A Black Agenda Radio commentary by
Glen Ford
Clear, concise and accurate language must be plowed under to make the American political conversation safe for corporate-speak. In place of various classes pursuing their own interests at each other's expense, the USA has been peopled by an all-encompassing "Middle Class." This bulging super-class is said to include almost everybody - or at least, all the decent people. As a result, "there can be no class warfare." This is quite pleasing to the Ruling Class, which denies its own existence - just as does most of the Working Class, which prefers to call itself Middle.
Welcome to the USA, Where All the Classes are Middle
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
"Most people will claim to be ‘middle class' regardless of their true condition."
Labor Day is a yearly reminder that language itself has been appropriated by the rich - that the people who own damn near everything have also stolen the very words through which the rest of us communicate. The Great Language Robbery may be the biggest heist ever pulled off by the Lords of Capital. By deploying their vast communications companies to skillfully manipulate the national language, the rich empower themselves to define reality as they see fit.
Sometimes all it takes is the mangling of one key term to render resistance to Capital infinitely more difficult. The term "middle class" is a case in point. In the American political conversation, "middle class" is sometimes so vague as to be meaningless, while at other times the term "middle class" stands in for a whole range of implicit "values" and attributes - especially race - that have nothing to do with one's type of work or salary. "Middle class" becomes a code word by which politicians and propagandists identify people who are the good, solid, "salt of the earth" people versus the Others. Rather than a useful term of economic and social science, "middle class" is in practice a cultural construct and political weapon.
"Middle class," in the mouth of a racist, is code for white people, or a certain kind of white people. These kinds of culturally "middle class" white people tend to live in the "Heartland" - another American term whose only use is to promote a virulent strain of white nationalism. Of course, the "Heartland" is a racial and political construction that has nothing to do with geography. Missouri is located in the Heartland, but inner city St. Louis, Missouri is not. That's where the "Others" live. Few people want to be counted among society's "Others" - so, naturally, most people will claim to be "middle class" regardless of their true condition.
"The term ‘middle class' stands in for a whole range of implicit ‘values' and attributes - especially race."
Because the term "middle class" has been so freighted down with all kinds of non-economic connotations and inferred meanings - most of them positive - everybody wants to be a member. If you're Black and lucky enough to have a job, you're middle class - or at least you think you are. If you're of any race and making $200,000 a year, you are still encouraged to consider yourself "middle class," even though your income is almost seven times the median for Black households (about $30,000) and four times the median for whites (about $50,000). Nevertheless, both John McCain and Barack Obama think that people making more than 97percent of the rest of us do, are still "middle class." It seems that everybody but the super-rich and the super-poor are middle class in the U.S.A. The flip side of that is: hardly anybody is anything in particular, class-wise - therefore, there can be no class warfare. The rich need not worry.
Now, that category of people who were once called "workers" might cause the Lords of Capital some problems - but they have become extinct, replaced by something called "labor," which gets a holiday every first Monday in September, and calls itself - "middle class." For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].
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