Come See Us at AWP!

Writing Class is headed to Chicago this week for the Association of Writing Programs’ annual conference. Come join us for a fun and lively discussion on, you guessed it, writing class. Thursday 3 pm. Be there. And do note, Sterling’s unable to join so we’ve replaced him with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

R214. Writing Class: Representing Socioeconomic Realities in Your Work
(Courtney Tenz, Josh Weil, Ru Freeman, Sabra Wineteer, Sterling Holywhitemountain)
Wiliford B, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor
As economic realities devolve the broader American Dream, writers are shaping a new U.S. life narrative. This panel collects contemporary authors’ responses to this socioeconomic shift by asking: will class-focused writing replace the American race and ethnicity paradigm? Can such a shift illuminate the differences in income and status and lead to greater understanding? Or will the money gap cut out most socioeconomic classes and usher in a new era of class appropriation in literature?

Food as a Class Issue

Do poor people have poorer diets? According to Tracie McMillan’s new book, the answer is yes. From an interview with her in Salon:

Obviously, diet has always correlated somewhat with social class. I have a quote in the book somewhere, from Jefferson, about how there’s less fresh food in the diet of the poor than that of the rich. He says that this is bad (but he says it in a much more beautiful and thoughtful way than that). I think when you have Founding Fathers talking about [that state of affairs] being unconscionable, and not being what they’re going for when they’re building the founding premises for the nation, and when you look at how our food system has changed over time, it’s reasonable to say that none of them would be particularly happy with the fact that, in a country that’s as rich as the U.S., fresh and healthy food is seen as a luxury, as opposed to something that everybody has a right to and has access to.

Writing about poor people in India

Salon’s got an interesting review today on Katherine Boo’s book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” said to be an example of reporting on Indian slumdwellers done well. From the review:

“I don’t really believe in the representative poor person as a construct,” Boo told me this week. “But even if every individual is anomalous in every class and every country, I hope there’s another way to read the book, looking at the way in which money that’s intended for schools and child laborers and girls gets diverted, or the realities of police brutality.”

Since I haven’t read the book I’ll refrain from comment on it but I must say, that review didn’t tell me much more than Culture Studies 101 did back in the day. Are we really at that level when it comes to class? That we have to remind people not to stereotype? That we have to peer behind the curtain to find the truth?

The Situation in American Writing

In 1939, The Partisan Review sent out a questionnaire to a number of prominent writers, asking them about literature, politics and their identities. While the questionnaire hasn’t been completely forgotten, we felt that these specifically political questions were rarely being asked of our writers. Considering that 2011 was a year of global unrest, we felt that it would be particularly relevant to update The Partisan Review’s questions. (For the curious, here are the original questions.)

Full Stop Magazine’s got a new feature up online called The Situation in American Writing in which prominent contemporary “serious” authors answer a standard set of questions about politics and writing. Two that caught my eye as relevant to this project were these:

Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, without other work? Do you think there is a place in our current economic system and climate for literature as a profession?

and

Do you find in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual?

These are heavy questions about money but, alas, the writers I’ve seen contribute thus far don’t seem to be answering them in anything but a roundabout way. Geoff Dyer mentions coming from working-class background but an allegiance to that goes undiscussed. Feels like that old adage that polite people don’t talk money is at play here. Either that, or class really doesn’t come much into play for these writers (which, considering some of the names, I doubt). C’mon, guys (and I say guys because, well, it’s been more guys than ladies so far). Let’s talk about The Situation of Class in American Writing!

Social Policy Disasters of the 60s

I’d feel a bit disingenuous if I recommended everyone read Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” without having read it myself but from the NYTimes review of the book, it looks like a worthwhile consideration of income inequality reworked as “cultural” (i.e., black vs. white) inequality. Might make an interesting read, even if the end thesis is a bit off.

Looking at America Mr. Murray sees a country increasingly polarized into two culturally and geographically isolated demographics. In Belmont, the fictional name Mr. Murray gives to the part of America where the top 20 percent live, divorce is low, the work ethic is strong, religious observance is high, and out-of-wedlock births are all but unheard of. Meanwhile in Fishtown, where the bottom 30 percent live, what Mr. Murray calls America’s four “founding virtues” — marriage, industriousness, community and faith — have all but collapsed.

The book says little about the roots of Fishtown’s problems, but in conversation Mr. Murray doesn’t hesitate to name the villain. “The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy,” he said. “The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.”

The Claremont McKenna scandal goes deeper

Recently, Claremont McKenna was caught falsely reporting their average college SAT scores in order to rise in ranks with the U.S. News and World Report on best colleges. This sort of prestige jockeying has become commonplace and has a very sordid side. (Emphasis added)

Colleges, they argue, have caved to the rankings pressure in a range of ways. A big one is recruiting as many students as they can to apply, even if they’re not likely to be a good fit, just to boost their selectivity numbers. And they’ve showered shower financial aid on high-achieving, and often wealthy, kids with high SAT scores.

In the mid-1990s, roughly one-third of grant aid, or scholarships colleges of all types awarded with their own money, was given on grounds other than need (typically called “merit aid’). A decade later, they gave away three times as much money — but well over half was based on merit.

Yes, some colleges recruited better students, but there was a price to be paid. Consider a 2008 study by The Institute for College Access and Success that examined the $11.2 billion annually four-year colleges were awarding in grant aid. Of that, $3.35 billion was awarded as merit aid. That would have easily covered the $2.4 billion in unmet need-based aid that the colleges said their low-income students still faced.

Rankings critic Lloyd Thacker, founder of the group Education Conservancy, calls that a shift in financial aid from “charitable acts to competitive weapons.” Or, as Schaeffer describes it, “they end up giving the money to rich white kids.”

Taking Lessons from Real Life

The brave Amitava Kumar, a writer who helped shape my writing immensely, directed readers to this New York Times article on people barely getting by in Maine, writing, as he did so, that these last two paragraphs were like something from a short story. It’s true, though a more admirable picture of the working class than often appears in fiction.

Hometown Energy has five trucks and seven employees, and is run out of an old house next to the Ellis variety store and diner. Oil perfumes the place, thanks to the petroleum-stained truckers and mechanics clomping through. Janis Carlton, 35, tracks accounts in the back, while Diane Carlton, 64, works in the front, where, every now and then, she finds herself comforting walk-ins who fear the cold so much that they cry.

Their boss, Mr. Libby, 53, has rough hands and oil-stained dungarees. He has been delivering oil for most of his adult life — throwing the heavy hose over his shoulder, shoving the silver nozzle into the tank and listening for the whistle that blows when oil replaces air.

“So, if the price of bread goes up, watch out!” ~Margaret Atwood

Last month, Margaret Atwood illuminated the similarities between our present day America and France just prior to the French Revolution.

1- There was a tremendous amount of national debt.

2- France instituted harsh and unfair tax policies that most affected the lower classes.

3- France’s upper class not only insulated themselves from their national problems, they began to hoard and build their wealth.

4- “So, if the price of bread goes up, watch out!” Failed crops and famine brought about a public uprising in France and the storming of the Bastille…

 

Today, I ran across some interesting data that further illuminates the issue. While we like to think of the income gap in America as widening, I wasn’t aware that it was so severely skewed. This, an article illuminates, is why the rich don’t feel rich:

The line gets much steeper because at the very top of the income scale, the monetary divisions between percentiles grow much greater. Those in the middle earn a little less than people a few percentiles up from them, whereas those at the top earn a lot less than their counterparts in nearby, higher percentiles. For example, those who aspire to hop from the 30th percentile to the 35th percentile would need to increase their cash income by $4,000 annually (or by about 17 percent); those who aspire to hop from the 94th percentile to the 99th percentile would require an increase of $324,900 (or 171 percent).

 

This table further shows that once you get to the 95th percentile, the income gap widens considerably with each percentage point. Whereas there is only a $6000 to $11,000 a year gap between income percentiles from the 83rd to the 95th percentile, past that point, the income gap increases dramatically and exponentially. A $1,25o,ooo per year income difference between the 99.5th and the 99.9th percentile is…Bastille worthy.

The German Middle-Class

As I’m preparing my thoughts for the panel we’re holding at AWP, I am realizing more and more just how my thoughts about class have been influenced by living in Germany for the last six years. I grew up in the US, yes, but so much of what I have to say about life in poverty in the US seems outdated and outmoded, especially since my parents’ salary now seems luxurious in comparison to the wages afforded in Germany. In reading this article, though, I see that class boils down less to earnings and more to spendings. Perhaps the biggest reason for the class divide in the US is not ill-paying jobs but all the other costs lumped into a paycheck that in Germany are covered by a social safety net. The LA Times has an interesting profile that highlights that difference.

ELZ, GERMANY — Every summer, Volkmar and Vera Kruger spend three weeks vacationing in the south of France or at a cool getaway in Denmark. For the other three weeks of their annual vacation, they garden or travel a few hours away to root for their favorite team in Germany’s biggest soccer stadium.

The couple, in their early 50s, aren’t retired or well off. They live in a small Tudor-style house in this middle-class town about 30 miles northwest of Frankfurt. He’s a foreman at a glass factory; she works part time for a company that tracks inventories for retailers. Their combined income is a modest $40,000.

Yet the Krugers have a higher standard of living than many Americans who have twice that income.

Their secret: little debt, frugal habits and a government that is intensely focused on high production, low inflation and extensive social services.

That has given them job security and good medical care as well as well-maintained roads, trains and bike paths. Both of their adult children are out on their own, thanks in part to Germany’s job-training system and heavy subsidies for university education.

For instance, Volkmar’s out-of-pocket costs for stomach surgery and 10 days in a hospital totaled just $13 a day. College tuition for their son runs about $260 a semester.

The End of Class: Fukuyama in Der Spiegel

I didn’t think I’d ever recommend reading Francis Fukuyama, but this interview with him in Der Spiegel contains several interesting tidbits. Here’s my cut-and-paste highlights (it’s quite political, as expected, but I’ve tried to take the politics out to focus on the class discussion) but I’d suggest reading it in its entirety.

“We forgot that the whole reason real socialism never took off in the US was the fact that the modern economy seemed to produce middle-class societies in which the bulk of the population could enjoy a middle-class status. … If income is relatively evenly distributed and there are not very sharp differences between rich and poor, you have a greater sense of community. You have a greater sense of trust. You do not have parts of the community that have superior access to the political system that they can use to advance their own interests … What you are going to see in a democracy with a weaker middle class is much more populism, more internal conflict, an inability to resolve distributional issues in an orderly way. … The trouble is that in the United States it is extremely difficult to mobilize people around pure class issues. …Where is this uprising from the left? … The big problem sociologically for the left in the United States is that the white working class and lower middle class, that in Europe would be reliably social democratic in their political behavior, tends to vote Republican or is easily brought into the Republican camp.”