“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
~ Howard Zinn
As a reminder: libraries, museums, zoos, etc are NOT brand accounts! As an example, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Tumblr is very cool & they support ocean conservation and education! I believe the National Archives and Smithsonian Libraries are also around here somewhere. Support public institutions!
“Hudson River”. Tiffany stained glass window, c. 1900.
The next four years I’m like…
America, American sociology, and the neglect of the working class.
By Reeve Vanneman, PhD; originally posted at Contexts
Among the many forces contributing to the surprising Trump election was the shift of many White working class voters to vote for the upstart candidate. For years, these working-class families had been hurting; their incomes stagnated, good jobs became hard to find, and their health suffered. More importantly, entire working-class communities declined. It was not just personal economic misfortune, it was a class.
The problems of the White working class were not unknown, but they were not often addressed very directly. Sometimes, the most common advice was they should get more training or send their kids to college – advice that could sound more like a middle-class put-down than a realistic policy addressing their problems. But, for the most part, the working class was just ignored, a neglect that made them ripe for Trump’s appeals.
This neglect was a general cultural phenomenon; a Google ngram count of the phrase “working class” in American books (above left) shows a spike in the Depression Thirties and an even stronger growth from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. But after the mid-1970s, there is a steady decline, implying a lack of discussion just as their problems were growing. The implicit message seemed to have been that their problems didn’t matter.
U.S. sociology was not immune from this broader cultural trend. A count of the frequencies of “working class” in the titles or abstracts of articles in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review (above right) shows a quite similar if even more dramatic pattern: rapid growth in the 1960s, peaking in the 1959-1969 period, a steady interest for the next two decades and then an abrupt decline beginning in the 1990s. These articles on the working class were not insignificant; even through the 21st century, the authors include a number of ASA presidents. But overall, working-class issues seem to have lost their salience, as if even American sociology was also telling them that they didn’t matter.
Perhaps the Trump election, which was in part a symptom of this neglect, may also produce its cure. Election post-mortems in the media have focused more attention on the white working class than they have received in years. Academe may soon follow. Arlie Hochshild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, and, in political science, Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment, are encouraging signs. But Trump was certainly dangerous medicine for what ails our professional discourse.
Reeve Vanneman, PhD is in the sociology department at the University of Maryland.
I’m curious what, for lack of a better word, replaced discussions on class in sociology? I’d like to see this compared to broader trends in the field, especially a look at how other issues of inequality like race and gender may have grown as issues of class decline. (Not that it’s a competition, but I wonder whether there was an opening to study identity issues as identity movements made demands on the academy to represent more issues.)
Perhaps a bibliometric analysis of sociology literature? hmm…
“SURRENDER DONALD,” ACT UP members (including Ronny Viggiani, as Dorothy) protest corporate greed in the face of rising costs of healthcare and housing for AIDS patients, Trump Tower, New York City, October 31, 1989. Photo by Lee Snider, c/o Stephen Vider, @slate. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory (at Trump Tower New York)