The Policing of Class

February 17, 2010 at 6:12 am | Posted in Society and Culture | 4 Comments

Folks don’t like nobody being too proud or too free.

So observes Celie, a character played by Whoopi Goldberg in her 1985 film debut, The Color Purple. The film is two hours of blacks holding other blacks down, with whites playing a supporting role. It demonstrates the curious phenomenon of lower classes policing their members to assure they remain lower class. This is done alternately by “taking them down a peg or two” with physical abuse or, more commonly, verbal berating. “Who do they think they are?” is a common refrain.

This is a real life phenomenon which is not confined to blacks, but common to virtually any social class. It is with ample irony, in this land of the free and home of the brave, where liberty and justice are ostensibly for all, that many who attempt to break from the shackles of social expectation are derided by their peers as sell outs. Such blacks are commonly labelled “Uncle Toms” or “house negros.”

In preparing this commentary, I was pointed toward a 2008 blog post by The Black Sentinel, where the presumably African American author diagnoses blacks like Bill Cosby with Stockholm syndrome for taking “the negative view of some in the white race.” Since the author does not specify what that view is, one must assume he refers to Cosby’s calls for individual responsibility. This diagnosis is apparently sufficient to discredit Cosby and others. It is a kind of high-brow name-calling, an ad hominem attack meant to preclude argument. It is an intellectualized form of the razing which underclasses employ to keep hopeful deviants from thinking too highly of themselves.

My father, a black man, is an example of someone who does not let anyone tell him what he can not be. In his case, it has more to do with an antisocial self-interest than a principled view of race relations or social class. But the result is the same. He clawed his way up from a flat filthy Detroit satellite to a comparatively Oz-like Minnesota suburb.

He had every reason to fail. Although not the youngest child, his family treated him as the runt. He was constantly told he was worthless, retarded, and would amount to nothing. Surely it bothered him. But it did not define him. Nor did being a black man in a “white man’s world.” My dad is the kind of person who will do something because you tell him he can’t. As he met with success, the attempts by his family to hold him down shifted from telling him he couldn’t earn, to begging for handouts from that which he did. It became his duty, in their eyes, to give back to them. Who did he think he was anyway?

Sarah Palin is likewise a class deviant. Chicago Now blogger Mr. Baker sums up what I believe to be the primary objection to Palin’s presence on the national stage – her pedigree:

At the end of the day, the president of the United States should be smarter, more logical, more politically astute, more learned, more connected, more global in their thinking, more scholarly, more insightful, and just about more everything than the man or woman next door. That’s what a leader is.

And what Sarah Palin is not.

I don’t want my president to be someone who I could envision living next door to me; washing their car on Saturday afternoon just like me; managing bills like me; as limited in their view of international affairs as me; and, plainly spoken, as common as me. I don’t want my leaders using crib notes from the palm of their hand.

Put another way, Who does Sarah Palin think she is? We common folk aren’t supposed to get these highfaluten notions of self-determination, or aspire to higher station. Why, it simply isn’t proper! What would the world come to were hockey moms running the country and the “more politically astute” sweeping the floors? Why, it would be chaos I tell ya. Chaos!

This self-policing among the classes is an arguably more reliable control mechanism than any systematic injustice from above. When progressive legislators look at substandard performance and fault a lack of funding or applicable law, the thought never occurs to them some folks are socially incentivized to fail. Consider a segment from KSTP TV, a local ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, which reports on State Senator Chuck Wiger’s proposed bill to raise the mandatory schooling age from 16 to 18. The bill is meant to address the “20% of students who do not graduate high school in four years.” The senator talks about his bill as though its value is self-evident, shamelessly neglecting any evidence it will work.

Meanwhile, when students are told of the plan, they say it won’t help. They tell us those who don’t succeed don’t want to! Legislation to bring horses to water will not make them drink. The desire to succeed must be cultivated in the individual, a task not suited for government. But, so long as our society refuses to confront the phenomenon of class policing, among other factors beyond the scope of state intervention, politicians will continue to sell new taxes and laws based on false assumptions. The price is liberty.

Further discussion in this week’s podcast:

The Policing of Class

Fightin Words