Racism, or Classism?

Racism, or Classism?

By Marco M. Pardi

“The distinctions separating the social classes are false; in the last analysis they rest on force.” Albert Einstein. “My Credo” Wisdom. 1956

All comments are welcome and will receive a response.

While walking Plato the other day I stopped to talk with a couple of neighbors, a White woman and a White man, who were having a discussion by the curb. Of course, coming in late on a discussion is always questionable but I knew them well and the discussion seemed rather open. One of them had just begun saying, “You know, deep down everyone is racist to some degree.” I cautioned them that Plato, a Korean Jindo, might bite them. That lightened the mood enough for them to engage me in their discussion of the media coverage of the Trump administration’s apparent racism. I will use the terms used in the discussion.

The woman went on to say, “Look at the Blacks who live in this neighborhood. They live in this expensive area rather than live in the Black neighborhoods because they don’t want to live around those ghetto Blacks.” I said, “That’s not racism; that’s classism. You would not want to live around the White people living in the North Georgia mountains, but they are just as White as you are. Remember the movie Deliverance?”

My remark pretty well dampened the conversation. But I later thought more comprehensively about it. I’ve long been sensitive to these issues. When my family moved to the U.S. I was a child. They drilled me daily on American English, telling me that I must lose any accent or suffer discrimination from everyone. But that’s not a race issue, and because my two grandmothers were British I “looked like” any other American kid (most of my life I’ve heard, “You don’t look Italian”). So, I thought, until I said my name I was an acceptable person.

As a young person I did not have opportunities to venture far from our neighborhood but the families on three sides of us were Observant Jewish and I got along with the kids quite well, especially Naomi, the girl next door. They went to public school and then Hebrew school; I went to Catholic school. No big deal.

Members of the family worked, but I do not recall anyone asking why no one in mine seemed to.

Later we moved to a much more exclusive area and I entered a very expensive monastic college preparatory school. It was all boys, from various countries and even different religious backgrounds. Boys were there from the Middle East, South America, Asia and even Canada. There was Old Money, New Money, and probably some ill gotten money. But clearly, everyone there had a family that could afford to put them there. And I never heard any references to race, although there were no Blacks.

But then I got a different and unexpected view. I was on the football and the track & field teams. Our school bus was the common yellow kind, with the name of the academy on the sides. One warm Spring day, as we made our way into a rather rough part of Cleveland to compete against a Catholic high school we paused in traffic on the edge of road and sewer main work. The workers, all of whom were White, looked up from their shoveling and stared at us through the bus windows. Close enough to reach out and touch the bus, two of them spit on the bus. I looked directly into the eyes of one worker and saw, for the first time, genuine hate. I had never felt “in” with any group or demographic. I was a bit puzzled that he apparently thought I was “one of those”. But then, I was on the marked bus. In fact, oddly, I felt a kinship with that worker though I could not possibly explain why. That I vividly remember this over sixty years later must convey something to you, the reader.

Over the years most of us have heard or read glib attempts to lump a group of people into a predetermined box. First comes the conception of the group – “All people who fit these criteria are upper class. Or, All people who fit these criteria are Black.” And on, and on. Ronald Reagan may have set a record for such a performance when he played to American preconceptions with his totally fictitious “Black welfare queen driving a Cadillac in Chicago.” When challenged to identify this person he did his routine “Huh, huh” and laughed it off because he knew many in America believed these people existed even if he couldn’t name a particular one. These same people shrug it off when presented with the statistics which show there are FAR more Whites on welfare than Blacks. What you know is of little importance when held against what you believe.

Just as the handlers who coached Hitler and scripted his speeches (Jews are the cause of Germany’s economic problems) became role models for those handlers who coached Reagan and propped him in front of cameras (Blacks are the cause of America’s economic problems), the handlers and coaches of Trump have helped him make Hispanic migrants the Jews and/or the Blacks of the 21^st Century. The time-worn trope, If they are this, then they are that still holds in the minds of many. I encountered it even as a teenager. When some people learned my family was Italian, and wealthy, I heard the refrain, Must be Mafia.

The Wall across the southern border is intended to keep the Hispanics out just as surely as the cordon around the Warsaw Ghetto was intended to keep the Jews in.

Of course, the regime’s early efforts at a complete Muslim ban backfired when someone realized the Saudis could turn off the OPEC oil spigots and sell their oil elsewhere. So the regime looks the other way while the Saudis murder and dismember journalists critical of them. And after an anti-discrimination protester is murdered in Virginia the regime tells us there are very good people on both sides. Very good people.

But the regime’s efforts to dance away from the White Nationalist ethos it blatantly supports are confusing on the surface. Are they based on some concept of race? Religion? Economic status? “Class”? Or are they somehow conflating all four? The belief that Jews secretly control the entire economic structure of the world banking system is still prevalent within the regime’s “base”. I still hear people say, I Jew’d them down when talking about a deal they made. When stationed in South Florida I heard the wealthier neighborhoods described as, Where the rich New York Jews live. The Jewish families I grew up around were hard working and, if they were hoarding ill gotten wealth I never knew of it.

Americans still confuse social class with monetary wealth. And this ignites discomfort when a person who is this, turns out to not be that….a person who is Black or Hispanic or Muslim turns out not to be on welfare, or mowing your lawn, or running a convenience store. How dare they? Must be that damned Affirmative Action.

The term Tribalism is now commonly used to describe the mosaic of American society. Although that comes somewhat close, that’s a mischaracterization of what tribes are and how they function. Instead, the “Melting Pot” of yore has become a rolling boil of disparate parts, each quickly glancing at and judging other parts as they swirl toward overflowing. Election cycles are contests of who can stir these parts into supporting their rise to the top. And each part hears only the tropes it already believes and see only the “truths” it was convinced of beforehand.

Because this society has such a garbled and confused view of ethnicity, “race”, religion, and “social class” I think it is pointless to label someone a racist or a classist or whatever. Any such label is bound to miss the entirety by a wide margin. If there is any label which comes close to comprehensive, perhaps it is bigot. But where does that leave us? How can we know that the person using the label bigot is not, therefore, a bigot?

The use of labels has always been with us, but it has escalated under a president who tosses them out like beads at Mardi Gras. Of course, they have their place. On a college campus where I enjoyed the various vegetation I noticed on a Monday that every tree and shrub suddenly had a label on it, apparently placed by the Botany department. Half joking, I said to someone from that department, “Gee, all this time I thought they were just plants.”

But we are clearly at a point where few if any are laughing. Labels are flying like bullets in an amateur gunfight. I’ve been in settings where someone appears on the evening news presenting a serious and cogent position on an important issue and someone in the room says, “You know they’re gay, don’t you?” What the hell does that have to do with anything?

What would our days be like if we saw plants instead of (enter Genus/species here), and people instead of (enter “race”, ethnicity, religion, class here) ?

It is within our power to resist the force which impels us to conveniently apply labels. Do you think you could do it?