I am a Grenade

"As we have seen with primary and secondary schools, college students from the middle class generally find in higher education the cultural rules, values, language, and community mores that are familiar to them.  Working class students, again, face a maze of new rules, values, language, and a world of indecipherable references" (150).

"When even the free-marked-oriented magazine The Economist argues--as it did in a special feature in October--that the magnitude and nature of the country's inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong"

"In unequal societies, highly educated, computer-using elites are surrounded by majorities with little education and no computer access, dragging down their productivity. This decreases young people's incentive to get more education and business' incentive to invest in computers, since the payoff will be smaller" (3).

"One method of simplifying social problems is to see them as resulting from countless individual failures of personal character.  According to this view, people are jobless because they're lazy, they're homeless because they lack forehandedness, they're addicted because they have no moral discipline" (351).

This is the issue with individualism--one of the main ideologies holding together classism.  As other writers have pointed out (as I have discussed in previous blog posts), individualism is the distraction from systematic issues that are the root cause to poverty, oppression, and in this particular case--drug abuse.  With this view out of the way, we can examine the systems beneath that benefit those who control them, and hurt those it takes advantage of.  It makes no logical sense for groups of people to simultaneously be "too lazy" or to have "no moral discipline"--there is always a root cause to joblessness and homelessness.

Chapter One: The Forest, the Trees, and the One Thing

"It's easy to think that social problems must come down to flaws in individual character.  If we have a drug problem, it must be because individuals just can't or won't say "no."  If there are racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and other forms of privilege and oppression, it must be because of people who for some reason have the personal "need" to behave in racist, sexist, and other oppressive ways" (9-10).

This is a very basic way to explain how individualism exists in multiple systems of oppression and how it infiltrates every aspect of our lives.  From here, it is easy to see how one could entirely miss the systematic nature of oppression and how it stretches beyond merely the occasionally blip of a psychopath in an otherwise neutral sea of humanity.  It is easy to say that everyone is inherently good, to shift the question of oppression from a larger system and onto an individual, making conversations about oppressive systems easily derailed.  Especially when conversation turns to internalized racism, sexism and so on, which are harder to detect because they slip under the radar that spotlights mouthpiece bigots (most famously, politicians).  Focusing on these people is pointless when trying to dismantle the entire system.

"The privileged in our society require a class-structured social order in order to maintain and enhance their economic and political well-being.  Industrial profits depend on cheap labor and on a pool of unemployed to keep workers in check.  Real Estate speculators and developers create and depend on slums for tax evading investments" (477)

“[Women] are pushed into military duty due to poverty and lack of other options”

“Some 42% of female veterans say they joined the military because jobs were hard to find, compared with one-quarter of men”

“31% military women are black […] this is almost twice the share of active-duty men who are black (16%)”

1. "Happiness means getting a man, and transformation from wretched conditions can be achieved through consumption--in their case, through new clothes and a new hairstyle" (133).

This quote particularly struck me as neatly summing up the role of advertisements and how they interact with (and are masked by) the media itself.  For this example of Cinderella, on a subtle level we are taught at a very young age that happiness comes from something outside of ourselves that must be purchased.  That somehow we will derive an abstract (non tangible) "feeling" from physical goods.  The fact that we must buy something in order to be happy appears to give us control over our lives, while in actuality these messages are transcribed into our personal ideologies without our consent through childhood movies.

We are taught, as children, that our ultimate goal is to be a consumer and that will make us happy.

1.  "Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one's social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal's baton in his knapsack and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything" (first page of "excerpted from Pierre Bourdieu The Forms of Capital, 1983)

This rather lengthy sentence is simply pointing out the great myth of class mobility.  We like to think that today in America everyone is given an equal opportunity to succeed.  All we need is luck and elbow grease.  The great myth is that at any given moment, everyone has equal capacity to become anything they wanted to be in an instant.  In regards to Bourdieu's theory, this is his "anti-thesis," the thing that he sets out to dismantle while explaining why this "imaginary universe" does not exist.  It is important to understand that this idea of equal opportunity is a myth if we are to proceed to asking what gives structure to the actual social world--Capital.