"Privilege" meme -- some notes

[libertango]

("Privilege" is in scare quotes here because, in my observation, the word isn't used except by people who already have it. Not unlike one who rails against the bourgeoisie is almost always a bourgeois.)

A very odd thing about this, right off the top: "The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University." Um, no, in fact. They're from Indiana State. Here's Mr. Barratt's page on "Social Class on Campus". Here's Barratt's faculty page. Here's Barratt's personal page.

The switch from Indiana to Illinois appears to have occurred very early on in the meme process. If you search by the cited researchers plus "Illinois," you get 819 hits. Do it with "Indiana" (the accurate version), and you get only 9. I suspect this is not unlike the time Mary Schmich's advice to, "Wear sunscreen," got mysteriously attributed to Kurt Vonnegut.

This is the original paper with the exercise, which appears to be meant to be done in a live class, not filled out as a questionnaire. (Note: MS WORD .DOC format, which Barratt seems to prefer throughout his pages.) Questions have been edited out, and a few have been re-worded, on their way to LJ.

In someone else's post of the meme (I won't point to it, since it's Friends Only), I had some more notes:



*^*^*^*^*

What's interesting, to me, are how many items are what I'd consider negative class indicators:

Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Credit? Bank card, perhaps. AmEx and/or Diners Club (that is, cards that used to require being paid off each month, and don't have revolving balances), perhaps. But credit is solidly middle class. See the movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, which is a fascinating time capsule.

Family vacations involved staying at hotels
I understand the distinction they're trying to make -- hotels vs staying with family. Trouble is, it depends. See George Howe Colt's The Big House, about the full-sized vacation house his family had on Cape Cod. Probably a better distinction here would be, Did you "summer" anywhere? When staying with family, did you sleep in the same bedroom as a family member; or was there a guest room; or was there a guest house?

Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
Worrying about cars is solidly middle class.

Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
So are phones, and technology generally.

You and your family lived in a single family house
They're trying to make the distinction between inner city vs suburbs here, I suspect. Trouble again is, it depends. To use a local example: Which is classier, a single family house in Arlington, or a duplex condo in Belltown? Or, on a larger scale, a single family house in Omaha, or a triplex facing Central Park?

Had your own TV in your room in High School
Technology rears its head again. If there's a TV in the house, the real question is, is it exposed, or is it in custom shelving where it can be hidden?

Went on more than one cruise with your family
Boats are good, but again, cruises are middle class. Better questions: Did your family own a boat at all? If so, was it large enough to sail overnight?


See generally: Paul Fussell, Class; Lewis Lapham, Money and Class in America; Nelson Aldrich, Old Money.

Comments

Thanks

[willbarratt.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your clarity and comments. This is a loaded topic and I appreciate the care with which you looked at our material.

Your idea of middle class seems to include a wider range than mine. See Michael Zweig's notions in "the working class majority". I think that for many reasons people have expanded the 'middle class' to include much of the upper 20% and much of the lower 60%. Some of this is for political reasons and some for personal. If you have an income in the upper 20% then I am not sure that you get to call yourself middle class.

However, our whole point is to help with awareness and stimulate discussion. That seems to have worked. I never thought that this would become a meme, and like others it seems to have a life of its own.

Will Barratt

Re: Thanks

[tylik.livejournal.com]

When I was working through this meme* one of the things that struck me is how many of the things on it were actively looked down on in my family as being vulgar or inappropriate. My family was, I suspect, fairly solidly middle class in terms of income for most of my childhood. But it was also in many ways a very typical family of the intelligentsia**, which was expressed in a different set of values and priorities.

Don't get me wrong, I thought it made a good exercise in an appropriate context. But it didn't strike me as a particularly nuanced way of talking about class, particularly class as represented by more than a single dimension. (Nor did I get the impression it was intended to be such.)

* Unlike Hal I did not do my research as to its origins.
** For lack of a better term. I certainly have noticed a number of people who worked through the meme on my friends list had grown up with a similarly broad exposure to the arts, a strong emphasis on education, and a general disdain for conspicuous consumption. And like a good daughter of my people, I spent a while after my undergrad years finding myself -- at Microsoft, building up a nice investment portfolio -- and have now returned to "finish my education". Scary, eh?

Re: Thanks

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"...one of the things that struck me is how many of the things on it were actively looked down on in my family as being vulgar or inappropriate."

Yup. Which was largely my point (although it looks like I wrote it badly enough that multiple smart readers didn't get that).

Re: Thanks

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I got this as a related point, but negative class indicators seemed like a broader term to me...

Re: Thanks

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Worrying about cars isn't solidly middle class in the interior of the United States. There are good reasons for rotting cars parked in the yard to be a sign of rural poverty, and there used to be good reasons for keeping all the rotting cars rather than getting rid of them. I don't know how reusable parts from old modern cars are in other old modern cars; I suspect they're not as reusable as they used to be, but I don't have to know that, so I don't.

The first kid I knew who got a driver's license got it at the incredible age of 13 because his parents needed him to be legal to drive their tractor on the street to get from one field to another. Only farm kids could get licenses like that in Ohio; I don't know if they still can. It wasn't a marker of class privilege in that time and place, although it certainly was a marker of teenager privilege. He drove the tractor whenever he had to; he drove the family car whenever he could.

It was a very odd experience to go to a private school full of very privileged and moderately wealthy girls while living in a farm community in the early stages of transformation into a bedroom community. The farm kids I grew up with all dressed in clothes that looked like rags to me, but they all had horses, which only the richest of the rich girls I went to high school with had. Some of the farm kids were from genuinely poor families with nothing but their (at that time) nearly worthless land; some were from traditionally thrifty families with nothing but their well-cared-for, productive, but otherwise nearly worthless land.

A few years after I moved away, all that land became very valuable after a posh golf course and a Toyota plant were built nearby. There are no farms and very little rural poverty visible there now.

Thanks for correcting the original references.

Re: Thanks

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"Worrying about cars isn't solidly middle class in the interior of the United States. There are good reasons for rotting cars parked in the yard to be a sign of rural poverty, and there used to be good reasons for keeping all the rotting cars rather than getting rid of them."

Agreed. I guess I should have said, "Is solidly middle class or below." My point was, the question is phrased to have at least some implication that having a car at a young age is upper class ("privileged"). I would say that, on the contrary, frequently the upper classes don't bother fussing very much about cars -- because they can afford not to. The piece of crap Plymouth is frequently driven by someone far better off than the new Mercedes S-Class (which could well be considered hideously gauche).

Re: Thanks

[gillo]

I used your material on my LJ without knowing its origins - I just wanted you to know that I have now given corrected credit.

I've found it interesting to read responses on my friendslist, and there has been some discussion about how many of the elements were probably different in terms of what they signified to non-Americans. Money and class are incredibly complex topics in any country - to a Brit, accent is very important too, and some elements would read differently - blocks of flats (apartments) could read as "wealthy" in The Barbican or Knightsbridge, or welfare/social housing in many other city locations. I was unsure about the hotel as vacation destination - we couldn't really afford a "proper" hotel but could manage "bed and breakfast" - I'm not sure how that counted, though.

Thank you for some stimulating discussion material. I am very ready to remove the entry, however, if you feel I have infringed your copyright in any way. Feel free to look at my responses and the discussion in my LJ if you wish!

I, too, saw this meme

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

And I had many quibbles. First, I saw some of those questions as being a bit outdated, so that things like phones or televisions that may have been markers of upper middle class in the 60s, were not so much by the 80s or 90s.

I think the "car" question needs to be rephrased, because if your parents buy you a brand new car, that's not even remotely the same kind of money as if they pay a few hundred to buy a car from their neighbor, but they are technically the same "yes" answer.

I find the "If you were the same or higher class than your high school teachers" question problematic -- the exercise as a whole is designed to tell you what class you are. But this questions presumes you already know.

I also think "If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family" needs to be reworked a bit. First, a kid might know high power bills are a problem for the family, without knowing an exact number. Second, if the student comes from the south or southwest, heating isn't the issue, air conditioning is.

Finally, books -- in my experience books in the house may culturally distinguish lower from middle class, but they may go the opposite direction when you attempt to distinguish middle from upper and upper middle. Richer people are often the sort who buy books and then give them to the Goodwill or something -- they don't keep them around in shelves. Too messy. Not designer-approved.

Re: I, too, saw this meme

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

re: car question
Yes, cars cross class boundaries. But some families don't have enough money to have even a single car, much less for one for a kid (especially including the cost of insuring a teenager).

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, it never hurts to remember that Fussell's book was meant to be humor, not anthropology. It also seems like you're assuming that only top-out-of-sight and true upper class (to borrow from Fussell anyway) count as privilege, and I don't think that's the distinction being drawn. The middle and upper-middle classes are privileged, that's part of the point being elicited, I suspect. So lots of what you're not seeing or at least not acknowledging is ways that these questions try to cut to differences between working class / poor people and the various strata of the middle classes.

[gillo]

Thanks for linking to this - you've done some very detailed research. As a Brit I am perennially interested in perceptions of class - it's what most Victorian literature is based on, after all, and that is one of my main interest areas as a teacher of English.

I hope you don't mind, but I am adding this link to my main entry, edited once again!