Class in America Discussion Questions

[Kathleen Shannon]

1) What are the first steps we need to take in order to minimalize the effect that class distinctions have?

2) In “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” by Langdon Winner we learned about the deliberate design of the low hanging bridges that were intended to keep out buses filled with poor people and blacks, while those of the upper and middle class were free to travel through in their cars. With this thought in mind, what technologies increase the gap between certain classes?

3) Why do we think we refrain from using the terms “upper class” and “lower class” in our language? What do you think caused such a change?

[Kim K]

In response to the first question, I think class distinctions would seem less significant in America if we began to define success in terms of happiness or fulfillment rather than wealth. In that scenario, a content stay-at-home mom would be admired just as much as CEO (who truly loves his job) and was admired as much as a construction worker who loved being outside. And furthermore, your income wouldn't matter as much because it wouldn't determine if you were part of the "elite." While this solution doesn't get rid of divisions in society, it could help redefine the divisions to have an outcome that more people liked. Also, it would be difficult to make this solution a reality because it is difficult to quantify happiness, making it difficult to compare happiness between people, which would make it difficult to group people into different "contentment classes."

[ABalko]

Kim, I completely agree with what you are saying. I also believe that success should be measured by how happy or content with life an individual is. Like you said, a stay-at-home mom can be the happiest woman in the world, but I am sure that there are people out there that would look down on her because she does not have a "successful" job. I feel as if the world would be a much better place if success were measured in happiness because then we would not have as many people judging others based solely on their career choice. It is also true that society tends to view CEO's (as you mentioned) as more successful even if they are the very unhappy. I also agree that happiness would be very difficult to measure. What makes one person happy can make another person equally unhappy. Therefore, like you mentioned, it would be difficult to group people into "contentment classes." It would be ideal if everyone would just accept everyone else if they viewed themselves as truly happy, and others just took everyone's word for it. In other words, if someone says they are happy, we all view them as a happy person, and therefore, they are successful to us.

[Micah]

Kim is right... and it is sad that happiness being a measure of success is not ideal. I am from inner-city Chicago, and there is an automatic association of the lower-class with the "south side." The south side of Chicago has a tragic history and continues to be one of the most violent places in the United States. The primary population? Blacks.

I have read a lot about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil War, and I find it really sad that there is almost an automatic association of blacks with lower class. I don't even know how I came to make this association. It is almost as if it is just part of reality and a fact of life. That is just really sad. last week's issue of TIME magazine was a feature on the Civil War, and on the cover it said "Why we're still fighting the Civil War."

Honestly, when is this shit going to end? My only hope is that I've found that most of the people my age are not racist at all and have no problems with race or class divisions. I feel like racism is such a dumb product of the past and the previous generation, and once those generations die racism will become less and less.

I know I am talking about racism, but race and class division go hand in hand.

[CaseyS]

I agree with all three responses so far. The world would be much less dinstinctive of class standings if success were measured by happiness and if racism was not an issue. However, these two claims are unrealistic. Our society is too based upon money and ownership. For example, consider a lower-class single woman who is perfectly content working part-time in order to care for her two children. This woman lives off wellfare and food stamps, things that other happy and possibly monetarily advantaged people pay taxes for. In the real world, this makes happy citizens unhappy for a variety of reasons, a prominent one being that people who work hard for a living should not have to support those that do not for whatever reasons. Also, people who have a decent amount of money have the means (and more likely) the time to do other things that will make them happy. If a person is struggling to put dinner on the table and living paycheck to paycheck, it would be a much more difficult situation in which to find happiness. Even if success is taken to describe something completely unrelated to career, financial strains will still cause unhappiness in an individual.
Another probable first-step to minimalizing the effects of class distinction (and equally as far-fetched) would be to devalue the concept of money and ownership. If money was not important to survival in our society, people would not have to base success on paychecks and would not need to strive to become part of a higher class (which is what produces the stigmas associated with being in a lower class). This would allow people to view success as happiness and, therefore, possibly eliminate race issues, since race is so intricately woven in class division, as Micah states. However, I have no idea how this could be implemented in our society, since it would completely alter the dynamics of our government.

[Mike S]

I think the key to minimizing class distinctions is education reform. First, it is important to increase the quality of the public schooling system. It is important that public high schools produce high quality students who will be competitive in the college admissions process because a higher level of education is always helpful to finding a stable, well paying job later in life. If these schools can improve graduation rates and begin to produce better quality students who are more competitive at the university level, then the obvious next step is to find a way to make education more affordable. With wider access to university-level education, more young people will hopefully have the ability to go to college and increase their education. A more effective and affordable education system will certainly be able to minimize class distinctions in the long run, and it is an effective first step to moving us closer to a "class-neutral society."