fundamentalist rural America,”^6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-
class whites. Deriding “political correctness” becomes a way for less-privileged whites to
express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites.
I don’t like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have
to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social
equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden
injuries of class^7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is
threatened.
A few words about me. Nearly 40 years ago, I married a class migrant: someone who has
moved from one class to another. My husband was born in a blue-collar family but then
went to Harvard Law School. Myself, I’m a silver spoon girl, born and bred. My WASP
father was from an affluent family that made its money in Chicago before returning home
to Vermont. My mother was the German Jewish daughter of a well-known reform rabbi. I
grew up in Princeton, went to Yale College, Harvard Law School, and MIT, and have
been a law professor for nearly 40 years. I now live in San Francisco.
I still remember how, at 16, I fell madly in love with an Italian boy from Queens. I
traveled to New York City from my hometown of Princeton, New Jersey, every weekend
to go out with him, staying with my beloved grandmother on the Upper East Side. When
he finally took me home to Bay Ridge for dinner, it didn’t go well. His father seemed to
hate me. His reaction: “She looked at us like a fucking anthropologist.” I was cut to the
quick, because it was so true.
The working class doesn’t want to be examined like some tribe in a faraway land. They
don’t want the kind of pious solicitude the wealthy offer to the poor. (Perhaps the poor
don’t either; different topic.) They want respect for the lives they’ve built through
unrelenting hard work. They want recognition for their contributions and their way of
life. They keep our power lines repaired, our sewers functioning, our trains running. They
give the mammograms that save our lives and pick us up off the street when we’ve been
injured. They demand dignity—and they deserve it.
In the half-century since that painful dinner in Bay Ridge, I’ve come to understand that
analyzing any group is best handled with extreme caution. And even then, it can easily
leave the analyzed feeling condescended to. Empathy—something well-heeled and well-
intentioned liberals often call for as a way to cross the class divide—often reads as
condescension. The hidden injuries of class are like a sunburn: even a gentle touch can
make you jump with outraged pain.
- Why Talk About Class?