{"id":17237,"date":"2016-08-23T16:41:37","date_gmt":"2016-08-23T20:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17237"},"modified":"2016-08-23T16:41:37","modified_gmt":"2016-08-23T20:41:37","slug":"the-different-logics-of-class-and-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17237","title":{"rendered":"the different logics of class and race"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s common to list racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia together. These are all important and bad phenomena, but they have different logics, and I’m not sure it’s helpful to put them in a single\u00a0category. Here I explore the differences by focusing on racism and classism.<\/p>\n

Older meanings of racism were, I think,\u00a0always attitudinal. To be a racist was\u00a0to have negative attitudes toward a racial group, even if those attitudes were\u00a0unconscious. We now speak of structural racism, which can exist even in the absence of racist attitudes. I sort of wish that we just called that problem\u00a0“racial injustice,” because the “-ism” suffix connotes an attitude or mindset. But I can accept the\u00a0linguistic evolution, and I certainly believe that both interpersonal racism and structural racial injustice\u00a0persist and are destructive.<\/p>\n

Classism can be made analogous to the older meaning of racism. You’re a classist if you hold someone in lower regard because of the status of her job, her working-class accent, her neighborhood of birth, or her parents’ social role. Classism of that kind\u00a0is evident and harmful.<\/p>\n

Structural classism would then mean some kind of advantage enjoyed by people due to their class. But this is where the analogy breaks down. Classes are<\/em> differences in status, power, and\u00a0advantage. If a society has classes at all, then it\u00a0gives people different advantages. Put a different way: if a society differentiates among social roles, then it has classes, and that’s structural classism.<\/p>\n

Racism is never justifiable, and it’s possible to envision a society that has\u00a0racial diversity yet\u00a0no\u00a0racism. Indeed, I hope that’s where we are headed. In contrast, it’s impossible to imagine a society with classes that doesn’t have “structural classism,” if that means different levels of status, power, or money for different social roles. In theory, we could pay everyone the same salaries, but I’m not sure that would work in practice, and even if it did, it wouldn’t eliminate differences in the quality of work or the status of professions.<\/p>\n

Further, classes may be justifiable or even good. Some argue that\u00a0a classless society is the\u00a0ideal. We haven’t seen one, however: communist societies produced powerful, detached social strata–the nomenklatura<\/a>, etc. John Rawls argued that it’s right\u00a0to pay heart surgeons more than carpenters if (and only if) that is necessary to serve the interests of cardiac patients–who would want highly skilled doctors. Rawls was not perfectly egalitarian, but he was more egalitarian than many Americans, who would make principled and sincere arguments in favor of\u00a0different pay and status for jobs of different difficulty and complexity.<\/p>\n

To say that structural racism exists is to make a critique. To say that classes exist raises the question<\/em> of whether they are\u00a0good or bad, and that is worthy of discussion.<\/p>\n

One can see the analogy\u00a0break down in educational settings. A university, for example, ought to be free of both interpersonal and structural racism. It should strive to be a place where your race doesn’t affect how well anyone\u00a0else treats you or how you flourish. A university cannot, however, be free of class if it exists to provide the education that people need to enter certain desirable professions. If a university prepares\u00a0people to be teachers, doctors, accountants, and poets, then it is producing a certain class. They could theoretically be paid the same as domestic workers and laborers; they would nevertheless form an advantaged group. A university can strive to reduce interpersonal classism, in the form of prejudice against first-generation students and its own\u00a0blue-collar employees. But as long as it has blue-collar employees at all, it has classes; and as long as it promises good jobs for its graduates, it generates the class structure. Again, this\u00a0may be necessary, justifiable, or even good–but it’s no use pretending that an advanced educational institution could be class-free.<\/p>\n

Ending racism is theoretically possible and compatible with everyone’s legitimate best interests. You have no right to any advantage conferred by your race, and the very existence of such differences is caustic for all. In contrast, ending class differences might be just, if it’s possible, but it is not compatible with everyone’s interests. We like to talk about “social mobility,” because then we can focus on happy\u00a0upward<\/em> trajectories from poor to rich. But for everyone who moves up, someone else must go down. For instance, if the children of domestic workers have a decent chance of growing up to be\u00a0doctors, then the children of doctors must have a good chance of cleaning houses for a living. Again, we could reduce the disparities\u00a0in after-tax income and political power, but there will still be winners and losers as long as some people diagnose\u00a0patients while others\u00a0clean homes for a living.<\/p>\n

Finally, the causation seems to be different. Presumably, interpersonal racism was an original cause (although maybe not the only original cause)\u00a0of structural racism. We wouldn’t have had slavery, Jim Crow, or redlining if\u00a0most white people had held most black people in high regard. But today\u00a0the causal link may be weakened, for\u00a0structural racism can persist even in the absence of interpersonal racism. For instance, assume that white college grads come to feel\u00a0benignly and respectfully toward all other races. Still, if each college grad\u00a0succeeds in getting his own children into a desirable\u00a0college, those colleges will\u00a0enroll mostly\u00a0white students. As long as\u00a0the distribution of goods in a society is racially unjust, you don’t need interpersonal racism to\u00a0replicate the inequality; you just need unequal resources plus self-interest.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, interpersonal classism is mainly a consequence of\u00a0objective differences in\u00a0income, status, and power. It’s not that middle-class people are prejudiced against working-class people and give them bad jobs. It’s rather that people with bad jobs get treated worse. That pattern can turn into class prejudice, as when a person who has\u00a0a working-class accent but plenty of money gets treated rudely\u00a0at a snooty restaurant. But classism of that sort is\u00a0not the main problem. The main problem is the real distribution of status, wealth, and power in the society. To change that is not a matter of improving attitudes but of redesigning institutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s common to list racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia together. These are all important and bad phenomena, but they have different logics, and I’m not sure it’s helpful to put them in a single\u00a0category. Here I explore the differences by focusing on racism and classism. Older meanings of racism were, I think,\u00a0always attitudinal. To […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,9,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-revitalizing-the-left","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17237"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17274,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17237\/revisions\/17274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}