Golden Girls: Class in America

Marxists get upset these days because the folks they thought were on their side, the academics with their theories and labels, have retreated into near-Victorian elitism (with far more pretense than the Victorians). That is, calling someone the wrong label or pronoun--showing a bit of ankle--has become more horrific than, say, keeping kids in school, funding rehab programs, and getting people registered to vote. 

I'm not a Marxist--I think it misses way too much about basic human nature to be a palatable theory. But it does get one thing right. 

Class has impact. 

In my undergraduate program, an instructor had us watch The Story of English, the PBS miniseries from the mid-1980s. I currently own the program, purchased through eBay. 

In one episode, an executive-type woman from New York tells a story about her engagement to a man from the South. In New York City, his accent was there but softened by the acquirement of Northeast speech patterns. She went home with him for a weekend. The closer they got to his hometown, the stronger became his very Southern accent.  She felt like a stranger had crawled out of the man sitting beside her in the car. The engagement didn't last. 

I'm not saying she was right. I'm saying, "Wow! Talk about honesty!" 

Because admit it or not, human beings make these judgments all the time. They may call them something else. They may pretend they are something else. But class--the expectations of class (blue-collar, middle-class, elite)--the associations of that class with certain choices and attitudes regarding education, lifestyle, politics, religion, child-rearing, entertainment--are immensely strong. 

The strength of those expectations doesn't always leave people open to the "other." Hence, the tendency for elites in America to cry "mea culpa" while keeping a quite literal distance from the people they claim to feel for. 

In Golden Girls' episode "Diamond in the Rough," Blanche, the romantic, gives up a great (and gorgeous) guy due to class distinctions. Rose and Dorothy tell her she is an idiot. And Blanche is not proud of herself. But she doesn't lie to herself either. 

Courtship is, to a degree, always going to be based on "I think I know what I'm getting" (even if nobody really does).