Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

Solipsism is often accompanied by judgments of taste: another form of classism. “Oh my God, she had plastic flowers and the couch was orange plaid! Plastic flowers are so tacky. She had no class at all,” a counseling client said of her new mother-in-law when they first met, as if a few style indicators said everything there was to know about her mother-in-law. “He was a real Archie Bunker type, you know, a redneck racist pig,” another client once said when he first met his adult older brother, who had been given up for adoption as a baby by his teenage mother. As it turned out, they had not discussed race at all. My white, college-educated client simply assumed this guy with a billed cap and nonstandard English must be a racist.