Class: The Other Taboo

The candidacy of Barack Obama has inevitably raised the issue of race. It is a topic most Americans would rather not talk about. Yet there is another issue that remains if anything an even greater taboo, and that is class.

If you want to make any number of predictions about a person's prospects at birth there is no surer way than by learning the income and educational level of his or her parents. This provides a more accurate barometer than race. Life expectancy, income, crime and incarceration figures, even traffic accident prediction are most accurately achieved by applying socioeconomic factors. Auto insurers know this. That is why they base insurance rates so heavily on a customer's zip code.

With race, there is a palpable discomfort level with most people. There are those who see its influence everywhere and others who feel that society is completely past it, that anyone who brings it up is simply whining or making excuses. But with most there is an underlying sense that it still matters, though how much or how little is difficult to determine and to talk about it is to walk on eggs. With class, however, there is usually the blank stare of incomprehension.

Sociology is the discipline that studies how people behave in groups. Put people in poverty and you get a consistent pattern of overall behavior. Overcrowd people and you get another. Expose them to danger or to greater or lesser degrees of opportunity and you get high correlations of definite behavior patterns. These understandings run counter to the propensity of upper and middle class Americans to believe that group factors do not matter; that everything is determined by individual choices for which individuals are personally responsible. They point to poor individuals who have "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" as evidence.

Yet the aggregate numbers are clear. Tulare County, California, where I live, is a good case in point. The county is largely rural. The unemployment level is about triple the national average. The demographics approximate rural Mississippi or rural Appalachia quite closely. They share similar high school dropout rates of around 40%, high teen pregnancy rates, divorce rates, incarceration rates, lower than average life expectancy rates and so on down the line. The economic conditions of poor Mexican-Americans in rural California, poor whites in Appalachia and poor blacks in the rural South lead to similar societal ills.

What worries me is the apparent national abandonment of a consensus to do anything about this problem. Historically, the national calamity of the Great Depression led to a great move toward egalitarianism. Millions from all walks of life got jobs with the CCC or the WPA. In World War II, the draft brought Americans of all sorts into the national service together. The GI Bill that followed it provided a hand up that moved millions into the white collar middle class. Brown v. Topeka and the Civil Rights Act began ending legal segregation. The 1950s and 1960s saw the formation of the greatest middle class society and the greatest widely shared growth of opportunity and prosperity in the nation's, and perhaps in the world's, history.

But the commitment to that vision ebbed and has seemingly been replaced in many places by a return to fear. Gated communities proliferate. More people send their children to private schools, which are no longer segregated by race but by income. Even public schools vary enormously depending on the wealth of their supporting community, and people with means move to where the schools are reputed to be better. There is a vibrant home-schooling movement. Tuition rates at public colleges and universities go up while scholarships are cut. The volunteer military increasingly is bifurcated into an enlisted mass drawn from the lower and lower middle classes and an officer corps drawn from the upper middle and upper classes. The national political, business and media leadership is nearly completely in the hands of people from these upper strata as well. People increasingly get their news from opinionated niche outlets that tell them what they want to hear, reinforce their own world views without contradiction, and demonize those who think differently.

Unlike those earlier eras, there exists very little impetus to recreate the shared experiences that once drew the nation's people closer together. There seem to be few who call for addressing these developments by making a concerted effort to improve life for those at the margins and integrate them into the middle class mainstream; instead that seems to have been relegated to the status of a lost cause for which the only answer is to hunker down behind protective walls to keep the riff raff out.

It seems as though we lived in a different America in 1967. That summer my father took me to a baseball game in Kansas City. During the game he sent me on an errand. I took my game program and a pen about three rows down and a few seats over to get the autograph of Warren Hearns, Governor of Missouri. That the Governor of the state would be sitting in the stands along with everyone else was just how it was. No one thought anything of it. Today a governor would be in a sky box behind glass with other mucky-mucks, shielded there from contact with the hoi polloi by astronomical prices and by security officers whose job it is to refuse entry to that stadium level to those who do not bear a golden ticket.

President Kennedy said, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." Can it be that knowledgeable people are not aware from historical example where the balkanization of a society into class-based enclaves leads? Can we have forgotten Kennedy's words so soon?