Class Consciousness is not Classism

In my graduating year of high school, during an English course, I remember a rather profound disagreement I had with a peer of mine. It was over whether my statement that mothers’ magazines tend to be geared towards the middle class implied that “poor women can’t read”. I was firmly of the conviction that my proposition entailed no such thing, but it reveals a tendency in our reform liberal society that I want to address. That is, the association of class analysis with classism and how it’s limited our ability to deal with the stark realities of structural inequalities.

The dispute happened when – as a classroom – we reviewed the techniques of literary analysis. To conduct this pedagogical exercise we read a short story (probably published in a parenting magazine) on a mother’s experience with her son’s sadness after his first breakup (as a twist at the end, it is revealed her son isn’t sad so much as confounded on how to interact with his new girlfriend - something the reader and mother don’t uncover until the conclusion of the story). We English students had to give out some ideas as to who the intended audience was – generic statements like “mothers” or “parents” or even “women” sufficed.

I, on the other hand, took it to a more fine-grained level and asserted that middle class women would be the main audience for that piece. A peer of mine in the room completely misinterpreted the assertion and rhetorically asked if I was saying that “poor women can’t read ... because if you are, I disagree.” In hindsight this strikes me as intellectually lazy self-righteousness at its worst.

My actual claim was that since the working poor and (to a lesser extent) working class in general spend more time working and eking out a living, they’d have less time to read parental magazines. My genuine claim actually contained a little bit of reverse snobbery – I felt that only parents with at least a middle class level of income could truly afford to mull over what – to the vast majority of the world – would seem like trivialities.

Another person I spoke to told me that “while that may generally be true” I shouldn’t make such generalizations as occasionally there are some people who do read a lot and end up on the fringes. This person gave me an example of somebody they knew who was a (verbal and visual-spatial) genius that obtained great pleasure out of reading textbooks yet was homeless.

This was also a misinterpretation of my proposition. I never said there were no hyper-literate people who had fallen through the cracks of society and not even that there were no generationally poor bibliophiles. My claim was simply that the working poor tended not to buy frivolous lifestyle magazines and the editorial content of those magazines was influenced by that fact.

“While you’re right, it’s bad to generalize” is a pretty daft counterargument – as the people who make magazines work on the basis of market demographic generalizations!

Less you think I am some high minded latte leftist who lectures on about social class with no real life experience of the near bottom let me give you some autobiographical details. Most of my childhood was spent in a working poor single-parent household in the North End of Winnipeg. I wasn’t apart of anything resembling a large close nit family – it was just me and my single parent. While I didn’t realize it at the time, much of the time and effort of my parent went into securing ends meet. There were none of the structured enrichment activities many of my generationally middle class peers in high school had – although some of this was due to my profound aloofness and introversion as a child¹.

While my parent managed to successfully beat the cycle of poverty and has moved on up into the middle class, lest not you think I’m ignorant of the immense structural hurdles one must overcome to climb up that ladder. I firmly believe our society is only marginally meritocratic when it comes to social mobility – differences in position between the super-rich and the poor are due more from historical accident than innate talent. Talent isn’t strictly preserved – familial wealth is².

And this brings me to a crucial point – why talk of social class is so “politically incorrect” in Canada. Whereas traditional conservatism depends on praising structural inequalities to avoid redressing them, reform liberalism avoids talk of it altogether. Speaking of social class as if it were real therefore entails snobbery or classism rather than the simple acknowledgment that a spade is a spade.

This tendency does not blunt the reality of structural inequality to all but the most delusional of people. Tough conditions will continue and their effects will be widespread whether or not we like to artificially compartmentalize them – that is to say, fantasize that a boy whose mother or father had to work long hours each day or try to manage money or even try to ease the burden of their existence, would be in as optimal a position as someone born in suburbs with a 100K family savings account to be the beneficiary of early reading and enrichment. That is absurd!

Social inequality pervades all facets of life – it cannot be abstracted away from any situation easily – it is not a localized feature. Social class has global effects on a person. Until we as a nation realize this, visions of a fairer society will be pipedreams.

<sup>ENDNOTES

1.There was some opportunity for athletic activities – indeed, even encouragement from my parent – but a lack of motivation and horrendous motor coordination closed off that avenue.
2. Indeed, it is because I hold this true that I was once offended by a peer of mine in high school who suggested I was the “brains of the family” considering my relatives were working class, working poor, or plain old poor. This implied that the social class system of Canada is completely or predominantly meritocratic, something I deny.</sup>