Is That Your Final Answer?

Although not set in the United States, “Slumdog Millionaire” was a movie I recently watched and definitely made profound points about class issues. An example of all the story lines Benjamin DeMott discusses in The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Class, the film is about a contestant Jamal Malik on India’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” who finds himself having to justify how was able to get to the final question given the fact that he is an orphan from the slums of Mumbai. Exploration of how he knew certain answers gives the audience the opportunity to get flashbacks on the life of Jamal, which is full of class implications ranging from the brutality that results in the death of his mother to his precarious childhood without formal education to really speak of to his inability to protect the girl he loves.

[Somewhat-of-a-spoiler alert!] The movie is a great representation of an upending movie because of Jamal’s lowly beginnings, consistent maintenance of admirable values, and ultimate ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds. His brother, who is with him most of his life, is directly contrasted to him, giving life to DeMott’s assertion: “Where preoccupation with class is found foolish and naïve, where changing one’s class is seen as feasible, where class is understood as really a disguise, class cannot be a major player in great undertakings.” (39) DeMott’s points about the career rhetoric are also valid, although being a game show contestant is not really a profession. In the case of Jamal, “After the sketch of social background the writer directly confronts—and overturns—skepticism about the ability of an omni patrician to close vast social gulfs.” (DeMott, 82) Even though I definitely found myself reflecting on the incredibly tragic circumstances presented in the slums, I found many of those who I stop with about the movie fixated on the love story or specifics of what Jamal did, such as jumping into a pile of feces in order to get to see a movie star. I agree with DeMott’s statement that media often presents a “sense of class as screen—[the] readiness at once to embrace and reject class talk, [the] having-it-both-ways style of allusion to social difference—[which] helps to illuminate the nature of the problem.” (26) Fortunately unlike some of my peers, Sociology 155 does not allow for me to reject this discourse.

On a side note, there is an interesting dance number that is homage to Indian Bollywood movies- you can get a sense of it from the lead actor and actresses appearance on a talk show!

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Peanuts or Protest Music?

On one of my plane trips into Boston, I found myself sitting next to an interesting looking man with a well-worn copy of a book written by Karl Marx, the title of which escapes me. He had brought on board a guitar, and while I was kind of intrigued, I had before me a mountain of PDFs to read for a course I am taking on global health. I decided to cut myself some slack when hearing the flight attendant say that the pilots were preparing for descent and put away my stuff.

Just before I could close my eyes, my neighbor asked if I was studying public health. I said yes, figuring that a smudging of the truth might allow me to catch a few minutes of shut-eye before landing, but I was wrong. This is not indicate that the conversation was boring by any means—in fact it was quite the opposite. He mentioned that he had been traveling to record music with his band and encouraged me to check out their music. We also got on the topic of politics since it was late October, and I was surprised when he said he was not going to vote for either McCain or Obama, despite leaning towards the other.

Upon going to the website, I found myself even more engaged. There was a part that stated:

What Barack Obama wants you to believe and why the ruling rich have their money on him and his billion dollar campaign (internet contributions notwithstanding!) is that we are all in this together. But you and me are not in the same boat as Obama’s pal Warren Buffett and his class. When Obama says tighten our belts, he is not talking to Warren Buffet. They’re bailing out the billionaires, you have as much chance as a family stranded on top of a New Orleans.

The sort of class consciousness exhibited in the preceding statement (Nelson, “Lecture 17: Is There a Dominant Class Culture?”) also was characteristic of the band’s protest music as well! (Nelson, Lecture 20: “Protest Music and Class Consciousness) In the lyrics of a song called “Billion, verse 3 includes the lines:

Well I’d rather be with a billion than be a billionaire
Cuz even though Bill Gates may be hoardin a horde of billions
A horde of billions will be stormin heaven’s gates
How could a nation of millions hold back a planet of billions?
With a billion we could take our place up in the air with quintillion stars
When we stop the billionaires from sucking our blood
A billion stars will shine right here in the mud…

and verse 4:

It’s Bliss once again on this comprehend don’t miss when I set to bomb this mission
Conquest through conflist Black planet arisen
Here to gather up the masses and uproot the system.
All our men women and children, bring back the aspect of Revolution missin
Confusion’s vivid
I come closed captioned, even pack a hearing aid for those that wouldn’t listen
Find these words on city billboards emblazoned
Tell heads I’m a bout to get a billion,
To witness this transformation manifest,
Try and test this bio tech technician,
With the mindset to clone Nat Turner, resurrect Malcolm,
recreate history in my laboratory,
Teel heads I’m about to get a billion,
To stomp on this reptilian, cess infested, vermin, villain, brainwashing disease of a President we’ve ingested.
Need help to vomit and gush out the wretched,
Bout to get a billion, not dollars,
I need a billion scholars, with a billion visions, to send out on a billion missions,
Not a sit in. I need a billion marching mad men to stand up in resistance of the victims
I wanna see a billion

Consisting of all the aspects denoted by Professor Nelson of such music (“1. IDENTITY – with all others of the working class; 2. OPPOSITION – to the interests of the capitalist class; 3. TOTALITY – recognition of the societal/economic causes of class; 4. ALTERNATIVE – vision of another type of society) and of a magnetic song, I want to admit that despite like the song’s musical execution and some of its message, it is not something I will likely listen to in the future. Maybe this is an indication that I do not consider myself in the class that needs to rebel or maybe because the ideas of classlessness/social mobility are so pervasive that I believe there are other ways of getting ahead…
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What Could Be More High-Class than Heaven?

To be honest, I have never really understood any of the televangelists and other extremely wealthy yet “devote” Christians I have seen or met. While the Bible says that we are not to judge, it also speaks about charity numerous times, with the (in)famous metaphor about the odds the rich getting into heaven as comparable to a camel getting through the eye of a needle. When reading David Brooks’ discussion about Bobo spirituality, I agreed that often people are “making [them]selves more superficial, by simply ignoring the deeper thoughts and highest ideals that would torture [them] if [they] actually stopped to measure [them]selves according to them.” (246-7)

There was a Times article called Does God Want You To Be Rich? I encountered a while ago that I skimmed again. It discusses how more and more Protestant evangelists were under the impression that wealth was something to which Christians are entitled. Given Brooks’ assertion that Bobos, who are upper class, are looking for refuge in religion and likely compromising at least some of these evangelists, I think that Karl Marx’s point that the “religion of the bourgeoisie will largely involve a justification of their social position.” (Nelson, Lecture 11: “Religion and Social Class”) I actually recently came across a biography Christian musician Canton James that claimed that his “unwavering humility to God is perhaps the only thing that might take you by surprise. Beyond that, there is little difference between him and the industry’s most popular rap artists. He rocks Sean John, Rocawear and Air Force Ones, pushes a black drop-top Benz on 24s, and can get a party crunk without breaking a sweat.”

To me, this is quite a contrast to the music we heard in Lecture 11: “Religion and Social Class,” about preferring to live out God’s word rather than have silver or gold since I am fairly certain that the members of that particular church, who were of lower class status, would not make an exception for platinum, even for spinning rims with a cross on them.

There is a story in acts about people who do not give up everything that they own to follow Christianity and are struck dead; while one could argue that they were guilty of lying and saying that they had done so, are not people who profess to be Christians also lying if they do not uphold the tenants of their faith to the utmost of their ability? Here Max Weber’s ideas about how “religious ideas are produced independently, but achieve social power because of BOTH the social and psychological functions they serve for different groups” are intriguing and seem valid for, as Brooks discusses, Bobos and other social groups are striving to find some sort of malleable structure they can use to provide support to their lives. (Nelson, Lecture 11: “Religion and Social Class”) At the same time, some of my cynicism is also self-directed because I too find myself going to (or running from) religion when it seems convenient for me, so maybe that is the reason why I am so skeptical of others. Nonetheless, the justification of wealth through religion by those with more of it and the justification of poverty through religion by those with more of it speak to both Marx and Weber’s points.
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Forget Old English- Go for Low, Middle, or High Class Vernacular!

One of my roommates is from Compton in California, and she always impresses me with her ability to code switch. Since her and I are really comfortable around another, we have no problem speaking in what could be considered restricted code. (Nelson, Lecture 9:”Language and Social Class”) Often I do not even think about the fact that our similar class statuses help us communicate with one another until around someone who seems at a loss for comprehension of our respective meanings.

The other day, a funny example of this happened. My roommate and I were grabbing dinner together in the dining hall when someone who had been a laboratory research program with her over the summer saw and decided to join us. In the midst of our conversation, she jokingly called the guy a “fool,” a term I too have picked up somewhere in life (according to my roommate, she introduced it into my vocabulary, but I am fairly confident a friend in Houston did). To both of our surprises, the guy got really excited and said something along the lines of, “I have never heard anyone use ghetto talk like that before.” My roommate and I broke into laughter, but her friend asked in earnest if she could say something else. She and I both humored him with a little vocabulary lesson, which resulted in more laughter. Although not intentional on his part, my roommate’s friend’s response illustrated to me how ingrained language can be not only geographically, ethnically, and the like but also by class, which is one of the few similarities between my roommate and I.
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Class Issues for the Class Clown

I have written in prior papers for Sociology 155 about the fact that I grew up sort of low/working class and have moved up since. It is always interesting for me to note the paradigm shifts that have occurred along the way. When reading Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, I had the chance to do so because I had unknowingly encountered on of those paradigm shifts not long beforehand.

Growing up, my parents always emphasized the importance of education but were not really involved in my education other than helping me with occasional math problems or when I had procrastinated too long for a project. They never really talked to my teachers other than brief small talk about how I was doing in class and to drop off assigned items for class parties. I was content with this, never really expecting anything differently even when struggling with certain subjects or teachers.

On the other hand, the older of my two brothers has come up with more material goods and American cultural capital than I did. When entering high school, he was well aware because of my other sister and I that his grades were counting towards the GPA colleges would later see when applying. Although smart, he considers himself quite the class clown, bragging regularly about how he cracks up his entire class. Apparently his comedic charm did not work on one of his teachers, so he told my mother that she had to go to the school and get him moved to another class because he was sure the teacher had a vendetta against him. My mother refused, saying that things are not that easy in the real world and that my brother should learn how to stick it out. My brother came back at her with the reasoning that the parents of some of his friends had done this in the past but it was to no avail.

While I have no idea whether or not my mother made the best decision, I do know that it likely will result in my brother getting a lower grade than he would otherwise receive either because he is right that his teacher is out to get him or because he believes that his teacher is. His sense of entitlement to a more “fair” situation, something Lareau attributes to middle class children, was a stark contrast to my mother’s sentiments and values as she had grown up working class. Fortunately for my brother, one grade is not really going to make or break his future and hopefully he has learned to be more careful when trying to get a laugh in the future.
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Katrina Patina

I wish I could take credit for the creative euphemism “Katrina Patina,” a reference to areas such as Tulane’s campus and other areas of New Orlean’s that are wealthy and were not damaged as significantly as areas like 9th Ward in the wake of Katrina, but I actually just heard it during trips I made to the city early this year. In Lecture 5 ” On the Street Where You Live,” Professor Nelson explicitly discussed the class issues in New Orleans, and I think it is really true that while the hurricane undoubtedly exacerbated them, disparities between class existed prior to rain fall let alone when the levies broke.

When helping clear out an area that was to be a neighborhood garden, my friends and I were approached by a local resident who came over to ask what we were up to. Fortunately the woman who was organizing our efforts both was recognized by and recognized the resident, who quickly engaged us in a conversation about what the lot had looked like before—overgrown with sugarcane and full of scattered items in front of an abandoned, boarded shed-like structure. She also told us about how police were believed to be unjustly terrorizing people in her area, including a young gentleman who had been hanging out on her front porch only to find himself being harshly interrogated by cops.

It was interesting to note that there was quite a degree of class consciousness among those in the area, which was fairly poor, even if consciousness about them was not as pervasive. (Marx ideas referred to by Nelson, “Lecture 17: Is There a Dominant Class Culture?”) The local resident spoke about how she and some other neighbors were able to unite over their frustration and organize a sort of watchdog group that would be available with cameras if aware of any occurring injustices, particularly around police brutality. For me, as a native Houstonian, it was an eye-opening experience to know that the city that always called to mind ideas of beignets, fried alligator and free beaded necklaces was a place where people of lower classes were being marginalized and unheard, and to some extent still are.

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Some People Just Never Share…

In his piece, “Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste,” Herbert J. Gans writes the following line: “Decisions about cultural choices often reflect status considerations, and when a culture of lower status borrows the content of a higher one, the latter usually drops the item from it cultural repertoire.” (142-143) While there is some humor to be found in the idea that people of higher class tend to shy away for things which they initially like because they catch on with people in lower classes, there are some real implications to take into consideration.

What came to my mind when reading this article was the thoughts around body size and class in American society. In other cultures, being bigger is associated with being wealthier because of assumed resources one must have to have a lot of food and not do a lot of work in order to pack on extra pounds. Here in the US however, food is not as scarce as it is in other countries. In fact, lower class individuals often find high caloric goods more readily available to them both financially and physically than higher class individuals. Although quite an extrapolation and needing to be tempered with an understanding of the health, culture, and preference issues associated with it, it is possible that obesity has become stigmatized greatly in our country in some part because higher class individuals began to stop identifying it as a characteristic of their status since it was attainable by others of lower socioeconomic status. Obese individuals are viewed by many as being out of control, greedy, or lazy in our country now, but such attributions seem less common in other areas where obesity is not connected to lower class individuals. It is intriguing to think about this sort of avoidance culture of the wealth-to-do in contrast to the oppositional culture of some poor individuals that W. J. Wilson describes as challenging “the system” and intentionally dissenting from certain social norms.
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Closed Due to Social Constructions?

During Lecture 12 “The Culture of Poverty,” Professor Nelson brought up Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton’s book American Apartheid. Having read the entire book prior to the class, I recalled their presentation of white flight, which is the phenomenon of white individuals essentially electing to move after a particular percentage of African Americans moving into their neighborhood. An arguable indication of racial intolerance as well as instigator of problems that the book elucidates, white flight is an intriguing issue but so is the phenomenon that seems to be its opposite- gentrification. Although still perpetuating segregation by race and class, gentrification essentially pushes lower class communities, often of African American descent, out of certain areas.

I first really saw clear signs of gentrification when working in Harlem. A place known for the Harlem Renaissance around the 1920s and 1930s, it is an important entity for African Americans as well as a desirable location to buy real estate for more affluent populations. While working out of Harlem Hospital, I had the opportunity not only to check a number of local venues but also to walk past the construction sites of a number of condos. I read about the closing of restaurants who no longer appealed to the shifting demographic as well as heard complaints from people living and working in the area.

Gentrification is an interesting issue explicitly tied to class issues. I personally am conflicted about it to a large extent because I believe that residential segregation perpetuates the concentration of poverty that Massey and Denton discuss in American Apartheid and thus points brought up in it and in Lecture 12 “The Culture of Poverty.” At the same time, the fact that the settling of people affects real estate prices and/or the goods and services available not to mention the overall culture of a location means that there is a tenuous tipping point around which perpetuate the aggregation of either low or high class individuals. To me gentrification seems harsher because people are essentially been driven out of their homes by economic circumstances whereas white flight people are driven out because of personal preferences (or arguably prejudices) and/or factors that should be addressed rather than avoided, such as crime. But that is just my opinion, which may be biased because I really like the historical, traditional charm of places like Harlem, Brooklyn, and U Street in DC that are becoming gentrified…
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Physician Pipeline

At a recent medical school interview, one of the physicians spoke to fellow interviewees and myself about how medicine is a business. Not said in a way to emphasize the importance of economics but rather of providing a service, her comments caused me to think about the points about rationalization Professor Nelson discussed in Lecture 4 “Work and Class.” During that lecture, Professor Nelson defined rationalization as the “practical application of knowledge to achieve a desired end” with the goal of efficiency, total coordination and control over social factors and guided by the idea that the division of labor is desirable. (Lecture 4 “Work and Class”)

In regards to medicine, the specialization of people in the field speaks to their agreement with the preceding ideas of Max Weber. Many elect to focus on very specific areas, such as pediatric oncology, so as to feel really informed. I would relate this to the fact that such doctors can be considered more upper class because their point seems to be that to be great, they must stay abreast of current trends and research by being very reflective, a task that is best accomplished if that amount of information over which one has to be reflective is not overwhelming. (Nelson, Lecture 3 “Revenge of the Nerds”) Although I am far from picking my specialty, I think it is interesting to consider how my class might play into my choice because while I do wholeheartedly agree that specialization makes one more agile in his or her particular field, it could make them less so in others. Given that I want to provide care to the underserved, it might be more prudent for me to be a jack (or jill) of all trades, particularly if I am one of the few points of access individuals have to the health care system.

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Marx Seems to be Off the Mark…

In one of my earlier posts (To SEF or Not to SEF- Is that the Question?) I had mentioned that one of my friends qualifies for Harvard’s Student Events Fund for low income students has a Blackberry, and while that one device does not necessarily mean that there are class issues at hand, I hope you will trust me when I say that he does not make it easy to classify him by any means. A point brought up Professor Nelson in Lecture 2: “The Best Things in Life Part 2” was that there are material changes in what now distinguishes upper class from middle class, and while it is quite evident in regards to wealth in regards to assets like real estate and investments, it is becoming harder to pinpoint in things like clothing, leisure activities and so forth.

According to Karl Marx, one’s class is determined by his or her relationship with the means of production, but I feel as though Max Weber’s reference to a class as when “(1) a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances, in so far as (2) this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and (3) is represented under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets” is more fitting for our society. (Nelson, Lecture 4 “Work and Class”) While I think generalizations can be made that align with Marx, places like Harvard act to clearly illustrate how one can escape limitations as a result of his or her ownership of certain resources. With the invention and dispersal of credit not to mention accessibility to loans that was not likely as pervasive in Marx’s day as they are now (although still undeniably tied to ownership of assets related to means of production), it is easier to defy Marx’s categorization scheme in favor of changing one’s life chances through things like taking financial gambles or spending beyond ones means. It is tough to say whether resisting Marx is for the better of the worse given that it is just as true that people can relate to others who may have different amounts of economic capital by being able to acquire certain things as well as that a number people of people spend beyond their means, but I think it is save to save that we are doing it regardless.
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