Class Passing

1. Class Passing Lina Medaglia-Miller, Ph.D. The Great Pretender: The Art of Passing GSSC 1073 May 2010

2. What is Class? • Social classes are the hierarchical arrangements of people in society as economic or cultural groups. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'.

3. In sociology and political philosophy, the most basic class distinction is between the powerful and the powerless. Social classes with a great deal of power are usually viewed as "the elites" (the “fat cats”) within their own societies.

4. The Fat Cat stereotype

5. Various social and political theories propose that social classes with greater power attempt to cement their own ranking above the lower classes in the hierarchy to the detriment of the society overall. By contrast, conservatives and structural functionalists have presented class difference as intrinsic to the structure of any society and to that extent ineradicable. “Social class” definition derived from Wiki

6. Distribution of wealth • How is the world’s wealth distributed? • The richest 20% of the planet own 82.7% of the wealth. Conley (2008), You May Ask Yourself

7. Closer to home, in the U.S., the top 1% of people hold 34.3% of the wealth. (See Wolff, 2004, Recent Trends in Household Wealth)

8. Here’s another way of visualizing those same statistics.

9. Predictors of wealth From rags to riches? Is ‘making it’ up the class ladder a possibility? • Who are your parents? • Who are your mentors? • To what clubs do you belong? • What is your gender/sex? • What is your heritage/ethnicity?

10. Abject vs. Relative poverty • No food >>> bad food • No education >>> substandard education • No housing >>> substandard housing • No work >>> working poor • No health access >>> poor health access

11. Criminalization of poverty • Socioeconomic value = materialism • Non-consumer = subversive • Non-consumer = without value • Elimination of social burden (Brazilian street children, mental health patients) • Loitering (no ID, no $) = crime • Guilty by association • “Dead-beats” pay on time, in cash

12. What defines a person’s “class status”? • Geographic location • Type of job • Income • Education • Family of origin • Title • Property Category 1 Category 2 • Etiquette • Friendships/connections • Clothes • Teeth and hair • Complexion • Language • Air of entitlement

13. Karl Marx • Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a Germanphilosopher, political economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, communist, and revolutionary, whose ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism. Marx summarized his approach in the first line of chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

14. Marxist analysis of class • People organized around Means of Production • Who owns the MoP? • Who has to work with the MoP? • Who lives outside the MoP?

15. Pyramid of Capitalist System

16. Class struggle • Economic exploitation • Super-exploitation • Hierarchy of class oppression • Bread and circuses • Opiate of the masses

17. What are the “opiates of the people” in our culture?

18. Types of Class Passing • Lying about your address • Misrepresenting your job status and income • Claiming more degrees or education • Lying about your ‘pedigree’ • Using a fake title • False property claims Don Draper (Jon Hamm) of TV’s “Mad Men”

19. The Art of Class Passing • Take etiquette lessons • Develop powerful connections • Buy expensive clothes • Fix teeth and hair • Develop a taste for art, fine foods, and wines • Speak with confidence and entitlement • Learn the grammar and dialect of the rich • Marry someone with status • Create a false history that is difficult to disprove Impostor ‘Clark Rockefeller’ did most of the things listed here.

20. Why might a rich person pretend to be poor? • Romanticizing Poverty: The Romantic movement began around 1800. It was an art movement through which intellectuals and artists expressed, among other things, their belief that the average worker was more honest and noble than the rich. This culminated in numerous artworks and pieces of music dedicated to ordinary people. Corot’s “Old Man on Trunk,” 1826

21. Appropriation by imitation • Ironically, this political/artistic movement was appropriated by the rich, who imitated the poor in dress and demeanor. • Rich and powerful people do tend to imitate art styles and behaviours that are considered trendy.

22. Appropriation by imitation • But also, psychologists speculate that there is a degree of guilt in the elite’s desire to be closer to those whom they have exploited or oppressed, in order to be forgiven. • When the privileged act like those without privilege, there is a pretense that there is no hierarchy.

23. Defenses • What defense mechanisms do you think are utilized during such appropriation (the elite acting as if they are poor/ordinary).

24. What examples of this kind of class appropriation do you see in the 20th century and in our culture today?

25. The End