REACTION PAPER

Reaction Paper

Reaction Paper

Making Class Invisible by Gregory Mantsios (1998)

A vast group has gone inconspicuously missing from American culture: the working class. The population to whom the rusting phrase "blue collar" applies has become invisible largely because class itself isn't part of a national conversation anymore.

Gregory Mantsios (1998) mentions it's been a long time since TV shows such as The Honeymooners and All in the Family focused on people who earn an hourly wage and look like they live on it. Working-class characters are all over the place, but they're usually there to do a job (cop, nurse), not to serve as the focal point. The omissions aren't confined to the small screen. Mainstream movies are far more likely to depict trailer-trash stereotypes (see Million Dollar Baby) than the nuanced portraits of working-class characters in exceptions such as Mystic River and Good Will Hunting. And whither have gone American literature's Steinbecks and Dos Passoses?

The reasons the working class is missing in action are no mystery. The creators of main stream American culture--"journalists, editors, writers, producers"--are children of the middle class themselves, and suffer from the usual myopias. Furthermore, it's kind of a bummer" to watch the struggles of real working-class life; the movies and shows that do so, such as Roseanne Barr's Roseanne, are so rare they're called "edgy."

In a land where we're all supposed to belong to one great middle class, sexuality, gender, and, above all, race are the dominant identifiers. That being black is a stand-in for being working class is evident everywhere. When the nation was shown images of Hurricane Katrina's victims, it saw that they were black, not that they were laborers, waitresses, and bus drivers.

Racial & Ethnic Formation by Micheal Omi & Howard Winant (1994)

In words of Micheal Omi & Howard Winant (1994) America is a nation of immigrants, with a population composed of a wide diversity of people with different ethnic, racial, and national backgrounds. The move from race to ethnicity was assisted by social scientists who, despite their many disagreements on how to conceptualize race, generally agreed that it often reflected phenotypical differences. These differences, in contrast to what racist discourses and theories claimed, did not necessarily correlate with geneotypical characteristics of various populations, or with specific predefined cultural traits such as personality and intelligence.

For many social scientists, racial divisions were socially constructed differences, which one needed to understand contextually; in certain historical and cultural contexts they legitimated and maintained forms of social, political, and economic domination. Some social scientists, therefore, suggested replacing race with ethnicity and race relations with ethnic relations to avoid conceptual confusion or reproducing racial ideologies and connotations inherent in the concept of race. Others, however, even found the term ethnicity problematic and pointed out that ethnic relations were a continuation of race relations, that ethnic implied race in Britain, and that in North America race usually meant color and ethnic meant descended from recent, non-English-speaking immigrants (Micheal Omi & Howard Winant, ...