November 25, 2003

Class Matters (Class as Behavior)

I talked about class as behavior. Thinking about class in this fashion is meritocratic in one sense I guess, in that the barometer isn't how much money you have (income or wealth) or what type of gig you have. The barometer is character. Pure and simple.

The content of one's character SHOULD determine one's worth.

But let's take a look at this further. When I asked my Race and Politics class to determine what is and is not "lower class behavior" this is what they came up with: talking loud at the movies, criminal behavior, drug use, disgusting eating habits, bad manners, kids that cuss (i came up with that one). There are a lot of other indicators...but let's be real. We know what ghetto is when we see it. A single mom on welfare is ghetto.

Or is she?

I am a professor at one of the top ten schools in the country (whatever that means). I remember talking to one of my former students about a project I was working on involving hiphop. He told me that he could help me if I needed tracks, because he had a lot of them downloaded.

"How many?" I asked.

"About 5 or 10 thousand."

My jaw dropped. If that isn't criminal behavior I don't know what is. Kids on college campuses routinely download not only full albums, but full-length movies, and entire seasons of shows like the Sopranos.

But that isn't "ghetto" is it?

A lawyer decides that she does not want to wait to for marriage to have a child. What does she become? She becomes a role model.

So there's an obvious double standard that goes on.

Now one counter-argument coming from the old school would be that these lower-class folk are bringing down the race by touting negative images. But we've been down this road right? Even if we find out (and I'm doing work on this as we speak) that Nelly's Pimp Juice has a harmful impact on how kids think about politics, we've got to dig a lot deeper to figure out who we need to fight. It very well might be Nelly...but there's another side.

Thinking about Cobb's Old School Values, I argued that discretion should be added. Knowing when to speak, and when to shut the hell up, automatically gives people with that skill a leg up on people without that skill. Even in the rap game. But there's another value that should be added as well--tenacity. The ability to fight and fight and fight and fight.

Then fight some more.

I believe that folks like Allen Iverson, Warren Sapp, and 50 Cent, have that in SPADES. And without that value, where exactly would we be?

I'm going to apply this directly to education next time around, in a piece called "How knuckleheads got me my PhD."

Posted by at November 25, 2003 08:23 AM | TrackBack

yeah, I'm feeling you.

I'm thinking too that another factor involved with folks identifying "lower class behavior" deals with the idea that those classes are easier to mark. Or, they're marked more often. Whether its large-scale data or offhand observations, it seems like folks can articulate what and who's "ghetto" more so than they can talk about the opposite of ghetto, know?

Posted by: hxr136 at November 26, 2003 07:07 AM