The unmentionable five-letter word

It’s a given that ideology and propaganda are phenomena of other
cultures. They don’t exist in the United States. Class is in the same
category. You’ve called it the “unmentionable five-letter word.”
It’s kind of interesting the way it works. Statistics about things
like quality of life, infant mortality, life expectancy, etc. are usually
broken down by race. It always turns out that blacks have horrible
statistics as compared with whites.
But an interesting study was done by Vicente Navarro, a
professor at Johns Hopkins who works on public health issues. He
decided to reanalyze the statistics, separating out the factors of race
and class. For example, he looked at white workers and black
workers versus white executives and black executives. He
discovered that much of the difference between blacks and whites
was actually a class difference. If you look at poor white workers
and white executives, the gap between them is enormous.
The study was obviously relevant to epidemiology and public
health, so he submitted it to the major American medical journals.
They all rejected it. He then sent it to the world’s leading medical
journal, the Lancet, in Britain. They accepted it right away.
The reason is very clear. In the United States you’re not allowed
to talk about class differences. In fact, only two groups are allowed
to be class-conscious in the United States. One of them is the
business community, which is rabidly class-conscious. When you
read their literature, it’s all full of the danger of the masses and their
rising power and how we have to defeat them. It’s kind of vulgar,
inverted Marxism.
The other group is the high planning sectors of the government.
They talk the same way—how we have to worry about the rising
aspirations of the common man and the impoverished masses who
are seeking to improve standards and harming the business climate.
So they can be class-conscious. They have a job to do. But it’s
extremely important to make other people, the rest of the
population, believe that there is no such thing as class. We’re all just
equal, we’re all Americans, we live in harmony, we all work
together, everything is great.
Take, for example, the book Mandate for Change, put out by the