Rosalea Barker: Class in the USA

Aha! Something that has long puzzled me since I moved to the United States has at last been explained to me on an MSN web page entitled Are you middle class? I grew up with a (perhaps fuzzy) understanding of the British definition of the classes, where the working class was anyone who earned a wage or salary with no control over their income except by working longer hours, taking a second job, or bargaining with their employer; the upper class was descended from, or were, people with titles like Earl or Lord, and existed only in Britain; and the middle class consisted of those who owned businesses or were professionals such as lawyers, accountants, doctors, whose income was to a large extent under their own control.

Here in the US, I learn, you’re middle class if your income falls in the median range of incomes, even if it comes from a job that could be stripped from you at any minute. Here is what the MSN webpage says:

For the 50% of families in the middle of the scale, household income ranges from $51,000 to $123,000 for a typical two-parent, two-child family. The median is about $81,000. Those numbers, from 2008, have probably fallen by 5% to 7% since then because of the recession.

Median income for a single-parent, two-child family is about $25,000.

It’s unclear from the article whether that second paragraph about the $25,000 income is there to exclude or to include it in the middle class, but since the whole premise of the article seems to be that, if you’re in the middle of any income scale, then you’re middle class, I can only assume that a solo parent trying to house, feed, clothe, and educate two children on $25,000 a year is in the wondrous “middle class” of American life. Because the middle class is evoked in just about every statement about any policy in the US, be it taxes or health insurance or the immigration debate, I’m glad to learn just who is supposed to include themselves in this category. Especially glad because it explains to me why many people who have everything to gain from supporting unions to protect their jobs and working conditions see them as unnecessary evils.

Back in 2005, Dante Chinni wrote a column in the Christian Science Monitor that said: “The Drum Major Institute, a progressive think tank, has a website called www.themiddleclass.org that places the range for middle class at individuals making between $25,000 and $100,000 a year. Ah yes, there's a group of people bound to run into each other while house-hunting.” Today, the Drum Major Institute doesn’t list any figures but says on its web page entitled What is the Middle Class?:

The middle class is more than an income bracket. Over the past fifty years, a middle-class standard of living in the United States has come to mean having a secure job, a safe and stable home, access to health care, retirement security, time off for vacation, illness and the birth or adoption of a child, opportunities to save for the future and the ability to provide a good education, including a college education, for one’s children.

Note that not only does the website abandon a numeric definition of middle class, but it now refers to a “middle-class standard of living” rather than a class in and of itself. The “fifty years” timeframe that the DMI refers to perhaps relates to the publication in 1951 of a book by an American sociologist, C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, which you can read about on Wikipedia here. It’s a short, not very good entry, but it includes a quote from Mills that is fundamental to the understanding of how the US has become the warped nation that it is: “People are required by the salesman ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them...”

There is no pride in being working class in the United States, which is why and how this whole “middle class” myth arose. In good economic times, when jobs were plentiful and workers to fill those jobs were in demand, and when access to credit was easy, the myth was easy to sustain. Today you would think people would see through it, but during the good times, hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of people who were (and still are) just working class stiffs had been manipulated into thinking they were middle class and that membership in that club was a forever thing. Bush’s promotion of the “Ownership Society” was a classic example—federal funds were thrown at banks to encourage them to make loans to homebuyers, and the banks soon found it was profitable to lend to people who really didn’t have the income to support their borrowing. All in the name of giving people a leg-up into the middle class. The only people who got a leg up were the managers in financial institutions—who used their leg-up as an opportunity to piss on the heads of everybody else.

It’s difficult to see any way around this usurpation of an entire “class” by marketers (including the subset called politicians) who manipulated the concept of middle class to such an extent that people still cling to their virtual reality even while they’re standing in line for government help. But perhaps marketing another reality is the answer. The Republican Shriek Machine might have removed Obama’s Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, from office, but back in his hometown of Oakland, California, the green-collar worker meme is about to get a big boost. Hub Strategy, the advertising company that has the account for the Oakland A’s has just launched that team’s new ad campaign. The logo is Green Collar Baseball (links to YouTube video).

If the two-word phrase hasn’t already been copyrighted by some advertising agency, perhaps the next defining book on American class will be called Green Collar: How the American Working Class Realized Its Dreams and Saved the Planet Along the Way.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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