Friends, I am running around all day today, but wanted to share a half-formed thought that’s been germinating for the last few days.

What the hell is “classism” supposed to mean?

Seriously though.  I know it’s a fixture in the litany of “isms”: sexism, racism, ableism, heterosexism, colorism, etc.

But isn’t the notion of “discrimination on the basis of social class” a little . . . redundant?

Don’t the existence of social classes already imply discrimination?

Like, oh, it’s okay that you remain lower-class, as long as I don’t make fun of you for being lower-class, or exclude you entirely from my middle- or upper-class institutions.

. . . ?

Does classism boil down to cultural chauvinism, and not much more?  That’s the impression one might get from the “Classism” section (nestled between the “Racism” section and the “Homophobia/Heterosexism” sections — there’s that familiar chorus, again) in famous U.S. feminist Jessica Valenti’s book, Full Frontal Feminism.  I’ll quote it in its entirety.

Classism

I’ll tell you a little story about something that made me acutely aware of classism—it was the craziest wake-up call ever.  I went to a public high school in New York that tested students for entry (it was kind of a dorky math and science school).  The majority of my friends in high school were Jewish gals from the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  They had awesome apartments and college-educated parents who were professors, artists, judges, and so on.  I grew up in Long Island City, Queens, which at the time was not considered the best neighborhood in the world.  My parents grew up in Queens and Brooklyn, got married when they were still teenagers, and never went to college.

But hey, it was all good to me.  My friends were my friends, and we were all the same.  Then one day, after a couple of my girlfriends spent some time at my house after school, one of them remarked, “Your mom is so cute!  Her accent sounds so . . . uneducated!”  They all laughed.  I don’t think she meant it to be cruel, or even realized what she was saying.  But after that moment, it was difficult to be around my high school friends.  I had this overwhelming feeling of not belonging.  I didn’t know if they were laughing at my potty-mouthed jokes because I was funny, or because I was playing up the Italian Queens girl stereotype.  I wondered, when they told me they didn’t like something I was wearing, whether it was because of a difference in taste, or because they thought I looked “trashy.”

Later, in college (at a private Southern university—I lasted a year before transferring back to New York), I would try to tone down the behavior I thought marked me as “lower class.”  I tried to drop cursing so much, the Queens accent slowly disappeared, and I continued to hang out with kids who went to boarding schools and to pretend I knew what the hell “summering” was.  But you can’t pass for long.  I would later realize that a lot of the hellishly sexist experiences I went through in college were completely tied up with classism.  I was called a slut not only because I had the gall to sleep with a guy I was dating, but because I dressed differently, talked differently (no matter how I tried to hide it), and was seen as the trashy Queens girl on scholarship.

So I know this is a little more personal than academic, but hey—the personal is political, right?

I understand that the experience of class stratification manifests partly in moralized judgments, ridicule, vitriol, and warped denial of other people’s humanity.  This is the flavor of class ideology.  But what about the structure?

Perhaps classism is not the real problem.

Perhaps CLASSES are the problem.

From Wikipedia:

The most basic class distinction is between the powerful and the powerless.^[1][2] Social classes with a great deal of power are usually viewed as “the elites” within their own societies. Various social and political theories propose that social classes with greater power attempt to cement their own ranking above the lower classes in the hierarchy to the detriment of the society overall. By contrast, conservatives and structural functionalists have presented class difference as intrinsic to the structure of any society and to that extent ineradicable.

What do you think?  Classes, ineradicable?  So we should swell the middle class as much as possible, knowing there will always be people systematically and categorically deprived of equal power because of their economic and social standing?

Reality is weird, people.  Very weird.

Meantime, happy Friday!  And here is a lovely song for you.  See y’all on Monday.