compare wealth. In that context, the 1% have 50% of the power.
Sure, the fact that people can in theory change their own wealth and become more powerful plays a part–they may not like the lack of power now, but would want it if they became rich. But I think that’s a smaller issue than the fact that rich vs. poor is an inherently uneven system, and the rich have outsized power compared to everyone else.
Classism is a word that confuses two different things.
On one hand it comes from Marxist economic theory that models society depending on a persons relationship to the means of production. Are you a worker or a factory owner? A land labourer or a land owner? When people talk about Classism and compare it with other -isms, they are talking politics - how to divide up society in order to exercise political power.
On the other hand, class is also a cultural concept that models society on a set of shared values and behaviours.
It is possible to have a lot of fun making up classes and deciding which you fall into. There are even people who do this for a liiving. At the most rational end are anthropologists (but who wants to read a dry academic tome?) More amusing are the style gurus and we have plenty who fill pages of nonsense about fashion and taste some you can keep up your social status with friends and neighbours. This class conciousness tends to be exaggerated at times of social mobility when people have the opportunity to change their lifestyles and look around for one that suits their tastes and panders to their insecurities. It should not be taken too seriously.
The UK, which has a culture that is dominated by notions of class had a debate about this a few years ago where there was an attempt to update define classes for the modern world to see how you fit in.
This, I think, is a lot more fun than all that political stuff about classism, which is really just about power and money.
Complaining about classism sounds like a ruse by the wealthy and their public relations people to persuade voters it is right that they hold onto their money and avoid taxes. It simply confuses the issue, associating the wealthy with an upper social class when their vulgar behaviour and dubious tastes shows little of that. The underlying argument is about economics, wealth and taxation and who should have what slice of the pie.
All societies divide themselves up one way or another.
