Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

Their responses clearly cohered into three different points of view or philosophies about their lives as winners in the American Dream and the nature of winning in the United States. Lamont’s descriptions of attitudes and values in the upper middle class closely match my own observations as a counseling and community psychologist, as well as my personal experience as a middle class professional from the working class. In my extrapolation, these philosophies are three popular recipes for classism—three different ways to say, “I am better than they are.” As we will see later, they arise from three different cultural ways of becoming, of self-actualizing, in middle class America. For all three groups the exclusion of people who are not “my kind” was openly discussed without embarrassment or apology. The people excluded by our boundaries are those with whom we refuse to associate and those toward whom rejection and aggression are showed, and distance openly marked, by way of insuring that “you understand that I am better than you are.” (Lamont 1992, 10)