Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

In 2004, Alfred Lubrano wrote about privileged students at Ivy League colleges who held coins to a flame and then dropped them from a second-story window onto the sidewalk below, laughing at the scholarship students who walked by and tried to pick up the hot coins. In 2007, “sport killings” of homeless people hit the headlines, as did a popular computer game called Bum Killing. In 2011, the phrase “tea-tards” is gaining traction, describing the “retarded” “tea party” sympathies of some––a magnified minority––working class folks. But the most common form of classism is solipsism, or my-world-is-the-whole-world, what I call class-blinders. This is the tendency to assume everyone has had the same experience we have had and to be blind to the experiences of people unlike ourselves. “We