Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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oneself up by the bootstraps" and obtain a higher social status and income.
This narrative implies the converse as well, that those not successful finan-
cially have failed to exercise initiative, work hard, or seek success and are
thus solely at fault for their poverty or financial struggles. Finally, the dis-
course of a class-free society obscures the power resting in the hands of the
very rich by making them invisible except as objects of prurient interest in
gossip media and thus obscures the extreme difference in resources available
to rich people and poor people.
In the past decade this discourse of the classless society has begun to
crumble. Some of this reflects social forces at work since the early 1980s.
Much of the classlessness narrative of the middle 20th century was derived
from the post-World War II successes of unions and the continuing effects of
the policies of the New Deal and then the Great Society. Each of these social
phenomena had the temporary effect of smoothing out economic differences
among social classes by creating more equitable distribution of income and
by ensuring good wages for blue-collar unionized workers. Generous veteran's
educational and housing benefits available to returned troops of World War
II and the Korean War had similar impacts on the landscape of American
life.
But with the election of Ronald Reagan and the ascendancy in Ameri-
can politics of social forces whose credo has been the reduction of spending
on social programs, education, and health care, the gains made in income
equalization have become slowly but surely unraveled, to the extent that
discussion of social class advantage and disadvantage are now part of the
public domain, with media pundits opining about a "war on the middle class."
During the past almost 3 decades many of the social programs that allowed
movement within levels of income and education have been undercut or
destroyed, leaving poor and working-class people with decreasingly few op-
tions for changing their economic circumstances. Unions have shrunk, and
the percentage of the workforce represented by unions has diminished in
tandem. Because of free trade agreements, formerly well-paying working-class
factory jobs have disappeared, with work shipped to developing countries
where labor can still be cheaply exploited. Classism also directly affects ac-
cess to educational resources in the classroom (Lott & Bullock, 2006); be-
cause school districts in the United States are tax supported at the local
level, poor communities have less money to spend on education than do
wealthy ones. As the costs of postsecondary education have risen, funding
for students to obtain such education has fallen; more students start college
today, but a smaller percentage complete it, and most of those who do suc-
ceed in obtaining a bachelor's degree emerge laden with debt. In tandem
with the increased frequency of discourse about class in the general media,
psychologists are also attending more to the issue of social class, exploring
both why it has been neglected and how it affects people's well-being (Lott
& Bullock, 2006).
WHAT CLASS?
Current critical thinking about class suggests that social class status
derives from a person's location on two nonparallel continua and is not sim-
ply a matter of income or financial resources. The first is the continuum of
actual income or access to real capital resources such as current income, sav-
ings, inherited wealth, and other aspects of net financial worth. The second,
which can be equally meaningful and is quite powerful psychologically, is the
continuum of what has been referred to by some authors as symbolic or cul-
tural capital. Symbolic capital refers to a person having attitudes, behaviors,
values, and knowledge that are associated with education and higher class
status or a family history of these. Thus, for instance, a person who is cur-
rently living in poverty as a result of a posttraumatic inability to work but
who attended an Ivy League college and has an advanced degree is not sim-
ply a poor person; she or he is a person with mixed-class status, which can
create attendant confusion and shame or attendant resilience and feelings of
entitlement. She or he is also a poor person who knows how to work systems,
how to dress for job interviews, and how to write a resume and a poor person
likely to have contacts with college friends who can help network her or him
to a job when she or he is ready.
Conversely, the person who grew up very poor, never attended college,
did very well in his work, and is now well-off financially and who, because
of an absence of education, lacks sophistication about art and music or
which fork to use at a formal dinner, is not simply a wealthy person, she or
he is also someone of mixed-class status, which may also lead to confusion
and shame. Coffey (2005) noted that "it is unlikely that upward mobility of
persons from a lower class to an upper class will be comfortable, or the actual
INTERNALIZED CLASSISM
The experience of being poor or working class intersects with each and
every other aspect of a person's multiple identities to affect how an indi-
Erin's experiences are those of a person with privilege. Families who are
poor and working class care no less about their children than do those of
privilege, but the reality of scarcer resources or class-based differences in deal-
ing with finances may be interpreted by a psychotherapist who lacks con-
sciousness of class issues as evidence of less care or poorer quality parenting.