Staggering Along the Periphery: Classism in America

“The rich are different than you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously penned in his short story “The Rich Boy.” Fitzgerald observed that, since the rich are born into wealth, it shapes their worldview — gives rise to an air of superiority and confidence — so that even if they do fall upon hard times or “sink below us,” they still manage to think that they are better than the rest of us. Whether Fitzgerald intended it or not, what he essentially described was a type of mindset that is somewhat akin, in its logic, to racism — that being the notion of classism.
In America, today, we are surrounded by classism. We are immersed in a culture that treats it with the same acceptability that its iniquitous cousin enjoyed not so long ago. What’s more, because of how history played out over much of the 20th century, with the struggle between totalitarian pseudo-communism in the Soviet Union and capitalism here in the U.S., the idea of class struggle has long been considered somewhat of a taboo subject.