"You're 50 yrs old and still worried about what your friends think." What's class got to do with it?

I haven’t had a whole lot of classes that focused on social issues or class issues. I took sociology my first semester and pretty much glided through the class without picking up a whole lot of information from it. Other than that the only class I can remember that I’ve taken that addressed social issues was my Africana Philosophy class, and this class focused more on racial issues and racial identity then a social class issue. So by watching People Like Us: Social Class in America, it opened my eyes to the social struggle that happens throughout our country and how bad it actually is. I’ve been aware about the different social classes in America but I’ve never thought about it being a detrimental part of America and still used as an oppressive construct in our society.

In the first section of this film, Bud or Bordeaux, I was really taken in by the argument in Vermont. The argument the town got into was over what food company they would build in the town to serve their citizens, and their options were between a supermarket chain and a small environmentally conscious specialty store. The problems that arose between the two were that the supermarket supplied a great selection of food at a reasonable price but the specialty food supplied a healthier selection of food and better quality food for a higher price. Many of the people in the town were lower income families who couldn’t afford the higher priced food items, and people were arguing over which brands should be supplied for items as simple as bread. An interesting statistic that they pulled was that Americans consume about five loaves of white bread for every one loaf of wheat bread. Growing up on wheat bread myself, and the fact that I can’t stand white bread due to the insufficient nutritional value of the “bread,” I found this quote to be quite shocking. I was highly amused though at the elderly lady who described what was in white bread and her facial reactions as she explained that it was just starch, egg, and I think milk. The town meeting was also an interesting part of the film where one of the council members was trying to explain the pros of the smaller food store, and the elderly citizens that were there were arguing back quite furiously. This whole debate just opens your eyes to how much our food implies where we fit in our society, and it’s sad how some people will look down on others when they see what kind of food someone else consumes.

The next section was call High and Low and what captivated me in this section was the WASP, the White Angelo-Saxton Protestant class. This whole part really bugged me, pardon the pun. The WASP’s just seems to be an elitist class of society and you can only get into it if you were born into it or if you were able to obtain a vast amount of money and are able to pretty much train yourself to act like them. It’s almost like an old style of an aristocratic system born in modern America. A high brow group of people that go to balls, plays golf, and has rich people gatherings. They seemed to marry only other WASP’s and looked down on anyone trying to get into the society that could not, or would not “fit.” It really annoyed me when the main white WASP gentleman doing the interviews described an event he went to where he seen a WASP couple having a good time dancing but he described them as not being aesthetically pleasing enough to even be a part of WASP. He was wondering how they got in and thought that the standards of being a WASP were getting to low. It was just really blatant discrimination on the sole basis of appearance.

Also in this section they talked about the Jack and Jill club. This seemed to be a Who’s Who club for young aspiring black students, which seems to be like it could be a good thing, but it turned out to be nothing more then just one more way to separate different student and place them into different class structures. One of the things that they talked about is how some of the graduating students from this club would look at the yearbook for that year to see who would be going off to the same college they were going so they may be able to maybe match up with them and court them; making sure they were dating someone of a higher class, and making sure they married up. On the flip side it showed a group of mothers talking about the program and one of them asked a friend, who had a child in the program, about getting her an application so she could enroll her daughter, and her friend completely blew her off. So this program became just one more thing for some of the lower class black Americans to hurdle over to “feel accepted.”

The third section was called Salt of the Earth, and if I remember correctly I think the story on Tammy was in this section but I will focus on another story since Alexandrea already expanded quite nicely on this story. There was a young woman who grew up in KY, southern I think since they were saying they were an hour away from Nashville, on a farm with her family. She went to college for writing, went to Washington DC, and wanted to raise herself up in the social class and become a writer. Since she was a small town girl, and always has her small town niches, she has a little trouble assimilating into the big city society. Now since she left her hometown and tried to make something of herself, she is also almost treated as an outcast in her home town just because she left. Some of her old friends and even family feel abandoned. One thing that was stated was a quote that they used which was she “got above her raison.” This meant that she tried to fit into a social class higher then her up bringing. When she visits home now her dad won’t even talk about what she does in DC, it just makes him too uncomfortable to talk about it. This notion by itself is sad, since within their own family they’re letting class relations sour their family relationship.

The last section is titled Belonging, in which this section focused mostly on high school cliques which we’ve all experienced this social outcast system. I was mostly a choir/band geek myself. They conducted many interviews with students from Anderson High School and this was a school with the demography of a higher class of society. They even interviewed a few teachers and some even said it was a little uncomfortable when they drove home and their students had much nicer cars then they did that their parent bought for them. These kids all recognized all the different cliques that were around, and that they mostly hung around others that shared pretty much the same social status as them. Some of the girls said that they would hang out with other kids with social classes outside their, but just never had the chance. In my opinion this is completely conceited, since the opportunity for them is open every single day if they just take some initiative. The girl who made the most sense out of everyone interviewed was the out casted, nerdy girl. She said she didn’t really care what others thought of her, and she didn’t mind if she was by herself as long as she was true to herself. Those are wise words that it’s a shame none of the other people interviewed in that school seemed to portray.

To close this entry I want to just reinstate how this film is an eye opener to the idea of how class affects every single one of us in some of the slightest ways. Some ways may be even subliminal with how we present ourselves, to something as obvious as our material things we like to flaunt. Which I am no exception, I have a leather jacket that I love to wear during cooler weather because it makes me feel more confident. This has been an age old issue from the beginning of human consciousness, and I don’t think we as human beings will ever be free from the idea of a social class structure.

P.S. can you get my title reference?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdey7Qa52nM&feature=PlayList&p=C6D871A2A8C3C8EF&playnext=8&playnext_from=PL&index=7