elisem

So I went to the book-release party for READING CLASSES, by Barbara Jensen, which is a very fine book from Cornell University Press and you should all buy a copy. In the course of what she read from the book and talked about, one thing in particular struck home to me. She talked about the differences between middle class and working class ways of doing things in terms of "becoming" and "belonging," and along the way she talked about competition. She talked about how competition and individualism are held up and venerated by middle class culture, and how they are assumed to be "the way things are," and middle class values are assumed to be better than working class values. (That would be classism, for anybody wondering.)

"Societywide institutions, like public education, do the same thing: presume we all think and learn like middle class people do, that we all work best as individuals in competition."

Classism results in things like middle class people who believe the only happy ending for working class people would be to "lift themselves up" and become middle class.

Classism also results in things like a person from an upper middle class background telling someone from a working class background who dares to challenge the utter naturalness and inevitability of the competition way of life, who dares to say that they personally prefer non-competitive ways of relating and getting along and having fun, that they are "actually being very competitive by saying that they prefer to be non-competitive."

How utterly solipsistic. How unthinkingly, unashamedly, breathtakingly classist. With condescension sauce on top, too.

(Yeah, that hit me on a sore spot. It's a long story. And they can just bite me.)

OK, onward to the rest of the book. You guys should get a copy, really.