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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

One thing I noticed during the years I lived in the USA was how unaware people seem to be of social class. In older societies, everyone is aware of their class from a very young age, but in America they seem to pretend that class doesn't exist there (or at least the lower classes seem blissfully unaware, and thus unable to voice it - to their own detriment).

I see it a lot in American racism as well. Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots (which is different enough that it requires a very different solution). Even the phrase "white trash" betrays the classim, whereby otherwise "white" (middle to high class) people are relegated to the lower ("black", "hispanic") classes (other terms like "white slavery" are also of a similar turn). And since it's extremely difficult to escape your class (as the author has discovered), the system is self-perpetuating.

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America's vieux riche spend exorbitant resources to muddy the waters of classicism and racism to prevent collective action. Look at the parent companies that own large swathes of media assets and look at what they push for information. Class issues are often reframed as race issues to disrupt collective action. This isn't to suggest there isn't residual overlap from historical racism, but there is a clear intention to prime Americans to believe most issues stem from racism rather than classism. Which leads to the issue you point out, Americans lack knowledge of classism, and I would suggest that they're overexposed to framed racism to avoid acknowledging classism.

The unfortunate consequence is developing political policy solutions that do not solve the underlying problems, which create additional problems. This seems ideal for vieux riche, who are insulated from the problems. Not to mention, that you generally require significant amounts of money to successfully run for public office. The rich are the gatekeepers of American society and want to maintain it that way, even if it causes chaos for people lower on the social hierarchy.

The narrative that America’s issues stem from socioeconomic classism instead of racism is just as biased and full of assumptions that it might as well be centrist propaganda. From a non-American looking outside, America clearly has both, and nothing screams American stupidity more than its people debating which of the two is the root cause of their suffering, as if the debate in itself matters and as if it’s supposed to be a contest of who’s more oppressed. The only thing that this whole debate does is for classism and racism issues to cancel each other out and for people protesting socioeconomic inequality to gloss over the issues of racism (I don’t see people protesting racism invalidating the existence of socioeconomic inequality in America). People who believe that racism is a class issue can’t even explain how it is so, or how come an affluent African-American man can still be discriminated against in affluent circles on the basis of his skin color. This is not where the discourse should be headed.

> I don’t see people protesting racism invalidating the existence of socioeconomic inequality in America.

I have. Mostly college kids in private colleges; they're in a bubble and only exposed to other well-off kids, which means that none of them have experience with classism and therefore they can dismiss it, whereas racism is a problem for rich POC and therefore, because it can affect their classmates, it's a huge issue (just like homophobia, transphobia, and sexism).

But it happens outside of that as well. One example is the framing of what happened in Flint as a solely racial issue, when the city is poor as hell (I made 28k and I believe I was in the top 20% of household income for the city) and about half its residents are white. The people making those arguments had never been to Flint and wouldn't have cared about the white students I saw who were so poor they only had a single set of clothes. Flint wouldn't have happened to a city of rich black people. (Of course, the fact that the city proper has more POC is partially due to the impacts of racism so the disproportionate impact is caused by racism and I wouldn't deny that).

Like how I see racism mostly dismissed from people who live in poor, white majority areas: It's really hard to understand the pervasiveness of racism if you're in that situation. (And from racists, of course, just like classists dismiss classism.)

"College kids in private colleges" are a tiny minority, are you sure that they comprise most of those protesting racism in the U.S. e.g. as regards policing and criminal justice? That's quite disappointing if true.

No. The OP just had mentioned not being sure if it DID occur, so I weighed in to say it did.

I wouldn't say they're most of the people against racism (particularly when it comes to criminal justice and incarceration issues), but they do have an outsized media presence precisely due to their privilege.

These topics are so filter bubbled I don't have a good sense of which, if either, of the two dismissals is objectively more common.

> "College kids in private colleges" are a tiny minority, are you sure that they comprise most of those protesting racism in the U.S. e.g. as regards policing and criminal justice? That's quite disappointing if true.

They are tiny minority with a disproportionately loud voice. They are also probably the group where the people with the loudest voices in society tend to be drawn from.

I only meant to say that in my subjective experience of the internet, I hardly see it happening but I did not discount that it could happen.

Anyway, this is really a small part of my entire comment.

It was, yes! Just a part I found interesting to contrast our bubbles.

I'm a nerd about the subjectivity of the modern internet experience.

> Flint wouldn't have happened to a city of rich black people.

Bizarre statement since no such thing exists. Previous attempts at creating a rich black city were met with violent white supremacy. The possibility a black community could be rich enough to buy influence to prevent its municipal water from being switched to a source that corrodes its water mains is so far removed from reality, it hardly seems useful to speculate on.

> the fact that the city proper has more POC is partially due to the impacts of racism

No, it’s entirely due to racism through explicit public policies such as redlining.

I'm going to assume you're referring to Black Wall Street, which happened 100 years ago in OK, and was only part of a municipality. I think whether or not there was a repeat of that would depend on a lot of things: Where it was, what group of black people were involved (for instance, a neighborhood of upper-class African immigrants is going to be treated differently than a neighborhood of well-off African Americans), etc. If it was a city with Flint's demographics (about 50-50 black and white) where the median income was 200k instead of 20k, I stand by my statement that it wouldn't have happened.

I'm also going to assume you're not from here/have never lived in the region. Flint's decline took place mostly AFTER the Fair Housing Act was put into place, and the reason there were so many black people in Flint to begin with is that (like Lansing and Detroit), the auto industry actually treated black people relatively decently. Unlike in Detroit, the white flight from Flint didn't result in the outer areas developing instead: The area just lost half its population because there were no more auto jobs.

It wasn't explicit public policies that made black people in Flint less able to leave, for the most part. Implicit and private racism played big parts, as does generational poverty and the latter generational affects of slavery (e.g. since most of Flint's Black people moved there in the 20s-40s and the city crashed in the 60s-70s, they didn't really have time to build the communities needed to do things like help them leave a newly dead Rust Belt city).

Flint in particular is a giant clusterfuck of interconnected issues of class, race, etc., which is why it was my example. (And also because I used to live there).

One problem I have with modern racial discourse is the insistence on flattening all history into one singular (usually American centric) model. Local history and context matters.

I'm from Cleveland, which is similar in its industrial history with race, but obviously different in other ways. My knowledge of Flint comes from books. With that out of the way, my experience doesn't jibe with the idea that racists aren't also going to be racist and xenophobic towards African (or Caribbean) immigrants, no matter how educated and hardworking "the good ones" are.

Housing discrimination didn't start with the FHA. It didn't even start with the New Deal-era Home Owners Loan Act. Those laws merely encoded the racial policies that created the segregation already in place. Sorry if I'm arguing a different point that what you're making here. I don't see how any of what you said comes from "class etc." when the reason why they were poor and separated from communities of support is because of race.

Local context matters, but I've lived in a few big cities and I think it's pretty tall order to show that your local racists are significantly different than the Median National Racist.

Hello, fellow Midwesterner! I apologize for the tone; these conversations often frustrate me, but I shouldn't have been rude. I want to lead with saying my thoughts here aren't meant to minimize racism; I believe that getting into the weeds on the details is necessary to come up with solutions that help people. (For example, a fair portion of my concern re: class is making sure that working class and poor POC don't just get a palette swap of their oppressors and have it heralded as progress).

I don't think racists in general are less racist to African/Caribbean immigrants, I think that the racism would be expressed differently. My point is that if you're a racist, you don't bomb things unless you're very sure you're going to get away with it, and upper-class immigrants are more likely (in general) to be well-connected and have the resources to fight back. Since overt racism is riskier, there are more microaggressions, 'I can't prove this is because I was Black but we all know, don't we?' type situations, etc.

You mentioned Flint's water crisis as being solely due to 'explicit public policies'; my point was by the time Flint started its decline that the racism had moved to being pushed through IMPLICIT means and by private companies. It matters because the mechanisms behind how racism acts determine where and how we should try to intervene.

Class enters the Flint situation in particular because:

- The entire city is poor as hell. Like REALLY poor. Like makes Cleveland look like it's doing well poor. It was routine for cars to die in the middle of the road and be left there because people couldn't afford to move them. Unfortunately, this means that homes are neglected and the city has no money. Which made the whole 'replacing or coating the pipes' question a clusterfuck, because in half the houses the pipes weren't in great shape to begin with, which makes it even more expensive to fix. The limbo of the city going so long without safe water was directly related to 'who should pay for it?' and if the residents or city had funds, it wouldn't have been such an issue.

- Some of the failure to address the situation came from false promises and utter failure on the part of the well off, including POC. Obama's visit and promises amounting to nothing, donations and invitations from celebrities not coming through, a ton of people involved in the cover up (especially in local government) were Black...etc. Hard to say it's 100% racism when the people hanging you out to dry are also Black.

I don't think there is such a thing as a Median National Racist, because racial history and relations vary so much throughout the country. Not that I'm making any claim about BETTER or WORSE: Just that the racism is different and I don't think there is a descriptive median.

Might be in a decade or so though, as the media defines one for us.

Temple Hills, Maryland, is upper middle class and predominantly black.

I don’t think there’s any way you can define $66k as upper middle class. That is below the statewide median.

> The narrative that America’s issues stem from socioeconomic classism instead of racism

¿Por qué no los dos? "Race" is merely a social construct, and subcultural differences are a big part of what defines that construct in the first place. And the whole point of referencing 'class' is that social and economic differences can in turn feed back on culture.

> ¿Por qué no los dos?

You should have read my entire comment before you replied.

I’m quite doubtful about your theory that there is a conspiracy of wealthy Americans to reframe issues as race issues. It’s plausible, but without evidence I find it counter intuitive.

What are we supposed to garner from looking at the parent companies of media assets? Time Warner owns CNN, Comcast owns nbc, etc… so what?

Much simpler explanation is that “Critical race theory” and similar veins of thought which view issues in terms of race at the expense of class were not born out of the media but from academia. Most journalists are highly educated and thus often have an academic viewpoint.

Anecdotal, but just from journalists I know, they are universally idealists, and I suspect that is common for journalists. The idea that they’re publishing narratives for the super rich seems far fetched.

$$$

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

> Class issues are often reframed as race issues to disrupt collective action.

How does reframing class issues as race issues disrupt collective action? Race issues lead to protests like Black Lives Matter, for example.

>In older societies, everyone is aware of their class [...], but in America they seem to pretend that class doesn't exist there

Americans aren't pretending because unlike England, the country itself was created without a monarchy handing out titles of nobility[1]. Europeans can trace deep historical bloodlines -- which further reinforces class distinctions and self-awareness across generations. However, America was built on immigrants arriving on ships where family records were lost.

So if one still insists on overlaying the word "classes" on top of America, it is very different from "class" in Europe. Therefore, social class in America is more about wealth rather than hereditary titles. The ability for money (e.g. become a millionaire/billionaire) to change your status in society means social class in the USA is fluid and can change.

Maybe a loose USA version of hereditary class might be families like Kennedys, Bushes, etc where the media nicknames the Kennedys "Camelot". Even so, a bricklayer who was the son of an Austrian village policeman and had a bloodline tainted by a bastard great-grandfather -- was able to marry into the Kennedy family. Why? Because Arnold Schwarzenegger became a successful multi-millionaire. The European-version of "lower class" in Arnold's family background wasn't a barrier in the USA.

>Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots

I think many do have pure and simple racism based on skin color. E.g. they don't care for black billionaires like Michael Jordan and they think it's wrong that a black judge sits on the Supreme Court. Yes, racism for some people may be (subconsciously) intertwined with class as you point out ... but for others, it's a simple dislike of black people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingdom

Paul Hill also married a Kennedy. I saw a movie about him, In the Name of the Father. To summarize its about a man who just because he was Irish got accused of terrorism and the police frame him, largely because they wanted to look like they caught the culprit of a bombing to save face. A halfway-martyr, lost decades of his life to imprisonment.

It had artistic merit. So with the Kennedy's remember they're Irish, so the Irish nobility was disintegrated by the English, all Irish are Irish nobility. And it has the most welcoming laws of returning, because it is actually far below it's peak population in the 19th century, when people were starving and escaping, the lowest point of poverty.

Like if you want a title do an online class, fuck. And it didn't work the same way, it was Celtic not Germanic nor Roman, much less conquest, Bronze Age traditions to this day.

So what you get instead is the origin of nobility, which are heroines and heroes. The Irish who made it in America attained worth, the whole premise of America is its the place to which people leave to come back--if they even feel like coming back--with reknown.

Nobody gives a shit whom Beowulf's father was either. I'm not sure it's addressed in the tale, it doesn't matter. What matters is Beowulf, the hero. And in fact the monsters he fought were descended from Cain, that's like nobility, Beowulf ripped the monster's fucking arm off with his own masculine strength, declining to use a sword because he considered himself his equal.

I think the additional question is one of History. You go to a new place, what happens to your History? It's very tied to place, time originally comes from the idea of wanting to understand the heavenly spheres, that was time. "When" comes from "where".

Except there's plenty of old-money (hereditary class) in the US that looks, talks and acts exactly like the "class" structures you're claiming are very different from those in Europe. You're arguing semantics because "it's different" in the US, which may be superfically true, but not meaningfully so.

Whatever you want to call it, there are de facto class structures in the US that operate as the functional equivalents of class in Europe. You are either born into these circles or you remain outside of them (for at least a few generations). Wealth is only one part of this mix, and while it certainly does pay for your tickets into elite events, it does not buy you into the circle.

> social class in USA is fluid and can change

And this is one of the major false-hoods that people believe to be true but simply isn't. Americans in particular suffer from this belief. Social mobility is lower than most people expect, and the trend has been heading downwards for years.

Also, the perspective here might be skewed. After all this is place that observes and connects with newly generated wealth and millionaires. Which could even be considered a entirely new and separate social class. Or multiple. From your average developer, to bay area developer in FAANG and like to those that made multi-million to billion dollar companies. And all this inside single generation.

Lower end is probably associated with your traditional professional classes. Then there is managerial classes. And finally the newly rich. Which might interact with others, but likely won't fully belong...

In essence, it's the 21st century equivalent of the "new money" industrialists of the 18th century. They weren't accepted by the established class either, and had to slowly bleed in over generations.

In fact, you still regularly hear the disparaging words "new money" today.

To be fair, flashy, tactless, and pointless displays of wealth for it's own sake is the kind of thing people are looking down upon when they use that term.

I was an engineer at a FAANG. The effects of pre-existing, generational social class are as strong there as anywhere else.

If you grew up old money, you get tapped for the best projects and will make Staff by 25, Principal by 30. If you don't have the technical abilities, they'll make you a manager. On the other hand, if you come from the rabble, you stay in the rabble--you get assigned regular grunt work and performance reviews actually matter to your future.

I’ve never seen this and I’ve been at two FAANG totalling six years

> If you grew up old money, you get tapped for the best projects and will make Staff by 25, Principal by 30. If you don't have the technical abilities, they'll make you a manager. On the other hand, if you come from the rabble, you stay in the rabble--you get assigned regular grunt work and performance reviews actually matter to your future.

I could not disagree with this more. I would say that tech, unlike legal, medical or other fields, is by far the most egalitarian. You can be a kid that comes from the "rabble" and make Staff/Principle if you are really good and committed.

Likewise I have seen many "old money" folks like you describe completely wash out. We had a few at my company get their foot in the door because the parents play golf with the owner. Sure they have the advantage in getting in, but once youre in if you aren't skilled technically, you're going to wash out very quick (both guys we hired were gone in ~3 months)

I think a lot of people might not notice it happen but it definitely happens and is common. And not just in FAANG's but in most companies. There are special people who, by virtue of something, end up being the "golden children" and are put on the express train through promotions. For reasons completely unexplainable if you believe in egalitarianism. You've got a team of people, and some NewGuy joins. They seem like your peer: they're at your level! You don't really know what their job performance is like. Then all of a sudden, they're Staff level, then Principal. Then the org-wide memo announcing that Executive X has moved on in their career and NewGuy is now Senior Director of your whole division. How TF did that happen? He was employee number 45519 a year ago! You can see it happen with actually-talented people and with bozos. It seems uncorrelated with how good at your job you are, and more correlated with less obvious/measurable things like your social standing, your background/pedigree, your "elite" mannerisms... it's hard to articulate what these things are when you're not part of the club, but they're there. You can see it in the way this class carry themselves: that haughty way they hold their head up, the fake but gorgeous smile, the handshakes, the similar speech patterns and word choices. It's like a secret code they share that's invisible to the rabble--like the aliens in They Live. They even all kind of walk the same way--that weird presence that is both carefree and commanding. Probably mannerisms they honed in finishing school, or in the Ivies or Stanford where they all seem to have come from. If you start looking for these things, you can squint and barely see them all over your company's leadership. There are always exceptions where one of the rabble got through, but they're rare.

Couldn’t disagree more.

In my org, half of the senior staff and executives weren’t even born in America. They were naturalized citizens or on work permits.

Not sure how those folks could be leveraging their social class in America.

> Not sure how those folks could be leveraging their social class in America.

One example off the top of my head: Indian caste discrimination in Silicon Valley [1][2]. Cisco was even sued by the state of California for such discrimination [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952698

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552047

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083

The caste system is not an American social class.

This sounds wrong. Old money people are not working at FAANGs, they’re investing in them. Old money people have enough wealth where you don’t need to code in an open office 60 hours a week. That is for the working class.

The old money kids don't have to use the open-plan offices, and they usually either get choice roles (not regular SWE work, but GoogleX stuff) or directly put on the management track (since they're almost never coding for more than 2-4 years out of school). They get put in as proteges of high-level people and what they do on a day-to-day basis doesn't matter; it's more like a college major than a career, something to say they did.

You're right that they don't need to work. They do it to legitimize themselves. And, of course, to make sure any genuine opportunities go to their social class and not the rest of us.

a good friend of mine who worked at a FAANG expressed similar sentiments. he is the son of a taxi driver and a christian healer and a person of color. his words were "G was a disneyland for rich white kids".

> Except there's plenty of old-money (hereditary class) in the US that looks, talks and acts exactly like the "class" structures you're claiming are very different from those in Europe. You're arguing semantics because "it's different" in the US, which may be superfically true, but not meaningfully so.

This. The idea that we were founded by the industrious poor of Europe doesn't really hold out. People came to the New World with all sorts of different motivations, and from all social classes. The rich who came over to get super-rich got super-rich and their descendants are now the elite. The poors who came over to work in the coal mines stayed poor and their descendants now work at Wal-Mart. And the one-sixth of this country whose ancestors were brought over against their will are still treated horribly because their skin color makes it evident (or at least likely).

Not only is social mobility rare, but there's a mean-reversion. Class doesn't prevent you from attaining wealth, but it makes it harder to keep it; there are so many forces in play that most people aren't even aware of, but that exist to keep long-term upward mobility at a minimum. You can get a PhD and work at a FAANG, and you're still going to lose in project allocation and in promotion battles to 23-year-olds whose fathers and grandfathers the VPs are afraid of.

And it's still happening. America is, compared to other first world countries, not the easiest to immigrate to. So out of all immigrants, who would choose to go to America (appreciating that many immigrants don't have much choice)? The ones most aligned with America's opportunities, so people who want to be capitalists. If you value a chance at getting rich over stability and safety, come to America. If you want a strong social safety net and aren't willing to arm yourself against your neighbors, go somewhere else.

What rich people immigrated here from Europe and founded dynasties in America?

How about one of the richest men in America? The son of a butcher:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jacob_Astor#Early_life

How about the Kennedys? Irish immigrants:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._J._Kennedy#Early_life

The Vanderbilts? From an indentured servant coming to America:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Vanderbilt#Ancestry

So colonialism?

It depends on your definition of dynasty, but they absolutely did.

Similar to the UK, most of these dynasties were based on real estate and failed to safeguard their wealth during the transition to the postindustrial era (post-civil war), unless they transitioned into finance/insurance.

Because of this, we don’t know their names today as well as we know the (post-)industrial names (your example of Astor is an exception because his story & wealth were singular, but even Astor isn’t well-known outside of NY).

John Jay, the various Roberts Livingston, the van Rensselaers,the Van Cortlandts, the Schuylers, Morris, etc.

These were people who had functionally feudal titles in post-revolutionary America, and many descendants retained them until the mid 19th Century.

They weren’t Windsors, Hohenzollerns or the uppermost crust of European houses. They were generally the descendants of Scottish, Dutch, or French elites who came to the new world once they caught wind of the killer opportunity provided by untouched and underutilized natural resources, in combination with a highly malleable set of local legal institutions. Many of them also had the motivation of fleeing asset seizures at home.

Having a feudal title doesn't mean they were rich. John Jay's ancestors came to America because the French government confiscated their property.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jay#Family_history

I didn't look at the others you mentioned. If you've got a cite that shows they came to America wealthy, feel free.

BTW, Astor is well known on the west coast. See Astoria, Oregon.

I guess this hangs on your definition of "came to America rich". America was a frontier, not the kind of place that rich people came to for fun, but the kind of place that people went to escape glass ceilings and exploit natural resources for profit.

It required capital and connections to make it big in the Hudson valley: many of the wealthiest families in the US at 1776 were descended from people of relative wealth and influence (again, not Windsors and Hohenzollerns), who found the british colonies to be a place where skill, capital and connections could be compounded into meaningful wealth at a far higher rate than their birth countries.

Jay's progenitor fled asset seizure in France to take up commodity trading in NY, where he became cozy with the established elites: Jay's mother was a Van Cortlandt, themselves married into the Van Rensselaers, who were among the founders and directors of the Dutch West India Company.

(Most prominent New Yorkers of the 1770s intersect with the Van Rensselaers). Alexander Hamilton married a Schuyler, a family whose history mirrors the Van Cortlandt's (wealth deriving from the furs trade, cemented with marriage to the "Vans").

Robert Livingston the Elder fled to the Netherlands from Scotland, where his well-to-do father had faced religious persecution. He ended up in New York, where he married a Van Rensselaer widow and was granted a "patent" to 160,000 acres of farmland along the Hudson.

---

South of the Potomac River, the stories are pretty similar if you substitute "fur trade" for "tobbacco trade".

e.g. James Madison's paternal grandfather was a man of influence and landowner in Virginia, who cemented his family's future influence with a marriage into the Penn family. The Penns, along with the Baltimores, represent an extreme end of the "arrived wealthy" spectrum.

>Except there's plenty of old-money (hereditary class) in the US that looks, talks and acts exactly like the "class" structures you're claiming are very different from those in Europe. [...] Whatever you want to call it, there are de facto class structures in the US that operate as the functional equivalents of class in Europe.

Both you and sibling commenter (zbentley) are making points that don't contradict what I was talking about in my reply to gp kstenerud. I'm not saying stratification, hierarchy, elites, etc don't exist in USA. Instead, I'm explaining why Americans don't seem to be aware of their class.

To re-emphasize the specifics that I was focused on, he commented: "In older societies, everyone is aware of their class from a very young age, but in America they seem to pretend that class doesn't exist"

I was dissecting his phrase "their class from a very young age" and how why Americans (e.g. USA children's brains) don't even know there are classes and thus, they're unaware which one they are in. Maybe one can call that self-awareness "class consciousness" or something similar but there's a reason Americans do not have it to the same degree as Europeans. In USA, the so-called "classes" are not _overt_ and _blatant_ to the same degree.

In contrast, some societies with overt & blatant classes:

- India Hindu castes with the "untouchables"

- feudalism with "lords" and "serfs"

- peerage with titles of nobility

America's particular circumstances of nation creation means the class system emerges from money & wealth rather than the 3 examples above from religion or monarchy. A young child in India in the "untouchables" class will be self-aware they're part of the untouchables. And likewise, a serf knows he's not a lord and a lord knows he's not a serf. But an American child in deep south Alabama won't necessarily know they are "hillbillies" or other derogatory terms like "white trash". These are class terms that others give them. In America, "classes" for many people are the proverbial "water that fish don't even know they're swimming in".

But to re-state your points a different way... Just because the USA doesn't have overt classes, it doesn't stop "invisible" classes from forming ("old-money") and functioning in similar ways. Some Americans authors are so exquisitely observant of subtle class differences such that they can write books where characters' self-awareness of class adds tension to their novels. Examples being F Scott Fitzgerald "The Great Gatsby" and Edith Wharton novels. Likewise, the readers of those books need to be aware of subtle class distinctions to see the significance of characters living in West Egg vs East Egg -- or that a Wharton character is driving a 2-wheeled horse & buggy instead of a more expensive 4-wheeled carriage.

The term "class" in the sociological sense originated in contrast to the old system of "estates". Originally, it referred to the "tax class" of a (male) person, which formed the basis for census voting rights in both the USA and Europe until well into the 19th century.

This is the reason why speaking of an "aristocratic class" remains somewhat inappropriate. The term "class" was introduced specifically to mark the difference between the old society, which was dominated by heritage ("estate"), and the new society, in which this has been replaced by wealth ("class"). That there was a lot of continuity from the old to the new order is another matter. Britian seems to be very special, because there the "upper class" is a mixture of old estate and new wealth (plus celebrities from academic, sport and culture), something that is more or less absent in the rest of Europe. While a poor Lord in England is still a Lord, a poor Graf in Germany is just a poor person.

> Except there's plenty of old-money (hereditary class) in the US that looks, talks and acts exactly like the "class" structures you're claiming are very different from those in Europe.

100%. You also have to keep in mind America is much younger as a nation compared to Europe, but the classism is trending it towards the hereditary classism found in Europe over time.

I think part of this is right. Up until Kennedy's presidency, the country was run by WASPs who make up most of what is called "old money". WASPs probably still exist in some form but I probably wouldn't call them the upper class anymore because they have no power or privilege. In fact, one of their exclusive gateways to retaining power, the Ivy League, has disavowed them and white people as a whole are the only race that is underrepresented relative to population size in the Ivy League. So I do not believe WASPs can claim to be the upper class anymore although I am sure they are relatively well off. Further, as a group Asians are among some of the highest earners so it would be hard to argue that they are part of a lower class despite being so in prior generations. So I do think class has changed in the US over the last 100 years.

WASPs might hold some prestige but I think as they lose power they become more irrelevant and less exclusive. I don't think it's straightforward right now who the upper class is. It feels like things are in a state of flux and amorphous or secretive. I completely agree net worth is not the only deciding factor.

The upper class will always be a small exclusive group by design so regardless of who is in it, social mobility is probably lower than most people expect. So to sum it up I only disagree with you about the power of "old money" in the US now. I think there is a somewhat parallel class with actual hereditary advantages that is replacing the "old money" class.

Could you spell out WASP?

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

I am trying to brute force it. It's about half way done at Wealthy Assholes. Need help decrypting the rest, though

edit: I see dzdt has provided something useful.

>> You are either born into these circles or you remain outside of them (for at least a few generations)

What can't Jeff Bezos do that he would be able to do if he had parents from a different class?

Get ~$300,000 investment from his parents to start Amazon?

His step father was an immigrant from Cuba who came to the US at 16 without being able to speak English. His father ran a bike shop.

That's old money?

Ordinary people buy houses for far more than $300,000.

...with a mortgage, and the house tends to maintain value. They don't have that kind of money lying around to throw into a risky business.

Not being willing to take the risk is very different from cannot raise the funds.

$300,000 is simply not an outsize amount of capital to start a business. People do it all the time. Expect to put out $1.3 to 2.3 million to start a McDonald's franchise, and those are everywhere. (Other franchises are less expensive, not more.)

The idea that one has to be rich to raise $300,000 is simply not true.

The ratio of people I've met who've taken out a mortgage to the number who've taken out a house-sized business loan must be well above 10,000:1. It's not clear that you're arguing from any basis in reality to suggest that they're the same in any way.

That's why those 10000 do not create Amazons. It's not that they cannot. It's that they will not.

It's like Bob and Ted have an equal financial position.

Bob: I just borrowed $10,000 and put it into Bitcoin!

Ted: Haha, you fool, that's so risky!

--- 5 years later ---

Bob: My bitcoin is now worth $1,000,000!

Ted: That's sooo unfair!

And remember, Bezo didn't have $300,000 either. He borrowed it.

The median home price in 1994 was $105k, so it was basically three houses back then.

I am not even sure this is really a Europe-wide thing. I migrated to the Netherlands from the US (West Coast) and class here is way closer to how it is in the US than in England for example. I understand (but can’t confirm) that France is quite egalitarian in comparison as well since the revolution.

Class (and income) in the Netherlands are very heavily education based (unless you have inherited money, but even then).

Curious , what are the schools in Netherlands that are considered exclusive? I always thought Netherlands university was not selective.

The universities themselves are not selective, any university would be ‘university’ (highest) level.

The middle level are now called Universities of Applied Sciences, which give out a bachelors, but as far as I know never a masters diploma.

The lowest level are vocational colleges, which don’t give you any internationally recognized credential at all (but do train you to do a variety of occupations).

You basically get sorted into one of these levels once you leave elementary school based on educational skill and aptitude (by your final year teacher), and while changing is possible, it costs you years (which still seem very precious at the time).

If you meet any Dutch person outside the Netherlands they almost per definition are middle level or higher, because anyone without a bachelors diploma often doesn’t get to immigrate (depending on country).

Thanks for the insight, although this does not sound nearly as elitist as the French, UK, Chinese, and American university systems.

Netherlands seems fairly egalitarian by contrast to these other systems.

> I understand (but can’t confirm) that France is quite egalitarian in comparison as well since the revolution.

In theory it is supposed to be egalitarian, and everyone will pay lip service to it. In practice, not so much.

As the sibling said about the Netherlands, there very much is a sort of class system built around education. When you meet someone, usually, the first question is "what do you do for a living" and the second is "where did you go to school".

People will also pay attention to the way you talk. If you have a "hood" accent, you'll be considered "less than" someone "without" accent. If you don't speak fluent French, it's also "better" to speak with an English/American accent than, say, eastern European.

> Even so, a bricklayer who was the son of an Austrian village policeman and had a bloodline tainted by a bastard great-grandfather -- was able to marry into the Kennedy family. Why? Because Arnold Schwarzenegger became a successful multi-millionaire.

For context, Schwarzenegger met Maria Shriver after he had gotten the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor for Stay Hungry(1976) while in an open relationship with another woman and married around a decade later after his big breakout in Conan and Terminator.

He was by then already a successful bodybuilder, she didn't really marry a bricklayer, and anyway it's not like you can't find similar example in European nobility.

I agree and you've summarised what I wanted to say.

One addition: social mobility is possible in almost any class based society. So using one such example does not prove that class in USA==wealth.

European aristocracy doesn’t have a lot of taboos left around marrying from the lower classes.

Maybe the most prominent example is Victoria, the Crown Princess of Sweden. She married her personal trainer, a gym entrepreneur and son of an ordinary civil servant, who received the titles of Prince and Duke.

Europeans have been famous for marrying "rich but common" Americans for so long it's a running joke in Wodehouse books.

Hell, Harry did it too.

Class is more than lineage or wealth or race. The signifiers run much deeper than that. To use an example from https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1237182.html -

>So, for instance, if I don't like the medical care I get from the doctors my state-subsidized health plan (thanks, Mitt!) gives me access to, I can't just whip out my checkbook and buy myself care from a better reputed specialist. Being poor might yet shorten my lifespan, as it curtails my access to care. But on the other hand, if I present with a serious booboo to just about any doctor, I will have narcotic pain relief offered me with no questions asked, because someone of my social class is not suspected of being one of those naughty "med-seeking" addicts. The decision of whether or not to trust me with a prescription for percoset is not made on the basis of the MassHealth card in my pocket marking me one of the precariat, but my hair style, my sense of fashion, my (lack of) make-up, my accent, my vocabulary, my body language, my (apparent) girth, my profession (which, note, doctors often ask as part of intake), and all the other things which locate me in a social class to observers that know the code. Contrariwise, a patient of mine – who is a white woman of almost my age – who is covered with tattoos, speaks with an Eastie accent, is over 200lbs, and wears spandex and bling and heavy make-up, gets screamed at by an ER nurse for med-seeking when she hadn't asked for medication at all, and just wanted an x-ray for an old bone-break she was frighted she had reinjured in a fall.

All that bloodline stuff is real, but it’s a pretty small fraction of the population. Most people’s experience of class difference in the UK is economic, not hereditary (I think).

This is misinterpreting both the UK and the US in important ways. Wealth is germane to class in both, sure. But after that, most of what you said is incorrect.

Family status in the UK is less about history than shared context: not "what titles did your ancestors hold?" (that might be highly relevant for the fractional upper crust, but not so much for others), but "did you go to the same (exclusive) schools as others in your social class?" and "did your last generation or two originate from the same (exclusive) areas?"

The same is true in the US, ironically even more-so in some ways: while people certainly can change their status by becoming [mb]illionaires, that's both vanishingly rare and insufficient on its own.

Rare: in that mobility in the US is almost nonexistent--so rare that many elite groups and institutions presume that none of their members transitioned into the elite by acquiring wealth. Whether mobility is greater in the US or the UK is a belabored and unclear argument I won't get into.

Insufficient: as the article mentioned, there is a massive set of social context and mores that are shared by elites that are not necessarily shared by someone who recently became wealthy. This works almost identically to that context in the UK, just with superficial differences.

That context amounts to an entire culture--which can be learned, or faked, but doesn't automatically switch on when you e.g. inherit money or sell a business to become wealthy. This isn't quite the same as the distinction between "old money" and "new money"; shared elite-culture context can be built in a single generation: a newly wealthy person is not automatically able to navigate and benefit from existing elite cultural structures, but if they research the shared background of people already in those cultures, they may put their children into e.g. the elites' schools or communities, at which point their children have a good chance at becoming "authentic" (really "passing", since authenticity is sort of a tautological quality here) members of the elite themselves.

Everyone can point to an outlier to these phenomena--someone that proves that you can "break into" or are falsely excluded from a class by some criteria. You point to Schwarzenegger, others point to various rags-to-riches stories, or stories of people who carefully research and dissemble to enter elite cultural circles. While those stories certainly exist, outliers are, by their nature, less relevant than the rules that govern the overwhelming majority of class dynamics in these societies.

> in that mobility in the US is almost nonexistent

What? I personally know lots of people who went from zip to millionaire.

Even in the 1990s, it was estimated that Microsoft had minted over 10,000 millionaires, not including the value of their homes. And that's just Microsoft.

You need to think in percentage and not in hard money.

How many of the people born in the first quintile of wealth in the 80s are still in the first quintile? How many people born in the last quintile are now in the first quintile?

If the answer is 20% to both, great, you have no predetermination of wealth at all. if you have 50%/10%, you have what is expected in a country with correct social mobility (Most western countries post WW2 until the 70s). If its 95%/2%, or less, you have an almost non-existant wealth mobility.

"almost nonexistent" means a lot less than 20%.

> correct social mobility

a meaningless term

And I know none. I don't recall ever actually meeting a Microsoft employee either, and I've been in tech a long time ( albeit in another country )

But picking Microsoft as an example or any of the faangs feels wrong, because they are the outliers. Millions of companies don't get that big and millions more fail.

The fact that a very small percentage of people do move between wealth classes and possibly social classes doesn't actually negate the original statement.

Maybe, but I think two things contraindicate that.

1. The first is a difference in degree. Millionaires (even in 1990s) money do not necessarily have cultural access to the kind of elite circles discussed in the article. Now, you might be right--I'm not going to no-true-scotsman the entire claim, as I have no way of deriving a particular asset value that makes access likely--but it does seem unlikely to me that "millionaire" has substantial overlap with the multiple-vacation-homes types of people attending the gathering in the article. Similarly, mobility fluctuates; the '90s were a time of both elevated economic prosperity and elevated opportunities to transition upward in economic class. Now not so much.

2. I think we can refute the statistical claim, that mobility is less scarce than I stated. That one we can verify with data--as others in this thread have pointed out, anecdotes are insufficient. Numerous analyses indicate that "upward mobility" (which, fair enough, is often a flawed measure) has decreased or remained stagnant since the '70s. Additionally, elite classes have widened the asset-value gap that needs to be crossed by someone looking to join those classes via wealth alone.

In short: zip to millionaire might not be relevant to the claim; even if so, it happens less frequently (per capita if not absolutely) now; when it does happen it is less likely to imbue the kind of cultural status/class change that I mentioned due to the increased economic "distance" that the people in that status/class have accumulated in the last decades.

> Americans aren't pretending because unlike England, the country itself was created without a monarchy handing out titles of nobility

Except in California, where you can inherit property tax valuation from your parents and grandparents. Or transfer your below-market valuation to another property. Oh, and your valuation is required to decrease over time in real-dollar terms.

> Maybe a loose USA version of hereditary class might be families like Kennedys

This is ironic as Joe Kennedy (the patriarch) struggled hard against being an outsider for being Catholic.

As far as I can tell, discrimination against Catholics has simply disappeared in the US.

It might come back due to obviously-bad Catholic ideas.

I think this is because in the U.S., everyone is operating under the (false) assumption that the American Dream ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream ) is still alive.

Maybe it was true at one point that anyone could move upwards in class with enough determination, but it seems to be really rare now. Regardless, in social settings people still act as if it's a thing.

In other cultures people seem to be less oblivious to the idea that upward social mobility is incredibly difficult.

Everyone says that american dream is not true, yet america keeps attracting the world's most ambitious people. Those people can't be all stupid - it's not an illusion.

The American dream is that you can supposedly just “work very hard” and move up in society, which is demonstrably false compared to many other countries with similar levels of wealth.

Being of a somewhat established middle class background before moving to the US to “make it big” is not the American dream.

So in that sense it’s most definitely an illusion.

Honestly it's a bit ironic posting your arguments on this forum. I somewhat agree, but technology has taken people all around the world to the top 0.1% of wealth in America and does so every day

Yes, but only a small portion of people are working in tech, and those who are tend to be middle class white males anyway.

Whites are not overrepresented at most tech companies relative to their share of the population. Which major tech companies are over 60% white?

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft all have a lower share of white workers than the general US population.

But how is that the American dream?

I myself work in tech and have nice academic credentials and all, and I come from from a “working class” background. I would never consider that the American dream though, because it was all paid through the welfare state of the country that I live in, and not because of any particular fortuitous circumstances.

That I use American-invented technology to generate revenue seems to be wholly besides the point of the American dream.

I have a similar background, but how is:

> I would never consider that the American dream though, because it was all paid through the welfare state of the country that I live in, and not because of any particular fortuitous circumstances.

Not the American dream? Education even if subsidized by the state (more so 30 years ago) still involves a lot of work, we still had to study hard while getting through our part time jobs to cover living expenses.

Working very hard was never really necessary for moving up in the world. The mindset to make other people work for you goes a lot further.

The American Dream is about living a comfortable, prosperous (as in more than enough, not necessarily rich) life. The 1950s family with 2.2 children, a car, and a house of your own with a white picket fence. It's evolved since then, but the American Dream is not about moving classes, it's about a comfortable life. And from my observation, most people can achieve this, except in the coastal cities, where single family homes with a white picket fence either no longer exist or are expensive.

This is only true for native stock Americans. Immigrants do very well here, and it's far far easier to become rich in America than it is anywhere else. The American dream is as real as ever. Income mobility could be a bit easier in Australia, I guess, but I'd be hard pressed to think of many places where it was as possible to climb the social and income ladder. Of course, in America we don't have much of a safety net, so if you have ambitions to climb you gotta be careful not to fall.

> Of course, in America we don't have much of a safety net, so if you have ambitions to climb you gotta be careful not to fall.

These things aren't unrelated or coincidentally occurring in the same place though. The US permits kinds and degrees of exploitation in the name of building wealth that are not possible or acceptable in its "peer" nations.

Define exploitation.

It’s the American Dream not the American Entitlement. Dreams rarely come true, it’s always been like this.

In some ways yes. In other ways - I suspect that a fair amount of the "unaware" is a "learn to publicly pretend that it doesn't exist" behavior. Think about the "polite & socially correct" ways of talking about Santa Claus, and how easily people follow those rules. (Yes, for social class, there's a creepy 1984 atmosphere around this.)

My own "behind closed door" experience with a small circle of older, middle-class whites is that people are very aware of social class. Associating with it, achieving it, maintaining it, displaying it, and/or faking it are very high, long-term priorities. Both for themselves and their children. You just can't say it.

My wife's mother told her fairly young Santa didn't exist after much questioning the practicality of it with her. After confirming her suspicions, my wife told all of her classmates, which prompted an angry call to her mother.

The conversation went something like

Teacher - "I am going to have to discipline her if she keeps telling the other children Santa isn't real."

Her mother - "Well, he's not, right?"

Teacher - "Well yes but she can't say that"

Her mother - "Well, why don't you talk to the principal, discuss this conversation, and call me back"

That was the end of the story.

There's something to be said for respecting others' beliefs, no matter how incredible. I wonder if your wife's mother would be singing a different tune if we replaced Santa Clause with God in your example.

To me, it's about respecting others as parents. It's not about 'lying to your kid', it's about realizing that treating other parents to a random meltdown after school because Susie said Santa isn't real isn't ideal.

If you lie to your kids, don't be surprised when they find out and are angry at you.

Kids are not always equipped to handle the truth, nor they will necessarily be able to comprehend it.

What truth do they have to handle if you don't start with a lie?

We give gifts to each other on other holidays, birthdays, and even for no reason at all. Isn't that a better thing to teach a child to comprehend than a made up sky person who sneaks in your house after dark and who is constantly watching what you do, even while you're asleep?

You can tell your kids the truth, just also teach them to mind their own business, essentially.

The ideal thing to do would probably be to tell the teacher/school admin at the beginning of the year that the child knows Santa isn't real and have the teacher pull them aside before the class Xmas party and reaffirm that your kid is so super mature for knowing the truth but since the other kids aren't as grown up as they are, they've gotta keep the secret.

You can definitely not do Santa but also find out ways not to make parenting your kid's friends and classmates difficult (because if you do, other parents will avoid you and you hurt your kid socially!)

How long is it ok to lie to a child once they figure out the ruse though? Her mother tells the rest of the story much better and how she tried to dance around it without lying to her kid, but ultimately she caved, and despite telling her daughter to keep it quiet.. kids with secrets are dying to share them.

It also isn't a matter of belief. If you show me a grown parent that legitimately believes Santa will bring presents to their kids, they'll only be disappointed once. It's a marketing gimmick convenient for parents because it encourages good behaviour. It would be far more useful to not put them through the eventual trauma of realizing it later in life and instead focus on gifting gifts to each other in the spirit of some holiday because they care about each other. Instead we all play a stupid game that involves lying because we're too afraid to be the one who isn't.

What if another family is foreign, and has not such myth or custom? How does that child feel in an environment where the people teaching them are telling them their own parents are lying to them?

Respecting a belief is one thing. Pretending it is true is another.

I’m fairly certain the principal agreed with the teacher but didn’t think the fight was worth it.

> people are very aware

I think so too: I found this article fake. There is no way the author can be so self-aware and yet so confused.

The author is not at all confused.

She knows about a lot of what she doesn't know, and would need to know to be able to do what those around her do. She knows that the routes to obtaining key details are closed to her.

yes: its the things she claims she doesn't know that I find fake.

I don't know them either.

Am I fake?

Like her acquaintances, I imagine I could puzzle out much of it, but in all honesty I would be guessing.

"learn to publicly pretend that it doesn't exist"

I definitely see this with public school redistricting where I live as the population of some parts of my city surges for apartments while neighborhood housing population stays relatively static.

The anti-redistricting argument seems to be a vague, "this will break up the community". The pro-redistricting argument is naturally that, "this will increase diversity", regardless of how diverse a school district already is. So nobody really discusses the problem head-on.

Agree.

For instance, I always found it fascinating how the peasant kids always found one another/grouped together whenever there were gatherings of gifted kids or during college programs.

And people are openly suspicious of people moving in directions they shouldn't- in both ways. My mother was a defector from a decently well-off family (they were abusive), and the discomfort people have expressed over the years whenever she drew on her childhood or had more 'high brow' interests than they expected out of a high school dropout who worked in a warehouse is fascinating.

And also, as someone who has talents that are more put to use in careers held by the upper-middle+ class, they are not comfortable with my refusal to disavow my more peasant/'lower' tastes and habits and don't consider them problems. Food is a huge one, for example. They're so assured of their own superiority that the idea that you have no desire to emulate them is baffling.

One thing I’ve noticed about middlebrow online commenters is that they think that poor people are unaware that they are poor and that there exist people that are of median and rich means. That they themselves (the middlebrow online commenters) are somehow more aware of the plight of the poor—many of them from a distance since many of the commenters are middle class—than the poor people themselves.

The "white savior" is still alive, and the more the unwashed masses resist the obvious good the more it grows.

You see it publicly and more vociferously after an election.

It is objective fact that the overwhelming majority of underclass people in the US consider themselves "middle class".

They are very successfully manipulated to vote for people who will deny benefit to people like themselves in the (sincere, induced) belief that it would mean taking from themselves to give to people even lower.

It is the bedrock principle of "conservative" politics, that successfully keeps the upper class from ever needing to pay their fare share. The underclass have been taught to carry them on their shoulders, and like it.

Socially liberal middle class Democrats on the other hand—the would-be saviors of the “underclass”[1]—are convinced that they are voting for the progressive party and not merely the more socially liberal business party which is more interested in maintaining the duopoly than they are in winning against the Rs. No brainwashing going on there.

[1] Half of eligible voters don’t even vote in federal elections. And propensity to vote correlates with socioeconomic class. You say “underclass”. Well, is someone from the underclass more likely to vote R? Or not vote at all?

Sure, the Democratic Party is captured by corporate interests. It is the only way to stay in the game. Lots of sincere people involved would like for it to better represent actual people. But politics is called "the art of the possible" for reasons.

95+% of Americans are underclass. (Between 1945 and ~1975 there was a pretty strong middle class. By 1990 it was gone.) Of those of them who vote, about half vote for each party. The rest, who knows?

"fair share".

When you’re an immigrant, you might have been a certain class in your old country but you are the lowest class in your new country.

You still have some elements of refinement, have resources and don’t subscribe to the attitudes of the lower class.

So you naturally find yourself back into those circles and the diversity alone blurs the lines. There is still an underlying attitude to wealth, work and life that is preserved across cultures.

A person born into a low class sometimes can adopt those attitudes but it usually doesn’t come naturally

White trash is a way of behaving though, not really a class of people. Is it not possible to be poor and not trashy? Every poor person needs to set off fire works and have an untrained pit bull?

I think your confusion on this issue proves OP correct that class in America is a silent issue.

Explain what I'm getting wrong? Acting trashy isn't exclusive to poor people. Remember paris Hilton in her 20s?

Sure, but she wasn't white trash, she was rich and famous and got invited to all the cool rich and famous parties. She was being eccentric, and perhaps sometimes went slumming, but that didn't change her social class.

she was wealthy and trashy. how is a description of behavior a class in society? anyone at any moment can stop being white trash, just stop acting trashy. Youll still be poor, sure, but not white trash.

You don't understand the point. An important aspect of class is what you like to do, what you consider ok, what you appreciate or accept in others. People who would be catalogued by others as "white trash" do not consider their behavior to be "trashy" in this sense, they don't think there's anything wrong with it.

You saying "just stop being trashy" is exactly proof that you view them as lower class than yourself. It's similar to people who think saying "ain't" is somehow less correct than "isn't", or that rap music is uncultured. All class markers.

i think your mixing up terms like class and culture. not all low class people have the same type of behavior.

> what you like to do, what you consider ok, what you appreciate or accept in others.

this is describing a culture

> exactly proof that you view them as lower class than yourself.

i don't think you understand what your talking about now. another post said the same thing. trashy is undesirable behavior from people. not acting trashy doesn't move you between classes. You just stop fitting the description of trashy.

You're hearing something that other people are not if you've ever heard someone refer to Paris Hilton as "white trash." They might call her "trashy," but never white trash, because that would be absurd. She calls you white trash.

You think of class as layers of wealth. But that's only part of it. The most important part is culture.

>Do they understand how little of their world I’m familiar with? Do they understand how much implicit knowledge they take for granted that I don’t have?

If you have that knowledge, you have the connections to regain your wealth. The people who act trashy, if they would learn to not act trashy, they most likely would change class - have different friends, make more money.

Class and culture are mixed up, they can't be completely separated.

Also, when you call some behavior "trashy", it's undesirable from your point of view. The people engaging in it may not find it trashy at all.

I think Thomas Sowell has some interesting scholarship on the topic, with regards to the roots of lower class culture in America.

If you look at this from a class perspective instead of race (hard in the current media environment) it makes sense.

Rather than focus on the white in “white trash” think about the word trash.

Class is relatively subtle because it is context dependent - classic example: a rich person wears ripped jeans to show they are rich, a poor person wears ripped jeans because they can't afford new jeans. And the situation seems silly until you cotton on to the insight that this game is being played around the ambiguous middle who can afford new jeans, but if they wear ripped jeans would be mistaken for the poor...

"White trash" would be a reference to a culture - beliefs, expectations and norms held by a group of people. Paris Hilton may have acted trashily, but is not part of that culture. The beliefs, expectations and norms that she is working to would be different and probably upper class ones.

I'm a little surprised you got downvoted on this. Where I am in Ohio, "white trash" doesn't mean "poor people who happen to be white (in addition to brown people who are by default trashy)", it implies going above and beyond to create misery while indulging in stereotypically white rural culture. The people in the apartment across the street from me who shout in the street about their domestic issues at two in the morning and have every cop car in town at their door every couple of weeks are White Trash. And unlike most people involved in issues of social class, they could instantly become Not White Trash by just knocking it off.

I think people are defining words differently or just being argumentative, your experience is exactly how ive seen white trash used, living on the coasts on the US.

Associating a class-based epithet with the worst behaved people you know isn't an argument against the existence of stereotyping the poor.

It's even worse, really. If you call somebody "white" trash, you're noting that this is a white person in a situation that you would expect of a nonwhite person. Expecting nonwhites to be poorer in the US is rational. Expecting nonwhites to be badly-behaved, stupid, and criminal is just racist. I'm sure you'll object to this, but I guarantee you don't call anybody "black trash."

It's an unfortunately named epithet. Where I grew up, the slur was "trailer trash" which is also nasty but is at least inclusive of all races.

I guess in part it's become a replacement for "redneck". Watching and listening to some older media, I swear they were using "redneck" closer to how someone would use "white trash" nowadays.

While I still think "redneck" carries a negative connotation in many places, it also seems to be a lot less negative nowadays, And I'm more likely to hear it in the context of self identification or (while somewhat still derogatory) to refer to a kinda idealized version of an unruly and unsophisticated, but fun rural people, and to many, the new redneck stereotype is a sort of role model. Hell, half the "rednecks" I knew in HS were middle class kids who's parents had good job and lived in nicer suburbs than my parents could afford.

There have been some artists trying to take back the "white trash" moniker and use it in a "yeah that's what I am, what about it?" sort of way.

The terms "white trash" and "redneck" have some overlap but they are not equivalent. The former denotes a socioeconomic class while the latter denotes a specific perspective of the world.

There's a lot of "redneck pride", but I don't think anybody has "white trash pride".

They may not use the exact words "black trash", but I think terms like "ghetto" are largely equivalent. And it's not just about material wealth, you can have "ghetto" behavior and be very rich.

I don't object to expecting everyone, regardless of skin color or ancestral origin, to act polite, intelligent, and law-abiding.

I will make the case that Elon Musk is the premier example of white trash.

We don't call him that because he's rich.

The term "white trash" denotes a socioeconomic class with distinctive cultural affectations stemming from having grown up in a very poor rural environment. The term is also regularly used as an insult against people not of that class, because it is viewed as such a low status thing to be. You can be educated and well-behaved and still unambiguously be white trash, and commonly referred to as such by other people both descriptively and pejoratively. It isn't a choice per se.

People who leave that environment are often very conscious that they are discriminated against for having the affectations of that class and try to erase them. Many people who grew up as white trash will self-identify as such in certain contexts, even if they no longer are, because it accurately conveys the socioeconomic class they came from and are not ashamed of it per se though people may treat them poorly for it.

I grew up as the platonic ideal of white trash. No one can tell today and people are surprised if they find out. When I travel into that environment I can still code switch.

In my country (the UK) the wage stagnation, increasing progressive taxes and rising living costs, anti small business legislation mean that there is no longer a distinction between e.g. working class and middle class. Everyone is struggling (of course the middle class still less so). You have majority of people just about managing and then 0.1% the rich, who don't pay taxes and live in parallel universe.

There's struggling, and there's "grab Starbucks on the way to work" struggling...

> And since it's extremely difficult to escape your class.

This idea that it's 'extremely' difficult to escape your income class is commonly spread and factually incorrect.

It's true that upward economic mobility is lower in the USA than many other developed countries, but it's not 'extremely' difficult. In fact, of people born in the poorest quintile, more than 50% rise out of that quintile, and ~10% climb to the top quintile.

Not only is this idea incorrect, I think it's pernicious because it robs people of their sense of agency/control to improve their lot in life, and turns them into victims.

Source: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...

You’re correct about the connection of classism and racism. I believe outside of that class largely doesn’t matter due to the many geographical cultural differences. Coastal classism will be different than southern classism, etc. and it’s just too much of headache to keep check of this and care. You think a rancher in Wyoming who owns a ranch with acres of land cares about Wall Street bankers? How do you measure class here?

Or maybe it’s just that Americans believe they are all temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.

Even in Germany don't like to explicitly talk about class, and I think it might be for the same reason the US doesn't like to: the most cogent notion of class isn't nobility vs commoners anymore, it's patricians vs plebeians, or the bourgeoisie vs workers. And while the old school Marxist analysis might be partially or completely wrong when it comes to finding solutions, the concepts of workers, workers aristocracy,lumpen proletatiat, petty bourgeoise vs grand bourgeoise etc. are very very applicable in analysis today.

The small store owner struggling to make ends meet and potentially "exploiting" their workers because otherwise they can't compete with Walmart is the modern petty bourgeoise, programmers sitting on golden cages complaining about meaningless jobs are the workers aristocracy etc. You can also further refine this analysis and remove the last I'll fitting things. There isn't really a good fit for the worker aristocracy owning stocks but not really wielding influence.

But what all of these (attempted) analyses of class have in common is that the are leftist, which in the US doesn't fly as easily culturally as it might in Europe - and even then, people avoid placing themselves in a lineage with Marx for historical reasons.

> In older societies,

Which ones? England and some north europe maybe. It's not an important thing really in most old societies. In fact british classism looks outdated and cringe to me.

The classes got wiped out in all Central and Eastern Europe countries which went through communism. Pretty much all of their wealth was confiscated and they were persecuted to a various degree. From society's perspective, it's actually one of the positives of going through the horror of communism - the societies were reset to be much more egalitarian. Even to this day, wealth disparity in post-communist countries is lower than in Western Europe - there wasn't enough time yet for the true billionaire elite class to emerge from the egalitarian soup.

Aren’t the new elites just the party elites? The ones who are not seen publicly and elect the party leader? It seems to me like they get full reign on economic development projects - which they loot to enrich their families. And once the country goes post-communist these same elites remain in control of the institutions and industries they helped set up.

At least in Poland, for whatever reason, the communist apparatchicks mostly didn't get rich off of their power. They had a higher standard of living - but that meant a house and a car, and not a small flat and a bus pass, like most of the population. I think the ideology was still strong enough to make such behaviours completely non-palatable and would mean exclusion from the party. Only in the eighties, when it was clear that the system is broken beyond repair, the communist values crumbled and the elites started to accumulate wealth. Even with that, there are very few if any former high party official on contemporary Poland's top 100 wealthiest people list. Of course, if the system continued to reign, as is in China's case, the people at the top of the party would probably amass giant wealth.

It's exactly as you say, imo, it's class and wealth, not a race issue.

But how to talk meaningfully about resolving a class/wealth issue, when it is framed as a race issue? You can't. First you need to correctly diagnose the problem. And so many talking heads etc are invested in a race problem..

I tend to think mis-framing the issue is intentional. It is a divide and conquer strategy, that keeps the oi polloi arguing amongst themselves.

"Trading Places" is still the best movie about class in America.

Eyes Wide Shut is a very good movie about class in America as well.

I agree. Tom Cruise was also well-cast for that. He typically plays hot-shots, and here he again is a hot-shot upper-class doctor, but one who by happenstance brushes with forces in the society that are way out of his league and whose existence he didn't even suspect. He comes out of it thoroughly humbled.

> Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots

Americans will easily hand the mantle of national oppression over to Ukrainians, but even though the US Supreme Court recently attacked indigenous communities, which barely made a blip in US corporate media, you don't hear much about America's national oppression of the Sioux or the Cherokee. You hear instead about "racism".

While Africans in the US face class oppression, they also face national oppression.

> how unaware people seem to be of social class

Is that not a manifestation of "the american dream", where "if you work enough, you too can be a millionaire"? It appears to me that too many people believe they are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, blissfully unaware that by design the deck is stacked against them.

That's exactly one of the types of unawareness that GP talks about: just acquiring a lot of money will not get you to a higher class all by itself. The idea that a blue collar worker who wins the lottery would suddenly become a higher class would be laughable in (let's say) Britain. You would still be lacking all the mannerisms, connections, skills, etc that serve as the true barrier to moving between classes. It typically takes a generation or two between for a family that has acquired money to actually become "upper class", often longer.

In my experience Britain is an odd case. The school system’s main purpose seems to be to segregate people by class and to perpetuate the class system. One of the results is that “working class” people develop different accents and manners from people with other backgrounds. It takes ages to relearn how to speak and how to behave.

> Britain is an odd case. The school system’s main purpose seems to be to segregate people by class and to perpetuate the class system. One of the results is that “working class” people develop different accents and manners from people with other backgrounds.

That's not a result of the school system. It's how things naturally occur everywhere.

The British school system is explicitly classist. To the point that what they call "public schools" are actually among the most private and exclusive by any reasonable standard.

So? If you take a phenomenon that occurs everywhere, add a classist school system to it, and observe that it still occurs exactly the same way as before, how do you conclude "This is a result of the school system!"?

It doesn’t happen everywhere. People in Italy don’t talk about the “working class” like they do in the UK and I’ve never heard anybody claiming they were a member of the “working class”, let alone people claiming that as if it was something to celebrate or to be proud of. There isn’t a “working class” accent in Italian, the closest thing is marginally educated people that can’t use half of the verb moods and tenses. Romans speak more or less homogeneously, likewise in other cities. Children are not segregated by class, so the child of a doctor may be in the same class of the child of the mayor, of a child that gets free meals and of another that lives in a squatted flat. They mix and they don’t develop different accents.

Instead in the UK people debate this class idiocy ad nauseam almost daily. They spend a significant amount of time and money to ensure their children don’t go to the same school as children from lower social classes (and as soon as you make a child, they’ll bombard you with their insanity). This is of course never stated explicitly and I suspect they are not conscious of that.

This is a country where even the supermarket where you buy groceries will be used to infer your class status. For instance, while I don’t know what my class is supposed to be, I’ve been told that I’m at least middle class because Waitrose is the cheapest place where I buy food. I’m posh and whatnot class because I occasionally go to the opera. Once I recognised the Thieving Magpie and told a colleague the name of its composer, that earned me the accusation of being megaclass. Once I was rented a flat, the landlady told me, because she could tell from my manners that I must come from a rich family (in fact I don’t). My girlfriend (that earns minimum wage and whose parents are cleaners) was suspected of being from the upper middle class because of how she holds cutlery (not as well as she should, if you asked me).

> This is a country where even the supermarket where you buy groceries will be used to infer your class status.

This is routine in the United States. And pretty much anywhere else with more than one grocery store. Grocery demands are highly informative as to social class; where you buy groceries is one of the first places people will look to judge your status, not the last.

Fine, it happens also in the US, but it’s not a human universal. I don’t know what the posh supermarket (assuming such notion makes any sense) would be in Rome.

You'd send your slave to do your grocery shopping.

there are around 20 million millionaires in the united states, that's almost 10% of the population. It's not an unreachable status. To say that it is, in fact, is quantitatively delusional.

I’m actually more surprised by the number of millionaires in European countries with high income taxes that typically go north of 50% way before you hit “millionaire” status

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_...

From the list, it seems like the top 3 are Switzerland, Australia, and the USA. Switzerland has low taxes relatively speaking but also offers deals to rich people that move there. Australia is more surprising.

You're confusing wealth with income, two very different things. Those are income taxes, not millionaire taxes.

Income taxes are paid by the working class, while millionaires are rich because they own valuable assets which are often tax free if inherited in most of Europe (the rent seeking class). They didn't become millionaires because they paid 50% tax on their €50k/year 9-5 job, but because someone down their family tree lucked out economically decades/centuries ago and left them a nice inheritance of appreciating assets or businesses.

Wich is why most of Europe's millionaires come from wealthy old money families with inter-generational wealth that has been rolled over for centuries, often tax free.

The richest families in Europe are rich since at least 50 years, to hundreds of years.

The US is a lot more progressive than Europe here since it has inheritance taxes on wealth to prevent the formation of such feudal families, wile most for Western Europe has policies to protect the wealth of the old rich families.

I don't believe I said it is unattainable, only that the deck is stacked against them. As we speak, the 20 million millionaires are just 6% of the population of the states. Being a millionaire alone doesn't really make you "upper class".

I know that regardless of how much I make, in my heart I will always be a prole, and that will never change because I lack the mannerisms and the connections said people. I grew up in a different world, and even if I were to spend every waking hour with them, things wouldn't change, and frankly I am not interested in it either.

The way it works (and has always worked if the historical novels are at all accurate) is that you make the money, and then put your kids in the "good schools" and donate a building or two, and their kids (your grandkids) will then be upper class. Part of this is often having enough money so your kids can marry into "upper class but destitute" families, of which there is always a steady supply.

It's worth observing that according to traditional Irish law, there was an explicit process for ascending to lordly status, and it required three generations to complete. So the three-generation model sees some replication cross-culturally.

If you didn't want to wait that long, traditional Irish law also allowed you to purchase an equivalent-to-lordly status for yourself. You held equal rank with actual lords, but there were two major downsides: (1) this was a tremendous ongoing expense, more than many actual lords could have afforded; and (2) unlike true lordship, your status was not hereditary.

A millionaire doesn't mean what it used to mean, and the number of millionaires is actually surprisingly low in the US.

In a Western country with mandatory pensions (such as Finland), a mid-income couple should have effective net worth over $1 million (excluding primary home) by the time they retire. They are just not counted as millionaires, because they have pensions instead of retirement savings. Had they been able to save for retirement instead of making pension contributions (which are mostly used to fund current pensions), their net worth would be twice as high.

A recent middle class retiree should be a millionaire. If most of them are not, there is probably something structural that prevents people from saving as much as they should.

Nobody's counting government benefits. The US also has a similar policy called Social Security and Medicare (for healthcare.) The average lifetime payout for someone retired today is about 1 million. For someone retiring in 2060, double that.

By your math, the US millionaire couple about to retire is actually 'worth' 3 million.

> Nobody's counting government benefits.

Yes, that's the problem your parent comment is pointing out.

You're not trying to count them either. The value of a pension isn't the payouts it provides. It's what an identical financial structure would cost. A pension that pays out $1 million over 15 years is worth less than $1 million.

You appear to be correct on the original point that US social security payments are pretty comparable to Finnish pension payments. As of March this year, the average Finnish payment was 1784 euros and the average American payment was 1537 dollars.

Mandatory pensions are not government benefits.

Also, your numbers are misleading. The average lifetime payout numbers include Medicare benefits in addition to Social Security. You should also use estimated present-day values instead of lifetime payouts if you want to compare benefits to savings.

Median full-time income in the US in about $55k. A quick estimate for Social Security payments for someone retiring today at the nominal age with that income is $1580/month. That becomes ~$38k/year for a couple, which is ~$750k using the 5% rule. Median household net worth, including primary residence, is ~$250k at retirement age.

My estimate was based on a median income of ~$40k and pensions that pay ~60% of income. That would become almost $1M for a couple using the 5% rule, in addition to ~$200k household net worth at retirement age.

By these very rough estimates, the median recent retiree is worth 9 years' income in the US and 15 years' income in Finland. That supports the idea that there is a shortage of millionaires in the US.

“White trash” is effectively an ethnic slur. Ordinary poor white people aren’t “white trash.” When people say it, they’re specifically referring to the stereotypical southern or Appalachian American (usually Scots-Irish) or Midwestern American (usually German).

> Everyone pretends that racism in America is just that, when it's actually classism born of racist roots

I am very tired of non-Americans comments about America. We don’t “pretend” that racism is racism, racism is racism in America and attempts to skirt around it with the Marxism-lite “actually everything is classism” are unhelpful.

Yes, Black people have largely been kept in the lower classes from slavery to sharecropping to Jim Crow to now, but even those who managed to become “middle class” financially still found themselves unable to get mortgages, loans, or jobs at the same rate as white people. Just using a Black-sounding name on paper will lower your odds of all of these.

Even the very site we are on now has a less than proportionate (in America) Black audience because the software/computing industry has a less than proportionate Black makeup. This cannot be explained by simple “classism.”

An Ivy League educated, middle class Black man even became president and was still subject to attacks from all classes of white America, not because he was middle class, but because he was Black. This includes lower class white people too, who are some of the most discriminatory against other races in America.

Even the phrase you used “white trash” was originated by Black slaves against white servants, not upper class white people like you claim.

America is not Europe or Asia. The white colonizers to America that arrived, yes, were mostly lower classes in Europe but in the “New” World of Native Americans, that was not the biggest distinguishing factor any longer.

Class is basically the cluster of attributes that emerge around people with different levels of wealth. In Europe, those attributes have been entrenched and reinforced and undisturbed for much longer than they have been in American society.

Yes and...

> I see it a lot in American racism as well.

TIL the notion of races is an American invention. The origin was to justify the subjection of enslaved peoples, to impose a class society.

During the apocalypse, I've been binging history and biographies. The (more) recent scholarship about America has been both challenging and illuminating. As a gen-x white guy, mostly I'm embarrassed. I've always "punched up", so feel a natural affinity for minorities, working class, etc.

But I just didn't get it. Even though I considered myself an ally, my understanding of racism, class struggle, justice, and so forth was really shallow. My diet consisted of Zinn, Chomsky, Rachel Maddow, Thom Hartmann, etc. For whatever reason, aside from MLK and Gandhi, I don't recall reading much from non-white authors.

Highest recommendation to these books, probably in this order:

Jill Lepore's These Truths, The 1619 Project, Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us, Caro's LBJ biographies (passing the Civil Rights Act).

I think I needed These Truths to prepare me for 1619 Project, to provide context, set the stage.

> when it's actually classism born of racist roots

Yup. There's two books in my queue about this specifically. I'll update with cites as able.

Another big cultural topic which I totally misunderstood was Liberalism and by extension Neoliberalism. Specifically, the (American) reactionary origins of "free enterprise".

Being a nerd, of course all my friends growing up were self-identified libertarians. So I thought I had a good grasp of that mindset. And I always assumed the grand struggle in the USA has always been wealth vs democracy, per Kevin Phillips' books and maybe a few others. (FWIW, I always assumed I was a left-libertarian -- anti-state, anti-corporation, rabidly pro people -- but noob me had no idea had no idea how to talk about it.)

But I just wasn't aware of the doublespeak. Nor how the intuitive sounding phrases obscure and obfuscate what's really going on. To the elites pushing this stuff, "free enterprise" is pro property, anti-democracy, anti-competition, freedom to act without consequences. It is explicitly against the rule of law, against accountability, against competition. Growing up in a "Lincoln Republican" area, "socially liberal fiscally conservative", none of these concepts would have jived with my notions of fairness and civics.

To really see the disconnect between the elite and folk understandings, I had to chew thru the podcasts Know Your Enemy, 5-4 "How the Supreme Court Sucks", and Strict Scrutiny.

Also, the books Democracy in Chains and Dark Money connected a lot of the dots for me. Specifically, the connection between pro segregation, anti-civil rights, anti-labor reactionaries and the modern movement conservatives.

> TIL the notion of races is an American invention. The origin was to justify the subjection of enslaved peoples, to impose a class society.

An "American" invention for sure, but not one from North America. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta - this is where that whole bunch of toxicity and prejudice first showed up, in its most concentrated form.

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