Class Matters Workshops
Download this brochure for more information on Class Matters workshops.
If you're interested in hosting a workshop, please click here for a brochure, or contact me about booking an event.
Order Class Matters
Order Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists by Betsy Leondar-Wright (New Society Publishers, 2005).
Press Coverage of CM
- Tim Harris interviewed me for Real Change: Read the interview
- Marc Cooper interviewed me for The Nation magazine's Radio Nation: Listen to the interview (MP3 file)
- Ben Merens interviewed me for Wisconsin Public Radio: Listen to the interview (Real Audio file)
What Do We Mean by "Class?"
Resources
Learning more about cross-class alliances...
Classist Comments
What's the most classist thing you ever heard someone say?
(I'm not talking about someone like Bill O'Reilly or your right-wing uncle. More specifically, what's the most classist thing you ever heard a liberal or progressive person say?)
Read five interviewees' answers — and my own.
Class and Other Identities
How do you experience class differently because of your race, ethnic group, religion, gender, age, or other identity? What class dynamics do you notice within your identity groups?
Here's how a few ClassMatters.org visitors answered those questions:
- White women from working-class backgrounds
- White middle-class women
- Middle-class women of color
- White male labor activists
- White middle-class activists
- Christians and class
And answers from the Class Matters book:
Working Definitions
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Professional Middle Class:
College-educated, salaried professionals and managers and their family members.
Signs that someone might belong to the professional middle class can include:
- 4-year college, especially at private and/or residential schools, sometimes professional school;
- secure homeownership, often with several moves up to bigger houses in a lifetime;
- more control over the hours and methods of work than working-class people, and/or control over others' work;
- more economic security than working class people (although that difference is eroding), but no way to pay bills without working.
Middle-class people are varied in race, culture, values and political beliefs; they are disproportionately white.
Upper-middle-class families have more in common with owning class families, such as more luxuries and travel, than most middle-class families.
Owning Class:
Investors and their family members with enough income from assets that they don't have to work to pay basic bills. A subset have positions of power or vast wealth that put them in the ruling class.
Signs that someone might belong to the owning class can include:
- elite private schools and colleges;
- large inheritances;
- luxuries and international travel;
- owning multiple homes.
However, people who live modestly on investment income are also owning class.
Owning class people are disproportionately white; they are varied in culture, values and political beliefs.
How Big Is Each Class?
About two-thirds of Americans are working-class, low-income or lower-middle-class. Fewer than one in ten Americans remains low-income for a generation or more, although many working-class people spend part of their lives in poverty. About 3% of Americans are owning-class. Almost a third of Americans are professional middle-class.
Class Self-Identifications
It's not true, as sometimes is said, that almost all Americans call themselves "middle class." That's only the answer when the choices are lower, middle, and upper. Few people want to call themselves "low class."
When "working class" is one of the options, then there's a big self-identified working class.
| By Self-Identification | 1998 | Average of all years 1972-1998 |
| Lower class | 5% | 5% |
| Working class | 45% | 46% |
| Middle class | 46% | 46% |
| Upper class | 4% | 3% |
Source: National Opinion Research Center, available at www.norc.uchicago.edu. Thanks to Jack Metzger, Politics and the American Class Vernacular, WorkingUSA, Summer 2003
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