Where We Stand: Class Matters

For many people the thrill of having more is intensified by the presence of those who have less. Waste is not the issue here. To many greedy individuals, power lies in withholding resources.

Confronting the endless desire that is at the heart of our individual overconsumption and global excess is the only intervention that can ward off the daily call to consume that bombards us on all sides.

Women who were lesbians, of all races and classes, were at the forefront of the radicalization of contemporary female resistance to patriarchy in part because this group had their sexual preference already placed themselves outside the domain of heterosexist privilege and protection, both in the home and in the workplace. No matter their class, they were social outcasts.

By championing hedonistic consumerism and encouraging individuals of all classes to believe that ownership of a particular object mediated the realities of class, mass media created a new image of the rich.

While the poor are offered addiction as a way to escape thinking too much, working people are encouraged to shop.

Let's face the reality that if OJ Simpson had been poor or even lower-middle-class there would have been no media attention. Justice was never a central issue. Our nation's tabloid passion to know about the lives of the rich made class a starting point.

In the late fifties and sixties, our nation had not yet become a place where the poor would be regarded solely with contempt. In the growing up years of my life, my siblings and I were constantly told that it was a sin to place ourselves above others. We were taught that material possessions told you nothing about the inner life of another human being, whether they were a loving, a person of courage and integrity. We were told to look past material trappings and find the person inside.

These children, like their adult peers, do not link their longing for wealth with uncritical acceptance and support of transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They simply believe they are longing for the “good life” and that this life has to be bought.

The only genuine hope of feminist liberation lies with a vision of social change that takes into consideration the ways interlocking systems of classism, racism, and sexism work to keep women exploited and oppressed

Oftentimes the poor are more addicted to excess because they are the most vulnerable to all the powerful messages in media and in our lives in general which suggest that the only way out of class shame is conspicuous consumption

As many black women and other women of color saw white women from privileged classes benefiting economically more than any other group from reformist feminist gains in the workforce, it simply reaffirmed that feminism was a white woman thing.

From the onset, reformist white women with class privilege were well aware that the power and freedom they wanted was the freedom they perceived men of their class enjoying.

The neat binary categories of white and black or male and female are not there when it comes to class. How will they identify the enemy. How will they know who to fear or who the challenge.