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There was a time when Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men. The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean.


Where Do You Fit In?
Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe. [Click here for more information on income mobility.] In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. It is supposed to take the sting out of the widening gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots. There are poor and rich in the United States, of course, the argument goes; but as long as one can become the other, as long as there is something close to equality of opportunity, the differences between them do not add up to class barriers.

Over the next three weeks, The Times will publish a series of articles on class in America, a dimension of the national experience that tends to go unexamined, if acknowledged at all. With class now seeming more elusive than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of individuals: a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Wash., regretting his decision to skip college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Mass., musing over the cachet of his 200-foot yacht.

The series does not purport to be all-inclusive or the last word on class. It offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people or decoding folkways and manners. Instead, it represents an inquiry into class as Americans encounter it: indistinct, ambiguous, the half-seen hand that upon closer examination holds some Americans down while giving others a boost.

The trends are broad and seemingly contradictory: the blurring of the landscape of class and the simultaneous hardening of certain class lines; the rise in standards of living while most people remain moored in their relative places.

Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are opening. Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a United States Supreme Court justice or a C.E.O., and there are more and more self-made billionaires. Only 37 members of last year's Forbes 400, a list of the richest Americans, inherited their wealth, down from almost 200 in the mid-1980's.

So it appears that while it is easier for a few high achievers to scale the summits of wealth, for many others it has become harder to move up from one economic class to another. Americans are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born.

A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy. Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned.

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In critical race theory, white privilege is a way of conceptualizing racial inequalities that focuses as much on the advantages that white people accrue from society as on the disadvantages that people of color experience. Most such theories focus on American and European societal condition, since inequality between whites and non-whites is a long-standing feature of these academic areas. White privilege differs from conditions of overt racism or prejudice, in which a dominant group actively seeks to oppress or suppress other racial groups for its own advantage. Instead, theories of white privilege suggest that whites view their social, cultural, and economic experiences as a norm that everyone should experience, rather than as an advantaged position that must be maintained at the expense of others. This normative assumption implicitly constrains discussions of racial inequality within the dominant discourse: such explanations are limited to factors specific to disadvantaged racial groups - who are viewed as having failed to achieve the norm - and solutions focus on what can be done to help those groups achieve the 'normal' standards experienced by whites.

In essence, theories of white privilege assert that discourses on racial inequality do not truly discuss differences between white and non-white social status, but only discuss the failure of non-white groups to achieve normal social status, effectively turning race into an issue that does not involve whites. In this sense it is similar to confirmation biases and the fundamental attribution error in social psychology.

The general claim of theories of white privilege is that racial inequity cannot be resolved solely by looking at the life conditions of disadvantaged groups. They suggest that solutions to problems of racial inequality can only be achieved by explicitly discussing the implicit advantages that whites as a group hold in society.

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I'd like to hear some reasons why people think that Whites are, in general, inherently intellectually superior to colored people.

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I don't know, but as a side note...

I have never heard a decent definitive answer of what it is to be "white."

What wikipedia has to say about the commonly used "Caucasian"

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The term Caucasian race (also Caucasoid, Europid, or Europoid[1]) has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the indigenous populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia.[2] Historically, the term has been used to describe the entire population of these regions, without regard necessarily to skin tone. In common use, specifically in American English, the term is sometimes restricted to Europeans and other lighter-skinned populations within these areas, and may be considered equivalent to the varying definitions of white people

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Blondell_Letrange said:

So which is more pertinent; the tone of the skin, or the ethnicity?

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Lakefingers said:

A lot of it is the same as with religion.

People don't want to look at history, facts, observe human behavior or look into their own minds. They find a quick solution based on appearances and prejudices people around them have. They ignore the architecture of things.

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Yep, I made a thread about this.

lines said:

It's impossible to make accurate generalizations about white people or black people with regards to intelligence. Its also impossible to determine a persons intelligence by their social class, people of high intelligence tend to be of a high social class but there are many people in low socio-economic classes that are highly intelligent too.

I would say that a persons intelligence is associated a lot with what culture they have been exposed to and the attitudes and beliefs they have adopted as a result of that.

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Totally agree.

I think it's sad when people use the fact that many poor colored people are less intelligent to fuel their racism, as if their lesser intelligence is merely due to their race/ethinicity.

wellage said:

How about this? People who rely on wikipedia for their main sources are less intelligent than those who do not.

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Why do you say that?

Are you implying that I rely on Wikipedia for my main sources?

wellage said:

How about this? People who rely on wikipedia for their main sources are less intelligent than those who do not.

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wellage said:

How about this? People who rely on wikipedia for their main sources are less intelligent than those who do not.

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Poid said:

I'd like to hear some reasons why people think that Whites are, in general, inherently intellectually superior to colored people.

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Show me an majority black country that isn't a shit hole?

Personally knowing some razor sharp black folks I don't know what to make of it but it's true. 

iThink said:

If we are talking about the type of intelligence measured by an iq test then you can make generalizations about different ethnicities.

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iThink said:

There is of course a huge amount of variance in each group though, for their are extremely smart and stupid people in just about any grouping you could come up with.

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Cups said:

Poid said:

I'd like to hear some reasons why people think that Whites are, in general, inherently intellectually superior to colored people.

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Show me an majority black country that isn't a shit hole?

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