This topic has been a long time coming, which is I think once I started outlining my notes, I realized I would need to do a part 2. This week actually ended up laying a lot of the background ideas about how class is not just a matter of money. See my outline notes below and watch or listen to the full discussion below. So much of the good stuff happens in dialogue with folks on the live, so it won’t be in my notes 😉
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Class is Always Intersectional
I’m speaking primarily about the United States, and I’m not an expert, economist, sociologist, etc.
Angela Davis- Professor of Marxist philosophy at UCLA, joined the Black Communist Party, understanding the danger of focusing exclusively on class as if it operates separate and apart from race (it doesn’t).
White guy in one of my graduate classes insisted that everything was about class. I think that’s awfully convenient for white people to insist that whiteness is not the problem but class is.
And I ask, who and what created capitalism??? I’ll wait.
White Culture is the birthplace of capitalism, so you can’t dismantle it unless you’re willing to take white hegemony down with it at the same time.
I’m spotlighting 2 intersections here, but there are always more than 2.
Ex. Race and Class play out very differently depending on your gender or color.
Class is not just about finances it’s also about status.
Therefore, 2 people can have the same financial net worth but be in 2 different social classes.
This is especially obvious with race and class, but it happens with color and class as well.
Class is also overall quality of life- Me and my colleagues might be in the same salary band, but our quality of life is not the same.
The Black Tax is REAL!!!
Race is Class and Color is Currency
Upward social mobility acts as a pacifier that ensures we don’t see a real revolution against the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy.
“The allegation that people ‘vote against their own interests’ typically takes the following form: some voters are led astray by appeals to social concerns and do not recognize their actual economic interests. This proposition distinguishes between social values on the one hand and pocketbook interests on the other; in doing so, it establishes an implicit hierarchy ranking … hard-edged economic interests over supposedly mushy social concerns. But frequently social values are deeply held, and also, what’s economic and what’s social cannot be neatly separated.”
Ian Hany Lopez Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class:
It’s not a flex to jockey for position within a system that oppresses you. It’s not a flex to jockey for position in a race you cannot win.
It’s not just color and class, it’s also color as class.
Color is currency.
It doesn’t necessarily take money to make money, but it does take currency to make money. Money is just one obvious common form of currency.
But your social network or reputation or your charisma or talent or knowledge or ability to garner empathy are also types of currency. People will give you money or a job or a car or food or a home based on their relationship with you or based on your reputation without you actually exchanging money.
In a racist and colorist society, race and color are also forms of currency.
“When people say “race is a social construct” as a way to derail dialogue about race/racism: You know what else is a social construct? Your paycheck. And yet you spend it to get material goods necessary for your survival, like food. You use your paycheck (a social construct) to gain access to spaces, places, and resources in the world. Race is also a currency in our society. Socially constructed, but still affording many people access to material goods, spaces, places, freedom, and even life itself. Been wanting to get that off my chest!”
Sarah L. Webb, Facebook post from January 12, 2018
“So you want to talk about…”
Example of what happens when “woke” white people think they don’t have to interrogate their own whiteness and think that their (self)righteous cause justifies them being irresponsible with their whiteness, or justifies the harm they cause Black people, especially Black women. That’s the currency of whiteness.
When I walk down the street, people don’t see my 3 college degrees, they don’t see my pay stub, they don’t see my credit score, or my home address. They just see a dark-skinned Black woman. That’s what they see, and therefore, that’s what they respond to. When I walk into a department store. When I go to a restaurant. When I go to the ER or the eye doctor. Even at the eye doctor where they can see…
Donney Rose wrote a recent story about a Black realtor and his Black clients were handcuffed and had guns drawn on them for touring a home.
When I tell yall, having the finances to buy a home does not make me the same as my white counterparts…
I started talking about Angela Davis and how she joined the Black Communist Party to address the intersection of race and class. But Angela Davis is a very fair skinned Black woman, with thin features, a loose curl pattern (the afro was highly manipulated), and middle to upper-middle class family.