Tag Archives: class

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Among the papers I wrote before finishing sophomore year a couple weeks ago was one tracing the development and dominance of culturalist views of poverty in American discourse and policy on poverty, bringing together quotes from Republican and Democratic think tanks popularizing the ideas, from Presidents Clinton and Bush endorsing them, and from welfare recipients attesting to the devastating impact of the policies they wrought. I talked about the intuitive appeal of a culturalist perspective – of the idea that the poor are suffering from a culture of poverty and not from material deprivation and economic displacement – as an alternative for the middle- and upper-classes to recognition of responsibility for the conditions of the poor and the potential for themselves to become poor in the future, not through moral failing but through economic crisis. No quote in that paper, however, could sum up the seductive appeal and utter dishonesty of the culturalist view as well as this one delivered yesterday by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Alphonso Jackson:

Being poor is a state of mind, not a condition.

Perhaps I can be among the first to call for Secretary Jackson’s resignation.

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Brian accuses professional students of “mooching”:

If you go to graduate school, you know going in what it’s going to cost. If you don’t have the means, and aren’t prepared to deal with debt coming out of it, then maybe you shouldn’t make the choice to attend that school. To my way of thinking, it is not Yale’s responsibility to provide anyone with an education — it is your choice to take advantage of a system, with full knowledge of your responsibilities. Even protesting tuition before you attend the school, I might understand. But once you’ve made the choice, you have to deal with the results. You have entered a contract to attend school for a certain price, and that includes the contract to pay back what you borrow to cover that fee. Seriously, if anyone can explain to me why these people are entitled to “forgiveness” (I’d call it mooching), please educate me.

There are a few perspectives from which to come at this. I’ll try (briefly) to make the case from the perspective of Yale’s own convictions about itself rather than an appeal to my more radical perspective on education and democracy. One is the social mission of the University, which the majority of people on this campus would agree includes extending educational opportunity to deserving students and creating strong national national leaders. Don’t take it from me – read Levin’s book on the topic (although I should warn you, it has some dull stretches). Yale is a non-profit educational institution and not, say, an elite private racquet club, and so while there may be disturbing parallels between the two at times, many within and outside of this community are rightly more indignant when Yale institutes or maintains policies which narrow the population to whom its tremendous resources are accesible. Because yes, it is precisely Yale’s responsibility to seek to provide education to qualified students. Ergo we have financial aid and a need-blind admissions policy in Yale College.

Accepting the conception of the academy which Brian posits – if you don’t have the means, you shouldn’t go – hurts everyone’s education here. It keeps exceptionally talented students with a tremendous amount to learn from and teach their peers and their teachers out of the University. And it further narrows and weakens the social and academic community experienced here by robbing it disproportionately of the perspectives of working-class students and students of color. That further divorces Yale’s students from the country they’re being trained (however much comfort some of us may or may not have with such a project) to lead, and does a disservice to everyone being educated here.

And accepting crippling debt as a consequence of professional education narrows the viable options for students to pursue after school, making careers in advocacy and non-profit work potentially untenable for many students and narrowing the career options for Yale’s graduates. This is, as they say, a double whammy.

That’s why professional school students will keep fighting for a more progressive policy that would both widen the opportunities available to them after college and widen the backgrounds of their incoming peers. They’re uniquely poised to do so as students already attending this school; discounting their advocacy because they chose to attend Yale is no more justifiable than discounting criticism of this country from immigrants who chose to come to the United States.

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Phoebe recounts a deeply disturbing discussion with Yale Financial Aid folks:

And she freaking tells me no, definitely not, “We never want to be like Princeton.” And why not? Because “we believe that every student and every parent should have to sacrifice something for their education.” About the Harvard plan, she tells me that “we believe that every student and every parent needs to pay something, even if it’s only $100.” Like they positively want everybody to be squished into the “my family and I sacrificed our lives so I could come to Yale” mold. It’s infuriating. And then she tells me that the real purpose of the Harvard plan is just “sticker shock,” “to get more low-income people to apply, because here, they have to take it on trust that we’ll make it affordable, but there, they’ll just see that and know they can afford it.” And I said to her, well, the financial aid folks did a survey at Harvard, and the new plan was created in response to finding out from this survey that, actually, people and their parents aren’t able to afford the amounts that they’re supposed to pay, and students end up taking out loans to pay for parental contributions, and all else, and the plan wasn’t some PR deal but actually about making Harvard affordable for people. And then she tells me, “you know, well, we don’t need do do that then, because, actually, we have more low-income students than Harvard or Princeton does” (she says it to me as if of course I’m not “one of them” and she and I are talking about some freaking statistic–like, let’s do just enough that we achieved the “low-income” quota for this year, and then stop). And I tell her that, atually, I was under the impression that Harvard had more people on financial aid than did Yale. And then she went on about, well, yes, but the way it breaks down, there are more specifically “low-income” people at Yale than at Harvard.

I’ll take these people more seriously when they start fretting that wealthy legacy kids are missing out on the chance to work their way through college. Meanwhile, to argue that financial aid students are being deprived of life experience if they don’t have the experience of working dozens of hours a week to make it through school while telling the rest of the students that they should devote their time outside of class to being leaders in lots of extracuricculars sends a simple and chilling message: Some are meant to be management, and others are meant to work for them.

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Phoebe ponders the Yale Herald‘s cover story on the search for the “Yale intellectual” and the different contextual meanings of the term:

here, “intellectual” as a term, as a marker of identity, is establishment, is upper-class white maleness. of course. but at ihs, intellectual, not those things already, was so entirely disestablishment, so entirely a rebellion against the student-governmentized majority (was it a majority, or did it just seem so, i wonder now?). intellectual was such a blatant marker of excludedness, a term infused with so much not belonging, a term disdainfully refused by the included…intellectual was not about the western canon (nobody gave a damn about a handful of white, european philosophers virtually no one read) but about the personhood of the less-formally-accepted folk. and owning the term was an empowering tool.

On the one hand, as I told the Herald,

I think that too often “intellectualism” is used as a convenient cipher to avoid discussing class – saying you prefer people who share an intellectual perspective is easier for many people than saying that you feel more comfortable around people who share the same amount of privilege. While intellectual may be an adjective that has meaning in describing activities, or spheres of individuals’ lives, I think it’s difficult to use intellectual as a noun to identify people without implicitly creating a boundary between those who count as intellectuals and those who do not.

And on the other hand – the part of the interview they didn’t print – I think “Anti-intellectualism” is also too convenient a mask for privilege, as it gives cover for the super-rich – like our current President – to feign a faux populism when shooting down progressive ideas by associating them with a mythical “cultural elite.”

Intellectualism at Yale has another meaning as well though – a pursuit of ideas divorced from their impact on the surrounding world – an unfortunate excuse for avoiding the education that comes from challenging your ideals in you interactions in the world. To me the letters I received from administrators during strikes here, telling me that my responsibility was to cross working peoples’ picket lines to get to class and learn how to be a leader, represent the worst contortion of intellectualism. And if being an intellectual college student means – as administrators here have suggested by their instructions in times of crisis – being sat on for four years in order to then hatch and go on to face the outside world, then I want none of it.

And yet, I know what Phoebe means when she writes,

i can’t but feel sad that the word has been taken away from me

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Ann Coulter has a new conspiracy theory: The American government (less often than she thinks, but never mind that) allows people who benefit from government services to vote for candidates who support perpetuating them. This is classic Coulter – first she argues that shredding the federal government is supported by everyone except for wealthy Hollywood celebrities and a pathological underclass – then that tax-cutting Republicans have it rough because so many Americans greedily want to keep paying taxes and benefiting from the services they pay for. Conservatives, of course, never vote their economic interest…

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Just watched an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy last night. My sense has been, and still is, that those who are arguing that the show symbolizes a crude minstrelesque stereotyping of gay folks and those who are arguing that the show symbolizes a new prominence and acceptance of gay folks are both right. The most powerful argument of the former camp, I think, is that after performing stereotypical queer labor for heteros, the “Fab Five,” leave the heteros alone and go back into their queer home to watch from a distance as the people they’ve served experience romance. The fact that they’re drinking martinis doesn’t diminish the resemblance to servant quarters. The powerful argument of the latter camp, I think, is that queer folks are being brought into heteros’ homes not only to joke, advise, and support them but specifically to facilitate the development of healthier monogomous, faithful, loving relationships.

What struck me most strongly on watching the show last night, however, was the class-typing which pervades it. I think that the “positive stereotypes” associated with the “Fab Five,” while they share some of the problematic nature and potential utility in social progress as, say, the idea that Blacks beat Whites as Basketball, are comparatively noteworthy in that they’re almost totally inaccesible to a large swathe of the homosexual community. What are gay teenagers gorwing up in urban ghettos – especially those of color – to make of a queer icon distinguished by his inpeccable fashion who in a recent episode found an unacceptable shirt in a hetero man’s closet and asked him, “What are you, poor?”

There’s a compelling argument that the recent media buzz over “metrosexuals” – basically, hetero men who follow homosexual stereotypes – represents a reification of the claim that homosexuality and the expressions associated with it – warmth, compassion, fashion – both other you and make you less of a man. There’s a compelling argument to be made that the buzz over “metrosexuals” represents a problematization of constructs of gender and sexuality, and a growing comfort with the idea that multiple masculinities are available to heterosexual and homosexual guys alike. But what both of these arguments gloss over is that “metrosexuality” further weds sexuality and class by implying that northeastern urban wealthy trendy heterosexual men can perform homosexual stereotypes too.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the internet parodies of this show – some quite hateful – which have risen up have also been pervaded with class-typing: regular, blue-collar, beer-guzzling, poorly-dressed men converting effete trendy queers. But perhaps it should be concerning. Just as it should be concerning how many of the official and unofficial spokespeople of the political gay rights movement are white, upper-middle class folks (some of whom have a great deal of vested interest in divorcing the movement from class- and race- based justice movements). What’s needed is more voices, and diverse ones. Let a thousand queer TV shows bloom – but please, let them depict more than the type of gay folks in the Fab Five.

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It occurs to me that Zach’s aspersions about my personal hygiene may be a hint that I haven’t yet responded to his latest thoughts on Rush, the Right, and such. I don’t think there’s much left to say. I of course agree with Zach that gloating at embarrassments of political enemies is less constructive than learning from them – that’s, in fact, exactly what I was endeavoring to do. I, like Zach, appreciate “insight both strategic and theoretical into the ways in which ideologies of control and strategies of Empire are linked” – I stand by my original (if I may be so bold) insight that the role of the right’s class agenda in determining the application of its social agenda raises questions about the integrity of the latter and the relationship between the two. On the other hand, while I share Zach’s aspiration of “destablilizing the structures of gender, sexuality, and race,” I don’t find the use of the term “minority” to refer to groups that are, empirically, smaller in this country than the majority along whichever axis we’re referring to a particularly problematic terminology. I would also maintain that while identities are constructed, they exist, and factual explorations of the breakdown of identities – who identifies how? what else do they have in common? where do they live? how are they changing? – in this country should be marshalled by the left rather than condemned and left as the province of the everyone else. Finally, resoundingly, I would affectionately but bitingly make a comment to the effect that sometimes we have to choose between laundering clothes and organizing a movement and then sing Pete Seeger’s rendition of “Which side are you on?”

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Zach accuses me of “starting a blog war.” Nah – but I’ll finish it. This would perhaps be the place to warn Zach that we at LWB “will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.” Or somesuch.

Zach takes me on for my suggestion that Limbaugh’s drug scandal, and the response from the media and the organized right, lend credence to the suggestion by certain ex-conservatives that the social agenda of the right operates primarily as a cover to advance its economic agenda. He argues that my argument is “mechanist,” and that it minimalizes the distinctive oppression of sexual and ethnic minorities and the stake of the right in that oppression by rendering it merely a by-product of an economic project. Perhaps unfortunately for those reading this site and Zach’s (you know who you are), again I don’t think my disagreement with Zach is as wide as it might appear. I argued yesterday not that social conservatism is merely a convenient superstructure over a material class war, but that conservatives lend credence to those who do think so when they take fundamentally libertarian stances on the failures of their fellow travelers to live by their social values. I would argue that the Right (capital “R”) of the past years is increasingly a libertarian one, and that there’s a great deal of deft politics and crass hypocrisy at work which makes it possible to draw on the libertarians at the Cato Institute as the brain trust of your movement and the Christian Coalition as your grassroots arm. Zach argues that Bob Barr’s suggestion that his daughter’s abortion is a private matter doesn’t detract from his work to make “the state apparatus to control people’s bodies in a fascistic linking of gender and power, of sexual reproduction and social reproduction.” Certainly, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous or any less real to those who suffer as a result. What it does detract from, however, is the integrity of the argument and the credibility of the stance. To argue that the right’s real relationship to its social values is soaked in classism does not, as I see it, suggest that sexism, heteronormativity, or racism are derivatives of classism. I would also argue, as I think Zach would as well, that the classism of segments of the right has a foundation of sexual and racial prejudice. The Wall Street Journal ran a long staff editorial a decade or so ago called “No Guardrails,” blaming the crime of a violent anti-abortion activist on the society that the left had fashioned for him to grow up in (strained already, yes, but it gets better). The basic thesis of the piece was that all things being equal, the elite might be able to dabble in drugs, sex, and pornography, but everyone should abstain because the lower classes don’t have the same reserves of strength so as not to be fully corrupted. This is to me a vital dramatization of the intersections of prejudice. All that said, I stand by my contention that the lifestyles and even personal beliefs of significant parts of the right elite are far less closely in line with their professed politics than are, say, their personal economic practices with their economics and that the right response to those who transgress its social agenda is often motivated by its economic agenda. I also strongly affirm Zach’s reminder that all oppressions are not the same and that economic determinism runs the risk of marginalizing both the nature and the victims of other types of oppression.

I should also note, perhaps, that I was not born with a copy of the Nation in my hand.

Zach ends with a call “to look more deeply at how racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and capitalism are both intertwined and sometimes contradictory as subjectivities from below struggle to reshape and have reshaped the social relations of capitalism.” Sounds good to me. But Zach, you’re gonna have to start that one off. Much respect to you as well.

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Rush Limbaugh’s alleged drug addiction represents a public embarassment for the organized right. As well it should. The story here isn’t that national leaders sometimes call for morals that they themselves are unable to live up to. The real story is that Limbaugh’s addiction to large quantities of expensive painkillers will be – and already is being – played not only in the media but on the organized right as a personal indiscretion Rush needs time to reconcile with and move past, and not as, say, an evil crimminal felony. The latter term would be reserved with non-violent first time marijuana possession by lower-class teens. David Brock and Michael Lind, both ex-conservatives whose books I read this summer, both argue in different ways that the social conservative agenda is, for the Republican elite, a tool to rally the base and divide the working class in the wake of the Cold War so as to advance economic conservatism. Brock describes his disgust at discovering that his homosexuality was an acceptable foible as long as he was a rising star on the right and a cause for moral condemnation once he left it. Lind suggests that the social agenda of the right is counter to the personal values of most of its elite but provides a cover for its economic libertarian agenda. Arguments like these gain more credence with each public spectacle of a fallen angel of the right, be it Rush’s drug addiction or Bill Bennet’s gambling addiction. Few right hypocrisies can match that of Bob Barr, who defended his daughter’s choice to get an abortion on the grounds that it was “a private decision.” Conservatives who want to demonstrate their integrity could go a long way right now by calling for Rush Limbaugh to be sent to a prison cell – across from the one Ken Lay should be sitting in.

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Yet again, behind the rhetoric of partnership Yale’s leadership demonstrates a vision of crass division and stable inequality:

A group of ministers accused Yale University on Tuesday of bringing Latino workers to the campus as strikebreakers to cause racial dissension among picketing maintenance workers.

Two area cleaning firms delivered 40 to 50 Latinos to the Old Campus on Monday, and “paraded” them through a picket line of mainly African-American strikers in Local 35, according to the Rev. Emilio Hernandez.

Hernandez said less than 5 percent of Yale’s workers are Latino, even though they make up 20 percent of the New Haven population. He said the ministers want to increase the presence of Latinos at Yale, but not as strikebreakers, and he accused Yale of trying to arouse racial confrontation.

The ministers said several clergy tried to talk to the workers on Monday, but were asked by police to leave.

Dan Smokler of the Connecticut Center for a New Economy, which works closely with the strikers, said Tuesday members followed buses with workers from a company in West Haven to a parking lot in the city’s Fair Haven section, where they were transferred to Yale vans and brought to several of Yale’s residential colleges under security escort. He said the workers were told not to talk with the center’s volunteers or they would lose their jobs…

Julie Gonzales, a junior at Yale’s Silliman College, said she was particularly offended by the hirings. “To see my university use these kinds of divisive tactics is like a kick in the stomach. A university that is committed to diversity should bring people together, rather than trying to break a strike,” Gonzales said.

This is the same strategy ONHSA ally Boise Kimber used in telling Ward 6 voters that Delores Colon represented the Latino threat to Blacks in New Haven. She won that race yesterday.

This is the same thinking that convinced Bartlett Giamatti in the early 80’s that Yale’s predominately Black male service and maintenance workers and Yale’s predominately White female clerical and technical workers would never go on strike together.

This is the grand strategy that Yale has been depending on to crush the unions in this fight – the conviction that once the situation got intense, a coaltion of thousands of clerical, technical, maintenance, and service workers, teaching assistants and researchers, students, faculty, clergy, and community members would fracture quickly. So far, looks like Yale’s leadership has a lot to learn.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus is releasing a letter to President Levin condemning Yale’s behavior today.

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Michael Gecan of the IAF has a searing, sobering piece in the latest Village Voice on the Democratic and Republican elites and the Americans left behind:

They are angry, and they are driven. They are profoundly and passionately clear on what and whom they are against. They intend to vanquish the upstart elite, the progressive establishment. It’s not Osama, Dead or Alive. It’s Dean, Dead or Alive. It’s Clinton, Dead or Alive. They have only one major problem: They don’t know what in the world—in the bigger, broader world where most moderate Americans live and work, play and pray, and try to raise their kids—they are for. Their relationship with their base is better than the Democrats’, but still terribly thin. It is not rooted in the interests of families struggling to survive in a service economy, with few or no benefits, in schools that continue to stumble and decline. It is not based on a foundation of respect for the working American, the struggling American, the vast majority of Americans who lack wealth. Not at all. Like the upstart elite, the new Republicans could care less about these matters. No, their newfound commitment to building a base is an instrument and offshoot of their tribal war with the progressive left. It is as clinical and cynical as the attitudes of some of the anti-war student leaders of the ’60s.

The Democrats lack this depth of passion and focused clarity. They aren’t as heated or as hardworking as the Republicans. They still sip sparkling water and make smug little jokes about Bush’s malaprops. They keep telling themselves how much smarter and slicker they are than the boobs on the right and the bohunks in the middle. They still think that getting straight A’s and appearing on television and having famous friends will dazzle the hoi polloi.

Both parties are led by women and men who believe it’s their God-given right to make more messes—from the Yale Commons, to blighted cities, to White House sleeping arrangements, to failed health reform, to bankrupt companies, to gutted industries, to post-war Iraq. They count on a wide and appreciative following in the media to report their antics and a silent servant class to clean up the wreckage.

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Looks like Bush may be losing support among another traditionally Republican bloc of voters:

“He pats us on the back with his speeches and stabs us in the back with his actions,” said Charles A. Carter of Shawnee, Okla., a retired Navy senior chief petty officer. “I will vote non-Republican in a heart beat if it continues as is.”

“I feel betrayed,” said Raymond C. Oden Jr., a retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant now living in Abilene, Texas.

Many veterans say they will not vote for Bush or any Republican in 2004 and are considering voting for a Democrat for the first time. Others say they will sit out the election, angry with Bush and Republicans but unwilling to support Democrats, whom they say are no better at keeping promises to veterans. Some say they will still support Bush and his party despite their ire.

While there are no recent polls to measure veterans’ political leanings, any significant erosion of support for Bush and Republicans could hurt in a close election. It could be particularly troublesome in states such as Florida that are politically divided and crowded with military retirees.

Registered Republican James Cook, who retired to Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after 24 years in the Air Force, said he is abandoning a party that he said abandoned him. “Bush is a liar,” he said. “The Republicans in Congress, with very few exceptions, are gutless party lapdogs who listen to what puts money in their own pockets or what will get them re-elected.”

…Since 1891, anyone retiring after a full military career has had their retirement pay reduced dollar for dollar for any Veterans Administration checks they get for a permanent service-related disability. However, a veteran who served a two-or-four-year tour does not have a similar reduction in Social Security or private pension.

A majority of members of Congress, from both parties, wants to change the law. A House proposal by Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., has 345 co-sponsors.

But it would cost as much as $5 billion a year to expand payments to 670,000 disabled veterans, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier this month told lawmakers that the president would veto any bill including the change.

The proposal is stuck in committee. A recent effort to bring it to the full House of Representatives failed, in part because only one Republican signed the petition.

“The cost is exorbitant. And we are dealing with a limited budget,” said Harald Stavenas, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee…

Good for these vets for deciding that the ones who want to deploy them for unjust and unnecessary warfare abroad and then welcome them back to the same shaft designated for every other working-class American are not on their side. The (first) Gulf War, and the official refusal to treat or even recognize the Gulf War Syndrome our soldiers suffered from exposure to our weapons, is only the most disturbing case. On a related note, one of the gratifying changes to see at the most recent round of anti-war protests was a departure from the pitfall too many on the left fell into in Vietnam: targeting the largely working class soldiers who carry out orders rather than the men who sit behind desks who send them. Looks like the latter group may be in for a comeuppance…