Merf. Thinking is Hard.

lowendtheory:

sorry i am not an academic, but what is wrong with the term classism? I am kind of ignorant.
- Anonymous 

(Made rebloggable by request)

Why apologize?  I would say, on the flip, that it’s a problem if terminological/analytical questions are seen as strictly academic concerns.  Anyway, here’s a quickly written response that I’ll probably regret later: I don’t believe that there’s anything inherently wrong with the term “classism” at all, and I think it’s often used with intentions I share. My reservations stem from the way it gets used.  I think when many folks use the word classism it’s because they want to gesture to the fact that poor and working class people are oppressed.  It gets used, typically, as one term in a list of other ones that describe intersecting axes of power and dynamics of oppression—i.e. racism, sexism, classism.  But terms like “________ism,” when used to highlight social dynamics of oppression, tend to approach oppression in a way that makes it explainable on the basis of discrimination.  The problem with making oppression explainable by way of discrimination is that, as a group, poor and working class people aren’t poor and working class because they’re discriminated against.  

You can stop discriminating against poor people, that is, without changing the fact that we live in a society in which a very small collective have a whole lot more wealth than the great majority of others.  Hell, if you want to get creative, you can even send a couple high-SAT-testing poor people to college so that they can mobilize toward the middle class and thereby make a system that makes so many people so poor have the appearance of fairness, even benevolence. So for folks concerned about inequality, the analyses of discrimination that are necessary for anti-racism and anti-sexism to make sense, don’t quite draw the same blood when we’re thinking about class, as what makes people poor and working class has somewhat more directly to do with the distribution of wealth and the division of labor.  Let me make that statement so that I can complicate it below.

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