Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Class

There's nothing too remarkable about this dialogue between Gail Collins and David Brooks, but I really liked this little snippet from Collins:
Racially, the country is moving up to the next step and it would be silly to imagine we’d get there without conflict. In the future, the great divide is going to be class, post-racial class. Poor people are stuck, while everybody else moves up, whether they’re black, white or Hispanic. Not sure that’s something to brag about, but there we are.
I would argue that the "great divide" that Collins' speaks of has always existed. The problem is that there is absolutely no appropriate place in Western Society to discuss "class." Public discourse on race ranges from ignorant polemics to pseudointellectual fluff, but at least people discuss it. Talk about class and you're labeled a socialist or something. Lame. Anyway, this was something that one of my favorite professors said once and I never forgot it.

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