i realize you might well grasp this intellectually, even if not viscerally, but the only people who could seriously not think there’s an upperclass (and every other kind, too) in this country are the kind who’ve never experienced its underclass.

i’m a thirtysomething immigrant here in the upper midwest. i spent my time flipping burgers for a living when i got laid off from my first blue-collar job; nowadays i refer to that as part of my compulsory Americanism education. i’ve done my time living in a trailer park; i got fond of telling anybody who’ll listen that the stereotypes about “trailer trash” are all true, all too true. (King of the Hill? thinly fictionalized documentary. been there, had those neighbours. had worse neighbours, in fact…) currently i’m holding on to the lower edge of the middle class with my knuckles whitening. if i’m lucky indeed, i might make it into upper-middle before i retire, though i doubt i will be. you, Hugo, by your self-descriptions are solidly upper class, please take my word for that.

my native country wasn’t a classless society, either, although we did tend to pride ourselves on social egalitarianism quite a bit. it was a great deal closer to the classless ideal (if ideal that notion be) than the U.S. is now, or likely ever was. the contrast i saw on immigrating here highlighted that (and many other things) starkly; America is most definitely a class-stratified place to live, do not ever doubt it.

…heh. here i thought all my experiences of genuine culture shock were in the past by now, left behind shortly after deplaning at JFK, and then along come you with this post… it’s not that bad a sort of feeling, the second time around. :-)

It seems to me you’re equivocating on the term “class”. The claim that your family can’t be “upper-class” because “Dukes don’t emigrate” explicitly ties class to the hereditary nobility: you aren’t upper-class in the British sense because you (apparently) aren’t descended from the titled nobility. But you then reference that fact in order to “maintain the satisfying fiction that [we] are middle class”, breaking that category down into “lower-middle, middle-middle, and upper-middle”, which in American usage is unequivocally a reference to wealth or income. You use your lack of hereditary “upper-class” status to deny your economic “upper-class” status, but the term doesn’t carry the same meaning at all when used in those two different contexts - and it is the latter, the one you deny, that is most salient in the US.

It’s easy to elide the distinction between these usages, both because wealth is often inherited with ancestry, and because the economic classes have distinct mores and manners, such that one can claim a certain “class” status on the basis of one’s values and behavior independently from one’s wealth or heritage. Thus one can plausibly claim membership in multiple classes on these different grounds. It seems to me, from your description, as if your family claims (but doesn’t speak aloud) “upper-class” status as a matter of manners and values, and “middle-class” status as a matter of heredity, while carefully avoiding the question of which class their wealth or income would mark them out to be. And, again, it’s the latter sign that most outsiders would look to to identify your class, regardless of what you say about yourselves.

This is true. I grew up in Appalachia, ‘coal miner’s daughter’ and all that applies, and I find it very entertaining when the redneck/hillbilly stereotype is employed in popular culture. When done badly, it can be offensive, but when it’s done well, it’s just beautiful and hilarious (and I think the difference is when, as Hugo said, the stereotype is used by people who understand the culture vs people who don’t). My mother, on the other hand, finds all portrayals of us highly offensive and cannot understand how I do not. The difference between us, I think, is that she is very much embarrassed by her background and was raised that way by her parents (grandma was the child of immigrants and was very much OKOP, even in southern WV married to a decidedly NOKOP man and all mom’s siblings try really hard to distance themselves from their neighbors and friends), while I’ve embraced my ‘redneck roots’ for the most part. At least, I don’t feel the least bit embarrassed or ashamed of where (and who) I come from. Sure, I’m upwardly mobile and I’ve left WV, gotten educated, etc., but no matter where else I go or what else I do, my favorite places in the world are in the hills of southern WV and my favorite people are the people who live there.

We need to be honest about the mistakes of our ancestors. We also need to see those mistakes in a historical context, and avoid the tendency to mythologize and glamorize those who were the victims of colonization. Cruelty is a human universal, and sin — at least the capacity for sin — is found in every tribe and nation under the sun. Collectively, some have inflicted both more harm (and perhaps more good) than others.

On the one hand, yes, of course; and on the other hand, no. I think these are precisely the vacuous truisms that are so tempting to _replace_ substantive reflection on what our collective history means and what it says about us.

(The rest of this comment out-grew comment size, so I posted it over on the Young Anabaptist Radicals blog - young.anabaptistradicals.org.)

a. not feeling guilty about what one’s ancestors did (guilt ought to be reserved for one’s personal failings only)

and

b. not feeling responsible to work to create a more equitable society.

Insofar as I have benefitted from unmerited privilege, I have an obligation to share with others and seek to create a more just California. It’s not white guilt, it’s an acknowledgement that what I have been given is less about my personal virtue and more about my heritage.

To paraphrase Ann Richards, those of us born on third base had better not lie to ourselves and assume we hit a triple to get there. I don’t think I do tell myself that lie.

We need to be honest about the mistakes of our ancestors. We also need to see those mistakes in a historical context, and avoid the tendency to mythologize and glamorize those who were the victims of colonization. Cruelty is a human universal, and sin — at least the capacity for sin — is found in every tribe and nation under the sun. Collectively, some have inflicted both more harm (and perhaps more good) than others.

I have no bone to pick with either of those, really. But I don’t find it very original, or a useful contribution to the discussion. There are people all over the place aggressively defending their right to not feel guilty about what their ancestors did! Rather than flippantly dismissing “the sins of the ancestors” (as you do in an earlier post), let’s have some real theological reflection on the Hebrew Bible’s repeated assertion that the sins of the ancestors DO fall upon the children. I think those verses provide an excellent biblical model for reflecting upon the _responsibility_ (rather than guilt) that we carry for addressing the situations of inequity that have been left to us, like it or not, by the actions of our ancestors.

And I think it is critical for European-Americans, while not trashing everything in our inherited ethnicities, to reflect carefully on what aspects of our inherited culture do reflect the deep influence of centuries of being colonizers, and not too easily claim that “our culture is as good as anyone’s”.

I’m definitely NOKOP, and until I was 14 I didn’t realize that OKOP existed. (This is odd, because one of my closest friends in elementary school was hard-core OKOP. But I had no idea that she represented a culture, rather than one eccentric and charming family.) But I ended up at a snotty private high school filled with OKOP types, which was eye opening. I will freely admit that I have some issues about this, some of which might be me conflating OKOP stuff with general high-school angst. And I’m sure that OKOP culture looks different from the right side of the invisible divide. But what I saw was a bunch of people who had elevated subtle exclusion to an art form, and it’s not a culture that I hold in especially high regard.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t think that being OKOP really matters that much at this point. It doesn’t come with any real advantages above those that are conferred by wealth. The only exception I can think of is that OKOP have better legacy connections with elite colleges than people whose wealth is of a more recent vintage, and I don’t think that’s really a huge advantage, all things considered. It’s also probably true that not-so-rich people from OKOP backgrounds have cultural capital that similarly-situated NOKOPs don’t, but we’re talking about a small group of not-rich OKOPs relatively speaking. So while it’s galling to have a bunch of entitled jerks think they’re better than you for no good reason, it’s really not a socially significant phenomenon. I think we’d be better off keeping our eyes on the structures of inequality that really matter in American society.

If I expand that definition, then I suppose an upper class exists. But as for my family, there were always people I knew who were both wealthier and better-connected than we were. And above all, we knew we were the descendants of pioneers who had simply gotten here first and stolen more. (That’s unfair, but it’s not entirely inaccurate.)