Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway9980 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe people just don’t have clear class identities? I grew up middle, perhaps upper middle class in the US. Both of my parents, especially my mother, came from lower social economic backgrounds than what they provided for me. I was very close to my mom’s extend family as a kid. My grandparents grew up very poor. No running water, dirt floors type of poor. By the end of their lives they were upper middle class. Some of their kids did even better, others regressed to the mean.

We’re all still part of the same family. The shared values among the family are much stronger than any shared values across class identities. Class just doesn’t offer much explanatory value to me. I suppose I am upper middle class today, but I don’t think “oh yes, let’s instill some upper middle class values in our kids.” I don’t even know what those would be.

View on HN

Class identities are much weaker in the US: they're much more tightly tied to economic status and are thus fungible (almost anybody can move up or down the US class ladder by gaining or losing wealth.) We have a "cultural class" system as well, but it's similarly weak (with opportunity, nearly anybody can join the starving intelligentsia).

The author is in the UK, where class identities are much stronger and are not intrinsically tied to wealth (but are frequently associated with wealth, thanks to generational privilege).

An upper-class British acquaintance recently related to me that they'd never eaten certain foods that Americans think of as "quintessentially" British, because those foods are lower-class foods. They weren't afraid of eating them or snobbish about it, it just hadn't occurred to them that it was part of the international perception of their culture (because, to them, it just isn't their culture).

> Class identities are much weaker in the US

I think that they are weaker in the US, but also stronger than Americans think they are. Which can lead to confusion.

I think the patterns and consequences of American racism has resulted in a lot of what would be class tensions elsewhere being subsumed into race tensions in the US. The system is the US has resulted in a very high correlation between being working class and being Black or Latino. So a lot of stereotypes and harassment of working class people have been applied to that group, as well as on the other end attempts to improve the situation.

Certainly. America is not a post-class society, and in some ways has a more subtle and pernicious class system than the UK’s. At least the British are aware of their class shackles!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com