Five myths about class in America

[rug]

This young employee of the Alexandria Glass Factory worked day shifts one week and night shifts the next. (Library of Congress/Lewis Wickes Hine/Library of Congress)

By Nancy Isenberg July 1 at 1:12 PM

The 2016 election is about class. “For the first time in a generation, the working class is front and center in an election cycle,” one MarketWatch writer proclaimed. Commentators fret that Hillary Clinton has “lost” the working class and that Donald Trump has risen to prominence on the backs of “white trash.” (Never mind that Trump voters are, on average, wealthier than Clinton’s constituency.) Bernie Sanders even calls himself the working class candidate. This demonstrates just how fuzzy this category is — though Sanders advocates for the working class, he has spent his career in politics, not manual or wage labor. There are lots of other misconceptions about class in America, too. Here, we debunk five.

MYTH NO. 1

The working class is white and male.

Trump is often credited with engaging the working class. He “won with the working class voters the GOP forgot,” blared one Breitbart column. Meanwhile, “Hillary is losing white working Joes,” proclaimed the Toronto Star. Even Sanders argued that Democrats had allowed Republicans “to capture the votes of the majority of working people in this country.”

Of course, that’s true only if you ignore Asians, Latinos and African Americans. “Factor them into the population of ‘working people,’?” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes, “and Democrats win that group, handily.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-class-in-america/2016/07/01/244ddb44-3e20-11e6-a66f-aa6c1883b6b1_story.html

[PatrickforO]

1. GREAT ARTICLE!!!

I'm passing on to friends.

[uponit7771]

2. +1, "Most Americans don’t notice class differences."

[rug]

4. "In America, inequality begins in the womb"

The haves and the have-nots: In the U.S., the zip code of your birth — for example, 10027 (Harlem), left, or 10021 (the Upper East Side) — has a powerful influence on your future income. Photos by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/america-inequality-begins-womb/

[pampango]

6. Both nationally and globally. The zip code and nation of your birth tell much about

your future success.

[HughBeaumont]

3. MYTH NO. 4 With talent and hard work, you can rise above your class.

The Bootstrap Bunch on here as of late might need to read this and get a clue.

It’s a tale as old as Horatio Alger: Anyone can make it in America, no matter their upbringing. As CNN put the notion , “Through hard work and perseverance, even the poorest people can make it to middle class or above.”

But actually, it’s hard to rise above your income level. In cities such as Atlanta, New York and Washington, a child raised in a poor family has a less than 10 percent chance of becoming wealthy in his or her lifetime. It’s not much better in other parts of the country.

There are lots of reasons for this. Our education-funding system perpetuates inequality. Children in poor families more frequently attend poorer schools and receive fewer enrichment opportunities. As a result, they’re less likely to attend college and earn a degree. Data shows that children from families with incomes of at least $120,000 score much better on the SATs than their peers from households earning $20,000 or less.

Sociologists have also found that parents’ wealth is one of the best predictors of a child’s economic success. Rich families are more likely to own property and to pass wealth on to their offspring. In America, land ownership is one of the best ways to preserve wealth — and share it with the next generation. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz said in his book “The Great Divide”: “America is no longer the land of opportunity that it (and others) like to think it is. .?.?. To a large extent, the American Dream is a myth.”

[Igel]

5. That rather assumes there are two classes.

The bottom 20% and the top 20%.

Odds are a lot better for somebody in the bottom 20% to wind up in the middle 20%. That's a different class. That's rising "above your class," at least where you started. But we don't care because it's not the top 20%.

Gee. If my family made $15k/year I'd consider getting up to $66k a year an improvement, even if it means I don't make $200k/year. But this kind of article says that those making $65k/year are just like those making $15k. It has to. If it's an improvement, if that shows social mobility, then the basic premise of the claim made is in error.

Some of the rest of the article is sketchy. It assumes that there's upper, middle, and working classes, no more. But even then, it says that the working class is projected to be <50% white in 2032. (So what is it now, and does "white working class" really have to mean "100% white working class"?)

Wealthier kids do better on the SATs. They have more enrichment activities. Once a teacher of mostly low-income kids said we'd provided our kid with a lot of them. That included going to the (free) botanical gardens and library, to the beach (40 miles away), and to the occasional museum. It included making a catapult out of a cereal box, rubber bands, and popsickle sticks and explaining energy, force, torque and moment arms. But the primary boost is in pre-K and involves vocabulary, phonemic awareness, and syntax--when more highly educated parents have a more interactive, negotiation-based strategy with small children, when they read and force the kid to engage with what's read to them. The vocabulary gap has been documented since the '60s, and hasn't changed. In fact, back then and in later decades two-parent educated families had more "face time" with their kids that counted than working families, and far more than families on welfare and unemployment. You may both work 8-hour days and commute an hour each way and bring work home, but you interact better than unemployed welfare families. That's not $. But for those who view everything in terms of money, it's easy to think that it is. Except it's hard to explain how mere money makes for the change.

The minimum-wage single-mother ex-Montessori teacher I worked with during the Carter/Reagan recession did a great job with her kid. I've known far wealthier families with far lower education levels that did much worse. Even though typically education = $ in the US, it's that kind of example that shows that what's important in many ways isn't $ but education. (That's true for health and life span, accidents, mental health, and so many other things.)

[rug]

7. It boils down to which side of the means of production you're on.

Using that measure, one percent is a high estimate.

How do they keep getting away with it?

[BuelahWitch]

8. CNAs at my nursing home get little more than minimum wage

They work hard and have very little to show for it. They GOT an education, for what? They're always struggling, a trip to the hospital or auto breakdown facilitates disaster. Do you pay this or your utilities?
In effect, these people who are trying to do better than be a Walmart checker and are working very, very hard are not making bupkis for it!

[TeeYiYi]

9. Thank you, BuelahWitch...

...for 13 years at DU. You'll be missed.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1280215569

TYY

[In_The_Wind]

10. .