sqbr | Pondering stuff white people like

Drive-by UCCan checking in here:

I am often amazed at how openly "left wing" people despise the poor. They watch Today Tonight! And have badly dyed hair! And use bad grammar!

I think in most cases these people despise the "stupid" rather than the poor. And in most of these cases, the "stupid" are actually just those who are not as well-educated as the person in question.

It's (somewhat) difficult to become well-educated even if you do come from a privileged background - that is, it requires effort to complete high school, and even more effort to continue studying at a tertiary level. This means that some people who are well-educated like to ignore the fact that a privileged upbringing makes it far easier to get there, for several reasons which I won't outline here.

If you do this, then the only difference between you and that less well-educated person is that they were too lazy or dumb to bother getting an education. Looking down on poor people is frowned upon; looking down on lazy and dumb people, not so much.

So I agree with your point - I just think that very few people who "hate the poor" see it as that, and this is my best guess as to why.

Oh absolutely. Of course a lot of the markers of being "well educated" come directly from classism, the whole idea of a "classical education" is to know the things poor people don't and can't. Being smug about speaking "proper english" is entirely about classism: there's nothing that makes any dialect inherently better than any other (more appropriate in a given context, maybe, but not better).

And yes, this isn't directly correlated to wealth, it gets very complicated. I was brought up by poor well educated parents while my husband was brought up by nouveau-middle-class parents with money but not much education, so on the one had I know a lot more about opera and Great Literature, while he knows a lot more about good clothes and restaurants. And then we're smug about it, and the other calls us out for being classist :D

Yeah, and the other thing is that the motivation to "get an education" in the sense with which we mean it (i.e. go to uni and get your bachelors -- or doctorate, heh!) is almost totally formed by class. So it's not "lazy and dumb", it's just "why would I?".

An interesting phenomenon at the moment is the rehabilitation of the trades in mainstream society -- the ongoing shortage of tradies mean that they earn a lot, and there are these quite noticeable trends in journalism and lifestyle programming to create the idea of the "tradie catch" -- you know, the hot, uncomplicated hunk who earns a lot of money and is great with DIY about the house, like those presenters on Backyard Blitz and so forth. I saw a competition for "Australia's Hottest Tradie" on the SMH website a couple of days ago.

(I wonder if this sort of trend will be accompanied by increasing stigmatisation of the white collar working class? Is The Office an example of that maybe?)

An interesting phenomenon at the moment is the rehabilitation of the trades in mainstream society -- the ongoing shortage of tradies mean that they earn a lot, and there are these quite noticeable trends in journalism and lifestyle programming to create the idea of the "tradie catch" -- you know, the hot, uncomplicated hunk who earns a lot of money and is great with DIY about the house, like those presenters on Backyard Blitz and so forth. I saw a competition for "Australia's Hottest Tradie" on the SMH website a couple of days ago.

Huh. That had managed to totally pass me by. And thus I have nothing to say on it but "That is interesting" :)

I found it interesting when my students, who are largely from low-literacy, blue-collar and/or welfare-receiving families assumed I was from a rich family because I had gone to university and was interested in books and SF.

They didn't believe me at first when I told them I had lived in Rockingham (aka 'Boganville') most of my live, gone to a public school with a bad rep and I that came from an ex-navy borderline blue/white-collar family not too dissimlar in wealth to them.

While in the other direction, after worrying that she wouldn't be classy enough to fit in mum was amused to discover that the well to do mums at PLC tended not to have any deeper appreciation of art/music/history etc than the ones from Willagee :)

That's a funny blog. I recognised a lot of myself in the things that were satirised, so it was nice and edgy for me.

Of course, aside from the fact that the "white people" it's talking about enjoy the highest degree of privilege in our world, it's the moral equivalent of forming a "Bogan Piss-take Society" on Facebook and putting up jokes like:

Q: Where does a bogan keep his underwear?
A: Under the back seat of his 1973 Kingswood parked on a verge in Kelmscott!

i.e. not that funny for any obvious reason, and unbelievably cheap (hence the creator's ability to churn through hundreds of examples of "Stuff White People Like").

And no doubt he's equally aware that his subjects are also his target audience, because nobody likes to be meta- more than "white people".

In general though I find the whole idea of holding people absolutely responsible for their cultural context, way of life, whatever -- absurd.

This relates back to your comment about supposed left-wingers despising the poor. I think you've struck the wrong word with "despise", or perhaps you're referring to an emotional response to which some people tend to default whenever they're confronted with something to which they can't relate: disdain.

It's an unfortunate truth that education mediates experience and that one of the key benefits of social privilege is education. If you and another person have wildly differing standards of education you experience life differently and might have trouble developing empathy or peer feeling. I've also seen this working in reverse, for example when I had a job delivering pizzas back at university.

(No, this is not a mere self-justifying anecdote about my real life experiences of poverty and working shit jobs, it's actually germane to discussion I hope. Any claims about working shit jobs I will leave for those two summers I spent as a full-time telemarketer.)

My pizza shop boss was a former baker with minimal formal education, who was (to me at that time) one of the least literate people I'd ever met. He couldn't write a simple sentence, even on matters immediately related to his business, without making at least one glaring error. This horrified me at first until I came to realise that it basically didn't matter to him. And of course, the nature of our relationship was such that I never raised it with him. His sister-in-law was the chief chef and she was similarly only semi-literate, and she later came to seriously resent one of the other workers, a law student called Roger, who just couldn't hide his contempt for her lack of education.

On the other hand, she pretty much loved me because I realised early on that I'd need to try hard to conceal my feelings about her not being able to spell or talk eloquently -- which are actually surprisingly strong, in fact I still automatically think ill of perpetrators of bad spelling whenever I see it.

At the same time as being exposed to this world of people who could only barely read and write, I was forced to listen to my boss' maundering, dispiriting rants about how all the things I was learning at university, all of it "up in my ivory tower", were completely useless in the "real world" (the reverse part I was talking about). He would also lecture me on correct mop usage each and every time I picked up a mop, much as a colonial priest might have rambled on about Jesus to an Aboriginal in the nineteenth century.

"No, you're doing it wrong" is just the default for a lot of people when faced with choices they don't understand, like watching Today Tonight -- who'd ever do that when they had the *cough* endlessly fascinating coverage of BBC World re-hashing the same stories in twenty-four hour loops to look forward to?

Yeah, perhaps despise is too strong a word. But certainly there's a disturbing amount of classism.

Personally I find I can relate ok to people without much education, but do have problems with people who dislike the idea of educating yourself on principle (especially since they're unlikely to look kindly upon my life choices :D) But I also get annoyed by people who think they're better than other people (especially me, though I don't get this so much any more) just because they have more education.

"No, you're doing it wrong" is just the default for a lot of people when faced with choices they don't understand

Pretty much.

I read a whole bunch of Stuff White People Like at once, so I caught on that it was a very specific type of white person they were talking about quickly. Not just upper middle class and left wing, but some entries quite specific to the US as well, though many of those references could be translated to Australia, barring the differences in race relations. It certainly has enough winces of recognition from me to keep it sharp ('White people like 80s nights!' Yes, we do).

Inside the ALP the whole issue about poor people liking the wrong things is pretty much the core of most of the factional divisions, and most of the policy debates. It turns out that poor people and working class people who join unions often tend to not be that 'progressive', and aren't interested in gay rights, would rather have jobs than environmental protection, don't like immigrants much, and quite like Today Tonight and Ralph magazine, all of which pretty much means much of the hard left spends their whole life trying to work through the cognitive dissonance, and the right spend a lot of time wondering how it is that they seem to have more in common with people on the 'other side'.

Oh yes, it's very american too.

much of the hard left spends their whole life trying to work through the cognitive dissonance, and the right spend a lot of time wondering how it is that they seem to have more in common with people on the 'other side'

disclaimer: Possibly very ill-considered rant inspired by certain far left family members who shall remain nameless.

I must admit it's something I find I have to think about. I think it requires more flexibility and compassion than a lot of ideologically driven far-left people can manage: if you believe that anyone who is at all capitalist/homophobic/sexist/racist etc is Pure Unadulterated Evil then you end up only having any real sympathy or respect for other people with exactly the same ideals as yourself. But if you acknowledge that these attitudes, while wrong, can come from understandable motivations and experiences, and these underlying issues need to be addressed(*), then that means maybe having sympathy for Liberal voters which is an impossible proposition.

ie if people are worried about their jobs being lost because of environmentalism/immigration etc then you have to actually address these fears(*) and not just dismiss them out of hand because the environment is important/racism is bad etc.

(*)By showing they're unfounded, or coming up with a policy which avoids these outcomes, or just saying "Yes, actually, there will be some job cuts, and I realise why that's upsetting, but it's necessary"

Drive-by UCCan checking in here:

I am often amazed at how openly "left wing" people despise the poor. They watch Today Tonight! And have badly dyed hair! And use bad grammar!

I think in most cases these people despise the "stupid" rather than the poor. And in most of these cases, the "stupid" are actually just those who are not as well-educated as the person in question.

It's (somewhat) difficult to become well-educated even if you do come from a privileged background - that is, it requires effort to complete high school, and even more effort to continue studying at a tertiary level. This means that some people who are well-educated like to ignore the fact that a privileged upbringing makes it far easier to get there, for several reasons which I won't outline here.

If you do this, then the only difference between you and that less well-educated person is that they were too lazy or dumb to bother getting an education. Looking down on poor people is frowned upon; looking down on lazy and dumb people, not so much.

So I agree with your point - I just think that very few people who "hate the poor" see it as that, and this is my best guess as to why.

Oh absolutely. Of course a lot of the markers of being "well educated" come directly from classism, the whole idea of a "classical education" is to know the things poor people don't and can't. Being smug about speaking "proper english" is entirely about classism: there's nothing that makes any dialect inherently better than any other (more appropriate in a given context, maybe, but not better).

And yes, this isn't directly correlated to wealth, it gets very complicated. I was brought up by poor well educated parents while my husband was brought up by nouveau-middle-class parents with money but not much education, so on the one had I know a lot more about opera and Great Literature, while he knows a lot more about good clothes and restaurants. And then we're smug about it, and the other calls us out for being classist :D

Yeah, and the other thing is that the motivation to "get an education" in the sense with which we mean it (i.e. go to uni and get your bachelors -- or doctorate, heh!) is almost totally formed by class. So it's not "lazy and dumb", it's just "why would I?".

An interesting phenomenon at the moment is the rehabilitation of the trades in mainstream society -- the ongoing shortage of tradies mean that they earn a lot, and there are these quite noticeable trends in journalism and lifestyle programming to create the idea of the "tradie catch" -- you know, the hot, uncomplicated hunk who earns a lot of money and is great with DIY about the house, like those presenters on Backyard Blitz and so forth. I saw a competition for "Australia's Hottest Tradie" on the SMH website a couple of days ago.

(I wonder if this sort of trend will be accompanied by increasing stigmatisation of the white collar working class? Is The Office an example of that maybe?)

An interesting phenomenon at the moment is the rehabilitation of the trades in mainstream society -- the ongoing shortage of tradies mean that they earn a lot, and there are these quite noticeable trends in journalism and lifestyle programming to create the idea of the "tradie catch" -- you know, the hot, uncomplicated hunk who earns a lot of money and is great with DIY about the house, like those presenters on Backyard Blitz and so forth. I saw a competition for "Australia's Hottest Tradie" on the SMH website a couple of days ago.

Huh. That had managed to totally pass me by. And thus I have nothing to say on it but "That is interesting" :)

I found it interesting when my students, who are largely from low-literacy, blue-collar and/or welfare-receiving families assumed I was from a rich family because I had gone to university and was interested in books and SF.

They didn't believe me at first when I told them I had lived in Rockingham (aka 'Boganville') most of my live, gone to a public school with a bad rep and I that came from an ex-navy borderline blue/white-collar family not too dissimlar in wealth to them.

While in the other direction, after worrying that she wouldn't be classy enough to fit in mum was amused to discover that the well to do mums at PLC tended not to have any deeper appreciation of art/music/history etc than the ones from Willagee :)

That's a funny blog. I recognised a lot of myself in the things that were satirised, so it was nice and edgy for me.

Of course, aside from the fact that the "white people" it's talking about enjoy the highest degree of privilege in our world, it's the moral equivalent of forming a "Bogan Piss-take Society" on Facebook and putting up jokes like:

Q: Where does a bogan keep his underwear?
A: Under the back seat of his 1973 Kingswood parked on a verge in Kelmscott!

i.e. not that funny for any obvious reason, and unbelievably cheap (hence the creator's ability to churn through hundreds of examples of "Stuff White People Like").

And no doubt he's equally aware that his subjects are also his target audience, because nobody likes to be meta- more than "white people".

In general though I find the whole idea of holding people absolutely responsible for their cultural context, way of life, whatever -- absurd.

This relates back to your comment about supposed left-wingers despising the poor. I think you've struck the wrong word with "despise", or perhaps you're referring to an emotional response to which some people tend to default whenever they're confronted with something to which they can't relate: disdain.

It's an unfortunate truth that education mediates experience and that one of the key benefits of social privilege is education. If you and another person have wildly differing standards of education you experience life differently and might have trouble developing empathy or peer feeling. I've also seen this working in reverse, for example when I had a job delivering pizzas back at university.

(No, this is not a mere self-justifying anecdote about my real life experiences of poverty and working shit jobs, it's actually germane to discussion I hope. Any claims about working shit jobs I will leave for those two summers I spent as a full-time telemarketer.)

My pizza shop boss was a former baker with minimal formal education, who was (to me at that time) one of the least literate people I'd ever met. He couldn't write a simple sentence, even on matters immediately related to his business, without making at least one glaring error. This horrified me at first until I came to realise that it basically didn't matter to him. And of course, the nature of our relationship was such that I never raised it with him. His sister-in-law was the chief chef and she was similarly only semi-literate, and she later came to seriously resent one of the other workers, a law student called Roger, who just couldn't hide his contempt for her lack of education.

On the other hand, she pretty much loved me because I realised early on that I'd need to try hard to conceal my feelings about her not being able to spell or talk eloquently -- which are actually surprisingly strong, in fact I still automatically think ill of perpetrators of bad spelling whenever I see it.

At the same time as being exposed to this world of people who could only barely read and write, I was forced to listen to my boss' maundering, dispiriting rants about how all the things I was learning at university, all of it "up in my ivory tower", were completely useless in the "real world" (the reverse part I was talking about). He would also lecture me on correct mop usage each and every time I picked up a mop, much as a colonial priest might have rambled on about Jesus to an Aboriginal in the nineteenth century.

"No, you're doing it wrong" is just the default for a lot of people when faced with choices they don't understand, like watching Today Tonight -- who'd ever do that when they had the *cough* endlessly fascinating coverage of BBC World re-hashing the same stories in twenty-four hour loops to look forward to?

Yeah, perhaps despise is too strong a word. But certainly there's a disturbing amount of classism.

Personally I find I can relate ok to people without much education, but do have problems with people who dislike the idea of educating yourself on principle (especially since they're unlikely to look kindly upon my life choices :D) But I also get annoyed by people who think they're better than other people (especially me, though I don't get this so much any more) just because they have more education.

"No, you're doing it wrong" is just the default for a lot of people when faced with choices they don't understand

Pretty much.

I read a whole bunch of Stuff White People Like at once, so I caught on that it was a very specific type of white person they were talking about quickly. Not just upper middle class and left wing, but some entries quite specific to the US as well, though many of those references could be translated to Australia, barring the differences in race relations. It certainly has enough winces of recognition from me to keep it sharp ('White people like 80s nights!' Yes, we do).

Inside the ALP the whole issue about poor people liking the wrong things is pretty much the core of most of the factional divisions, and most of the policy debates. It turns out that poor people and working class people who join unions often tend to not be that 'progressive', and aren't interested in gay rights, would rather have jobs than environmental protection, don't like immigrants much, and quite like Today Tonight and Ralph magazine, all of which pretty much means much of the hard left spends their whole life trying to work through the cognitive dissonance, and the right spend a lot of time wondering how it is that they seem to have more in common with people on the 'other side'.

Oh yes, it's very american too.

much of the hard left spends their whole life trying to work through the cognitive dissonance, and the right spend a lot of time wondering how it is that they seem to have more in common with people on the 'other side'

disclaimer: Possibly very ill-considered rant inspired by certain far left family members who shall remain nameless.

I must admit it's something I find I have to think about. I think it requires more flexibility and compassion than a lot of ideologically driven far-left people can manage: if you believe that anyone who is at all capitalist/homophobic/sexist/racist etc is Pure Unadulterated Evil then you end up only having any real sympathy or respect for other people with exactly the same ideals as yourself. But if you acknowledge that these attitudes, while wrong, can come from understandable motivations and experiences, and these underlying issues need to be addressed(*), then that means maybe having sympathy for Liberal voters which is an impossible proposition.

ie if people are worried about their jobs being lost because of environmentalism/immigration etc then you have to actually address these fears(*) and not just dismiss them out of hand because the environment is important/racism is bad etc.

(*)By showing they're unfounded, or coming up with a policy which avoids these outcomes, or just saying "Yes, actually, there will be some job cuts, and I realise why that's upsetting, but it's necessary"

Pondering stuff white people like

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maybe :"despise" is the wrong word

Re: maybe :"despise" is the wrong word

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maybe :"despise" is the wrong word

Re: maybe :"despise" is the wrong word

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