Spirit in Action

Social Class & Powerful Social Action

Most activists recognize the strength to social action groups of drawing power from across the racial and sex/gender landscape, but too few recognize the key effects of class. In Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures, Betsy Leondar-Wright shines a focused light on the opportunities for pulling together as never before, by seeing the many ways in which social class impacts our thoughts, actions, and organizing.

Duration:: 54m
Broadcast on:: 24 May 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Most activists recognize the strength to social action groups of drawing power from across the racial and sex gender landscape But too few recognize the key effects of class. In her recent book Missing Class, Betsy Leander Wright shines a focused light on the opportunities for pulling together as never before By seeing the many ways in which social class impacts our thoughts, actions, and organizing. Betsy's previous book was Class Matters, and she's program director of and senior trainer for the organization, Class Action. Betsy Leander Wright joins us by phone from Massachusetts. Betsy, I'm really, really, really excited to have you here today for Spirit in Action. I'm delighted to be with you, Mark. We have someone in common, Gail Leander Wright, who connected me up with you and your book Missing Class, Strengthening social movement groups by seeing class cultures. What I want to know is, did you and Gail come together because of social activism? We did not. Oh, I'm so disappointed. And I was sure that that was it. Right, we've been a couple for 22 years, and no, I guess it was more the world of Jewish feminism that brought us together. We met at a retreat for that. Of course, we did have compatible values, but she thought of herself as a theater director, and I thought of myself as a progressive activist, which is what I've been my whole life. It turns out to be a useful background for the kinds of things I've studied for this book. Since this book is about activism and social class, I'd like to know up front what class you came out of, working class, middle class. Where were you on the spectrum? Well, I grew up. My parents both went to college, and I grew up in a single family house. Kind of one of the little white picket fence type neighborhoods in suburbs outside of New York. And so I think of myself as a professional, middle class background. But then when I was a teenager, my dad got promoted and also made a killing in the bond market. And we bought this enormous house, and he sent me and my sister to prep school. And suddenly I was meeting people of a really different class. And I already was in a mixed class town and had been pretty confused and mystified. Why was there this social segregation between the kids that lived in apartments and the kids that lived in houses? Why did we all go to different churches and other houses of worship? So I was confused already. And then as I watched people react to me to my big house and to the fact that I was going away to exit, I got positive and negative reactions that I really, really didn't understand. So I think some of my fascination with class differences started then because I just met people with all these differences in our life experiences and our life chances. There were no words for that. There was no explanation given by the adults what was going on. There was the 60s. Of course there were words for racial differences, but there weren't any words for class differences. I think a good starting point here would be to have you list the different class levels that you use in the book. We need this because we do in fact really think so little about it. You've already described yourself as having grown up professional, middle class. So this of course is one of the confusing things about talking about class and why we don't do it is that class is a series of interrelated spectrums. And they don't necessarily line up in any one person's life story. Your parents' education might put you in a different place on the spectrum than the kind of neighborhood and housing that you grew up in. But with class action, that my nonprofit, we've found that if you do a four-way distinction based on real differences in lived experience, that rings pretty true to the people who've lived through the different experiences. So if you say the majority of American households, no one has a four-year degree or a professional managerial job. Instead, people work for wages and are pretty closely supervised and have high school degrees and either rent or have modest homeownership. So to say working class or working class plus lower middle class as a term for that maturity, I think it's an accurate and respectful term. And then there's a subset of working class people who are outside the formal labor market and just struggling not meeting basic human needs and so not having stable housing or income and so saying long-term poor chronic poverty, lots of people dip into poverty briefly. But it's really a different standpoint that gives you a different insight into the society if you're poor for decades or generations. And then among the people who do have four-year degrees, at least someone in the family does, and have more autonomy and more security at work, although of course that's eroding away before our eyes, to say professional managerial or professional middle class, that's a really good descriptive term unlike middle class, which is this vague term that could mean anything. Professional middle class has a distinction of different kind of work and a different amount of education. And then some people with four-year degrees or advanced degrees also have investment income so that they wouldn't necessarily have to work. And so to say owning class, but that's really a different perspective on the society if you're in the about one in twenty families that you could live on your investment income if you needed to. So I think that's a pretty good four-way split. And so if you say we all roughly fit into one of those four class backgrounds and then we either stayed about the same as adults or we were downwardly mobile or we were upwardly mobile, so we all have a class trajectory. And so you need to add two terms, upwardly mobile, I love the term stradler, a lot of first-generation college students, first-generation professionals call themselves stradlers, and then downwardly mobile. And because I'm looking at progressive activists, there's this big subgroup of people who are voluntarily downwardly mobile. Parents went to college and had professional jobs, they went to college, but now they're making choices either to live off the grid for environmental reasons or just to free up their time only to work part-time and not pursue a career in order to free up time for activism. Very, very common, especially in the anarchist wing of the progressive movement. So that sort of gives you, I guess, some up to six terms, which is a lot to remember, but a large share of the 400 or so activists that I talked to in this study, their life experience did fit into one of those six categories, so I think those are pretty helpful terms. So someone like Bill Gates, enormously wealthy, is he just in the owning class? Is that how that kind of person gets categorized? Yes, certainly is owning class because he doesn't have to work for a living. There's a subset of the owning class that I would call the ruling class, like in the tradition of Dhamshul rule of America, meaning the small subset of owning class people who have vast wealth and power. I didn't include them in the book, in fact I didn't include owning class people very much, because I didn't run into them in this particular activist group, the 25 groups that I studied. That doesn't mean that none of them are activists, some of them are activists, and I've had the good fortune to work with many owning class activists and a few ruling class activists. So I think that progressive causes can be moved forward by activists of all class backgrounds. So it's really important to know that we're not ruling anybody out, everybody has a contribution, everybody has strengths that come from their class life story. So yeah, I'd say we're looking at everybody across the entire class spectrum as contributing to cross class alliances for social justice. This also connects with why you wrote this book, what motivated you? You weren't perhaps just doing it for fun? Well, fun. Yeah, it was fun, but no, my motivation was, so as you mentioned, I've been an activist for about 30 years, and I've had this perennial burning curiosity about why do movements, why hope we had so few cross class movements in the United States, and why have so many coalitions and groups that I've been part of or watched fractured along class lines just over and over and over again. What is going on here? And I think there's many reasons, including different class interests, which I don't go into in the book, but I just had a sneaking suspicion that class culture differences had something to do with it, that we end up socially segregated because we just do everything differently. We talk about the issues differently, we run our groups differently, and I made a statement in my earlier book, Annock Totally, saying, "I think there are class culture differences among activists that we're not dealing with." And it was like, by far the most provocative thing I said in that book called "Class Matters," that people were excited and wanted to know more. They were arguing with me and disagreeing with me and wanting examples or giving their examples or disagreeing with my examples. It was like there was this charge around this issue, and basically people were asking me like, "Prove it, prove it." And I already had a master's in sociology, so I had been trained in social science research, and I thought, "Well, that sounds like it would require social science research." So it took about five years to do the field work, getting out there, wonderful groups consenting to let three of us observe their meetings and interview them, and take their demographic information by survey, and we approached a lot of groups that boiled down to these 25 that we got full information from in five states. It was just incredibly fascinating, like everything, and most of my initial hypotheses were wrong, and this very painstaking process that makes me respect every single social science study I've ever read that successfully comes up with generalizations based on data, because you observe meetings, and you talk to people, and you have all these impressions, and of course there's a lot else going on besides class cultures. And then you actually can use software to tag the transcripts with different themes and things that you observe, and then you can call up and say, "Okay, let's see how much -- I did different types of humor as you saw." So, okay, now that I've tagged all the times that people laughed, what were they laughing about? Let me call them up by class, let me call them up by race, let me call them up by gender, let me see if there's patterns. Oh, there are! Look at that, there's class patterns in what groups laugh about at meetings, and how often per hour do they laugh. Huh, well, I'm onto something there. So, I did that for hundreds and hundreds of different traits and qualities, group processes, words, use of specific words. I just tested so many things, and so what this book is is like, which things really strongly showed up as more common among activists of one class or another? Or it seemed to matter. Some things like, okay, people are different, who cares? But the book is organized by problems that members of any voluntary group face, whether it's a social justice group or just a neighborhood group, any kind of group that has meetings, you know, we all have the same problems, so that's what's organized around low turnout. What do you do when people don't show up? How do you recruit more people and get your old people to come back? What do you do when there's conflicts within the group? What do you do when there's inactive people who don't take on any tasks? What do you do when somebody talks too much? We all have the same problems, and in every case, the solutions that people have preferred and used varied by their class, by their class background and their current class. And so we could learn from each other. That's the main point I want to make, is if everyone who wanted to make their world or their community a better place had more contact and learned from activists of other classes, we would all get new solutions that would strengthen our group and move the groups forward towards their mission. And we could build stronger cross-class alliances, build bigger movements, and make more fundamental social change, which is the whole point. Yes, and again, the name of the book, Missing Class, Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures by Betsy Leander Wright, you already mentioned, Betsy, that you started out from professional middle class. Is that where you still see yourself? Yes, I do call myself professional middle class. I think when I was a teenager, I would call myself upper middle class. So I think I've had a little class mobility in my life, but now I would say professional middle class, I'm a homeowner. I now have PhD, thanks to this being my PhD dissertation, went back to grad school to get help with the research. And so, yeah, by education, by type of occupation, and definitely when I saw the strengths and the downsides of the professional middle class activists, I saw myself all over them. And sometimes I would get embarrassed when I saw the kinds of pitfalls and mistakes and putting your foot in your mouth that sometimes happens with professional middle class activists. I also saw strengths, but I felt like, yeah, I have that strength too, and I could feel proud of it. I think we all have something to be proud of from what we've learned from our class backgrounds, but we all have stuff that we didn't learn growing up. And I've made every single mistake that I point out a college educated, more class privileged activist making in the book. I've made every one of those mistakes myself, so we can all be in this together, this process of learning. Well, I am curious, who are your best working class friends? Hmm, that's a great question. Yeah, I've had this fantastic good luck of being an activist with other activists from across the entire class spectrum. So besides personal friends, which I also have class diverse personal friends, for years I was either a community organizer or a tenant organizer or I worked with working class people, low income people, homeless groups, groups of welfare recipients, who just really were incredible activists. I've also worked with suburban environmentalists, and I've worked with big donors, big inheritors who've given all their money away and helped them lobby to, say, text me more. I worked for many years at United for a Fair Economy, the group that works for fairer rules for the economy. UFE has a group called Responsible Wealth to get into that membership. You need to be in the top 5% by income or wealth, and I was the communications director, so I was always helping them get on the radio or testify, go to a shareholders meeting and argue against excessive CEO pay or in favor of taxing wealthy people more. I admire people who can see their bigger class self-interest, the bigger context that they may be benefiting personally by rules that make them even richer, but it doesn't make the kind of society that they want their kids and their grandkids to live in. So I admire a lot of owning class activists, a lot of professional middle class activists. I really was incredibly impressed by the working class and poverty class majority groups that were observed in this study. I think they got some real tools that I didn't learn as a young activist, as how to recruit, how to build strong bonds among people, putting relationships first, keeping their eyes on the prize of what's a winnable goal if they stick together and have a sense of solidarity despite their divisions. It was very, very impressive not to romanticize those groups because they had downsides too, but I definitely felt like there was a lot I could learn from the community organizing groups and the labor movement groups in the study. But that's a different question than what I asked, because I was wondering if you have friends that you hang around with from the further reaches of the class spectrum, I find that those class related tastes and things like music or language, restaurants, what you eat, they're so profound. I don't want to go out and watch NASCAR racing or whatever. I have close personal friends who didn't go to college, and I do get introduced to different pieces of culture. For example, roller derby. Did you know that roller derby is an incredible hoot? There may be college educated. Do roller derby, but my friend has an associate's degree, vocational degree, but not an academic degree who plays roller derby. I think I live in a mixed class area, and so I have neighbors who eat really, really different food than me, and Gil and I may bring the most wood cookbook vegetarian thing to the potluck, but other people may be bringing the hot wings or something. I do cross-class socializing as well as cross-class activism. You know, when you really hooked me in the book was when I was reading through it and saying, okay, a study of thoughts and ideas, a kind of thing that ivory tower intellectuals like to ruminate about, but is this really useful? And where you really hooked me was when you noted that the middle class groups never thought of offering food as an incentive for people to show up. And when I saw this, I said, my goodness, because you see, I'm a struttler. I do. Yeah. Yes, yes. I grew up working class, and even though I speak English as if I'm well educated, which I was, my 11 brothers and sisters all speak differently than I do. They speak working class, accented English. And do you code switch when you go and you talk to your siblings or your cousins or your old neighbors? Well, to a certain degree, a limited degree, although I have to admit that I probably like to show them all that I'm smarty pants and all. Yeah, so they tease you about how you talk and about your education? My sister Sharon refers to me as the white sheep of the family. Yeah, that's a good one, yeah. Well, they do look up to me to a certain degree, but I do know that there are some really, really smart people in my family who are not of the same ivory tower where I've made my way. That's great to point out, because until it's such a, the basis of so many classes slurs, the assumption that people with less formal education are less intelligent. It's just a preposterous stereotype. So that's great that you say that. And the place in the book where you completely bought my souls, when you pointed out the differences in humor of the different social classes, because I have both working class and middle class humor in my lexicon. And I can use words like lexicon, which my brothers and sisters would not be likely to use. Right, right. But the different humors, the self-deprecating or teasing humor of the working classes, I do that in my Quaker meeting here, which is heavily middle class. And they look at me like I'm some kind of foreign creature, but then I also do like the word play and cultural humor of the middle classes, which they recognize that, and that fits in fine. Like great example in the Quakers, man, that's a very class distinct denomination, isn't it, in terms of who the majority is? You have the average education is something like one year post college or higher, and that's the average education level. And yet we do have a couple people in our Quaker meeting who are working class. But, you know, I think there's a little bit of discomfort in both directions and a tendency to judge based on class norms. Yeah, well, I was wondering when you said that you have a different sense of humor, did you ever step on any toes by having a different humor style than anybody in your Quaker meeting? Yes, and it's probably in the minutes of the meeting for a business where I did it. Quite definitely, as a matter of fact. I can give you a quite specific example, something that I knew I would do, but that no one else in the Quaker meeting would be likely to do. Recently, we had all these middle school teen girls visiting our meeting for special activity that the teens would be doing during worship time. So we had 16 girls present, and just two of our young teen boys were there. So when the time came for the kids to exit the meeting for the activity, the six girls headed up, but our boys were reluctant to go, just staying in place. So I walked over and I whispered to Ben and told him that he had better get his butt upstairs, or that he'd find me kicking his butt up the stairs. Now, Ben's known me all of his life and knows that I would never do any harm to anyone, but I also think he appreciates my directness and comfortable humor. So I had no fear that he would take it wrong, and he said, "Okay, I guess so," and he and the other boy headed up to join the girls. But I knew no one else in the meeting would use humor that way or say anything like that. They would have had to say something very careful and reasonable in a way that's acceptable to the middle class, but I got an easy quick reaction without all the drama or arguing or reasoning or logicing. Right, right. So that's a perfect example. And how I have this great faith, that's why the subtitle says, "Strengthening Social Movement Groups," just by seeing class cultures, that once someone knows, "Okay, the cultural competence to tease the rougher humor and using that kind of pretend hostility, pretend violence as an affectionate thing, but just a sign of familiarity and jocularity," that if you're someone like I was, it was brought up like with a teasing taboo. The teasing is equated with bullying, and especially I think I'm talking about middle-aged and older white women who are professional middle class, upper middle class, such a teasing taboo. So if you just become aware that actually there's something that's not bullying at all, it's not mean at all, it's a sign of familiarity and it's a really comfortable form of joking, and it's common in a lot of different working class cultures. And of course there are really varied by ethnicity and geography and so forth, but that rough teasing is cut across, it shows up in different ways, in a lot of working class cultures, then you can take a deep breath and say, "Alright, so maybe I'm a quaker, a middle class, a quaker woman, and I overhear you saying that and I know we're a pacifist, a religious tradition, you know, I could be like, "Mark, what did you say to that boy that's not okay by our values?" Or I could say, "Look at that, look at how Mark can make that kid laugh and can get that kid to get up those stairs and form that bond with that kid." Cool, that's great, you know, maybe I'll give that a try, or in a minimum, maybe I'll respect that and not have it bother me. I think just being aware of the class cultural differences is going to make us more able to work together. And working together well is so important. We're speaking with Betsy Leander Wright, she's author of a new book Missing Class, Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures. And if that sounds erudite, it is because it's her PhD dissertation. But it's not boring, you've got to tell people, it's written in plain English. Right, it is not, it is not, I repeat, boring. I've worked with wonderful professors whose own books are all in plain English, written for a lay audience, and they all said to me, "Take all the jargon out and just write it so activist can read it, and that'll be fine." So it's got a dual audience of people who study social movements, but also people who are in the trenches working for a better world. And it is a great book, an interesting book, and I'd even say it's a captivating book, which is why I have Betsy here today for Spirit and Action, which is a Nordenspirit radio production on the web at Nordenspiritradio.org. Complete with eight and a half years of our programs available for free listening and download, and we have info about and links to our guests. So if you want to track Betsy down, just come to Nordenspiritradio.org and follow the links to class matters and class action, for example. Leave a comment when you visit as well, because we love to-way communication and we'd like to hear more from you. There's also a place to donate, your donations are crucial in the continued existence of this program. We don't depend on commercial or other special interests, we depend on you, so use the donate button or the address on our site and make a difference. And I can't say strongly enough how important it is to support your local community radio station, bringing you a slice of news and music that you just don't get anywhere else. So with your wallet and with your hands, start by supporting your local community radio station. Betsy Landa Wright is here, her recent book is Missing Class, and it was her PhD dissertation. And Gail had mentioned that to me, Betsy, ahead of time, which was really surprising because it was so very readable, not stiff or a formalistic anyway, free of jargon. Gail told me that you had told your PhD committee of your intent to write the dissertation and then afterwards to write a book, and they told you no, just write the book. >> Write the book, exactly, write a book for activists and that. There's no contradiction between rigorous research and talking in plain language with action implications that can actually make social justice groups run better. There's no contradiction there, and there's lots of activists who are real idea junkies and love theories and ideas, and there's lots of academics who, especially sociologists, who get down in the trenches and try to build movements and make change. So I think we can be one big network of trying to turn things around in this country. The other genesis of this book, besides the academic genesis, is that I've been working for ten years with the group on the National Nonprofit Class Action. Classism.org is our domain. This book was created as part of class action's mission to get people talking about class, get people to claim their class identities and think more about them. Create more cross-class dialogue and reduce classism so that we can work together across class to make a fairer economy and society. So the events that I'm doing on book tour that you can find out more about on missingclass.org, they're all sponsored by class action. There'll be lots of ways if you come to one book event or workshop, then the follow up will be to join this national network of people who are creating ways to have cross-class dialogue and work together against classes. I want to delve into a couple of the concrete ways in which you saw class working. I mentioned one of them already, food. Groups wanted to encourage people to show up for their events. And there's hand-ringing that happens sometimes in middle class groups. How do we get people there? And often the middle class argument is that the ideas will get people to show up. Talk about the role of food and how that's important. Well, first of all, every single working class or poor majority group meeting that we observed had food to share with everyone. And many college educated majority groups did not, including groups that were too small, turn out. And as you said, sitting there, ringing their hands, worrying at 6.30 at night in a room with no food in it. So I feel like that's the most straightforward way that you can get a concrete solution to an important group problem just by being aware of how another class does it, is just feed people. But even more than just seeing this come up in the meetings themselves, one of the questions that was in every interview just about was what would you do to get more people to join your group? And there was a dramatic difference in how people thought about that, that the working class and poor people almost entirely would bring up concrete benefits to the individual. So, you know, we have a food pantry and anybody who joins the group, you know, gets to take food from the food pantry, or we've got a campaign that's going to make things safer near such and such a school. And so the parents in that school, they would see that it would be good for their children. So it's either we've got to have really good food and entertainment to get them in the door. We've got to give that door prizes. Or our campaign is not just for long-term change, it's also for short-term change, and if people get involved, they'll see a benefit to themselves in the short run. That was the overriding theme. And the overriding theme of the college-educated activists who were asked that same question was we've got to work on the messaging, work on the framing of the issue and the ideological bent of our message to match a certain constituency. So lots of conversations about, okay, if we want to track this constituency, we have to talk more about this issue, or we have to slant it towards this kind of politics, which is a really useful kind of conversation to have. I think it was overemphasized. I think actually both of them were overemphasized, and that the strongest recruitment is going to be both the and, that thinking about what issues do people care about, what political ideas do people agree or disagree with, who we want to reach and want to draw in. And also what kind of concrete and incentives are going to get people in the door, what's in it for them. You also mentioned in the book a motivator that had near universal attraction. In order to do your project, you had to have people fill out surveys, and you found that there's a miracle motivator that gets people to fill out the survey, and it was... >> Chocolate, this great social psychologist, Ray Physicchio, looked over our research proposal and design and said, I see this is a very good study. There's just one problem. How are you going to get those people to stay longer at their own meeting and fill out a demographic survey? I recommend chocolate, and it worked like a charm. It worked in almost every kind of group. We discovered that lint balls work the best, those round, wrapped, extremely good chocolates. We thought maybe there'd be a class difference, and there wasn't. Everybody went for the lint balls. But as soon as meeting with draw to a close, I or whoever the researcher was would pull out of our bag, the surveys and the chocolates, and everyone's eyes would be riveted. What's that? Well, if you fill out a survey, you'll get one of these. So we had almost 100% survey compliance, which is unusual in social science. The only type of group that didn't work with was certain of the really radical, voluntarily, downwardly, mobile, anarchist, and other anti-corporate environmental living off the grid groups, because we were bringing in a corporate consumer good. And it wasn't vegan. So it bombed in a couple places. Sadly, it was not a universally true thing. So that's one thing I would do differently. I think, Betsy, that you know who musician Bill Harley is, because he's kind of from your neighborhood. I've had him on my program, and he mentioned something that I had never thought of before, which makes great sense to me now that I look at it. And again, I partly have a heightened awareness of this because of being a strattler who grew up in a family with 12 kids in the working class. He said that when it comes to food, the way that you think about it is directly related to your social class. If you're poor or working class, the question is, is there enough? For the middle class, you ask, how does it taste? And for the upper classes, the question is, how is it presented? That's very good. I've seen that before, I think. That was one of my things I'm really glad I did, which was ask for everybody's favorite meal, favorite TV or radio program and favorite music. So I could see how much tastes vary. And I don't know if you're familiar with that idea that we no longer are a society that's stratified by high culture, low culture. The vast majority of Americans, including very class privileged Americans, are not that into classical, formal, high culture, where you mostly make fun of it. The spectrum now runs from Univore to Omnivore. And I really found that Univore meaning you consume the food or the music of one culture, your own culture of origin usually. And working class and poor people mostly answered the food and music questions with things from their own ethnic ancestry. So making immigrant would say Jamaican food and reggae music and the Irish person and so forth. And one way I could tell the college educated people, not so much the straddlers who tended to like comfort food, but the second generation college educated people, it was international food, not their own ethnic background. But you know, like in Thai food, Indian food, when you are not from Thailand or India and liking world music, so there's a real cultural difference. And religion, I know religion is a theme of your show, there's a dramatic correlation between how religious people are and class. That the process of secularization is happening much, much faster for more highly educated people, especially second, third generation college educated. Overwhelmingly, especially activists were not religious or the voluntarily downwardly mobile folks were overwhelmingly atheist. Whereas the majority of working class and poor activists were Christians and mostly in stricter denominations. So Jehovah's Witnesses, American Baptist, Southern Baptist, other more rigorous denominations. So bridging religious differences comes up a lot when you're bridging class. And I've known a lot of community organizers who were, you know, Buddhist by choice or Jewish or really firm and being atheist, that that's one of the challenging things of going door to door in a neighborhood, meeting grassroots people is Jesus' talk and people who want to pray at meetings. That's just a culture clash and if you recognize it as a class difference, not in all cases, of course, but by and large, I think it could make people a little more sensitized. Like, well, this is coming from a really different class life story than mine and so perhaps I could be a cross-class bridger and learn something about a different way of seeing the world. I want to mention a couple instances I saw of possible class differences at work that I encountered along the way. Back when I was in college, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had a speech communications professor who put forth the idea that back during the Vietnam War, it could have been brought to an early end, much more quickly had two elements of the population separated by class been able to work together. On one hand, there were the college students, stereotyped as hippies, and often flaunting their differences from working class culture with their long hair, their music, their cool and not conformist. Then there were the working class folks, labor unions, etc. And my professor said that if only the hippies would have been willing to cut their hair a bit, not so deliberately, in effect, flipping off the working class, that they might have been able to work together to end the war, which was in both of their interests after all. Yeah, there's a really great new book out by Penny Lewis about that, about the hard hats and the hippies, I'm forgetting the name of it, I think that's in the subtitle. And of course, it was generational, it wasn't just class, there were, of course, long hair, casual clothes, working class people too, but I think that's a perfect example of the failure to bridge, because you're too attached to your own counterculture. You're failing to recognize the class roots of your countercultural traits and values. And I coined a phrase many years ago and never put it into print until this book, "Inessential Weirdnesses." So if you are a more privileged person, like a white person reaching out to communities of color or a college education person being an organizer and working class or poor neighborhood, you can be very effective, you can build bridges. But if you're very attached to something that the community you're reaching out to finds weird, and it's not essential to who you are. To me, to hold onto those weirdnesses like the drugs and the bushy hair and so forth in the '60s, to me, that's classic, to hold onto inessential weirdnesses, because you are having a sense of superiority in your own little subculture and you're prioritizing that over building bridges. Now, of course, there are weirdnesses that are essential, like being lesbian or gay, bisexual. That, of course, is an essential weirdness. You know, as a lesbian community organizer, I had a tenant leader walk out on me, on the group, when I came out to him. And I was mentioning, you know, if there's someone who's Jewish or Buddhist going door to door and not wanting to join Christian prayers, you know, what can you do? The cultural differences happen, and both sides need to adjust, and I'm not saying you should drop something like that. But if it's something like, you know, wearing very, very scruffy clothes, only wearing used clothes when that's seen as a sign of disrespect in the community you're going into, well, it could be anything. You know, it could be food things, like refusing to have anything, but vegan food at the Coalition Conference. I think we all need to drop our inessential weirdnesses if we want to build bridges and build a cross-class movement. And, yeah, I'm hoping that this is the first book ever to have that term in the index, and I'm hoping it's not the last, but seeing one form of classism as being attachment to your own countercultures inessential weirdnesses. So let me bring up what may be a second example. I'm part of a transition town organizing group here in Eau Claire, and I'm on a committee that is connected with awareness raising, outreach, getting our message out. And we had a couple of discussions around the name of our group. We were aware that we might want to bridge to groups that might be regular listeners to Fox News, other conservative, and from my point of view, anti-scientific sources of information. Coming as it does from an analysis of post-peak oil and climate change, the transition movement can run square into climate change deniers and folks who are repeating a theme of burn baby burn in terms of fossil fuels and such. The thing is that the advocacy of transition towns and the good that comes from their actions, things like making communities stronger, more resilient, less susceptible to fossil fuel rising prices. All of that is a shared goal that conservatives and liberals can have without regard to any individual ideas about climate change or peak oil. So our committee advocated that we choose a name that would not be instantly off-putting for those others who might function well in our transition tent. When we were at the group meeting, however, one very good, but I think mistaken individual, claimed that our name for the group was deceptive. We were suggesting vital Chippewa Valley because we might be luring someone in the door tricking them, as it were, and that they would be mad at us about it for having deceived them. I think it's a case of something like an inessential weirdness that you were talking about, that he was advocating for something we didn't need for our purpose, but he was seeing our approach as being manipulative. If it was deceptive, of course, that would be a valid point, but to just have the same ideas but tapping into why to help values or an accessible language, it sounds like you weren't talking about something deceptive, you were talking about something accessible and welcoming. Obviously, Betsy, you can tell that I was advocating for one side of this, and man, I referred to could possibly make an excellent case for his point of view, but I tend to think it was a case of attachment to certain words or labels instead of going for terms that could address the same concern, but which would communicate across the spectrum. Do you think that this could be a class culture issue? Absolutely. One of the most dramatic differences between classes is the degree of abstract or concrete speech. And I did actual word counts. I had a thousand pages of transcripts, and I could identify the class of the speaker in interviews and meetings, and so I did -- how often did certain words come up? Partly and not surprisingly, people who have gone to college use the big abstract ideological words a whole lot more. It could be organizational development jargon like benchmarks or it could be left as political jargon like hierarchy or socialism or anarchism or something. So that's kind of like a course, but it's not just that. It's even in everyday speech, even when you're not using a $64,000 word, college educated people often talk in a more abstract way, omitting words that have concrete reference like places, people, action, verbs, and that that omission is almost never heard by anyone working class. I mean, there's a few exceptions, but this was like a really dramatic class correlation. So, for example, I observed a coalition started by unions that got an outside facilitator to do their annual goal setting retreat, and they brought in a professional middle class woman with an advanced degree. And, you know, they really liked her and she really liked them, but she put out what she wanted them to talk about in these very abstract terms like the process by which we're going to come up with the strategy and she made entire sentences without any concrete reference. When the union members answered the questions that she's posed, most of them didn't use any of the terms, any of those generalizations. They spoke in much more concrete language about particular politicians, particular injustices that were going on in the community, particular tactics, particular people, and what should we do? And it was like Apple's and Orange's. It was like they were just talking past each other. It's not just a matter of knowing different vocabulary. It's actually a taste difference that for a lot of college educated activists, there are some words that are just really, really meaningful to people like the person that suggested climate change. Maybe the word sustainability would be really, really meaningful to that person. And so it's just like encapsulates a lot of their ideals. So that kind of attachment to using certain abstract general words, it's a class taste. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it as that, but I talked to some working class activists, so it's not that they didn't know the vocabulary. They thought people were too dry, that it was boring, that it didn't make as much sense, that it wasn't going to connect with the public, and they talked in this much more lively way. First of all, with more other modes of communication like laughter, gestures, body language, and with a concrete reference, but also with metaphors and analogies and telling stories that just made it more lively way of speech. So one of the exercises that I'm going to do in the workshops, based on the missing class book that I'm class action is sponsoring all over the country, is practice talking about a social change goal, an issue that's important to you, using the best of both of these speech codes. And a lot, if you go to a communications workshop, like messaging, telling your group story, you know, getting your issue to the public, what they're going to train you in is really close to what the working class activists were doing. Because I think that a couple generations of college flattens people's speech out and creates some bad habits, so it's not that there's something wrong with those general politically charged words, they can be really, really useful, but you need to use them sparingly and not over rely on them. And remember that most people are going to be more moved by a story with people in it, by a colorful saying or analogy, and by putting some beam and some emotion into your speech. So I think this is another case where it's both and if we understand each other's speech differences, we're going to be able to work together better and come up with something better than what either of us would have come up with alone. You mentioned earlier, I think, something about your Jewish background. No, it's gale is from a Jewish background. No, my mistake. Actually, I think what you said was something about meeting gale over Jewish feminism or something like that. Yeah, I have a real affinity for Jewish renewal and Jewish feminism, Reconstructionist Judaism. I've been involved with it as a non Jew actually since the 70s. I just think it's a wonderful, wonderful tradition where a lot of the holidays and the traditions mean a lot to me, but I've been a friend of the family to Jewish people as a non Jew. I'm Unitarian by Congregation Membership, but I like to think of myself as someone whose spirituality goes across all boundaries. Isn't that the definition of a Unitarian Universalist? It is, it is. Yeah, but yeah, I think of myself as someone that I find that kinship in any tradition that sees the divine within every person and doesn't put up walls among people. Any of those kind of traditions based on human unity, I feel a kinship with and I wouldn't want to put myself into any category that would separate me from any of those traditions. Did you grow up with a religious or spiritual home life? Yeah, I grew up Presbyterian. I was Christian in my youth. I was always very religious and still am today, but I shed the denominational affiliation and even affiliation with Christianity. And my teens, so I've been a pantheist since my youth. Well, Betsy, you're in great company because Albert Einstein also described himself as a pantheist, which also probably has something to do with Einstein being such a strong advocate of people and justice. I've read some awesome writings on the topic by him, really powerful stuff. Yeah, I think that I think it's very related to the politics that I'm talking about that, you know, we put up these walls and see some parts of the human race as other. And a lot of people do that in a classist way of looking down on working class or poor people or assuming there's someone less intelligent or less worthy than yourself. So one of the reasons that my passion in life is eliminating classism from the United States is because I've got this spiritual belief that the inherent worth of every human being and the spark of divinity in every human being. And that we're moving in the right direction if we're moving towards, you know, a united human race. And then we're moving in the wrong direction if we're othering people and putting up walls. So to me, those values go together, the political values and the spiritual values go together. Missing class is a great book, even if, or maybe especially since, it is a PhD dissertation, which could put you in the theoretical world, the world of ideas, out of touch with real people and events. But, you know, Betsy, I'm confident that this is not the case because, among other things, you work with an organization called class action. Tell us what class action is. Class action is a national nonprofit and it's 10 years old this year, we're going to have a big 10th anniversary celebration. Our focus is on raising awareness of social class and in particular of classism, looking down on people, sending less worth to working class and poor people, and rigging the rules as I was talking about so that we reproduce too much class inequality. Our vision is a world without classism, and you can see what we mean by that on our website at www.placism.org. What we do is we get people talking about their class life experience, about the classism that they see, and how they can change their organizations. We do a lot with colleges, high schools, foundations, social service agencies, we do workshops, we get first generation college students talking to each other and giving each other peer support. And advocating for programs that will help them succeed and also transform their colleges to include the strengths of their own working class cultures. We just had a big first generation college student summit where people from 23 colleges that have organized the first gen programs came together. So that's the kind of thing that we do. We're the only national nonprofit that focuses specifically on classism, and we are hoping that through the contagion of this idea of how excited people get about it when they hear about it, that someday all diversity work. And whenever people start talking about racism and sexism and other isms in their organizations or in the society, that it will always include classism as well, which from the most part, classism is omitted at this point. So that's all we know we've succeeded and we're not needed anymore is when every organization in the society is struggling to rid itself of classism as well as other oppressions. And when we've reached the point of a world without classism, that's when we'll know we are free to disband. In the meantime, we are a wonderful, a wonderful band of people across the country trying to get people talking about classism. Well, I've had a great time with you Betsy. And just so everyone remembers, we're speaking with Betsy Leander Wright, author of Missing Class, Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures. See the website, missingclass.org. Betsy is program director of and senior trainer for class action. And you can find links to Betsy and her work on northernspiritradio.org. The book is lively and insightful, just as you are Betsy. And I admire and honor your decades of dedication to social change and improvement. I love your spiritual attunement, not to mention that you've got a wonderful partner in Gail. And in general, it's been just wonderful to have you here today for Spirit in Action. My pleasure, Mark. It's great talking with you. And listeners, you can find bonus excerpts of this interview on our website, stuff that we couldn't fit into our broadcast, available when you visit northernspiritradio.org. And we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.