Prometheus 6

This Education and Class blog may have to become a regular.

In early November, Jeanne, on her Social Class and Quakers blog, posted a version of a staff development exercise on class privilege created by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Indiana State University. I won’t copy the exercise here; you can see it on Jeanne’s blog. In the original exercise, participants are asked to “step forward” if they experienced any of a number of elements of class privilege (parents graduating from college, staying in hotels on vacation) growing up.

Jeanne’s post generated a lot of discussion among other Quaker bloggers. The discussion was generally thoughtful, honest, and self-reflective, with a number of people remarking that they’d never before thought of some of these things as related to “privilege”.

But, the exercise then went viral, and over the past few days, my Technorati and Google blog alerts have been humming with hundreds of blog posts spreading what has now become a “meme”.

I’m fascinated. Why now? Why this list? In the year that I’ve been following blogs on social class, nothing else has generated this many posts, comments, and sometime vicious reactions.

The answer to those "why" questions involve the nature of our universe: everything must happen at some specific time, in some specific place. As for the rest, Jane plucks out some really interesting examples of people who are oblivious about their class privilege or offended by people pointing it out. She then asks

How is it that so many people can simultaneously disdain the poor and working class while also pretending to live in solidarity with “real” people who had to work for everything that they have? To argue that while they simultaneously enjoyed a great deal of material privilege growing up, they are not “privileged” people because their parents worked hard for what they had?

You don't have to be a member of the American Brahmin class to be this unaware, either. You don't even have to be evil. People assume everyone around them is pretty much like they are, barring some specific evidence. People don't realize that there's a class that will never own an island no matter how hard they work. A class that will never attend Harvard no matter how hard they work. They don't realize it...unless they are a member of that class.