Mentioning things

[mmcirvin]

So which is it? Do people constantly talk about class in America because they don't want to mention race, or do people constantly talk about race in America because they don't want to mention class? Because apparently both things are true and I want to know which taboo to fight first. Or are these different groups of mentioners?

Comments

[jarai.livejournal.com]

I feel like race is a more taboo subject, but that class probably deserves a whole lot more attention than its been getting in the past decade or two.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that when Americans don't want to talk about race and racism, it's because the subject is actually making them uncomfortable because it's such a large part of the American experience, and connected to harmful irrational feelings that even well-intentioned Americans absorb from the culture, and have to fight. Whereas when they don't want to talk about class, it's because they honestly think they live in something like a classless society.

Which from, say, a British perspective, may even be partly true: here class is mostly about money, whereas over there it has another dimension that strikes me as similar to our fixation on race. Which is not to say that it's completely absent here; we have the distinction between "new money" and "old money"; but it's nowhere near as powerful in people's minds, and race occupies that brain lobe instead.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...The relative weakness of the European notion of class, by the way, is probably the reason for the all-devouring advance of the casual in American culture that op-ed writers have such a grand time decrying. Think of the origin of words such as "vulgar" and "classy" and the way that America is generally supposed to represent the triumph of the former over the latter. Yet the purely monetary notion of class is incredibly strong here because of how our government and economy work, and racism in turn still feeds into that.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Money doesn't buy you old-school class.