Because of where I grew up (rural South and Appalachia), my native accent is something that I've learned to mask in all professional settings. It doesn't matter how immaculate my grammar is: in the profession of software engineering, southern accent = ignorant bigot who can't be trusted. People's biases, conscious or otherwise, are noticeable.
The irony is that I practice "code switching", so basically my coworkers have no idea where I'm from until they ask me. They'll overhear me on the phone talking to my family, and notice that I speak in an entirely different manner. It's not a conscious thing on my part, but I sometimes feel very awkward about it. At times, I'm very upset by the fact that someone who grows up in a particular part of the country gets to speak in their native dialect at work without judgement, all because of stereotypes about intelligence and education, which essentially tie directly to the author's point about class.
Basically, since class is culture, and cultures have language, a sociolect describes the language of a class, the ways you have to talk to perform that class.
And, naturally, this goes both ways. Someone talking the sociolect of a certain class is seen as performing that class, and therefore belonging to the class.
It should also be noted that the original article is itself a class performance! The author uses more complex words and grammar than necessary, thereby signalling academia or professional class. (Someone in the comments on that page wondered why this article had a more complex language compared to other articles by the same author, but didn't connect the dots...)
Back in the middle ages, when the French conquered Britain, the ruling class spoke French and the peasants spoke English. A lot of French words flowed into English as a result.
But even today, if people use the words of French origin rather than the old English words, one is regarded as being from the upper class, such as using 'purchase' instead of 'buy'.
Absolutely! I'd like to add, high culture is also used as a term for cultures that are insular and use lots of culturally specific vocabulary. The Southern Culture and accent is actually considered high culture by many anthropologists! By the same token... So is tech culture... Even when it's really annoying stupid fat lazy and mysogonistic and repeating the same problems in a different language that were solved before computers were even invented!!! Wrap your head around that one!
People also use something like that to mask a lack of knowledge / experience / understanding / intelligence. Once in a while someone uses big words so well it's poetry, but those people are the exception.
It's interesting to watch how, in a big tech project, a director or architect will occasionally start using a word like "corpus", "idempotent", "assert", etc. and it will trickle down the layers of the team. By the time the keypunch guy is using it, it's gone out of fashion, like last year's suit.
> Back in the middle ages, when the French conquered Britain, the ruling class spoke French and the peasants spoke English.
This features quite a bit in War and Peace, too. As tensions increase between France and Russia as Napoleon takes over much of Europe and war between the countries looms, you'll find Russian nobility taking Russian language classes, because their first language is French!
This is a funny aspect of English. In general, we distinguish the meat of mammals (beef, pork, venison, mutton, ...), but non-mammals are their meat (fish, chicken, ...).
But I don't think this is well explained by a class distinction. I mean, the classes of people who raised sheep weren't so different from the people who raised chickens.
However this comes with the interesting caveat that the English upper classes don't like to appear too French, especially when it comes to pronunciation, where using the foreign pronunciation can be considered rather lower class. This is reflected in class shibboleths such as:
Upper class: valet [val-ett], fillet [fill-ett].
Middle class or lower: valet [val-ay], fillet [fill-ay].
Upper class: claret [clar-ett] (from French clairet).
Middle class or lower: Bordeaux.
I could see the author choose more complicated vocabulary (superfluously) as she progressed through her introduction, and I took it as a demonstration of what she was talking about.
I do the same thing. There's a particular way of speaking in the North of New Zealand that is associated with poor Maori - when I'm talking to my dad's family, I switch back to talking like that. I mask it in almost all other situations, but it's caught a few friends out at times. One told me it was like talking to a completely different person.
My dad is a tradesperson, and his influence is the one thing I have never been able to completely hide, even in professional settings. It's gotten me a bit of grief over the years, as my response to stress is often to start swearing like a builder.
On one hand, I like being able to code-switch easily. On the other hand, I feel like the only reason I can do it is because I had to, and the inability to completely mask my lower class upbringing has negatively impacted my opportunities at times.
At this point, I just try to own it. If I don't, it's just persisting the negative stereotypes of people of Maori descent never making something of themselves. Gotta start breaking those biases down somehow.
In case people think you're being dismissive to the parent, this was a quote from a popular "drink driving" ad which ran in New Zealand - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtWirGxV7Q8
It's remarkable to me how folks who would never, ever be seen to say anything rude about other races (or who would only do so very obliquely) will quite loudly smirk about how much they hate Southerners, how stupid they think Southerners are &c.
It's all just class. One can be just as intelligent with a Southern accent as one can be stupid with another.
When I moved to New York City after living in Florida and North Carolina, I was really surprised at the blatant bigotry here. I've had people respected in this industry for their open mindedness look at me without irony and ask me if it's really as bad as everyone "down there" calling everyone else ... (looks around nervously) ... the N-word.
I had an opposite experience - I moved to Louisiana from a northern state and was shocked at the amount of racism and bigotry openly displayed. While looking in to buying a house I was told but multiple realtors to avoid certain areas because they are "too black." Also I distinctly remember seeing a bumper sticker that deriding mixed race relationships that ended with "don't be a race-mixing slut." Absolutely blew my mind - I didn't know those attitudes still existed.
Was it the openness of the bigotry that shocked you, or the bigotry itself?
In my experience, there isn't a huge difference in the level of racial bigotry between northern and southern states. The difference lies primarily in the openness of it.
For example, the effects of deed-restricted home sales are still being felt today in many neighborhoods in northern states.
In some ways, the openness of the southern brand of racism is more respectable than the northern brand. While the southern real estate agent was open with you, the northern real estate agent may simply assume you don't want to live in a neighborhood that's "too black," never say so to your face, and proceed to only show you houses in the "nice" part of town.
Yes, it's a contrived example, but it's also something that happens every day all over the country.
>In my experience, there isn't a huge difference in the level of racial bigotry between northern and southern states. The difference lies primarily in the openness of it.
When I was managing people in the '90s in California one of the technicians who worked for me was black and had worked all over the country.
He said he much preferred living in the South, because while there was no difference in the number of bigots he ran across, outside the South the bigots weren't brave enough to be open about it so it was harder to tell where he stood.
I think there's probably some legitimacy to that view, but I always wonder how much "shit happens" type stuff gets identified as racism. I'm white, so when a white guy is an asshole to me I assume he's an asshole. If I were black I might assume he's a racist.
>While looking in to buying a house I was told but multiple realtors to avoid certain areas because they are "too black."
Besides racism, that's also a way to say "too poor/downtrodden/crime ridden".
To which, they would indeed have a point (statistics wise), although that of course is caused by the systemic injustice and lack of opportunities against blacks for centuries.
Also notice how people still say the exact same thing about "white trash" places in the North (and South), and nobody seems to mind, because while the US got more tolerant about race, they still don't give a rats arse about classism and social exclusion based on being poor and not a "success".
When I moved to New York City after living in Florida and North Carolina, I was really surprised at the blatant bigotry here.
There is a lot of bigotry in the Bay Area and online. Considering what we know about the mental shortcuts people use to process complex social information, evidence/science minded people should expect there to be bigotry as an unfortunate phenomenon to be aware of. Instead, it has received the imprimatur of "sin."
It's a thorny problem. Talk about bigotry in the "wrong" way, and you ironically open yourself up to yet more bigotry involving projections about your internal mental state.
This particular point has always been a bit funny to me.
I mean, sure, there are super racist areas in the south. I grew up and lived in mostly rural Alabama for the first 20+ years of my life, and there were some rural areas that were just as terrible as people imagine (cross burnings, open Klan meetings, etc, though that was starting to die down in the last 10 years or so I lived there).
That said, a lot of cities in the south are 30% - 50% black (sometimes more), and people who live in those cities, generally speaking, coexist and interact with many black and white people on a continual basis. It'd be kind of hard to do that and be super racists to the level people imagine the south to be.
I talked to a lot more black programmers in meetups in Atlanta than I have in San Francisco (I'm not American and was a visitor in both places) & was surprised by how biased against the former people in the latter were, despite evidence to the contrary.
In Atlanta race is not a special issue, it's a fact of daily life. Interacting with black people isn't an unusual event where you get to pat yourself on the back for 'not being racist'. It's simply what happens everyday.
Or maybe I am just bitter about a 70% white city talking about how racist a 53% black city must be.
Exactly. As a southerner, I have an accent, but I also don't answer important questions fast. IOW, I pause a beat to collect my thoughts. People tend to think this too is a sign of "stupid". Really, it's just I don't like to be wrong. I'd rather be slow up front and be right, than fast up front and be wrong. However, our development culture tends to think everything needs to happen as fast as possible (the whole twitter in a weekend meme).
Just a useful trick, you can have the best of both worlds if you respond with "well, it depends", play up a dramatic pause, and follow with "on one hand..." and finish with a counter-point. It seems to result in a less argumentative response when people disagree as well.
(impending anecdote) - this is something I noticed when I lived in the south for a while. More people tended to think before they spoke which would result in cleaner, less runny conversations compared to the typical word diarrhea I was accustomed to sifting through growing up in the Northwest. It was actually quite nice to deal with after a short adjustment period for me to discard my knee jerk reaction of assuming the heat fried everyone's brains.
> IOW, I pause a beat to collect my thoughts. People tend to think this too is a sign of "stupid".
A lot of tribes in the US have members that exhibit this same behavior. A respectful pause to consider a response and a slow cadence should be a sign they have considered their words, but instead is portrayed as stupid. It made going to DC and dealing with bureaucrats in the 90's a pain in the butt.
>IOW, I pause a beat to collect my thoughts. People tend to think this too is a sign of "stupid". Really, it's just I don't like to be wrong. I'd rather be slow up front and be right, than fast up front and be wrong.
I'm really glad to hear that I'm not alone with this struggle. Still don't have a good answer for it though. :(
That's because there is often a social (status signaling) benefit to disparaging Southerners in many parts of the US. Particularly in coastal, urban areas.
The only reason I even live within commuting distance of a large city is because that's where the only good-paying tech jobs are. If I had been a, say, banker or a mechanic or a plumber I'd be able to work in any town in the country, but no, dumb me had to become a computer programmer.
If I could participate in this career/industry from a smaller town, you bet your butt I'd do it in a second.
Do you realize that ours is one of the few jobs that can be conducted entirely remotely? Perhaps the remote-work train is destined to derail at some point in the future, but at the moment it's totally possible to find work that lets you live anywhere there's available internet.
Is it really? I see this written on HN all the time, but of everyone I know who tried to find a remote job failed.
The people who ended up working remotely are the ones who worked in the office for many years and gained the trust of their employer. Then when the family moved (usually due to a spouse changing jobs) the employer decided to let them work remotely rather than letting them go, at least in the near term.
> The people who ended up working remotely are the ones who worked in the office for many years and gained the trust of their employer.
Well yes pretty much this. I worked for a year on-premises before switching to remote, and I can imagine it's harder to find remote work from the get-go.
I've had many remote jobs (including current). Another option is to start as a (remote) freelancer / consultant and transition to normal full-time while remaining remote.
Yes; but I don't want to work remotely. I want to work in an office with colleagues. I just don't want to have to commute to the center of a large city to do it.
My father was a school board administrator. He was able to make good money, work in an office with colleagues, and still had the ability to live in practically every town in the US. School boards are everywhere. Tech companies are only in the largest cities.
I noticed that, particularly about the New York Times. Periodically they'll have a piece about something in the South and it's always about the stereotypical slack-jawed yokel who's trying to marry his sister, or is living in a dirt hut but has 5000 guns, or a preacher who preaches black people are the descendants of Cain, or some such. It's like people in New York can't start their day without feeling superior to someone else.
The people who Fox News caters to the most are suburbanites. Most people way out here are lukewarm on Fox News. They're just... different. They agree with some things that I imagine would be popular in big coastal cities, but disagree with other things that might surprise you, so.
> Sure, but I'd wager that the rural folk would be fine if all the city dwellers disappeared, and that the opposite is not true.
As much as I like rural folks and like to spend time with them (and despise folks who look down on them), the farmer is just as reliant on the financiers who ensure a steady cash flow for the multinational which delivers him his fertiliser, his fuel, the parts for his tractor, his clothes, his food &c. &c. &c.
But do you think your medicine, qualified doctors, medical equipment, internet, computers you use, movies and tv series you watch, trucks you drive and tons of other things besides grow on trees?
Cities really, truly, have historically predominantly invented, produced and designed those things (including designing and paying for the factories seemingly in the country).
Not many medicine schools, pharma corps, research labs, car manufactures, tech companies, tv and movie studios, etc operating out of rural Idaho, or South Dakota, or Alabama, or what have you...
In the United States, if the "city dwellers" all disappeared, the "rural folk" would go from barely getting by despite being heavily subsidized by everyone else to some kind of devolved state that looked like an Amish version of The Road Warrior.
If the opposite happened, urban areas would buy their food somewhere else and eventually save some money thanks to the increased competition in the market and the lack of agricultural subsidies, not to mention all the other ways we subsidize rural America's inefficiencies.
If you want to go back to subsistence farming, sure. The world is filled with places like that. Don't forget that your machinery is largely designed and built in urban environments. Don't forget that your serious medical care comes from urban environments. And, most importantly, don't forget that your customers largely come from urban environments. If the cities went away, so do your clients and your manufacturing and transportation sources. So, back to subsistence living for you...
I grew up in the city and spent summers on my uncle's farm and have seen both sides. Gods, I am tired of this fucking stupid rural vs urban debate. They need each other, and can't exist in a modern world without each other. Move to the countryside and I hear stereotypes about how shit the people in the city are. Move back to the city and hear stereotypes about how shit the people in the country are. Both sets of stereotypes are largely wrong. Likewise, the people whose jobs straddle both urban and rural environments are not the people who use these stereotypes.
Part of that is because Chicago is considered the baseline "accent" for many news broadcasters, radio personalities, etc. As a result, most Americans have heard that accent their entire life and therefore don't really interpret it as all that different.
I've found that it's the keywords that indicate where people are from within the Midwest:
Even that can differ between rural and urban. I've lived in the midwest for most of my life, and apparently there's all sorts of "terms midwesterners use" that I've only rarely heard anyone say, and most often only to point out that they don't say it.
This depends though. Did you live "all over the midwest" or in a specific state? The very same things people pointed they don't say, could be prevalent in a nearby state.
On the other hand, look at how (politically) "those people" behave in aggregate. It might only be a majority of 51%, but clearly there is a sizable portion of people in the (traditionally somewhat sparsely populated) south / center of the country that have quite different values than the the people living along the crowded coasts.
Not saying one group is smarter/dumber, just that the difference in values makes it hard to come to an agreement, which can make the "other" side seem stupid / "full of shit" / nuts.
Yes, but there are lots of Southerners who are just as progressive as anyone. The distribution is skewed relative to the rest of the country, but that sort of thinking is far from universal.
It's only reasonable to recognize and acknowledge that the South as a whole acts somewhat differently. But it's wrong to talk about all Southerners as if they're the same, or treat all Southerners badly because of it.
It's just like with race. There are real, factual differences between racial groups, and acknowledging this is not a bad thing. What's bad is judging or biasing your interaction with people from those racial groups because of it.
Not everyone southerner has "southern" values. The south also has urban areas where people lean more to the left than their rural counterparts. There are just fewer of them. They (unfairly) get stuck with the same stereotypes.
That's the idea of generalizations. They don't need to be 100% fair, just statistically useful.
I'd wish people would get that, and only complain when a generalization is statistically wrong (e.g. doesn't really hold for the majority of the people it lumps along), instead of everytime they find a counter-example...
Simpsons paradox though. There are more conservative people in California than there are in Georgia (e.g. more people in California voted for Mitt Romney than people in Georgia). Slicing people up into states to make nice sound bite statistics is useless and leads to stupid stereotypes.
Well, that more people in California "voted for Mitt Romney than people in Georgia" might not tell the whole story.
Are the people in California traditionalist, religious, backwards, or even racist, etc, as the people in Georgia? They might not be, regardless of who they chose to vote for -- which takes into account many factors and policies.
That said, California is also traditionally regarded as conservative (at least by us in Europe) -- it's places like Massachusetts or Vermont that we'd count as progressive. Especially since California is regarded as hardcore pro-money/big-business, which is large part of being a "conservative" here.
Same percentage voted for Romney in Massachusetts as did in California. Again, grouping people by states is ridiculous to represent the views of the whole population of the state. It usually comes down to urban vs rural and that's about it.
Atlanta is not all that different from LA and Boston politically.
Or, you know, less people vote in the south. In the 2012 Election, southern states all had far less turnout than northern states[1]. Your'e not comparing apples to apples.
Saying the entire south in aggregate is "stupider" because of that is plain wrong.
1) I said that a difference in values (due to location / population distribution / history ???) made them reason differently, not that they were actually stupid.
2) I also meant to highlight "some do, some don't" by saying "perhaps 51%". Perhaps 51% is even too high, maybe it's just a vocal minority.
3) By calling them (in quotes) "those people" and "other" I was alluding to a certain amount of xenophobia on the part of coastal dwellers when considering fly-over dwellers. And yes, that cuts both ways.
If one hasn't visited the South and relies on current events and news to derive an opinion on the area it's hard to blame them for thinking the southern states are in a race to the intellectual bottom.
I've lived my whole life in the South and think the southern states are in a race to the intellectual bottom -- though only the legislators are actually running in the race. A majority of the rest of us are just cheering them on.
That's fascinating. I remember reading something a while ago about the loss of regional accents (there's a great "Downeast" accent up here in Maine that no one has anymore, except lobstermen). People like to blame mass media, but in reality it's mass communication and the stigma of having a thick Brooklyn, Southie, or Downeast accent that encourages folks to pretend they don't have one.
On the flip side, there is some evolutionary reasons why humans make quick decision when encountering new people or places, and I would guess it would take generations to change our hardwiring to NOT make those assumptions unconsciously. Even more brutal, if that hardwiring changes, there are circumstances where we'd likely be in trouble but for our split second assumptions.
Fascinating story on NPR last year about a cop in an evacuated Wal-mart looking for an active shooter. Came around the corner to see a white woman and for half a second wondered why a civilian was still in the store. Then she shot at him, he returned fire and barely escaped with his life. So there's arguments to be made for learning how to avoid those assumptions too :) Crazy, mixed up world we humans make for ourselves.
Just because he was quick to classify with a false negative doesn't mean he would have been quick to classify with a false positive. Just because he's a police officer doesn't mean he doesn't deserve to be seen as an individual that makes his own decisions, and has his own opinions, views and predispositions.
That you would make such a comment in a discussion about classism and racism is very ironic.
While the outright assertion that a black suspect would have been shot is unjustified, it seems counterintuitive to simultaneously make reference to one erroneous snap judgment (the cop assuming the white woman was not the shooter) without acknowledging the other side of that coin. Why is the cop an allowable surrogate of societal stereotypes when he assumes the white woman is not the shooter, but an "individual that makes his own decisions, and has his own opinions, views and predispositions" when an alternative hypothetical is presented?
> it seems counterintuitive to simultaneously make reference to one erroneous snap judgment (the cop assuming the white woman was not the shooter) without acknowledging the other side of that coin.
No supporting evidence has been presented that a person will necessarily attribute the same level of certainty when positively or negatively associating a person to a category, either globally or under specific circumstances that match these. Identifying someone as a threat and discounting someone as not a threat may engage different levels of reasoning and heuristics in different circumstances, and assuming they are equivalent without justification is a mistake, in my opinion.
> Why is the cop an allowable surrogate of societal stereotypes when he assumes the white woman is not the shooter, but an "individual that makes his own decisions, and has his own opinions, views and predispositions" when an alternative hypothetical is presented?
His behavior with regard to race was classified based purely on his profession. I'm not sure how that's justifiable.
Edit: To more directly address what I think your point is, we were presented a situation, not necessarily the police officer's reasoning and perspective. We don't know if the reason he thought she was not the shooter was her color, gender, clothing, bearing or some combination of those and other factors. There is little information to go on, so we shouldn't assume we know much.
In the long-form radio story, the cop very clearly presents that it was the shooters apparent gender that confused him and nearly cost him his life and the life of the perpetrator. They also noted in the story that officers are briefed on active shooter situations to assume a white male suspect. This was in Nevada, a state that has become (thanks largely to this and other similar stories) a paragon of officer education on the nature of cognitive biases and how to understand and use them to greatest affect.
If this information was available at the start, portions of my comments would have been different. As it is, I don't think it's appropriate to assume the facts you've now presented, as it doesn't make for a good discussion, and it isn't fair to the people involved. As it is, I stand by my earlier comments which referenced what information we know or don't know, since anyone coming with information only from your original comment couldn't know that, and what's more, according to you, the skin color actually wasn't the deciding factor.
I present this not as an argumentative reply to you, but just to clarify my point in my immediately preceding comment in this thread, as it seems to have been polarizing (it fluctuated from -2 to +3 multiple times, and now sits at 0).
I don't think that's true if it had been a black woman. I'd argue that it was the sex of the person more than the color that got him in trouble. Men commit a lot more violent crime than women do.
While you are right that gender is a very strong predictor, you are wrong about race, according to CNN[1].
> white people ... committed some 64% of the shootings ... Black people committed close to 16% ... Asians were responsible for around 9% ... Latinos are almost nowhere to be seen
> whites and blacks are pretty proportionate to their population
No, the cop on the show explained his reasoning that he expected a young white male. Cops are taught that active shooters are predominantly young white males. You can argue statistics, but the officer in the piece specifically said he was looking for a man, not a woman.
Also being from the south (Kentucky, so not as far south perhaps), I see this as well. My approach is actually the inverse. Like racism or really any form of bigotry, I call it out when I see it and make it known this is _not_ ok. Very few HR departments are ok with bigotry of this sort.
You shouldn't have to be ashamed of how you sound or where you're from. I do massively agree with you regarding people thinking southerners are stupid bigots. The way to fix that is to show them you're not, and make a strong point of showing it.
It reminds me of a trip I recently took to Belfast. The day I was there, a car bomb from the IRA killed a police officer. A cabbie asked me if I supported Donald Trump and told he we was surprised I didn't. He told me all Americans supported Trump. So I asked him if he was an IRA thug/terrorist, to which he naturally said no. So rhetorically, I asked how he was from northern ireland and not IRA. When he explained what was obvious, I said EXACTLY, this is much like people who support trump in America. The vocal minority often drown out the majority. Blindly categorizing someone in $group is bigotry plain and simple. Just because it comes from an educated person in tech doesn't make it any less so. Perhaps point out this hypocrisy.
"A cabbie asked me if I supported Donald Trump and told he we was surprised I didn't. He told me all Americans supported Trump. So I asked him if he was an IRA thug/terrorist, to which he naturally said no."
It's hardly reasonable to compare being a member of a terrorist organization to supporting the leading candidate of one of two major parties.
Consider just the sheer effort of participating in terrorism is far greater than voting.
Can you come up with a better analogy on the spot that would have worked in that situation?
SEJeff obviously isn't saying that Trump support and IRA support are exactly equivalent. He's saying they're both subgroups in a larger population that outsiders stereotype as representing the entire population, to the disgust of many of the people stereotyped. It's an excellent analogy because it references a situation that's intimately familiar to the person he's speaking to.
"Are you protestant/catholic" would suffice. Lots of people in the US support Trump. Lots of people in NI are either protestant or catholic, and it's a shorthand for the sides of the same political divide that the IRA is involved in.
Well I was pointing out his logical fallacy in assuming I supported someone because of where I was from. That is a ridiculous assumption, so I made an equally ridiculous one, which he immediately understood. Then we got on really well.
38.6% of Americans state that they would vote for Donald Trump over Hilary Clinton while 49% state that they would vote for Clinton over Trump.
There are only several hundred members of the IRA today (out of 1.8 million people in Northern Ireland) and even fewer of them participate in terrorism.
And it's not a logical fallacy. The cab driver clearly didn't mean all Americans support Donald Trump. Presumably he knows there are other candidates so thats at least a few people who don't support Trump. He meant a lot of Americans do support Trump and clearly they do.
> The cab driver clearly didn't mean all Americans support Donald Trump. Presumably he knows there are other candidates so thats at least a few people who don't support Trump. He meant a lot of Americans do support Trump and clearly they do.
Why are you willing to accept that the cab driver was speaking figuratively, but not that SEJeff was?
Trump is considered racist for wanting to secure the borders. Both parties leadership, made up of out of touch elites, have decided that illegal immigration is good for their interests, voters be damned. Dems need to have more people on gov assistance and the GOP wants cheap labor with no rights. I dislike Trump but if both sides are demonizing him then he is probably on the right track.
I'm from SE Texas and had a very thick accent growing up. I spent considerable effort getting rid of that accent around age 16. It's a double edged sword. I got so good at it that when I acquired a job at a newspaper in the town I was born in it caused some issues. Locals were upset about our paper hiring a girl from Indiana and another guy from Ohio. It was a very small town and the locals believed the local newspaper should be staffed by locals. When I would interview people they would get standoffish, accusing me of being a northerner, an outsider. I would tell them I could see the hospital I was born in from my office window, but they wouldn't believe me. My accent still comes out when I've had a few drinks or get tired. I've had a few people notice and think it's hysterical that I try to hide it. I too work in tech now and don't want anybody making snap judgments about me from the way I speak.
I use both accents with people, depending on context. It it not false nor disingenuous in my opinion because different sentences may work better with one or the other.
I've had instances where if I reveal my technical experience with the usual way I speak about such things - I get cold/rude service. This happened at one of those AT&T storefronts, Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, and at more than a few Apple Stores. I don't try to be intimidating, but I do want to inform the person "helping" me if I can...
I've gotten into the habit of adopting a slower speech with a slight drawl in an effort to appear more relatable and honest about my intentions. It takes some patience as I have to describe my problem 'in a circle' and without a larger vocabulary. However, I don't get treated like sheltered upper-class and people seem to want to help me rather than avoid me.
I've also avoid sounding like the stereotypical homosexual. Just the "accent" makes some people freak out and say I'm 'shoving it in their face'. I'm looking at you Aunt Marlene. I reserve the lisp for Vegas and Chippendales.
I'm from Atlanta and still live here. You wouldnt know I was from the South because of my accent, I have none. I did kill my accent in grade school when kids made fun of me for saying words different.
In my limited experience working with others, southern accent = ignorant bigot has not been something I have seen with my co workers. People usually just shrug it off but I can see why a country accent may be looked down upon by ignorant people.
I'm from Northwest Pennsylvania, and everyone there would also say "different."
I know, because in high school I became friends with a highly educated family who moved into town after having lived all over the world, and made an effort to match their more intelligent sounding speech (which included, among other things, adding -ly to adverbs.)
My mom still occasionally teases me that I say "eye-ther" instead of "eee-ther" (for "either.")
Fascinating since I feel that a southern accent (perhaps a light one) can be an advantage in professional services (ex: law) since it communicates approachability and trustworthiness.
Stereotypes. They exist for a reason, it's just that we think they are true more often than they are, so we end up making the wrong choice much of the time.
Most elite Northerner whites are just as insulated as they think Southerners are, when it comes to traveling within their own country. In fact they typically know jack shit about Southern culture. There was a time when Southern accents were considered deliberately slow, enunciated, cultured. Yes, at that time whites were at the top of the class food chain, and yes most of that white privilege was racist or at least depended on it. But the accent is orthogonal to racism. We've just come to associate one with the other, using a stereotype.
Another stereotype is white Northerners will pretty much assume white Southerners, identified as such by their drawl, may be a racist.
This hasn't been my experience at all. I moved to Seattle from Alabama (almost 10 years ago now), and openly tell people I'm from Alabama, and I've yet to feel discriminated against because of it. In fact, some people are a bit envious of property prices there. I think mostly they are just glad I'm not from California ;).
They like you just fine. You're not like "them". You're not like the racist, bigoted, regressive, backwards, ignorant, inbreds of people who still live in the South.
Most people out here can comprehend the concept that there are people in our country who conservative, religious, and smart. They'd shit themselves if they met someone who was conservative and smarter than they were. (This is where you insert a joke about if they're so smart then why are they conservative! hardy har har.)
I grew up in Seattle and still live there. If you voice any opinions that are not in a narrow band of the far left wing, they (including recent transplants) will attribute you holding that opinion to your place of origin, rather than listening to any justification you have for holding that opinion.
My girlfriend's company in Capitol Hill is super big on diversity. It's a huge part of their hiring process. They're about 50 to 60 people large. I asked her how many conservatives work there. Answer: zero.
Along some axes Seattle is very diverse. But along others not so much.
Everything you say is essentially also valid for immigrants (perhaps now citizens) who haven't lost their accent.
While I agree this is not ideal, it's also built into human nature to use any/all hints to help generalize/categorize (likely because it determined survival in the past).
Not quite the same thing, but I have a friend who naturally has a Midwestern accent. She told me once that when she used to be a waitress, she got way better tips by faking a British or Australian accent.
I grew up in the South (though not rural or Appalachia) and at age 10, I made the conscientious decision to get rid of my southern accent. It sounded "unintelligent" to me but more than that, it seemed to bely my moral values. As judgmental as this sounds (and it's true, it is judgmental), I looked around at the values that are often attached to the South -- bigotry and racism being the big two -- and said, "no."
So, at age 10, I lost my accent. I first stopped saying "y'all" -- but it quickly morphed into my entire accent changing. My parents/sister and most of my friends still had an accent, but I lost mine. With the exception of a few words or phrases, I don't even say southern colloquialisms. (I do still call every type of soda "Coke" -- but that's just Atlanta pride).
When I take those tests that determine dialect, I never get the South, I almost always get midwest or Southern California. (That was the goal, so go me?) Even drunk, I don't slip back to a southern accent, simply because it doesn't exist as part of me anymore.
The fact that I made that decision at age 10 -- and to be VERY clear, it was my own decision and not one pushed/encouraged by my parents (in fact, they probably rolled their eyes) -- I think says a lot about just how palpable those stereotypes that you mention are. Because at that age, when given the opportunity to lose an accent (I had speech impediment, was taking speech therapy a few times a week and had to basically re-train myself to talk. I decided to hack the system and get the accent I wanted in the process), I took it. I'll be totally honest, I don't regret it.
But still, I do often think about the code switching that I chose to take on at that age and what that means. For my career now, which often includes going on television -- it's realistically probably served me well to have no accent. Even in high school working in retail, it often served me well to "not sound like I was from the South" when selling someone a $1500 digital video camera or charging $50 an hour to repair a computer.
Still, I do think about it a lot. I think about why it was so important, even at that age, for me to reject something like my voice/accent.
My husband (a software engineer) is a lot like you in that he is able to switch his accent on and off depending on who he talks to. When speaking with his parents or grandmother, his Tennessee twang comes out. With colleagues or people in our neighborhood, there is a slight hint of an accent, but nothing major. And he does it for the same reasons.
No one wants to sound like a redneck in a professional setting, especially one stereotypically white-collar like software engineering. And yet, we don't talk about why that is the case -- or why where we are from matters.
While I was born in Australia, I worked in the UK for many years in a job that involved traveling the country. I would often see confusion as people realized I didn't fit their social groupings and stereotypes. It was a real advantage.
For me, the Scottish accent is the hardest of the English accents for me to understand. I work with English speakers from New Zealand/Australia and India to the UK/Ireland.
English and Scottish sayings/slang are my favorite. Southerns have some good sayings but they are not as enjoyable for me to hear, maybe because I used to them.
There are quite a lot of Scots accents and dialects - my wife, who is from near Glasgow, can't understand a word of anything said in the dialect I used as a kid as I'm from a completely different part of Scotland (Moray).
Indeed when I was growing up even though I was in a rural area people who lived on farms had a noticeably different accent from those of us who lived in coastal fishing villages even though the farms might only be a kilometer or so from the coast.
e.g.
“A ken a ken im, but a da ken far a ken im fae.”
or
"I know I know him, but I don't know where I know him from".
And of course, I was a "wee loonie" when I was younger.
Edit: Of course, the biggest crime I commit when it comes to class is, of course, using "toilet" rather than "loo".
(Non-native English speaker here.) I worked for a Scot in Dublin for three months before I realized his accent wasn't Irish. I also had almost no problem understanding him.
On the other hand, I find it almost impossible to read text that is supposed to show Scottish accent, like the one from arethuza.
Listening to that phrase would be worse in reality as folk from the North East of Scotland tend to talk quite quickly and without proper breaks between words.
I've probably said something like that many times when I was younger (I now have, as someone described it, an "affected Edinburgh accent"). However, you can get silly Scots phrases like:
"Fit fit fits fit fit?"
Or, my favourite:
"Aye, ane an an ingin ane an a"
The latter I can't say without almost singing (and smiling).
I lived in the south for some time, and being from the midwest ('no' accent), I was always called a yankee. Sometimes as a joke, but there were plenty of cases where it made me feel uncomfortable.
Wear your accent with pride, if your co-workers' stereotyping persists then they're the bigots. Otherwise it becomes a cool personality trait others can't fake.
Duuuude! Me too all the way... Except I don't change my accent. I just fuck with people and their stupid biases... I tell the truth, and when people are sacarcastic I take it all literally on purpose... And I make them explain everything, especially their stupid jokes!!! Oh man I love making people explain their stupid jokes to me. My favorite thing to say is, "I don't get it?" Or "yeaaah, I'm a literalist. I don't get sarcasm." ....and if the conversation hasn't turned to something real and interesting by this point and right when they're fedup and ready and to walk away and dissmis me... That's when I tell them I'm fucking with them in my best voice impression of theirs. It's all about vetting and breaking social facades. Most people and especially in tech were abussed by their peers as kids. They learned early on to judge and dismiss. You can't take it too personally and you always have to be ready to fight. The key is to come from a place of humility and not to be mean. Otherwise you'll just add to the problem and growing cultural divide. Oh yeah I'm from Oklahoma, I had a speech impediment as a kid so they tell me. I was beat up or confronted nearly every day in school by people who were afraid and didn't understand me. It didn't help that I went to school in the poorest school in town, that was also the most racially/culturally diverse school... And my mom was an administrator there. So all the worst kids had beaf with me because of my mom. But one of the best lessons I ever learned was "fuck the dumb shit"... This goes for all things in life.
Being from Europe, I was also weirded out that almost all discussions of class in the US was about money. To me, the separation of economic class and social class is clearer than to the average American.
But, the same rules of "invisibility" apply where I'm from. Whenever I've talked to my upper-middle class friends about what social class they belong to, they are completely clueless. They don't know they belong to it, they don't know others don't, and they completely subscribe to the "we're all just regular middle class" mentality. The friends I have from other classes, or who have also made class journeys, are much more in tune, they have no problems seeing class and classism.
One thing that was very illuminating to me in this article was the notion of class as culture, and class as performance.
> It is a common misconception that the primary obstacle to being in a much higher class is money to afford the things by which one performs that class. The limiting factor is not money, it is this: it is impossible to join a culture the ways of which you know nothing. You may come by money, but the ignorance of how to use it to perform that higher class will keep you out as adamantly as if there were a wall built around it.
> Being from Europe, I was also weirded out that almost all discussions of class in the US was about money.
The subtle differences between the USA and Europe on this subject are quite interesting. Another one is that in the USA, being branded as 'upper class' is pejorative and instantly implies you are rich, spoiled and not likely to be a hard worker, if you work at all.
That's also fascinating, because in the US, wanting to be rich is seen as a very positive thing. Everyone is supposed to be living the American Dream and improving their lives, but reaching the end goal is a bad state? Hilarious.
And where I'm from, wanting to be rich is seen as an ugly thing, the only socially acceptable ways to be rich is to win the lottery or be a sports champion. Then it's perfectly fine, but should you actually earn your money then that's automatically suspect and you're labelled a Bad Person.
I have friends who are in the IT industry, making good money, and who are genuinely ashamed of how much money they make.
> That's also fascinating, because in the US, wanting to be rich is seen as a very positive thing. Everyone is supposed to be living the American Dream and improving their lives, but reaching the end goal is a bad state? Hilarious.
It's more complicated than that. It's people who start with wealth who are looked down on, not people who come from modest means to achieve wealth. The default assumption is that these individuals bought their way into whatever success they have, never have to work for anything, and never experience hardship.
It isn't. I'm from a economically below-average country in Europe, have lived in a couple others and I've settled down in the north. Almost none of my friends (particularly back home but here too) know how much I make because it's genuinely embarrassing. It's something of a "why do I make so much more when I'm no better than anyone else here?" feeling.
Also I know it's not just me, I see it around me from other people in both countries; the only people I've ever talked about it with was with other friends I know earn similarly to due to similar circumstances at the time.
edit: now that I think about it, while talking about earning a lot is generally shameful, discussing buying expensive things doesn't elicit the same feeling, despite being effectively the same.
Interesting! Thanks, this clarifies something for me - my wife is mortified because I freely discuss my income with anyone who asks, and it's way higher than the average. She considers it "bragging" and, as you say, embarrassing. I always thought I was showing friends / relatives / acquaintances that getting a lot more money is possible with not much effort - I work from home and don't have a degree.
Anyway - it's interesting to think of this mentality as part of "European culture".
I had associated it with survivors/metaphysical guilt. It's similar to the guilt that survivors feel when an accident happens and injures/kills others but not them. It's not that we did anything wrong to be ashamed of, but instead almost a guilt about being lucky or being who we are.
It's an interesting phenomenon and I've begun studying it more after moving out of Silicon Valley and suddenly realizing how very privileged I really am. A specific point is that generally you can't discharge the guilt just by doing good things. Donations and volunteer work don't seem to help because there's nothing to atone for.
>but reaching the end goal is a bad state? Hilarious.
To make a defense, reaching the end goal implies that one (or more likely, one's children) have stopped striving, stopped contributing to society, and are enjoying a parasitic lifestyle of indolent luxury.
More to the point, it makes sense that "upper-class" is pejorative in the US because the US was settled in large part by people from Europe fleeing from the aristocratic upper-class there. The people here specifically wanted to contrast themselves from the rentier upper-classes in the "home countries".
Being rich != upper-class. The first is an economic indicator, the second is a social indicator.
As noted in the essay, a plumber can be rich, but will unlikely ever be upper-class.
It's also worth noting that the "American Dream" is really just upper-middle-class. Single family house, 2.5 kids and a dog, a new-ish car, and enough disposable income to take an annual vacation.
Very few people truly aspire to be upper-class (think Kennedy or Vanderbilt). Rich, maybe, but probably not upper class.
I really do not think that is the American dream. If it were, people would have demanded better working rights and benefits by now. The American Dream is to become filthy rich and/or famous.
The American Dream is to become filthy rich and/or famous.
Among some demographics, that may be true. But, ask a classroom full of not-poor children, and answers are more likely to be along the lines of "I want to be an astronaut", not "I want to be Kim Kardashian".
> I have friends who are in the IT industry, making good money, and who are genuinely ashamed of how much money they make.
Not just them. I feel the same when I hear that I earn more on my 28-hour-a-week job than my brothers working full-time as civil engineers (including night shifts and lots of overtime).
Is it possible that your friends are actually right? How did you gain this ability they lack, to detect precisely who is upper-middle class?
You say class isn't about money, and I suppose it shouldn't be. Maybe they think class is about something even worse than money and they don't want any part of it.
> Whenever I've talked to my upper-middle class friends about what social class they belong to, they are completely clueless. They don't know they belong to it, they don't know others don't, and they completely subscribe to the "we're all just regular middle class" mentality.
> Is it possible that your friends are actually right?
In being oblivious to a well-documented phenomenon? That's not very likely. Obliviousness to class is a class marker for middle class. Major values of the middle class are equal opportunity and meritocracy, but existing class structures prevent that, so the middle class stick their heads in the ground and pretend that the upper classes have earned their position at the top, and that the lower classes haven't yet earned a higher position. Members of both the upper and lower classes are well aware that this is a complete farce.
> How did you gain this ability they lack, to detect precisely who is upper-middle class?
By being friends with people from different classes, by being interested and observant, and by having made a small class journey myself. I suggest you read the entire article, it might open your eyes as well.
Social class is astonishingly multidimensional as pointed out in the works of C. Wright Mills (Power Elite), Paul Fussel (Class), Tom Wolfe (The Pump House Gang), etc.
In my extended family there are no college professors, but a lot of cops, even a lot of women that are cops. (There are some accountants, but they are forensic accountants ;-)
When I get stopped by the cops I don't worry, they like my attitude, they will tell me that people don't like speeding in their residential neighborhood and to them I look more like a guy who doesn't like speeding in my residential neighborhood and not the kind of guy who likes to play Initial D in residential neighborhoods.
Sometimes I've been a bystander when it looked like the cops showed up to arrest the first black person they saw, or when 15 police vehicles show up to arrest some black guy as thin as a rail and I even have a friend who grew up in a much richer family than me who had a bad attitude towards the police and has had his ass kicked, etc. Somehow though, even though I am not a cop and I don't particularly see things the way cops do, I've somehow absorbed enough protective coloration that I have a lot of "privilege" in this area, and less in some other areas.
Fussel's Class was sort of OK, but then he went on a wish-fulfillment tripe dump, whereupon he wished college professors like himself to be above it all.
Class is probably Fussel's hardest book to rip up. Look at Muscle, the book he ghost wrote for his son to find out what he really thinks.
To be fair when a graduate student I knew had an absentee PhD supervisor and a nervous breakdown and tried the "experiment" of not showing up for work and seeing how long it took for the paychecks to stop, the "experiment" strung on for most of a year until his dad realized he had no idea how to get in touch with his son, called up the department, and they called me up.
He had managed department failing department stores for decades and he thought our college town was a "dump" because it didn't have a Nordstrom's.
The social position of the college professor has changed a lot since Fussel's generation. Up until 1970 or so it was a path of upward social mobility, but a slowdown of tenure track hiring, social changes that doubled the number of professor's kids that could be recruited (counterbalanced enough by massive imports of male graduate students from hyperpatriarchical cultures to not threaten feminoid narriatives) mean it is no longer a path to social mobility, unless you mean trading a life of baking cookies at an organic cafe 9-5 to working 80 hours a week at 5 different colleges spread out over 200 miles while eating off food stamps...
Think it's very possible that you believe law enforcement thinks about the world differently than someone trying to avoid law enforcement.
My understanding is that they share the same mental model of the world on average; which is not a critical view of either, just what I've heard from people that know much, much more about how different types of people think than me.
To be clear, it would be foolish to say all people, even of a given type, think the same.
To be clear, it would be foolish to say all people, even of a given type, think the same.
This statement doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
One of the main purposes of training for many jobs (lawyers, physicists, police, etc.) is explicitly to modify the mental model you apply to the world.
I found his comment interesting but I don't know what to think about it.
Certainly cops and criminals have plenty of reason to get into each other's heads.
Maybe a better analogy could be the rift that exists between police and the black communities in many places. Definitely these people have a different perspective about things. There is definitely a hard core of criminals who are coincidentally black who are playing a "cat and mouse" game against the cops, but then there are a lot of blacks who have surplus trouble with the police as well as situations like
It's a clear case where there is a gap between a community segment and the police and also my original comment was about my own experience of what seems to be "hyper white privilege" in terms of grooving along abnormally well with the cops.
Point is there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions. While I'd agree that mental induction into a field does happen, that unlike in many fields, law enforcement has a very primal nature, and many that take on this domain are predoposed to it; within nature, the domain would be the relationship between predators and their prey.
Honestly didn't mean to have a "tone" - unless you mean my comment about evolutionary psychology, which is just balderdash in general.
Anyway, I can't really see the connection you trying to make, are you saying that something innate to (some of) the people who choose policing as a career overrides their training? Or that police training is in some particular way unsuccessful in modifying mental models?
Yes, your response to evolutionary psychology was not constructive in my opinion; also, just to be clear, I'm very sure I make tone mistakes too. As for evolutionary psychology, I see your point, and happy with leaving it at that; meaning evolutionary psychology, like much of the field is not a science.
Any rate, what I am saying is that some types of personalities (that develop prior entering a life of crime or law enforcement) predispose individuals to enter either one, the other, or both.
Special forces has a saying, that is, you're either born to be a seal, or you're not; which is to say, training will never make you something that you're not, but it will weed out those that can't be trained; reference the seals, since they're at the extreme of having a very develop mental model prior to training.
Ok, I'm not sure I agree with you entirely but now I can make sense of your point.
I think there is probably some truth in what you are saying, and some pure selection bias. However, I also believe that there are many modifications to ones mental models that happen through training - that a) are probably very opaque to the recipient and b) do not occur naturally/intuitively almost ever.
dont really think its that certain types of individuals being drawn to law enforcement, or rather i think that is true but i dont think thats the largest factor. I do not think its so much the type individual as the type of situation.
Meaning I think when you put people into primal life or death situations which require split second decision making a lot of instinctual processes take over.
Geography plays a huge role in determining social classes and the perceptions of them. It also influences spending habits.[1]
In New York, for example, it has been shown that people across the income spectrum there will pay more than the national average for shoes and watches. New York is very wealthy and urban, so you are always walking and being seen in your shoes (and checking the time) and it confers a sense of class. The more people think about the quality of their footwear, the more they will be concerned with keeping up appearances. Even poor New Yorkers spend a higher part of their income on shoes than most poor Americans.
Contrast this with, say, San Francisco. The shaggy-looking dude in jeans and a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt could be a multimillionaire, you'd never know. But it is more likely than not that the given individual is physically fit. It's always bikini season in California, whereas New York's long and snowy winters allow for big meals and bigger coats. The more fit people you encounter, the more you will be concerned with your and other's fitness, because it is more readily on your mind. ("It's warm and sunny all year round and you don't even jog or bike? Get off your ass."). Consequently, the Bay Area sees a disproportionate amount of income spent on health clubs.
Weird example if you ask me. New Yorkers get about an hour of physical activity a day just from transportation, and have a culture of looking more attractive than in other cities, which includes fitness. I find it pretty hard to find a fat person on the subway in NYC.
In contrast, few people in Florida away from the beach seem to work out at a gym, and very few people bike (drivers there see cyclists as fun moving targets). It's often too gross outside to do physical activity, whether it's raining or hot as balls.
The NYC government says that 56% of people in NYC are overweight or obese. That's lower than the national average, but higher than many other cities. It's also only a few percentage points lower than the State of Florida's averag (which includes rural areas with much higher obesity rates).
>I find it pretty hard to find a fat person on the subway in NYC.
Maybe you ride a particularly fit (particularly affluent?) section of the subway because if 56% of New Yorkers are overweight or obese, it seems like they'd be fairly common on the subway.
There has always been, and always will be, class in a society of people. Even among "progressive" societies like coastal North American cities, classism exists. It may be seperating people based on what level of educational attainment you have, or even how politically correct you act around peers (the more the better...?), but it will exist no matter what.
Status was once (and perhaps still is) a useful metric for the level of contribution someone offered a community - doctors, lawyers and others like them get status because status is what a community could use in lieu of payment as a means of expressing gratitude for the useful service the person provides. We attribute status to athletes, musicians, companies and others for the same reason - they give us something we want.
In order to feel like one belongs you must have acceptance from your community, be it a street gang or a country club. One of the most critical dimensions of the character of a person is how you treat someone that you do not have to treat well.
So we should use our progressive monocultural aspirations for good (treat people fairly and as they want to be treated) instead of just talking about how much you want to save the world while you reject people who have a lesser degree than you.
I once went out to lunch at a modest restaurant with a couple friends, one from a wealthy eastern family and one from poverty. The former was dressed like a slob, the latter in a nice suit.
I was fascinated how the former exuded class in how he comfortably dealt with the waiter and the wine list, etc., while the latter clearly was desperately trying to do that and failing.
The difference was apparent even in how they walked and sat.
For other good (albeit fictional) accounts of social class, there's "Gone With The Wind's" treatment of Rhett Butler by southern society, and "The Blue Max's" treatment of Bruno Stachel who rises from being an innkeeper's son to a role formerly reserved only for the nobility. (Neither is about money, but manners and behavior.)
The upper classes are effortlessly sociable, polished, and polite, even if they think you're an idiot - unless you're the help, in which case they aren't.
There are some subtle markers you can only learn either by being born into them or being told about them.
E.g. when middle class are introduced they say "Pleased to meet you."
When upper class people meet they say "How d'you do?" - and if someone says "Pleased to meet you, they immediately know they're not dealing with one of their own."
I spent some time on the edges of the upper class scene, and the polish often hides drama and resentment - possibly because public school in the UK can sometimes seem to be a bizarre form of institutionalised child abuse.
It's hard to imagine someone who's set to inherit a gigantic country mansion feeling that life has given them a raw deal, but I've seen it happen.
There's also an almost complete absence of passionate creativity. I've seen working class kids (almost literally) kill to become musicians or artists. The upper classes sometimes drift into it, but the work is often derivative and shallow, and doesn't have the kick it has when someone has had to struggle.
I have a friend I grew up with in Florida that for some reason developed an extremely thick southern accent (I didn't).
He never finished college but started a machining company making parts for the food industry and has done very well making many times the money I have. He is a reasonably smart guy but most people wouldn't guess it talking to him. He sounds like he stepped directly out of the "Deliverance" movie. I didn't realize how bad it was until I saw him a year or two ago and even though he hasn't lived in the south in years, I swear his accent has gotten worse.
Obviously this would be a huge negative in certain professions in certain locations. But it certainly hasn't prevented him from succeeding. In fact, my theory is that it has helped and this is why the accent has gotten stronger.
His employees are mostly machinist/welder types. No way to say sissy to those guys more than speaking properly without accent. So maybe it give his some credibility with that crowd. He also does high dollar contracts for major companies. I bet more than a few times he has been sized up as "dumb hick we are going to take advantage of" and been severely underestimated in negations. Point being, in some times and places appearing a dumb hick might get one further than talking smart. Not in the software industry in California necessarily. There appearing smart might be more important than actually being smart:)
The truth of the essay is illustrated by studies that show lower social mobility over longer generational windows, i.e. ones grandfather's income quintile is a better predictor of ones owns than ones fathers's. The intangible cultural inheritance of social class is more lasting than fluctuations in material wealth.
I've always found the reflexivity of class to be somewhat interesting. Economically, my family is in the bottom quartile of the country—but it never felt like that. They definitely raised me with "upper class" values and attitudes. (For example, there was never even a shadow of a doubt about whether I'd attend college.) My grandparents, on the other hand, were quite well off.
As such, I've always felt more comfortable and fit in with people whose families have incomes vastly exceeding my family's.
> "ones grandfather's income quintile is a better predictor of ones owns than ones fathers's"
Wouldn't this actually meant that the average of one's parents, grandparent's, and great-grandparent's income quintiles is a better predictor than one's parents alone? (Unless these studies only looked at personal income of male relatives instead of household income?) The income of the grandfather is still a single point subject to fluctuations.
I haven't finished the article yet, but one thing that strikes me is the flamboyant use of vocabulary. Given the topic, I'm not sure whether it's just a peculiarity of the author, an attempt to tailor the reception of the piece with regard to specific audiences, a slight trolling or the reader, or a combination thereof.
For example, early on we get "impecunious" and "shibboleths", followed up shortly afterwards with "booboo" (!). I find it distracting, to the point that I've lost the main thread of the article and I'm now wondering what the author was trying to accomplish with this style, if anything.
I often find myself switching to a different form of conversing when debating here, but I would like to think that's because I'm trying to be precise, and so I switch to a more precise method of expression. Sometimes that makes it into my speech, for example when I'm trying to explain or diagnose a problem. It can be detrimental to communication if leaned on too heavily though.
You ask in another comment whether you are oblivious. Playfully, I respond "Yes, you are oblivious".
Using "shibboleth" as a shibboleth is itself a shibboleth. She's declaring her bona fides (gratuitous Latin is also a shibboleth, especially if highlighted with italics) as a scholar by demonstrating her ability to use an obscure term correctly, and is being gracious to her audience by assuming their comprehension. Switching to "booboo" is intentional, showing consciousness of register.
My background is somewhat similar to hers, although without the parental guidance. Perhaps as a result, my acculturation was less successful. I think this is a brilliant article, and (having read and enjoyed many of your other comments on this site) I encourage you start from the assumption that the author is fully conscious of the tone of this piece.
> You ask in another comment whether you are oblivious. Playfully, I respond "Yes, you are oblivious".
A totally valid response, I was asking honestly, not sarcastically. :) The truth is, I'm not exposed to southern accents very often outside of media. I've lived and worked an hour north of SF most my life, and I think I'm more likely to identify a British or Australian accent in the area than I am a southern one. Unless they are hiding their accent, which I guess is entirely possible considering this thread.
> Switching to "booboo" is intentional, showing consciousness of register. ... I encourage you start from the assumption that the author is fully conscious of the tone of this piece.
I assumed the author was completely aware of the tone, I just wasn't sure how to interpret it myself in the short amount I had read.
> I think this is a brilliant article
Well, with that endorsement, I'll put extra effort into finishing it then. Not that I stopped for reasons pertaining to the content or delivery, I just ran out of time and all too often interesting articles are never finished due to that (the number tabs I have open in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to work around this behavior actually make for a comical view).
Oh, and thanks for the compliment, It's (usually) nice to be noticed. :) After you've been following discussions on HN a while, certain names start to stick out when you see them, and I've definitely noticed yours (for positive reasons!)
I've lived and worked an hour north of SF most my life
As evidence of my incomplete assimilation, I happened to spend last weekend up your way (north of Lake Sonoma) doing carpentry and pig hunting at a relative's cabin. Culturally, as an Eastern-educated Wisconsinite who was born in the South, I sometimes think I fit in better in your area than down here in the Bay Area proper.
the number tabs I have open in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to work around this behavior
I'm familiar with that. When I said "this is a brilliant article", it means I had the article open in a tab for months with the intent of submitting to HN at some appropriate time, and closed it only when I switched browsers (Opera to Safari).
> Culturally, as an Eastern-educated Wisconsinite who was born in the South, I sometimes think I fit in better in your area than down here in the Bay Area proper.
My parents probably agree with your assessment of the area, as they both grew up in rural Wisconsin (Wabeno/Lakeview), and settled here close to forty years ago.
> it means I had the article open in a tab for months with the intent of submitting to HN at some appropriate time
I have the opposite problem, as I get a far larger proportion of my reading from HN than from external sources, and I've been thinking I need to fix that lately.
I knew my tab-bookmark prooblem was really bad when I had two separate tabs for Fogus best things and stuff lists for separate years, and each tab was started when they were first submitted. :/ (of course, this example is mitigated by the fact that a list such as that is not something that can, nor should, be consumed quickly).
The author is obviously self-aware and this is precisely what makes it frustrating. Nearly every point is obfuscated through ornamentation, or broken up into parenthetical statements like a jigsaw puzzle. The entire article could be summarized in a concise paragraph with minimal loss of meaning. It's just pretension.
I find this comment jarring, because I had little-to-no issues reading the article. So I encourage you to instead read her language as a performance, and figure out what group she's performing in.
This writing style is itself a performance of Rationalist culture. Read anything by The Last Psychiatrist or Scott Alexander or Eliezer Yudkowsky for comparison.
You think The Last Psychiatrist is performing Rationalist culture? I hadn't noticed such a relationship, and at a moment's consideration I still don't notice it, and if you really do think that, I'd appreciate any evidence you can point me to.
I do think so; hard to prove if reading the content isn't argument enough. One fact is that TLP is the third link on the left-hand blog roll on SSC's website, so there's at least a one-way relationship. Anecdotally I remember reading something by Scott Alexander that mentioned that TLP was part of the LW community at one point, but I can't back this up with links.
No. Or maybe yes, but not in the condescending way you imply. The article is about "class", and stylistically, it's speaking to a particular class. If you are in that target class (or familiar with it), it reads very well. If you are not, well, that's the self-referential topic of the article.
There are a lot of important details and discussions here that would be lost in a single paragraph. For instance:
- Many people think that things that indicate social status cost money (who thinks this, why do they think this, when it is and is not the case)
- How education and occupation do, and do not, influence social class.
- How our culture defines class in ways that we may not realize even exist. We're so immersed in culture, it's difficult to realize alternatives.
- She explores inter-class relations, and how the perception of class differs around the world.
I mean, those are just a few things I ran through and picked up near the beginning. I found the article extremely easy to read, and appreciated some of the subtle details in the writing that drove the point home. Is any type of long form writing on a subject pretension, or what would you prefer?
Cognizant of your tone, it seems those twobuckn'fifty words are turning a perfectly clear statement into the written equivalent of caramel toffee. It's not terrible, but sticky to chew through. Ain't a college essay with a 500 word cap, spaces are cheap and plenty.
Ploughing as many 7 syllable words as possible into a sentence makes an author seem...self-conscious about tone. Strunk & White says "Omit Needless Words". I've always taken that as "Omit Needless Ornament". Thrice nested sentences, v̶e̶r̶b̶i̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶b̶s̶c̶u̶r̶a̶ o̶b̶s̶c̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶v̶o̶c̶a̶b̶u̶l̶a̶r̶y̶ big words, flowery language, et cetera.
I presume this was intentional, but I found your first paragraph hard to read. I had to go through it twice to get the meaning of each sentence down.
In contrast, I find the "ornamental" language of the essay itself to flow easily. It's all part of the register we're typically accustomed to. Shibboleth, for example, is instantly recognizable to me (though it always reminds me of The West Wing).
Since it's an essay about class as performance, I thought it was obviously playing with the professional/academic performance that the piece is itself?
If you're talking about inclusion and exclusion from any particular groups, you're going to talk about "shibboleths". It's quite a common term and no more flamboyant than talking about "MathML" or "hyperlinks" on HN.
Or Shibboleth, of course. I'd actually expect quite a few folk here to know the word from the SSO solution.
I don't know, I'm not sure I've ever encountered it before. Since it's rooted in Hebrew, perhaps it has to do with exposure to Jewish vulture, or people that express Jewish culture? Certain Hebrew words have become common in American culture (I would say due to long history of excellent Jewish comedians, from Brooks and Allen to Seinfeld), but others are more esoteric (to my view).
Of course, it's entirely possible it's just my experience, I don't want the above to be taken as me discounting that possibility. That's just how it looks from my perspective with the input I've gotten so far.
Oh, I meant common within the field of social geography. I noted that they'd talk about shibboleths of various sorts (language, accent, dress, manners). I wouldn't expect your average person to know about it but it's not obscure in any way for the type of article this is.
OTOH, I first heard the term it was from working with academic institutions in the UK, because Shibboleth seems to be the favoured form of SSO there (though apparently it came from the Internet2 group, which is US).
So anyone doing SSO or SAML etc would probably have heard the word and you'd have to be fairly incurious not to look it up :-)
Article raises an interesting point... I think the divide is valid between social class and economic class, however i will say it is much more fluid in US than in most other countries both developed countries like UK and developing countries like say India. I think the reason is because to the US point of view the ultimate social goal is financial success.
Next interesting point, I think a lot of the outrage with Donald Trump from within the republican party is he is projecting 'lower' class based signifiers and in effect turning power from the 'upper' class republicans to the 'lower' class republicans.
George W. Bush played up the good ole boy from Texas image. Even though he was from a wealthy East Coast family and went to Yale.
He was definitely trying to project an image of being from a lower social class, and he played to issues that lower social classes were more likely to support.
Very interesting thought, that colleges' purpose is to acculturate one into a certain culture. That would explain why collegiate athletics are so important: because people of a particular college's culture place importance on chasing after balls on grassy fields, it's important for colleges to acculturate their students to watching people chase after balls on grassy fields. I'm not saying that sarcastically — as much as I personally have never understood the point collegiate athletics, it makes a lot of sense in this context.
I take issue with her desire to leave race out of the discussion. That's precisely the problem with race in America: race is a decent first-order approximation of class, with all the bad that entails. If we could address that head-on, if people didn't automatically assume that others of the same race are 'like them' and others of a different race are 'unlike them,' and not have those things be true, then racism would be a thing of the past — or, at least, no worse than the silliness one sees about redheads/gingers. The colour of one's skin has no more effect on one's worth as a human being than the colour of one's hair: the day that it's seen as no more important is the day racism is dead. But as long as race and class are conflated, that day won't come.
> The ban on smoking in restaurants – which, let me be clear, I am wildly in favor of, being someone who can't patronize a business with cigarette smoking in it
Can't? Given that tobacco smoke contains no allergens, methinks the mot juste would be 'won't.'
> I empathize when social classes not mine find themselves on the short end of the stick, such as in the above account of smoking regulations, but that doesn't mean I'd do anything to change that outcome. Like, "Wow, it must suck to have your class' norms so disrespected by a change in the law like that. Welp, I'm off to buy a burger in this now refreshingly smoke-free burger joint, and discuss with my class-peers how else we can change public policy to make it more support my class' norms – even, if necessary, at your class' norms' expense."
What was wrong with the previous policy, which meant that some places catered to the author's class and some places catered to other classes?
> That's precisely the problem with race in America: race is a decent first-order approximation of class, with all the bad that entails.
Not really. I mean in my state (WA), 48% of people below the poverty line are white, 18% are hispanic, 14% are asian, 14% are black. Sure some approximations of some classes are heavily involved with race, but if you're discussing class dynamics in general race isn't a necessary distinction.
> If we could address that head-on, if people didn't automatically assume that others of the same race are 'like them' and others of a different race are 'unlike them,' and not have those things be true, then racism would be a thing of the past...
Except that humans can't ignore race. The feel-good stories we tell each other about how we are naturally colorblind and taught to be racist, about how racism is an unnatural malignant artifact in our culture, are just that; stories. In reality children will show a strong preference for members of their own race by age 3, and it's not something we can just disappear.
> I mean in my state (WA), 48% of people below the poverty line are white, 18% are hispanic, 14% are asian, 14% are black.
You may just be getting numbers back based on the ethnicity that predominantly lives in your state.
Look at relative poverty numbers. i.e., of the number of people who are of ethnicity X, how many are poor? I think you'll surely find a correlation that OP describes as a decent first-order approximation.
For example: white 9%, hispanic 18%, black 37%. That's 2x and 4x more likely to be poor vs white depending on if you're hispanic or black.
> > The ban on smoking in restaurants – which, let me be clear, I am wildly in favor of, being someone who can't patronize a business with cigarette smoking in it
> Can't? Given that tobacco smoke contains no allergens, methinks the mot juste would be 'won't.'
I cannot speak for the author, but my asthma is severe enough that indoor cigarette smoke (or being in the home of a smoker) is sufficient to cause discomfort.
while your points are true, its kind of the whole point of the article is 'economic' (and of course race) are first-order approximations of 'social' class but they are NOT the same thing, only approximately overlapping. Pretty much the whole point of the article.
Which is why it's so odd that she doesn't want to discuss race, which like economic class is merely a first-order approximation of social class.
In general, of course, I find the idea of announcing 'derailing' topics to be ridiculous, meaning something like, 'here are my thoughts on a topic: you are free to talk about your thoughts in these related areas, but not those related areas, because I don't want you to, and will consider you rude.' It feels childish to me.
So why not elucidate on the themes of the essay, explaining how they play out racially? This will nicely illustrate that it is a mistake to announce derailing topics.
All you've done is complain about it (i.e., derail).
Personally, I think racial issues are too often far closer to the social class issues mentioned in the article, than economic ones... or even genuine full blown racial hatred. A lot of times, it is more mannerisms -- how someone speaks, how someone dresses -- that seem to be a huge amount of what is described as "racist".
So many times, when you hear racism of any kind, it's more complaints about mannerisms. Stuff like: That black person, dressing up in "gangster" (read: hip-hop fashionable) clothing, playing "gangster" music (also read: general hip-hop), well, to the racist, he must be a "thug". Regardless of how rich or poor that person is, regardless of the actual lack of "thuggery", etc.
Put a similar black person in a business suit, adjust the mannerisms to be more "professional" for a lack of a better term, and the person becomes more acceptable to the "professional" type classes. (However, he might be an "Uncle Tom" to some of his black peers, and he probably won't impress the "blue collar" social class either.)
You can go on from there. I do think there are general "I hate everyone who is xyz race" people out there as well, but I almost would be willing to say that a lot of racism is more the sort of social class issues identified in the article. The race is almost more of a side note as a way people over-generalize, kind of like the "Southern accent = hicks" over-generalization mentioned above.
> > The ban on smoking in restaurants – which, let me be clear, I am wildly in favor of, being someone who can't patronize a business with cigarette smoking in it
> Can't? Given that tobacco smoke contains no allergens, methinks the mot juste would be 'won't.'
Those of us who have had to put up with reactions to cigarette smoke do not particularly care that those reactions are due to cigarette smoke being an irritant rather than an allergen. Won't is the operative word (except if you define "won't" as "won't because I might have to go spend some quality time in the local hospital").
From the article: "Most people are very ignorant of the norms and values of the social classes more than one degree above or below their own." Somewhere, there must be a "how to" guide for social class. There's a questionnaire, but other than some meaningless content on Quora, not much guidance.[1]
Where there is guidance, it's about language usage.[2] The classic on this being, of course, "My Fair Lady"[1]. This is less of an issue since TV and movies imposed a standard linguistic dialect.
The author likes Paul Fussell's "Class", which is an excellent read. It's quite funny.
Social class is less social than it used to be, and more marketed. As a horse owner, I've seen this change since the 1980s. In the 1980s, it would have been considered tacky to have
advertising at a horse show. Now, Rolex ads are all over the place. Polo is the classic upper class sport (Silicon Valley has three polo fields), but polo players are usually people who were football jocks in high school, but not college.
Well into the 1980s, regular customers could sign their register receipts at Roberts of Woodside (a supermarket with an excellent deli) and be billed monthly.
> Somewhere, there must be a "how to" guide for social class.
The upper classes constantly change the performance, because when lower classes catch on to a certain performance, it is immediately discarded. The elites are trend-setters, and they are constantly making damn sure that it's hard to quickly learn how to perform.
I didn't watch television as a child, but I do now and I'd say I'm still very ignorant of the norms/values of social classes 2 or more degrees below my own.
Keep in mind that television itself has significant class segmentation. The vast majority of characters on shows I watch are from my class or present as such.
On the occasion that I do see something from a lower class, it's quite jarring and I also have a lot of trouble differentiating race and class in such scenarios (>90% of the "lower class" characters I see are African-American).
Funny, to me it was an indicator of her age (ie when she started using the Internet). I have the same reaction to articles on blogger. I associate Medium with minimalist know-it-all bearded fixie hipster programmers (under 35). :p Still better then the SV(u)btle peeps (but less exclusive, by invitation only peeps, let's keep it classy!).
Correct insertion of the extra P tells me so much about you. This whole social class stuff is quite funny when you start thinking about it. I'm terribly judgmental it seems...
In all seriousness, I've only run into two groups that (in my personal experience) still use LJ: Eastern Europeans, especially Russians, and pop-culture related "creators" (which is the broad brush that I'm painting fan art, fanfiction, etc with). It's a really weird mix.
I think the question of social class applies to my situation quite well considering that despite the fact that I'm a programmer and have a degree in computer science I honestly don't fit in well with people who would be described as middle class. Working class still seems to apply to me despite my salary and job.
This is widely true in a lot of other engineering disciplines, especially those that are more hands-on. Anecdotally, in certain parts of the country this is why engineers (think mechanical, civil, etc) are viewed a large step below "true white collar management" types.
Culture in many ways is an adaptation to local conditions magnified though feedback loops. Deserts promote different types of stories vs. grasslands vs. seashore. Now days location is less important, but wealth and poverty are also worlds apart.
What IMO get's lost in these discussions is poor people can make rational choices that conflict with wealthy culture. "Sorry, broke" is a shield for many things making savings often money that you simply don't get to spend. What happens when your 50 and owe more money than you will make in the rest of your life?
One of OP's early theses is that the left is all about economic class, but can't admit social classes exist, so conflates them with economic class in order to talk about them.
Who exactly can't admit social classes exist? Karl Marx was very aware of the existence of status classes running counter to economic classes (the status of wealthy jewish people of low-status in Europe was fascinating to proto-sociologists, many of them jewish), he just theorized that economic class was "the big one" from which the others stemmed. Jews as a social class weren't sprung from the ether, though.
Max Weber, another leftist considered one of the fathers of sociology, named the "Status Class", related to prestige, one of the three main ones along economic and political allegiance ones.
Modern intersectionalists routinely bring up how arbitrary many of our social predilections seem to be, such as "tan white > white > black", or "pink is for girls", and look at these chicken-and-egg situations trying to figure out where they started. Where does the impetus for this bloggers' parents verbally check[ing] us in a heartbeat if the vowel in our "to" started getting too schwa-like come from?
The big mistake made by the author of that piece is the idea that they can isolate class and talk about it as its own thing. It's a very scientist-like analytic-approach (kinda like Marx isolating economic factors in spite of the others), but seeing as the author is openly against abolishing classes, it seems to be in service of discrediting the efforts of the economically-conscious-left ("even if you abolish economic classes social classes will prevail, so don't bother") rather than as an honest intellectual inquiry.
With this line:
> Please note: for purposes of this discussion, the topics of race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, and native language are all derails of the topic, which is class.
The author seems more concerned with prevailing than with being correct.
If your benchmark for analyzing the modern left is a collection of theorists from a hundred years ago, you're going to misunderstand a lot more than just this.
This is well worth the read. It's far too easy not to perceive the class issues she brings up, because we're so uncomfortable discussing them. And if you're affluent, it's much easier not to think of yourself as part of a self-perpetuating privileged class.
The telltale sign of classicism in modern America is how the upper middle classes continue to put up with inflated college tuition fees. They're basically paying to keep the lower classes out.
I feel programmers have made it econimically. I know a large number of devs in their 30s who make over 200k a year. But we haven't climbed the social ladder as well. Maybe that follows the money.
Yep, that's definitely my situation in life. Still working class despite the salary. It's like the areas that are suppose to be open to me seem hostile to my mere presence. I'm not sure if it's the way I walk, talk, act, or whatever. Just the look on certain people's faces really tell me that I'm not welcomed or "one of them" without a single word said on the matter. It's so weird being aware of it now after all these years.
> It is a common misconception that the primary obstacle to being in a much higher class is money to afford the things by which one performs that class. The limiting factor is not money, it is this: it is impossible to join a culture the ways of which you know nothing. You may come by money, but the ignorance of how to use it to perform that higher class will keep you out as adamantly as if there were a wall built around it.
So learn from this. Learn how to perform as upper middle class. Learn to radiate more confidence, try to look like you belong. If you look like a trespasser, if for a moment you look like you cannot believe you would end up in a place like this, you're exposed as not "one of us".
What places are not welcome to you? I am genuinely curious. Is it regular high-price places (3 star Michelen restaurants, business lounge in airport, five star hotels) or closed clubs and such?
As old saying goes: "White tie fits one well only in third generation" (sorry for the ad-hoc translation). So your friend's grandchildren should be up on the social ladder.
Yeah I got rid of my accent years ago when I realized that stigma existed. I also try to sound...less gay (idk how else to explain it) when I'm dealing with new people. Deeper voice, neutral accent, etc. It's pretty annoying to have to dodge random prejudices but that's life I guess.
Thus social class and economic class are not identical, they are intersectional. They relate and they mediate one another, but they are not the same thing.
And both of these are not identical to race in the US, but their perception is indeed still partially mediated by race.
I find it frustrating that while everyone seems to be fine discussing privilege afforded by ethnicity, lack of disabilities or gender, the elephant in the room tends to get ignored: people like Zuckerberg or Gates weren't just privileged because they were born in the right skin (including the dangly bits) but also because they were born into the right families.
If you are studying in an Ivy League tier university in the US and your parents know influential people in major companies, you are incredibly privileged. And as the article lays out, this actually reflects two forms of privilege: social class and economic class (of parents, close family, potential love interests and eventually yourself as an aggregate).
The number of trans, non-male, non-white or non-heterosexual founders and leaders in major tech companies gets talked about every now and then. But I doubt any of those (proportional to the absolute distribution across the population) is significantly more concerning than the number of people from lower social and economical classes in the same roles.
Of course these attributes can compound (e.g. "race" is often used as a handle for social class) but diversity needs to take all factors into account in order to fulfil its promise. Nepotism isn't just about skin colour and dangly bits, and class discrimination is far easier to hide behind "culture fit" than other forms of discrimination.
I had an almost jarring occurrence of this happen when I graduated with my BSME. My first name is traditionally associated with old rednecks. I sent out a hundred or so resumes before I got any response at all - an offhand comment about duct tape engineering.
For whatever reason, that clicked with me. So, I added my middle name to my resume and had a job within a week. I've been going by my middle name professionally ever since.
Have a friend with tattoos everywhere; his recent remarks about a local yacht club had a layer of loath attached. It's as if he despises my 1) access and 2) ability to stroll around (no visible tattoos). He grew up inland, I didn't. His mom thinks money is bad, my family doesn't. The difference in the details make all the difference !
The authors family sought to raise their blue collar class to a higher one. I have for years thought of a non-profit that might do this by sponsoring children into music instrument lessons, horseback riding, and language lessons. Things that most (say 75% of people) cannot afford. This could be done in group lessons to save on cost.
I don't think it's simply a "can't afford" issue. If the parents don't make a conscious, long-term effort (like in the author's case), you risk a huge blowback from them when the kids start acting "strangely". Nerds get bullied in school for being different than jocks; imagine having that happen with everyone you encounter, including your parents.
I moved from NYC to the rural reaches of upstate New York when I was 11. My family and folks I hung out had a mixed of "Lunged Idland", Brooklyn and Irish accents. Nobody had any idea what I was saying for several months after moving, with good reason.
The accent still pops out once in awhile, usually when I'm tired or agitated. Some folks find it grating or aggressive. I just tell them to screw off.
In America, there is also an example where we "build up" the social class of some segment to compensate for our self-centered guilt.
Take the example of the military service. The vast majority of people would rather be at the mall and let someone else fight and die for the country. But the "I support our troops" bumper sticker is everywhere, or maybe they sent ten bucks to Fisher House or Operation Homefront, but not once have those people wanted to volunteer at a veterans hospital.
So what do we do to cover got guilt? "Ah, let's do a parade for them!!!"
When I was a teenager I thought charity absent asceticism was pathetic. Why give the homeless guy your pocket change when you can afford to give him $20 for dinner? Why donate to the fire department, when you could make time in your life to volunteer for the fire department? (I live in a small New England town where volunteer depts are the norm.)
Compensating for self-centered guilt is not evil or virtuous. Life is not boolean. When you start to dig into any one person's psychology it's amazing any of us have the gumption to wake up in the morning and accomplish anything given how much of our habits and behaviors are coping mechanisms for something else.
This was a very good article. But the conclusion that we should all feel guilty for covering up our guilt with social class worship is not terribly productive.
Sure, charity is better than non charity. Charity with ascetism is better. consumption usually created pollution, and white often is a product of exploitation. Even high income is often a product of exploitation (power imbalance effects how much money flows in your direction -- even if you are not selling that power, your employer or customer may be weilding it to your benefit )
But I'd rather be at the mall than mow my yard. I pay someone to do that. I'd rather be at the mall than work on my own plumbing. I pay someone else to do that.
The key point is that at some level I'd rather be at the mall that work as a software developer, but I'm really good at that so that's what I do instead of goofing off at the mall all day. We should do what we are most productive at, in this way we contribute the most to society (see Comparative Advantage in any economics text).
The military does a tough job. That most of us don't want to do it isn't being hypocritical. It's just the truth that I'm a better software developer than solider.
Now, when I was of an age that I was eligible to be in the military, one often had no choice about it. You were simply told by the government that you had to take years out of your life and perhaps lose you life killing people that most of us saw little point of fighting. Fortunately, my number wasn't picked. Not all of my friends were so fortunate. In that time, we all bore some collective guilt for sending young men off to die against their will to for our politics.
But how do you know you are not a better soldier? Assuming you are in the USA, there is no mandatory military service. Who is to say you are not great one, but you just don't know?
On another angle, the point is not about being a soldier specifically. How about doing intelligence, or translation, or manufacturing, or X, or Y, or Z for the purpose of fulfilling whatever mission the President has decided is important?
The point that you are "told" by the government is a weak one. In the US at least, you elect representatives to make the right decisions for you.
I have been to Israel where I saw armed young people welcoming me to the airport and doing their job for their country. Everybody has to do that job for some time. Everybody needs to sacrifice that time during which you cannot "go to the mall."
Maybe if that was the case, there would be less wars as people would think twice about it, as it used to happen in the past in the US.
My point was that we do build up this "social class" called the "military" when most would not ever consider joining. And that is what is hypocritical.
By the way, here in the USA when I was 18 there was a mandatory draft that sent some people to fight in Vietnam while others, like myself were lucky enough to get high numbers in a national lottery (that only men were subjected to) so I was not forced to go fight.
The troops example is a tricky one. Many people disagree with war as a way to solve problems, but respect that soldiers aren't actually responsible for said wars, and are doing a horrible job in horrible circumstances.
Thus you can support the troops, but deplore the actions of those who caused them to be there in the first case.
I do agree that volunteering at a veteran's hospital would be a perfect way to contribute though. Volunteering at any hospital would hopefully be a useful contribution to society!
Militarism is a cult, and there are worse jobs, however blaming the soldiers for wars doesn't solve the problem. It's like blaming bank managers for the state of the economy.
Idealistically, if you could convince all of the soldiers on both sides to not fight, then you stop the wars, but realistically you need to convince the populations and leaders of the states they are fighting on behalf of that war is a bad idea in the first place.
This cult is propagated by civilians more than soldiers.
This is not something unique to the US. Mexican soap operas and movies often trump up the darker, poorer people as "noble savages" and native culture is celebrated. However if you look a bit closer, all the money and power is still in the hands of the whiter characters!
>disproportionately impact the impecunious – the almost-certain forthcoming hike in T fares looms large in my anxieties right now – but I am a professional with an advanced degree and possession of the shibboleths of the professional class
This actually hurt to read. It sounds like an excerpt from a Nabokov novel.
(Don't get me wrong, Nabokov is a fantastic writer. But there is a time and place for writing like that, and this is not one of them.)
It's a bit disturbing to me how enthusiastically the SlaterStarCodex crowd latches onto this "fuck you, got mine" essay, gushing with praise and admiration about telling it like it is. The entire thing is a rationalization for the thinking illustrated in these quotes:
> I feel the need for a disclaimer of sorts. I am writing about class and some of the injustices of classism, but I do not particularly pretend to position myself as an enemy of classism: I'm pretty classist. And by "pretty classist", I don't mean in the sense of "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist" or "gee, internalized misogyny is hard to totally eradicate". No, I mean closer to Segregation and PUAs.
> My parents were born of blue collar families in blue collar communities and were of concerted agreement that their life goals were to flee that class and never have anything to do with it again. Elevating their – and their progeny's – social class was the family project. They enlisted my sister and I in this project, and were explicit, formal, and unapologetic about it.
> I empathize when social classes not mine find themselves on the short end of the stick, such as in the above account of smoking regulations, but that doesn't mean I'd do anything to change that outcome. Like, "Wow, it must suck to have your class' norms so disrespected by a change in the law like that. Welp, I'm off to buy a burger in this now refreshingly smoke-free burger joint, and discuss with my class-peers how else we can change public policy to make it more support my class' norms – even, if necessary, at your class' norms' expense."
The idea that "the Left" engages in "Orwellian double-think" with regards to class, is also pretty puzzling.
> A thing that has been very frustrating to me is that most books and other discussions I have been able to find that really address that social classes are cultures have come out of the Right. Again this pattern: the Right, at least, admits the phenomenon exists, mostly so they can hate on people (also see "culture of poverty"); the Left engages in Orwellian doublethink, insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of.
The Left promotes class-consciousness with the goal of abolishing unjust and arbitrary delineations, in its many dimensions (including the extremely well acknowledged ones such as vernacular). The idea that "the Left" has no notion that a poor Led Zeppelin fan can be higher class than the wife of a wealthy drug-dealer is insane.
edit: reply to gjm (because I got flagged too much)
The author
- belittles their opposition (ie: "It is a common confusion – or intellectual dodge – to conflate social class with economic class."),
- expresses veiled dismay that they can't "describe an ethnic, regional, or national culture with contempt, as broken or defective",
- is against legal prejudices today, but against any measures that attempt to correct the damage caused by those legal prejudices in the past ("I'm on-board with the idea that all people have equal rights before the law, and entitled to a baseline level of respect as fellow humans, but I'm not sure how much further than that I go." - ie: the arrangement looks like this today, deal with it as if it was fair regardless of how we got here)
- and concludes with "let's leave race out of it for the moment", echoing much of the talk by LessWrong-types "tired" of talk of sexism and racism.
This piece is not just a humble description of how they see the world, it's very prescriptive. The overall impression I get is a righteous defense of the "fuck you, got mine" mentality, very inspired by Ayn Rand.
> The idea that "the Left" engages in "Orwellian double-think" with regards to class, is also pretty puzzling.
Heard any jokes or insults about Southerners lately? "Trump voters"? Etc.
Which isn't to say that anyone who identifies with leftism is doomed to infinite self-deception with regard to social class, but, most people would benefit from some reflection on how they feel about which groups of people and why.
"John Oliver"-left (which is to say, center), may be cracking low-quality Trump-voter jokes.
"Jacobin Magazine"-left, which has a better claim to the mainstream title imo, is all about publicizing interesting and charitable analyses of the phenomenon.
edit: Down-voted into a post-freeze (again). Reply:
Yeah, it's a hairy topic. However, the author states that they had trouble finding left-leaning "books and other discussions [...] that really address that social classes are cultures", which honestly seems like they weren't trying very hard.
Yeah, the overloading on "left" is definitely an issue here. I agree the Jacobin types are much more likely to have some self-awareness here (though I've unfortunately met a cluster of counterexamples).
It's a common attitude in a lot of LessWrong-adjacent blogs: analyze some complex phenomenon that the social sciences have studied in depth, but act as if no one has ever thought of it before. So when class comes up, it's better to think of in the terms of some rando blogger, not (for instance) Bourdieu or Weber.
And then when you get absurd results, it proves your originality and willingness to look past conventional wisdom.
I think the LW diaspora types are almost always doing "here's a model for understanding this thing that I like, let's talk about it" rather than "this is How This Thing Works and there is no need to consider other perspectives". A lot of this type of criticism that I see looks like expecting the latter, when there's an underlying assumption shared by the author and the people familiar with the subculture that the former was the goal.
For my own curiosity, what tension do you see between Bordieu's or Weber's work and this rando blogger's perspective?
Presumably anyone studying Weber and Bourdieu has also studied Marx. Anyway, Weber's influence on sociology is huge, comparable to Marx's, and Bourdieu was obviously influenced by Marx, so your comparison doesn't work on any level, really.
> The entire thing is a rationalization for the thinking illustrated in these quotes
What makes you say that?
It doesn't look that way to me, because (1) nothing in "the entire thing" particular looks (superficially or otherwise) like a justification for that thinking, and (2) the author doesn't cite any of the rest of "the entire thing" to justify that thinking.
It looks to me as if the entire thing is an attempt to describe how the author sees social class in the USA, and those quotes are just what they say they are: "a disclaimer of sorts".
> It's a bit disturbing to me how enthusiastically the SlaterStarCodex crowd latches onto this "fuck you, got mine" essay, gushing with praise and admiration about telling it like it is. The entire thing is a rationalization for the thinking illustrated in these quotes:
>> I feel the need for a disclaimer of sorts. I am writing about class and some of the injustices of classism, but I do not particularly pretend to position myself as an enemy of classism: I'm pretty classist. And by "pretty classist", I don't mean in the sense of "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist" or "gee, internalized misogyny is hard to totally eradicate". No, I mean closer to Segregation and PUAs.
> The idea that "the Left" engages in "Orwellian double-think" with regards to class, is also pretty puzzling.
It is not at all puzzling that humans -- regardless of their gender, age, race, nationality -- are bound to identify themselves with particular set of groups to the pointing of "segregating" themselves (and their ways of thinking, mannerisms, etc) from other groups. Left's Orwellian double-think of "insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of" is but a cunning way some acculturated groups achieve the said segregation under a moral veil.
The only solution to all of this is to cease identifying once and for all, and treat one another as fellow human beings. It will however be eons before the LessWrong/SlaterStarCodex crowd can even get close to such a stage if they were to continue their current modus operandi.
The irony is that I practice "code switching", so basically my coworkers have no idea where I'm from until they ask me. They'll overhear me on the phone talking to my family, and notice that I speak in an entirely different manner. It's not a conscious thing on my part, but I sometimes feel very awkward about it. At times, I'm very upset by the fact that someone who grows up in a particular part of the country gets to speak in their native dialect at work without judgement, all because of stereotypes about intelligence and education, which essentially tie directly to the author's point about class.