ClassismMaurianne Adams, Larissa E. Hopkins, and Davey Shlasko*The toll taken by the 2008 recession has focused public attention onto issues of class, eco-nomic status, and classism. People notice the glaring disparities between CEO and worker compensation, and between bank bailouts and personal bankruptcies or foreclosures, and wonder why executive bonus contracts are sacrosanct while union contracts and worker health beneits and pensions are stripped.The authors of this chapter have noticed that in this climate, our students and workshop participants are more open to exploring economic injustice in the U.S. and globally, and to acknowledge the impacts of global and local economic forces on themselves and their families. Beliefs that are core to the U.S. class system—such as belief in universal upward mobility, meritocracy, and the reachable “American Dream”—are now being questioned.In this chapter, we take a social justice approach to class and classism in the U.S., which pays serious attention to the historical legacies of economic injustice from the colonial period moving forward. We note some ways in which class-based oppression and race-based oppression have been entangled, and explore contemporary manifestations of class and classism that represent today’s version of those legacies, reproduced throughout U.S. insti-tutions and normalized in everyday life. Based on the historical legacies, the complex sys-temic manifestations, and the intersections with other social justice issues, we frame a social justice approach to teaching and facilitating about classism. Materials and activities that support our social justice approach can be found on the website for this chapter.OUR APPROACH: CORE CONCEPTS IN A SOCIAL JUSTICE APPROACH TO CLASS AND CLASSISMIn this chapter, we describe our approach to class and classism and then examine the soci-etal and cultural dynamics of class inequality, the reproduction of those dynamics at the institutional level, within groups and relationships, and as internalized through socializa-tion. In order to make sense of the long-term economic inequities in our cultural, social, and political systems, a class analysis must address all three levels, and explore the sources as well as the indicators of economic difference.Our approach to class and classism is shaped by the core concepts described in the intro-ductory Chapter 1, such as power and powerlessness, privilege and disadvantage, the levels of oppression, the Five Faces of Oppression, and socialization. Our approach is addition-ally shaped by an analysis of the myth of meritocracy and by attention to intersectionality.SOCIAL JUSTICE DEFINITIONS NEEDED FOR CLASS AND CLASSISMDeinitions of class are wide-ranging and contested, based on differences in theoretical ori-entation and in personal experiences. Some writers deine class on the basis of occupational | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO214status (blue collar or white collar, professional or hourly, levels within a managerial hier-archy), while others deine class based on relative levels of income and/or wealth. Some approaches (such as Marxist) emphasize the ownership of resources (such as land, facto-ries, corporations, or inancial instruments) while others (such as followers of Max Weber) note the impact of wealth and social position on an individual’s life chances (Lareau & Conley, 2008).To provide consistency and clarity in discussing the various dimensions of class and classism, we propose Leondar-Wright and Yeskel’s (2007) deinition of class as “a relative social ranking based on income, wealth, education, status, and power” and their deini-tion of classism as “the institutional, cultural, and individual set of practices and beliefs that assign differential value to people according to their socioeconomic class,” in a social system characterized by economic inequality (Leondar-Wright & Yeskel, 2007, p. 314; see also Fiske & Markus, 2012; Lareau & Conley, 2008).Class as “a relative social ranking” is deined by a variety of indicators, many of which are relational rather than quantitative. There is no one number that deinitively determines one’s class location. Almost everyone is privileged relative to someone else, and at a dis-advantage relative to others. Individuals internalize assumptions and stereotypes about different class positions, often based on misinformation about the economic system, and these simpliied understandings deine their relationships to others within a class hierarchy. Thus, classism implicates all participants in a social system in which the class categories are nuanced and opaque, and in which relative advantage and disadvantage are repro-duced through a complex interaction of social, institutional, cultural, and interpersonal mechanisms.In addition to examining a variety of class indicators, this approach allows us to con-sider the cultures and identities that form around shared class location. As a result, our understanding of class categories is not simply linear: A person may have higher relative ranking according to one indicator but lower ranking according to another. For example, a woman with greater wealth than another (because she’s a professional athlete or she just won the lottery) may have lower class status (because she is less educated, or has less “sophisticated” language and dress). A nuanced view of class also allows us to examine the mechanisms of class privilege, by which we mean those advantages and resources accorded to some groups of people and not others (often at the expense of others), based on relative class ranking.CAPITALISMThere are different understandings of the relationship between classism and capitalism, including the question (that we do not pursue here) of whether classism can be understood to exist independently from capitalism (as in pre- or non-capitalist agricultural, migratory, or socialist-industrial societies). Because we are focusing on the contemporary U.S., we limit ourselves to a discussion of the relationship between classism and capitalism as they manifest here and now.Capitalism describes a type of economic system based on private ownership of the means of production (agriculture, industry, and technology) in which owners’ proits derive from the labor of people who receive ixed wages (rather than a share of proits). Economic growth is driven by competition in the marketplace (thought of as a “free mar-ket”) in which fairness is assumed to emerge from market forces in the absence of regula-tion (e.g., by government or unions). In fact, in our current U.S. capitalist system, there is signiicant interference in the “free” functioning of markets, primarily by corporate inter-ests. Even when government regulations providing protections, like workplace safety and CLASSISM |215fair banking practices, a capitalist economic system by its nature creates and reproduces class inequality because of the different ways in which owners and workers can or cannot accumulate wealth. Economic inequality is a key part of classism, along with cultural- and interpersonal-level manifestations that we explore below.CONFLATION OF CAPITALISM WITH DEMOCRACYOne challenge to understanding classism is the conlation of our U.S. democratic political system, which assumes political equality (one person, one vote), with the U.S. capitalist economic system, which assumes equality of economic opportunity. The democratic myth that every child can grow up to be President has been conlated with the capitalist myth that every child can become rich through hard work and talent.Democracy is a political system, characterized by individual rights and responsibilities, and in the case of the U.S., a representative (as opposed to direct democracy) system of governance. The conlation of U.S. capitalism with U.S. democracy has often served as a tool for those with political and economic power to discredit poor and working people’s movements (including organized labor and the civil rights movement, among others). When workers have organized to protest economic inequities, they have sometimes argued that some version of a socialist economic system would be fairer, because shared owner-ship of production would lead to people beneiting more equally from economic growth. People opposed to such a system of distribution have attacked socialism as if it were a political system opposed to democracy, rather than an economic system parallel to capital-ism. This confusion of political with economic systems has stiled thoughtful and serious consideration of alternative economic policies and structures in the U.S.Additionally, the capitalist assumption that markets are fair supports the psychological investment many Americans have in the American Dream—the idea that everyone can achieve prosperity, homeownership, and other markers of a middle-class life if they work hard. These assumptions make it dificult to challenge the problems of advanced capital-ism, such as the extraordinary inluence of large multinational corporations and wealthy donors on U.S. democratic institutions (Callahan & Cha, 2013; Collins & Yeskel, 2005; Hacker & Pierson, 2010).WEALTH AND INCOMEIt is important to understand two forms of economic capital: Wealth and income.Wealth consists of what one owns (cars, stocks or securities, real estate) minus what one owes (credit card or school debt, home mortgages). It is obvious that wealth confers class privilege—there are advantages and resources available to people with higher wealth that are simply inaccessible to people with less or no wealth.Wealth expresses the amount and type of assets one owns, whereas income refers to the periodic inlow of resources, whether from investments, salary, hourly wages, government beneits, or any other source. The type or source of income is relevant, as well as the over-all amount. For example, families with inherited wealth often have signiicant income from long-term investments that do not require their ongoing labor to maintain, at a scale which is not possible for those who rely on salary or wages—even those whose salary or wages are very high. The privilege accorded to individuals who have steady high income without needing to work (even if they choose to do so) differs qualitatively and quantitatively from the privilege connected to a high income from working.The complexities of class location, as well as the assumptions about class status or loca-tion that characterize classism, go well beyond wealth and income. These complexities | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO216grow out of the fact that indicators of class are not only material. There are non-material cultural and social indicators as well that include class culture, status, cultural capital, and social capital, and also political power (Fiske & Markus, 2012).CLASS CULTUREClass culture describes the norms, values, and ways of life shared by people with a similar class position. Class cultures develop in response to economic realities as well as other dimensions of experience, and can be thought of as those aspects of culture that help people to survive, thrive, and make sense of their roles in the economic system, whether or not people are consciously aware of that relationship (Shlasko & Kramer, 2011; Williams, 2012).One’s class culture is not shaped only by one’s membership in a general class cate-gory, but also by a more speciic location deined by context and by other social identities (Matos-Daigle, 2011; Yosso, 1996). For example, Lamont’s (2000) research documents differences in culture among three groups: White factory workers, black factory workers, and white managers. Lamont found that some culture markers varied across class more than race (i.e., white and black workers shared a value, norm, or assumption that differed from that of white managers), and others varied across both class and race (i.e., each of the three groups was different from the others). Similarly, one could expect to ind very differ-ent class cultures among new tech industry millionaires in Silicon Valley than among white Protestant families with multiple-generational wealth in New England.Even as class culture is highly intersectional, recent research suggests that some aspects of class culture may hold true across a whole class category. Cultural patterns that seem to be highly correlated with class include parenting beliefs and practices, norms around conlict and politeness, beliefs about morality and values, and linguistic patterns, includ-ing abstract vs. concrete language and direct vs. indirect communication (Jensen, 2012; Lamont, 2000; Lareau, 2003; Leondar-Wright, 2014; Streib, 2013).Like other kinds of cultures, the patterns of thought and behavior learned from one’s class culture often remain unconscious. The fact that class cultures are rarely talked about makes it even more likely that people will fail to notice their own patterns of class culture, or will ascribe them to another aspect of their identity. Someone who does not “identify with” a class category, or who identiies generically as “middle class” without knowing what that means, may nevertheless be steeped in the internalized norms of a working- or middle-class culture that affects how they think, talk, act, and relate to other people and the world.The normalization of the dominant class culture and the devaluation or disregard of others is a manifestation of classism. For example, the highly controversial idea of “the culture of poverty” links poor or working-class culture with cognitive deicits, educational failure, and criminal behavior in ways that appear causal, rather than analyzing the mul-tiple dynamics of racial and class oppression (Moynihan, 1965; Patterson, 2010; Payne 1995; Wilson, 2009). The idea of a culture of poverty relies on stereotype and overgener-alization (Ng & Rury, 2006), and blames poor people for the disadvantages they experi-ence while ignoring key systemic factors like power, status, and material resources (Gorski, 2005). As part of a social justice approach to classism, class culture needs to be understood within an analysis of the reproduction of power and wealth (Lavelle 1995; Smith 2010).CLASS STATUSClass status conveys the degree of prestige attributed to one’s position (Leondar-Wright & Yeskel, 2007), or to a particular cultural marker, by people and institutions with power. CLASSISM |217Because classism is often internalized, disadvantaged people may buy into the status hier-archy and agree with the power system’s perspective on who or what is “highly regarded,” and who or what may be looked down on or ignored, even at their own expense.Cultural markers that are associated with wealth tend to have higher status than others. For example, Standard English pronunciation, or English spoken with a European accent, has higher status than rural regional accents, non-European immigrant accents, and Afri-can American vernacular English. However, the alignment between wealth and status is not perfect. Professors, clergy, and some artists are examples of occupational groups with relatively high status, but in many cases, relatively low income and wealth. Unexpected alignment between wealth and status also come up when someone gains or loses wealth. A family that lost some or all of their inherited wealth can sometimes retain the culture status that had been associated with their former wealth. Conversely, someone who grew up working class and has recently acquired wealth may continue to think and act from the norms of a working-class culture, and may not be highly regarded by other wealthy people.CULTURAL CAPITAL AND SOCIAL CAPITALCultural capital and social capital are concepts that help to explain the relationship among culture, status, and material resources. Cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) describes non-material resources, such as the knowledge, language, style, way of life, and self- presentation, that act as personal markers of class and that inluence economic opportunity as well as quality of life (Lareau & Calarco, 2012; Swartz, 1997).Class culture becomes cultural capital to the extent that someone’s knowledge, famil-iarity and comfort with a given culture affords them material advantages. For example, students at elite private colleges whose class culture matches the dominant or normal-ized culture of the institution are likely to “it in” and beneit from the range of campus resources, while students whose class cultures do not align with the dominant culture of the institution face barriers to accessing such resources (Hopkins, 2014).People often use cultural capital to refer speciically to facility with the cultural mark-ers of the more privileged classes, but in our view, all class cultures have their own forms of cultural capital, though these are valued and ranked differently by the broader society. For example, familiarity and comfort with the norms of interaction in a working-class community may help a person to navigate that social environment successfully and lead to work opportunities, access to aid from the community, and so on. At the same time, this does not mean that different groups’ cultural capital are equivalent or interchangeable. In particular, attempting to leverage cultural capital from a lower-status class culture in a context characterized by a higher-status class culture is unlikely to be successful. Further, the cultural capital of high-status groups provides access to material resources on a much larger scale than that of lower-status groups.Whereas cultural capital refers to “what one knows about,” social capital refers to “who one knows”—that is, the social networks one is part of and to which one has ready access. Like cultural capital, social capital is sometimes used to describe connections to elite social networks that help people gain access to private schooling, professional advancement, and other forms of class advantage (Allan, Ozga, & Smith, 2009; Mohr & DiMaggio, 1995). However, all communities’ social networks can translate into material beneits, albeit at different scales. Working-class social networks can provide access to referrals for jobs, hand-me-downs from neighbors, and other forms of material aid shared within a class group. Being in close touch with one’s family and extended family can be a form of social capital in itself, insofar as it provides access to direct and indirect material support that peo-ple with small families, or who are estranged from their families, cannot access. Although social capital can be quantiied in terms of how many people are in one’s network, it is | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO218often more useful to consider who is in one’s network and how that network functions to provide access to resources in a particular context.Cultural capital and social capital help to explain how class differences are reproduced and passed along from one generation to the next (Bourdieu, 1984; Mohr & DiMaggio, 1995). Those with higher wealth and status are likely to have the social connections and cultural capital that assure continued access to material resources, enabling them to replen-ish or grow their wealth, maintain their status, and pass on all forms of capital to their children (Kozol, 1991; Lareau, 1987, 2011). Their cultural and social capital also pro-vide access to decision makers at organizational and political levels (and opportunities to become a decision maker) so that they can inluence policy to their own advantage. Some individuals with signiicant class privilege may choose not to use it for their own advan-tage, such as members of United for a Fair Economy (UFE)’s Responsible Wealth network; yet the fact that it is a choice is in itself a privilege.The cumulative advantages and disadvantages afforded by these class indicators—income, wealth, class culture, status, cultural capital, and social capital—largely determine the degree to which individuals and communities can leverage economic and political power, which may be used to maintain the status quo or to create change.MYTH OF MERITOCRACYOne challenge to understanding classism in the U.S. is the pervasive belief in meritocracy—that is, the belief that hard work and talent will always be rewarded by upward economic and social mobility (McNamee & Miller, 2004). By this logic, people assume that those living in poverty have simply not worked hard enough or are less intel-ligent, in effect blaming the victim. The belief in meritocracy encourages U.S. citizens, especially those who already are middle or upper class, to believe that they and their chil-dren will have equal economic opportunities and that each generation will advance further than their parents.Among many lower-income communities, it is more common to acknowledge that eco-nomic opportunities are persistently limited by a number of self-perpetuating cycles of race- and/or class-based disadvantage. Since the 2008 recession, the U.S. belief in meritoc-racy has been seriously undermined by the failure of the middle class to bounce back to its relative prosperity, despite great gains by the wealthy (Boushey, 2014).Despite recent historical experience, some apologists for the status quo vehemently deny class inequality and shame or blame people in poverty, whose failure to thrive eco-nomically is mistakenly thought to be their own fault. Proponents of the economic sta-tus quo frame critiques of these economic inequities as efforts to inlame “class warfare” rather than efforts to create a fair and equitable economic system. For example, defenses of the status quo obscure the intergenerational economic disadvantages for Native American nations conined on reservations, African American descendants of slaves and debt peon-age, and Mexican-American and Asian victims of wage inequity and unfair labor practices.To explore evidence of economic disadvantage based upon cultural, political, linguistic, and race-based factors, we need to examine the intersections of classism with other systems of oppression: The economic, social, and cultural exclusion experienced by, for example, people with disabilities, youth, and elders marginalized on the two ends of the “ageism and adultism” spectrum, and women who, despite being integrated into almost all areas of the workforce, still receive less pay than men in comparable jobs. In this way, a social justice analysis of class and classism reverses the tendency to blame the victims—such as urban young men of color who are blamed for crime, immigrants who are blamed for lowering wages, and poor countries who are blamed for taking U.S. jobs. Instead, our approach CLASSISM |219recognizes the underlying forces of class inequality that create vast inequalities in wealth, the legacies of racism and gender oppression, as well as global factors such as imperialism, war, trade policies, global inance, and multinational corporations that unduly inluence national tax and spending policies (Collins & Yeskel, 2005; Hacker & Pierson, 2010).HISTORICAL LEGACIES OF U.S. CLASS AND CLASSISMThe historical legacies of U.S. class and classism offer a stark contrast to the narrative of “The American Dream.” The American Dream paints a picture of equality of opportunity, meritocracy, upward mobility, and national prosperity enjoyed by all U.S. citizens as well as immigrants. But the historical record reveals harsh realities that undercut the dream’s veracity. Some of the major themes include: 1) the reproduction in the colonies of class distinctions from Europe; 2) the racialization of a two-tier working class; 3) expansion, settlement, and immigration; 4) labor organizing and union movements; 5) ballot box and regulatory policies; and (6) the 20th century’s “free market” and deregulation.THE REPRODUCTION IN THE COLONIES OF CLASS DISTINCTIONS FROM EUROPEThe U.S.’s founding documents articulated egalitarian ideals as part of a rhetorical strategy to legitimize U.S. independence from England. However, the revolution mainly beneitted an emerging U.S. aristocracy, whose members were well placed to reproduce the class sys-tem they inherited from Europe. After independence, the revolutionary language of eco-nomic freedom, taxation based on representation, and opportunities for upward mobility became the rallying cry not of the colonial ruling class, but of tenant farmer and worker revolts against a newly entrenched system of class advantage and disadvantage.Wealthy colonial settlers had beneited from English land-grants (available exclusively to white men) that situated them from the start as the economic and political elite, replicat-ing the rank and class inequities of their homelands. Such disparities were maintained and enhanced by economic opportunities for those (primarily white men) who could control or speculate in land, trade, industry, or inance. Class and classism in the colonies and early Republic were characterized by disparities between a wealthy elite who could consolidate local and federal political power for economic beneit; a laboring class of tenant farmers who owned nothing and had little individual power; and unpaid, enslaved Africans whose labor was fundamental to the colonial economy and created a racialized lower tier of labor that is, in effect, still in place.The 18th through 21st centuries have seen shifts in the speciic characteristics of class difference (along lines of urban and rural, industrial and agricultural, small business and global inance). Yet history also demonstrates a continuity in class inequality, in which a self-perpetuating elite inanced and beneited from building railroads, drilling oil and gas, mining copper and coal, and expanding banking and inance, all based on the exploitation of labor of people with less political power, including enslaved and free blacks, Latinos, white immigrants and immigrants of color, and others living in intergenerational poverty.The political inluence of the wealthy elite in the early U.S. resulted in federal policies that removed Native peoples from land that was desired for territorial expansion. Federal policies encouraged settlement of the West by an emergent “middle” class of farmers, skilled workers, and small- to medium-scale business owners. At the bottom remained the landless tenant farmers, hired-hands and service laborers, including African slave (and | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO220then freed) laborers and generations of exploited Irish, Italian, Jewish, Asian, and other immigrants.The sheer size of the continental U.S. allowed for an optimistic belief that social mobility would be based on meritocracy. For example, the Homestead Act (1862) offered land that had been seized from Native peoples for sale as 160-acre homesteads for $1.50 per acre. Leaders talked about the act as providing nearly free land, equally available to anyone. In reality, homesteads were only available primarily to those settlers—almost all white—who could pay $200 up front (the equivalent of about $4700 today). Although 50 million acres were set aside for settler homesteads, much of the land went to well-inanced speculators, and another 100 million acres went to railroads at no cost.Meanwhile, working-class families in northern cities lived in overcrowded tenements, vulnerable to typhus and cholera and industrial accidents, with no garbage removal or clean water (Zinn, 2003). In the South, millions of southern whites were poor tenant farm-ers, or worked in cotton factories for 30 cents per day, while blacks earned 20 cents. The opportunities of settlement were not for them.Working people have protested their lower wealth, income, and status throughout U.S. history. In the colonial period, they protested against excessive land rents. In the 19th century, they organized walkouts from textile mills and factories, despite accusations that their actions constituted “conspiracies to restrain trade” (Zinn, 2003, p. 223) and were therefore illegal.On the other side of the class divide, a centralized banking system fostered symbiotic relationships among politics, business, and trade that enabled corporate monopolies to consolidate economic power in the hands of a wealthy corporate elite with formidable political inluence. For example, railroad owners were bribed to ship Rockefeller oil, allow-ing the Standard Oil monopoly to consolidate iron, copper, coal, shipping, and banking, and building a fortune of two billion dollars (about 57 billion dollars today) (Zinn, 2003). The political corruption evident in such monopolies leads historians to conclude that “in industry after industry—shrewd, eficient businessmen building empires, choking out com-petition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies . . . were the irst beneiciaries of the ‘welfare state’ ” (Zinn, 2003, p. 257; see also pp. 253–295).THE RACIALIZATION OF A TWO-TIER LABORING CLASSThe system of slave labor on Southern plantations was enforced through a legal system that segregated blacks from whites and hindered them from forming common cause. “Race laws” outlawed intermarriage and literacy among blacks, punished white workers who joined slaves in rebellion, and established “sundown towns” where black laborers were required to leave town at the end of each workday. Blacks, whether enslaved or free, ranked socially and economically below the “free” white men regardless of their skill or capacity. For white men, their presumed racial superiority obscured the fact of their eco-nomic exploitation.Poor whites often lived in poor conditions similar to those of skilled slaves and free blacks, but work opportunities and salaries were racialized. Whites, no matter how poor, were still white and still free, would usually be hired before free blacks, and would earn more per hour for the same job. This two-tiered system provided the basis for a racialized union movement, which helped to create a white middle-class in the mid-20th century.The system of de jure racism against blacks (vagrancy laws, laws against intermarriage, inferior schooling) and Native peoples (laws banning religious ceremonies and disbanding tribal authority), formalized in the 18th through the 20th centuries, is today perpetu-ated by racial disparities in policing, legal representation, and judicial verdicts. De facto economic racism, built into the plantation slave system and the forcing of Native peoples CLASSISM |221onto agriculturally unproductive reservations, continued as immigrants of color (including Sikhs, Chinese, and then Japanese) and Mexicans were shunted into menial labor—men in farms, factories, mines, and railroads, and women in domestic work. Factory and mine owners fueled interracial conlict, and discouraged union organizing, by exploiting blacks and Asians as strike-breakers at lower wages than whites.The self-perpetuating legacy of this process was white elite ownership of industries that depended largely on a racialized labor force. Economic mobility belonged to the upper tier of skilled U.S.-born whites and European immigrants, while crushing poverty prevailed for the lower tier of blacks, immigrants of color, Native peoples, and Mexicans. The system was held in place by intersecting economic, legal, and social advantages for whites, and disadvantages for workers of color.This racial divide also played out in late 19th-century U.S. overseas expansion and imperialism, in the plantations of Hawaii, Standard Oil’s control of the global export mar-ket, United Fruit’s control of the Cuban sugar industry, and the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines (Zinn, 2003). Puerto Rican, Filipino, and South American immigrants soon joined the lower tier of the U.S. labor force.Thus, the U.S. class system has always been racialized. The wealth of the owning class originated in the proceeds of racism: the plantation system based on slave labor, the gov-ernment’s redistribution of land stolen from Native peoples to wealthy investors, and the transatlantic slave trade. The owning class established racist and other policies that allowed them to maintain their wealth and power, giving them the primary control of and beneit from inance markets, land speculation, mining, and trade (Steinberg, 1989; Takaki, 1993; Zinn, 2003). A racially tiered labor market created and exacerbated racial tensions among the poor, hindering effective coalitions among poor people across race, and allowed own-ers to continue exploiting workers of all races. The historical legacy of this racialized class system appears today in the racially tiered workforce, in which darker peoples of color continue to be relegated to low-paid labor and service roles.IMMIGRATIONImmigration has been central to the economic and class system of the U.S. since before its founding. The irst immigrants, in the early-17th through late-18th centuries, included white, mainly Protestant landowners, inanced by European investors, as well as skilled farmers and craftspeople and indentured workers. They settled the colonies by displacing and killing Native peoples and acquiring ownership of their lands, forming the basis for a landed elite. The second wave of migration (mid-17th through early-19th centuries) was entirely involuntary—millions of African people were kidnapped as part of the transatlan-tic slave trade and brought to the colonies for use as a racially marked workforce in the labor-intensive colonial export crops of sugar and cotton.With each subsequent wave of migration, most new immigrants became part of the working class. Along with enslaved and indentured workers, and others who were kept from economic mobility, immigrants built the infrastructure and provided the domestic labor that allowed the owning class to make immense fortunes while the workers and their children largely remained poor.A third wave of immigrants during the mid-19th through early-20th centuries came from diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, class, and religious backgrounds. Irish led famine and starvation, caused by British colonial policy, in the 1840s. Mexicans became absorbed into the southwest and western U.S. territories when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago (1848) shifted the U.S./Mexican border. Southern and Eastern Europeans (Italians, Jews, and Poles) immigrated in the millions, leeing from poverty, war, and persecution. Arabs and Asians also led poverty and war in Syria, Lebanon, India, China, and Japan. | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO222The rate of immigration rose from 143,000 per decade in the 1820s, to 8,800,000 in the irst decade of the 20th century (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Ofice of Immigration Statistics, 2014). By 1860, the foreign-born American population was over four million (Jacobson, 1998). By 1920, 36 million Americans, more than a third of the population, were immigrants and their children, the majority from southern and eastern Europe with smaller numbers from China, Japan, and India (Daniels, 2002).Irish immigrants were a signiicant part of the mid-19th century wave of immigration, with 1.5 million arriving between 1845–1855. They settled in East Coast and midwestern U.S. cities, where they faced anti-Irish (and anti-Catholic) resentment. Later, Italians, Poles, and Slovaks, leeing from war and poverty, and European Jews leeing from pogroms, set-tled mainly but not exclusively in urban centers. They interacted in factories but generally lived in ethnically segregated communities, often drawing upon social capital in networks of earlier arrivals for employment and housing.The Mexican landowners who were absorbed into the new U.S. territories in the South-west were vulnerable to extortion, discriminatory taxation, and fraudulent claims from whites who wanted their land. Many were forced off their land and pressed into a migra-tory labor force, along with Mexican tenant farmers, to compete with immigrant laborers for grueling and underpaid work building railroads and working copper mines (Takaki, 1993). Owners kept wages low by replacing Mexican workers with even lower-paid work-ers recruited directly from Mexico, despite workers’ efforts to unionize in protest against the practice (Takaki, 1993).Many Chinese immigrants became agricultural workers in California, and railroad own-ers hired them in the erroneous belief that they would not strike. But like the Irish and Eastern European railroad workers, Chinese workers organized against dangerous work-ing conditions, long hours, and wages below those of white workers. Chinese workers made up half the labor force in San Francisco’s low-wage industries; they built California’s agricultural dykes and canals; Louisiana and Mississippi planters hired and pitted them against black laborers; and they created niche laundry businesses.The white European immigrants were also an exploited, ethnically marked working class, whose poverty and desperation left them vulnerable to wage exploitation and to being pitted against even more vulnerable blacks, Mexicans, and immigrant Asians and Arabs (Steinberg, 1989; Takaki, 1993; Zinn, 2003). Economic competition was racialized, sometimes to the advantage of white ethnics who got priority and (slightly) higher wages, and sometimes to the temporary advantage of Chinese or blacks employed as strikebreak-ers against white workers who organized to protest unfair wages and working conditions. The white immigrants constituted the “upper” tier of the racialized two-tier working class at the bottom of the overall economic ladder (Brodkin, 1998; Guglielmo & Salerno, 2003; Ignatiev, 1995; Roediger, 1991). Irish women displaced black domestic labor, and worked alongside Italian and Jewish women in textile mills and sweatshops that didn’t hire blacks. White ethnic generational upward mobility existed for Irish, Italians, Jews, and other white ethnic workers that was not available to blacks, Latinos/as, or other workers of color. The process by which white ethnics moved from the upper rung of the working class into a skilled factory worker or small-business owning “middle class” status, while most blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese remained in the lower tier, is part of this complex historical legacy (Foner, 1998; Roediger, 1991).LABOR ORGANIZING AND UNION MOVEMENTSLabor movements had a signiicant role in creating the kind of organized workforce that became the middle class. Railroad, mining, and factory jobs were particularly underpaid CLASSISM |223and exploitative. Workplace injuries and deaths were common, children labored along-side adults, and many workplaces lacked sanitation. When wages and work conditions improved, it was as a result of organized resistance to exploitative conditions. Union organizing required planning, skill, effort, and determination, as well as courage, solidar-ity, and self-sacriice to face down the militias and armed security guards whose brutal government-sanctioned violence attempted to suppress organizing and protect owners’ interests over workers’ interests.The United States has a tradition of homegrown class-based revolt, dating back to the colonies and early Republic. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, New England farm-ers, carpenters, and shoemakers revolted against conditions of work, while tenant farm-ers organized rent-revolts in New Jersey and upstate New York. Native peoples rebelled against broken treaties, and small-scale farmers against excessive land and agricultural taxes (Zinn, 2003). Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1676) exempliies one such revolt that crossed lines of race and class. These rebellions were regularly and violently suppressed by local and state armed militias who maintained the economic status quo on behalf of the governing and owning class.Labor unrest was accelerated by chronic instability of the U.S. economy (with major unemployment and economic depressions following inancial crises in 1837, 1857, 1893, 1907, 1919, and 1929), and spread throughout many industries. In most cases, organizing was suppressed using police and military brutality. Workers meeting in Tompkins Square, New York (1874) were clubbed and beaten back by mounted police; Irish “Molly Magu-ires” on strike in the textile mills of Fall River, Massachusetts, were arrested and executed (Zinn, 2003).Beginning in the mid-19th century, private mercenary forces were hired to supplement or substitute for government militias in the violent suppression of organized workers’ rebel-lions. Owners of factories, mills, and mines hired private detectives (such as the Pinker-tons) to use whatever force necessary to harass and disrupt union organizing. Notorious examples of such suppression include the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Homestead Strike of 1892, and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 (Zinn, 2003).In addition to economic hardship that accompanied inancial crises, labor unrest and union organizing in the 19th century were motivated by the hardships of unregulated labor conditions: long hours and work weeks, unsafe work sites, powerlessness against wage theft, and wage cuts during periods of economic downturn. Rather than acknowledge these inequities, business interests and the media sought to blame “foreign inluences” for the mass marches of unemployed, for periods of labor unrest, and for particular union organizing campaigns.The stereotypic scapegoating of “foreign inluences” succeeded in demonizing work-ers’ rights movements that had been inspired, but only in part, by socialist movements in Europe. Although U.S. traditions of rebellion against unfair tax and labor practices had paralleled European labor movements, owners beneited from blaming immigrant activ-ists, whose socialist critiques of unregulated capitalism could be labelled “un-American.” Wealthy owners and popular media leveraged racist, ethnocentric, and antisemitic rheto-ric to paint labor organizing as a threat to democracy itself, rather than as a threat to the owners’ inancial interests in maintaining unregulated conditions of labor. The ethno-centric and antisemitic legacy of early-19th century anti-socialism resurfaced during the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.Despite the formidable political, corporate, media, and military forces arrayed against them, a comparably moderate nationwide federation of labor unions—the American Fed-eration of Labor (AFL)—emerged in 1886. It was initially organized as an umbrella organi-zation for craft unions (Nicholson, 2004) and was composed mainly of skilled white ethnic | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO224workers. The success of the AFL was based in part on its opposition to more radical labor unions (still associated with “foreignness” and communism) and also on its exclusion of the many black workers seeking jobs in northern factories, who were forming their own labor unions, and of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican workers (Nicholson, 2004; Takaki, 1993; Zinn, 2003).The success of the AFL had enormous consequences for U.S. class and classism. First, their success in negotiating beneits, hours, and safety nets largely erased the ethnic or not-quite-white markers for an increasingly Americanized immigrant workforce. The unions enabled European immigrants to ind productive employment with stable wages and beneits so that within two generations, the children and grandchildren of European immigrants had become assimilated as “white” middle-class Americans (Brodkin, 1998; Guglielmo and Salerno, 2003; Ignatiev, 1995).Second, the termination of large-scale immigration after 1924 provided a 40-year breathing space, before immigration was reopened in 1964, during which the pre-1924 immigrant generations gained middle-class status by learning English, holding union jobs with reliable pay and good pensions, and graduating from public schools into an increas-ingly suburban middle class. Economic mobility was not universal for white ethnics—some remained in the working class and others (particularly Italians) emigrated back to Europe. But enough Italians became skilled construction workers, Jews became businessmen and professionals, and Irish moved into urban politics and policing to “create a middle-class cushion for class conlict” (Zinn, 2003, p. 349).Many upwardly mobile white-ethnic immigrants supported the AFL and CIO and shared their vehement anti-communism. As a generation of new Americans, they were patriotic and suspicious of European radicalism. The children of former immigrants bonded in the trenches of World War I and battleields of World War II, lost their ethnic markers, and ben-eitted from the military-industrial boom. The many who prospered came to believe the mer-itocratic narrative for their generation and to hold radical union organizing at arm’s length.As the moderate AFL/CIO membership became more upwardly mobile, they abandoned any hint of the egalitarianism of earlier labor unions. Instead, the AFL and CIO took the view “that workers must frankly accept their status as wage earners and seek higher wages” based on “the rigid segmentation of the job market along racial and ethnic lines” (Foner, 1998, p. 135). This created a skilled and union-protected majority white working class with limited demands for wages, hours, and working conditions. The U.S. economy became “more thoroughly racialized at the dawn of the twentieth century than at any other point in American history” (Foner, 1998, p. 135).THE BALLOT BOX AND REGULATORY POLICIES: POPULISM, PROGRESSIVISM, AND THE NEW DEALThe success of a relatively conservative union movement was aided in part by late-19th and early-20th century newspaper and muckraking exposés of the unregulated and abusive working conditions in many industries. Increased media attention and awareness gener-ated public outrage and shored up working people’s leverage at the ballot box. Organized labor’s success at the ballot box had the ironic effect of diluting the movement’s more radi-cal and far-reaching demands for change.Two threads characterize the story of this era: First, the continuity of labor unrest and the emergence of rural worker’s alliances, and second, the absorption of moderate labor into the two-party political system.At the same time that urban workers were organizing in protest against sweatshops and slums, farmers also were in crisis. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the U.S. army CLASSISM |225had forcibly removed Native peoples from the Great Plains, and railroads brought settlers westward. Many were farmers, intending to feed the rapidly growing U.S. population. But as the economy remained unstable, farmers went into debt, and many were driven into a crop-lien tenancy. In the South, 90% of farmers lived on credit (Zinn, 2003).Farmers resisted by organizing Alliances throughout the South and West. They shared equipment, storage warehouses, and inancing in “a drive based on the idea of coopera-tion, of farmers creating their own culture, their own political parties, gaining a respect not given them by the nation’s powerful industrial and political leaders” (Zinn, 2003, p. 286). With 400,000 members by the 1880s, Alliances formed statewide cooperatives and met in 1890 to form a national Populist party. These agrarian resistance movements generated political clout for embattled white farmers in the cotton and wheat belts as well as white miners and industrial workers who the farmers supported politically (Foner, 1998).A Colored Farmers National Alliance with around a million members organized in the South, and the populist Texas People’s Party (1891) was interracial, but blacks and whites were in different social and economic positions. Blacks were ield hands and hired laborers, whereas most white Alliance organizers were farm owners who opposed higher wages for the black cotton pickers (Zinn, 2003). The potential for interracial collaboration was over-whelmed by the prevailing racism as well as Jim Crow laws that sabotaged voting strength for blacks. As a result, it was primarily white populist alliances that became a political force within the Democratic party of the 1890s (Foner, 1998; Zinn, 2003). Southern blacks not only had no vote, but also were denied a place in farmers’ Alliances, just as they were left unrepresented by nationally organized labor unions representing a skilled white working class. As unions and farmers’ Alliances entered the political system, they lost vitality in a two-party system and were absorbed by political power brokers.Rural populism was eventually drowned in a sea of Democratic party electoral poli-tics, while urban radical socialist labor organizing was delected by the more conservative national unions (AFL and CIO), both of whom aligned politically with the Democratic Party. Those who remained outside the big tent had their strikes disrupted or violently bro-ken by the weapons of the system—local ordinances forbidding union gatherings, negative media coverage, and violent suppression by police, militias, and private mercenary forces. The “reluctant reforms” achieved through the combined efforts of muckraking journalism and (white) workers’ political leverage proved suficient to quiet the uprisings, but not to create fundamental change. Zinn uses the term “political capitalism” to describe a system “where the businessmen took irmer control of the political system because the private economy was not eficient enough to forestall protest from below” (Zinn, 2003, p. 350). Politics became the mechanism to stabilize and salvage capitalism, and in that spirit, the “Progressive” era established regulatory commissions to stem the worst excesses of inter-state commerce (the Interstate Commerce Commission, ICC), the inancial and banking system (the Federal Trade Commission, FTC), and food safety (Meat Inspection Act, Pure Food and Drug Act) without the kind of fundamental change called for by radicals and socialists.The term “Progressive Era” disguises the time’s intense conlicts: Jim Crow, lynching, and race riots; a militant (white) women’s suffrage movement, working against tremen-dous odds; the blacklisting, incarceration, and execution of union organizers; and mas-sacres of striking workers and their families.The prosperity of the “Roaring Twenties” that followed WW I affected a limited seg-ment of U.S. citizens, mainly the wealthiest. Real wages in manufacturing went up 1.4% per year, while owning-class stockholders gained 16.4% (Zinn, 2003). Southern blacks remained sharecroppers, harassed by a burgeoning Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and cut out of unionized manufacturing jobs in urban centers. Workers continued to strike for fair wages | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO226and safer working conditions. But much of the wealth accumulated during the 1920s came from unsound inancial speculation, and the economy collapsed after the stock market crash of 1929 that brought in the Great Depression. The election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was taken as a mandate for change, and inaugurated an alphabet soup of regula-tory experimentation and jobs programs, such as the National Recovery Act (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). To address the explosion of strikes by the mid-1930s, the National Labor Relations Board (Wagner Act) gave unions legal status, created channels to address some grievances, and channeled union energy into meetings and contract negotiations rather than direct tactics like strikes (Zinn, 2003).Although the New Deal (like the “deals” of the Progressive Era) provided beneits to poor and working poor people, it did not change systemic or structural inequalities of wealth and poverty, nor did it address the racialized distribution of wealth. The exclusion of people of color from economic advantages granted to whites is one of the persistent historical legacies of U.S. class and classism. African Americans were initially excluded from most New Deal programs. Similarly, in the aftermath of World War II, black, Mexi-can, and Asian veterans did not beneit from the G.I. Bill that enabled the children and grandchildren of 19th-century European immigrants to attend college, receive affordable home mortgages, and move into the rapidly growing (and racially segregated) middle-class suburban developments (Brodkin, 1998; Lipsitz, 1998).Black veterans’ disappointment and outrage upon returning from World War II to such a cold welcome from the government helped spur the civil rights movement. Black veter-ans would not allow Americans to forget that they had fought against fascism in Europe and also against racism in the U.S. The civil rights movement in turn inspired other poor people’s movements, such as the United Farmworkers, the American Indian Movement, and the National Welfare Rights Organization, among others.TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE FREE MARKET AND DEREGULATIONIn the three decades between the entry of the U.S. into World War I (1917) and the end of World War II (1945), the U.S. emerged as a global power with a form of capitalism regu-lated by banking and workplace protections put in place following the 1929 depression. The industrialization in preparation for World War II marked the end of U.S. economic depression. A post-war “boom” based on wartime industrialization and post-war global supremacy supported a thriving middle class for several post-war decades.But the post-war economic factors that had facilitated middle-class prosperity were soon undermined by changes in federal policy in the closing decades of the 20th century. These included changes in the tax code beneitting corporate interests, opportunities for corporations to go offshore and avoid U.S. taxes, the movement of factories and jobs to countries with lower pay scales and fewer protections for workers (supported by treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA), the weakening of regula-tory structures of banks and inances, and legal changes making it more dificult for unions to organize and negotiate on behalf of workers (Bartlett & Steele, 1994; Domhoff, 1983; Phillips, 1990). By and large, many of the union jobs whose paychecks, beneits, and pen-sions had supported a middle-class lifestyle disappeared, and with them the stability and prosperity of working families who depended on those jobs and networks (Henwood, 2003; Piketty, 2014; Reich, 2007). Voters were encouraged to trust in “trickle down” economics, by which the accumula-tion of wealth by those already wealthy would somehow beneit everyone else. Political elections and longevity in public ofice came to depend increasingly on the deep pockets of CLASSISM |227corporate interests. Intricate tax codes provided loopholes for complex inancial arrange-ments and stock options; unregulated inancial interests found ways to garner enormous proits; and companies “too big to fail” were granted federal support not available to bankrupt individuals.In this climate, labor regulations were relaxed and unions lost power. As industrial jobs became less secure and middle-class income levels decreased relative to booming stock markets, the middle-class lifestyle required the support of two or three jobs per family, supplemented by increased reliance on debt (in the forms of mortgages, car loans, and credit cards). At the same time, changes to welfare policy (such as welfare-to-work pro-grams) meant that the poorest Americans were less and less able to meet their basic needs for food and shelter (Mishel, Bernstein, & Allegretto, 2007).CURRENT MANIFESTATIONS OF U.S. CLASS AND CLASSISMThe historical legacies described above continue into the present time in the maintenance of an unequal and inequitable class structure, the many manifestations of classism, and organized movements of resistance. Major themes include: 1) the growing gap between rich and poor; 2) declining union membership; 3) immigration and employment; 4) racial disparities in wealth and income; 5) personal credit and debt, and 6) classism in education.GROWING GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POORThe uneven distribution of income and wealth has been growing since the early 1980s, at an ever-increasing pace. We can track growing inequality by comparing two periods of growth in the U.S. economy: 1947–1979 and 1979–2009. Between 1947 and 1979, the U.S. economy grew at a healthy pace, and the beneits were distributed more or less evenly across different income brackets. On average, families in every income category more than doubled their income in those 30 years.By contrast, economic growth from 1979 to 2009 was less robust and the beneits were concentrated in the top ifth of income earners, whose average income grew 49%. In sharp contrast, the middle ifth saw only 8% growth, the second-to-lowest ifth’s income was stagnant, and the poorest ifth had their income decrease by 12%. Even within the top ifth, inequality increased, with the top 1% gaining 185%, compared to 49% for the high-est ifth overall (data from the U.S. Census and from Piketty & Saez, 2012, as compiled and summarized by UFE, www.faireconomy.org; see also Gordon, 2013).Large tax cuts during the George W. Bush years (2001–2009) went disproportionately to the highest income brackets, creating a deicit in the federal budget. Earnings based on hourly income fell, and failure to enforce fair labor rights limited union and workforce leverage to counter declining wages.Accelerating class inequities were disguised by the re-entrance of middle-class women into the workforce and by easy access to credit. Families that were previously supported by one income now needed two to maintain the same standard of living. With the collapse of global inancial markets in 2008, the median net worth of U.S. families dropped by 39.4% from pre-recession levels (Fry & Kochhar, 2014). The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2011, 46.2 million Americans were below the poverty line (including 16.4 million children), and poor Americans became even poorer. Deep poverty rose 44.3%, the highest level in 36 years, with about one in eight Americans and one in four children dependent on government aid (Bishaw, 2013). | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO228In the 2008 economic crash, many relatively wealthy people lost large sums of money when their investments lost value. However, the richest bounced back, while non-wealthy people continue to struggle for inancial stability. In the short period from 2009–2012, the average growth in family income across all income categories was 6%, but the top 1% saw income growth of 31.4%, compared to only .4% for the remaining 99% (Pikkety & Saez, 2003, data updated through 2013).The 2008 crash accelerated a process by which many people in the middle and working classes were already losing ground. Changes in tax policy during the Reagan years (1980s) provided windfalls to industrialists who moved manufacturing to low-wage countries, leading to the loss of whole categories of stable working-class jobs throughout the U.S. Financial investments followed industry overseas, where tax shelters meant less income was returned via taxes to potentially beneit people in the U.S. Global trade treaties, such as NAFTA, cost the United States hundreds of thousands of jobs that moved to South American and Asian countries in the 1990s.As a result, public attention became focused on the destructive consequences of grow-ing economic inequality (Stiglitz, 2013). The 2008 economic crisis called attention to the instability of global investments backed by pooled subprime mortgages rather than secure inancial backing (Shiller, 2008). These revelations made clear that some of the wealthiest corporations and their stockholders were growing ever richer at the expense of working-class and middle-class homeowners, who had been lured by subprime mortgages and were now losing their homes to foreclosure as markets collapsed (Henwood, 2003; Reich, 2007). Since then, such mortgage-backed securities have been replaced by similarly unstable rental-backed securities and even car loan-backed securities. Although inancial markets can seem impossibly complex, many people gained an increasingly clear under-standing that both the causes and the consequences of the mortgage crisis represented a massive transfer of wealth from working- and middle-class people to wealthy corporations and their stockholders (Piketty, 2014; Shiller, 2008).A global movement, largely led by youth and young adults, manifested in public pro-tests that literally occupied public spaces in major cities around the world for months—in a continuation of the U.S. tradition of class-based activism (Leondar-Wright, 2014). The movement that started as Occupy Wall Street popularized the language of “the 1%” and sought to unify non-wealthy people with the slogan, “We are the 99%.” By the time the most visible actions dwindled, the Occupy movement had succeeded in shifting the public discourse about class, making room for frank discussions of economic inequality in con-texts where such discussions had previously been unthinkable. Many groups that began organizing around the Occupy encampments have continued their work around economic inequality in less visible ways (Collins, 2012, 2014; Korten, 2010; van Gelder, 2011).DECLINING UNION MEMBERSHIPHistorically, unions had been an important way for working-class people to inluence the terms and conditions of their labor through negotiation with employers. Union members earn an average of 10–30% higher wages than nonunion workers (Long, 2013; Mayer, 2004), and often provide better beneits (such as health insurance) and more favorable policies (such as grievance procedures for workers who experience harassment). The per-centage of employed workers in the U.S. who are members of a union peaked in 1954 at 28%. The rate has declined more or less steadily since then, and between 1980 and 2013 it fell from around 20% to 11.3% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). The declining rate of union membership means that fewer workers are effectively protected from exploitation, low wages, and inadequate beneits. CLASSISM |229Unions also serve as a vehicle for organizing workers’ political voices, and they remain one of the primary mechanisms through which non-wealthy people’s interests are rep-resented in the U.S. political process. Unions mobilize and coordinate large numbers of workers to exercise their political rights through mechanisms like meeting with elected representatives and hiring lobbyists to advocate for workers’ interests. Despite current efforts to unionize agricultural, domestic, and food service workers, the decline in rates of union membership has lessened unions’ political pull and decreased the number of workers who are able to be politically involved as an organized group.Government employees have a much higher rate of union membership than private sector employees (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). In recent years, some politicians have blamed public employee unions, and public employees generally, for government deicits that are actually caused by macroeconomic policies and trends. Portrayals of unionized public workers as lazy or greedy illustrate classism playing out on a cultural level through stereotyped media representations. When such representations lead to policy changes that make it even more dificult to unionize, this becomes an example of institutional classism.Workers and unions continue to organize to push back against the trend of declin-ing union membership, including through new approaches to labor organizing (Mantsios, 1998). An example of recent organizing that highlights the intersectionality of class, race, gender, and immigration is the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), which sup-ports state- and national-level organizing campaigns to improve working conditions for domestic workers (those who work in other people’s homes). The National Labor Rela-tions Act of 1935 (NLRA), which legitimized unions’ role, established basic workplace protections, and helped the U.S. emerge from the Great Depression, speciically excluded both domestic and agricultural workers. Because of race and gender segregation in the workforce, most women (across races) and most people of color (across genders) did not beneit from the NLRA as much as white men. The NDWA works to correct this omission by creating new legislation protecting basic rights of domestic workers, such as the right to sleep uninterrupted, to get paid minimum wage, and to have paid sick days (Burnham & Theodore, 2012). As of January 2014, the NDWA has succeeded in winning these protec-tions in New York, Hawaii, California, and Massachusetts, and for some home health care workers at the national level (see the NDWA website, http://www.domesticworkers.org/).IMMIGRATION AND EMPLOYMENTAgriculture is another sector of the workforce in which classism, racism, and immigration are deeply entangled. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA, 1938, 1966) established basic employment protections, including the federal minimum wage and overtime system; how-ever, it did not apply to farmworkers. The law was amended in 1966 to apply some provi-sions to farmworkers, including the minimum wage, but not overtime pay. There are about one million hired farmworkers employed in the U.S. at any given time of the year (Kandel, 2008). Compared to other workers, farmworkers are not protected from unfair practices such as substandard wages and housing, occupational safety hazards, and irregular work schedules—for example, being required to work 80 hours a week for several weeks (with-out overtime) and then having little or no work for several weeks after that (Kandel, 2008).About half the farmworkers in the U.S. are not authorized to work in the U.S., which makes them especially vulnerable to exploitative labor practices, including wage theft and overwork. Additionally, about half of farmworkers move from place to place throughout the year to work on different crops as the seasons change (Kandel, 2008). Their mobility can make it dificult to receive beneits for which they may be eligible, such as food stamps or subsidized health care, and prevents their children from having regular schooling. | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO230Some politicians and media outlets depict farmworkers, especially immigrants, as lazy people mooching off a generous public beneits system, despite the fact that farmworkers perform some of the most demanding labor and have less access to beneits than workers in other industries. These depictions are examples of classism (and racism) at the cultural level. The structural elements of the agricultural industry that keep farmworkers poor, such as different labor laws than other industries and a heavy reliance on seasonal and often unauthorized workers, are examples of institutional-level classism. At an individual level, one often-unconscious manifestation is the privilege many of us have to remain ignorant of the working conditions of the many people whose labor helps to bring food to our tables.RACIAL DISPARITIES IN WEALTH AND INCOME AND THE RACIALLY TIERED LABOR MARKETAs a result of the historical and ongoing entanglement of racism and classism in the U.S., class position remains highly correlated to race. Black, Latino, and Native American people are about 2.5 times as likely as whites to have income below the poverty line (although whites still make up about 45% of those living in poverty) (Macartney, Bishaw, & Fon-tenot, 2013). Asian Americans have a similar poverty rate to white people overall, but within the category of Asian American, there are large disparities across different ethnic or national identities. For example, the poverty rates of East Asian and South Asian Americans are much lower than the rates among Southeast Asian Americans who arrived here as refu-gees. The same is true of different ethnic identities within the umbrella category of Latino.The impact of the 2008 economic meltdown hit communities of color harder than white communities, reproducing and exacerbating the correlation of class and race (Sul-livan, Meschede, Dietrich, Shapiro, Traub, Reutschlin, & Draut, 2015). The loss of credit and homeownership disproportionately affected black and Latino households, for whom home equity had been a source of wealth and upward mobility. Black and Latino families experienced 53% and 66% losses in wealth respectively, compared to the 16% loss for white families (Kochhar, Fry, & Taylor, 2011).Educational inequities also reproduce racial disparities in income and wealth. Inequities in the quality of schooling, differential school funding, and disproportionate penalizing of students of color for breaking rules, lead to a higher dropout rate for youth of color (includ-ing the children of recent immigrants) (Cookson, 2013; Lui, Robles, Leondar-Wright, Brewer, & Adamson, 2006). Without a high school diploma, these young people are more likely to enter into a lower tier of the labor market, working in low-wage service jobs with no opportunities for economic advancement.Combined with the disproportionate policing of communities of color, high dropout rates put poor youth of color at high risk of arrest and incarceration in what some have termed a “school to prison pipeline” (Heitzeg, 2009). Once saddled with a criminal record, released former inmates face severe obstacles in securing employment and remain at high risk of being arrested and incarcerated again. The school-to-prison pipeline, the pressures of poverty in the racially tiered labor market, and the “war on drugs” that disproportion-ately targets and punishes people of color, have together contributed to a mass incarcera-tion of young black men (among other men of color) that Michelle Alexander (2010) has dubbed “the new Jim Crow.” Alexander uses the term to highlight how current-day incar-ceration of black youth and other youth of color have negative impacts equivalent to the explicit legal segregation of the U.S. South before the civil rights movement (Alexander, 2010). In addition to damaging the social structure of families and communities, the New Jim Crow harms communities economically by removing potential wage earners, perpetu-ating a cycle of poverty and vulnerability to arrest. CLASSISM |231PERSONAL CREDIT AND DEBTDecades of weak and stagnant wage growth made it less feasible for many families to main-tain a middle-class lifestyle (Emelech, 2008; Mishel, Bernstein, & Allegretto, 2007; Shier-holz & Mishel, 2013). Families borrowed money through second mortgages and accrued increasing credit card debt in an attempt to meet their expectations of a middle-class life, including sending their children to college as well as paying for day-to-day necessities (Wolff, 2009). Weak or unenforced consumer protection laws allowed banks to prey on consumers by setting high, uncapped credit card interest rates, fees, and penalties (Garcia, Lardner, & Zeldin 2008), and lower-income workers were vulnerable to exploitative lend-ing by paycheck cashing and loan outlets charging 20–35% interest (Williams, 2001).As a result of these policies, the total revolving debt in the U.S. reached $890 billion in 2014 compared to $54 billion in 1980 (Federal Reserve, 2015; Soederberg, 2012). Banks continue to proit from targeting low-income communities, African Americans, Lati-nos, single women, undocumented workers, and the newly bankrupted, all of whom need cash to survive despite escalating debt obligations (Soederberg, 2012). The very commu-nities with less inancial security are subjected to higher fees and interest rates and home foreclosure.CLASSISM IN EDUCATIONThe widely held assumption that education leads to class mobility is contradicted by the disparities in K–12 education (Brantlinger, 1993; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 2007). These persistent disparities include unequal quality of instruction and resources, teacher-student ratios, local funding per student, and race- and class-based counseling for students to pur-sue vocational or academic paths (Allan, Ozga, & Smith, 2009; Ornstein, 2007). They are perpetuated by policies and practices that continue to funnel resources to wealthy communities at the expense of low-income communities (Biddle & Berliner, 2002; Kozol, 1991; St. John, 2003). Unquestioned class-based assumptions and stereotypes track low-income students into vocational programs and community colleges, and aflu-ent students into elite colleges (Brantlinger, 2003; McDonough, 1997; Schmidt, 2007). These class-based assumptions and stereotypes play out in the dynamics of self-identity, relationships among peers, and doubts or hopes about one’s future (Brantlinger, 1993; Fiske & Markus, 2012).In higher education, escalating personal debt poses a major challenge to today’s students and endangers investments in their future. Several factors converged over the past several decades to make higher education increasingly unaffordable and classed. Home foreclo-sures closed off one source of family collateral for student loans; states decreased their sub-sidies to public higher education; the cost of college tuition skyrocketed; federal Pell grants were cut; and many college scholarships became “merit” based rather than need based. Students have to resort to private loans with high interest rates to inance their education, unwittingly supporting a lucrative new income stream for private banks.The soaring costs of higher education in the context of cuts to public-funded loans and grants have resulted in the accumulation of more than $1 trillion in student debt as of 2012, with about 70% of graduating students in debt, up from 45% in 1993; and individual debt loads average $23,300 per student but run as high as $100,000 (Fry, 2014). This debt burden needs to be coupled with the current youth unemployment igures (16.3%) noted earlier to grasp the human tragedy facing this current generation of college graduates and indebted dropouts, burdened by unprecedented levels of personal debt and aggressively pursued by student loan debt collectors. | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO232Classism in higher education is perpetuated by admissions practices that reward appli-cants with enough class privilege to afford college tuition without aid (and/or with the cultural capital to receive “merit”-based scholarships), to participate in extracurricular and co-curricular activities, and to pay for SAT preparatory classes that boost their scores (Espenshade & Radford, 2009; Stevens, 2007). Once matriculated, lower-income students often encounter challenges to their academic and social success in college, including ongo-ing family responsibilities, differences between their cultural capital and that expected and valued by the institution, and having to catch up academically after receiving an average or below-average K–12 education (Hopkins, 2014). They may lack academic conidence, face barriers to harnessing campus resources, and experience classist microaggressions that can affect their psychological well-being (Hopkins, 2014; Smith & Redington, 2010).Examples of classism in higher education also include inequities whereby students with more class privilege are able to focus on academic and extracurricular responsibilities, while students with less privilege have to work one or more jobs; relatively privileged students can take advantage of unpaid internships, which allow them to gain professional experience and build social capital for future career opportunities, while poorer students must work for income in jobs that do not contribute to a professional career path; and stu-dents have differential access to the many personal development opportunities offered by colleges (which are also means of building social and cultural capital), such as study abroad programs, student clubs, and fraternity or sorority membership.INTERSECTIONS OF CLASS AND CLASSISM WITH OTHER FORMS OF INJUSTICE AND OPPRESSIONAs mentioned above, we take a broad, intersectional social justice approach in order to address how other systems of oppression operate through classism and vice versa. For our approach to classism, an intersectional framework is key. Even as we focus on how oppres-sion plays out along class lines, we also hold that classism operates both in parallel to other systems of oppression, and in mutual reinforcement with them.For example, as noted above, the U.S. economy has depended upon occupational segre-gation by race, and many historical examples illustrate how class and classism are compli-cated by and entangled with race and racism. In the contemporary U.S., the school-to-prison pipeline, prison labor, and non-unionized migrant labor in agricultural and domestic work connect race intimately with economic exploitation. Race and class are so entangled that race continues to serve as a class indicator, as evidenced by the persistent racial dispari-ties in wealth and income (Lipsitz, 1998; Sullivan, Meschede, Dietrich, Shapiro, Traub, Reutschlin, & Draut, 2015).Historically, religion was used to justify economic exploitation. The presumed superi-ority of Christianity was used to justify the murder of Native peoples and appropriation of Native lands by European settlers, as well as the exploitation of black, Sikh, Muslim, Chinese, and Japanese talent and labor. In all these cases, resistance was met by violence from armed security forces, militias, and police.Gender intersects with class and race for women in domestic service (mainly African American, Caribbean, and/or Latina), who have been vulnerable to wage uncertainty and sexual abuse, as it did historically for the women who rebelled against wage cuts, long hours, and unsafe working conditions in 19th-century New England mill towns and 20th-century sweatshops. CLASSISM |233Occupational segregation and unequal pay mean that women have less of their own income and wealth than men (although they may access some class privileges through the income and wealth of family members). Women still perform endless hours of unpaid work caring for children and the elderly (Folbre, 2001), while men are socialized to equate their self-worth with their inancial net worth.The intersection of classism with heterosexism can be seen in part through the repro-duction of class within families. It is still true that many lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB), and queer people are estranged from their families of origin, which can lead to loss of eco-nomic and social capital. Those who have been ineligible to marry (and those who choose not to) are excluded from policies that reward marriage with economic beneits. Along with the risk of employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, this means that LGB people are more likely to live in poverty than their heterosexual peers (Sears & Badget, 2012). Among youth, LGB, queer, and trans* youth are disproportionately likely to lose access to family support and become homeless, leading to increased risk of violence and criminalization (Quintana, Rosenthal, & Krehely, 2010).Like LGB people, many trans* people suffer from downward mobility spawned by fam-ily rejection, in addition to potential loss of professional networks (social capital) due to transphobia. Discrimination in employment, health care, and safety net services; lack of access to an appropriate government-issued identiication; and occupational segregation into criminalized work all conspire to make trans* people highly concentrated among those living in poverty (Shlasko, 2014).Classism also intersects with ableism: People living in poverty are more likely than others to acquire disabilities (through factors like workplace injuries, poor nutrition, and limited access to health care), and people with disabilities are more likely than people without disabilities to experience downward mobility (due to factors like employment discrimination and lack of support for health- and accommodation-related expenses). A far higher percentage of people with disabilities live in households that are below the poverty level (29% as opposed to 10% overall), and a similarly disproportionate number report not having adequate access to health care or transportation (National Organization on Disability, 2000).Youth and elder oppression intersect with class in multiple ways. Changes in the economy over the last few decades mean that younger people today face a much more challenging economic environment than their parents and grandparents did. Entire categories of stable working-class jobs that used to be available to people who did not attend college—such as manufacturing jobs—have moved overseas. Professionalization of some ields means that work that was previously performed by people with little formal education now often requires a bachelor’s degree or more—such as in early childhood education—so that a college degree now in some cases has become equivalent to the high school diploma of the past. Meanwhile, the cost of college has escalated dramatically, and the availability of scholarships has decreased (St. John, 2003). As a result, today’s college generation gradu-ates with substantially greater debt than prior generations (Kamenetz, 2006), which often leads to postponing life milestones, like moving away from one’s parents, purchasing or even renting a long-term home, and having children.For elders, increasing health care costs and the economic collapse of 2008 have meant that many people were not able to retire when they expected to. People were forced to continue to work well into old age, while leaving fewer job openings for young adults entering the workforce. Elders who had depended on income from work often face pov-erty when they stop working. Elders who wish to work or need to work face discrimina-tion in hiring, and may be forced out despite capability and experience. | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO234In each of these examples, we’ve honed in on the intersection of classism with one or two other systems of oppression, but of course it’s not that simple. An intersectional analy-sis acknowledges all of the interactions among all of the systems of oppression as well as the various levels at which they can be identiied—a practically unimaginable complexity. We usually think about one, two, or perhaps three systems or levels at a time, in order to examine speciics at a scale that we can conceptualize. Yet we return to the broader frame-work to remind ourselves that no system of oppression can be isolated from the others; all of the systems or levels are relevant to each other all of the time. In the pedagogy and facilitation sections below, we present a design that attempts to strike a balance between zooming in on classism particularly, and maintaining a broad intersectional view. CURRENT GLOBAL CLASS AND CLASSISM ISSUESThe collapse of inancial markets and soaring private debt after 2008 shook up everyone from Main Streets to Wall Streets, in a global context where “Wall Street” referred to inancial net-works linking New York and Los Angeles to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Shanghai. If we are to understand the international scope and local consequences of global inancial interdependency, we need to trace the entanglements of global capital (inance, ownership, and trade) with global resources (cheap labor and raw materials) as well as with educational systems geared to produce a tiered workforce (Apple, 2010; Collins, 2012; Piketty, 2014).Several speciic examples will be obvious, such as the U.S. dependency on oil markets that have also affected our Middle East policy, the outsourcing of clothing manufacture to low-wage workers in South Korea and China to maintain a price-advantage within U.S. markets, and the outsourcing of technical jobs to college-trained workers in India and Paki-stan. Another example is the geo-economics by which heroin from poppies grown in Peru and Afghanistan gets reined in local drug labs and transported by murderously competing drug cartels, who control trade routes across national borders to reach the drug markets in the U.S. and elsewhere.Globalization has made an already complicated set of economic interdependencies all the more dificult to understand. Still, as social justice educators, we believe it is important to help participants not only to understand the broader context of our international eco-nomic interdependencies, but also to locate themselves in these systems and draw connec-tions from broad economic contexts to smaller scale relationships and experiences. Only by coordinating these frames of reference and placing themselves in the shoes of people who have resisted class oppression in the past, and continue to resist in the present, does it seem possible for participants to understand the role of personal responsibility and agency (Taibbi, 2014; Young, 2011). This is our effort in the following design.CLASSISM CURRICULUM DESIGNThe classism design presented in this chapter aims to provide participants with an overview of the core social justice education (SJE) concepts related to classism, together with a basic understanding of historical and current manifestations of classism at the individual, institu-tional, and cultural levels. We also focus on possibilities for taking action and making change to challenge classism in our personal lives, universities, workplaces, and communities.This design, like other designs in this volume, uses four quadrants as a way to sequence learning goals, key concepts, and activities. The quadrants generally follow the sequence CLASSISM |235“What? So what? Now what?” The design can easily be modiied for other modalities, such as short workshops or semester-long courses.This sample design presupposes familiarity with the core social justice concepts that we consider foundational to any social justice approach presented in Chapter 4. In the quad-rants below, we incorporate these core concepts as organizers for an exploration of a social justice approach to classism. It is strongly recommended that instructors and facilitators will have read Chapter 4, and will have considered these core concepts fully, before apply-ing them in a social justice approach to classism.The sample design for classism is followed by learning objectives and key concepts speciic to each quadrant, as well as brief descriptions of the activities needed to carry out the design. Detailed instructions necessary to carry out the activities, as well as any handouts needed for each activity, can be found on the Classism website, Part 1, that accompanies this volume.Following the design with its learning outcomes, core concepts, and activities, the chap-ter closes with a general discussion of pedagogical, design, and facilitation issues that we have found likely to be needed in teaching and learning about classism. More focused facili-tation considerations related to each activity can be found with each activity on the website.Quadrant 1: Opening the Session and Introductory Material1. Welcome and Logistics (10 min)2. Icebreaker Option A: Common Ground (15– 20 min)3. Icebreaker Option B: Meet and Greet (10 min)4. Assumptions, Goals, and Agenda (10 min)5. Frameworks (10 min)Group Norms and Guidelines1. Option A: Creation of Group Norms and Guidelines (10 min)2. Option B: Hopes and Concerns (30 min)Self-Relection and Sharing about Class Background1. Class Background Inventory (20–50 min)2.□Deining□Class□Brainstorm□(15□min)Income and Wealth Distribution1. Option A: Distribution of Wealth Activity: 10 Chairs (30–45 min)2. Option B: Video & Discussion3. Quintiles (UFE activity demonstrating changes in real income over two 30-year periods; highlights impact of government policy on individual class experiences) (20 min)Quadrant 2: Class Culture Activity1. Option A: Discussion of Class Culture Readings (assigned ahead of time or handed out during the session) (30–90 min)2.□Option□B:□Class□Culture□Guided□Relection□(20–40□min)Cultural Capital Activity1. Option A: Cultural Capital Questionnaire (30–45 min)2. Option B: Cultural Capital Brainstorm (60 min)Social Capital Activity1. Option A: Exploring Your Network (30–45 min)2. Option B: Quantifying Your Social Network (30–45 min)History1. Option A: History Lecture Presentation (30–60 min)2. Optional B: Participant Activity to Accompany Lecture Presentation (60–90 min)3. Option C: Family History in Context (30–45 min)Integrate Learning1. Closure Activity (20–30 min)Quadrant 3: Bring in Unrepresented Voices1. Option A: Multimedia Activity (70–90 min)2. Option B: Discuss Reading Assignments (70–90 min)Bringing It All Together1. Examples of Classism Using a Five Faces of Classism Activity (40–90 min)2. Follow-up with Examples in Contexts: Option A: Web of Institutional Classism (20–40 min) Option B: Identifying Opportunities for Coalition (30–60 min)Quadrant 4: Classism in Your [Insert Context]1. Option A: Classism in Your . . . (60 min)2. Option B: Organizational Classism Assessment (45–60 min)Taking Action1. Acting Accountably (4A’s) (10 min)2. Action Continuum (20–40 min)3. Action Planning (60–90 min)Closing Activity1 Option A: Closure Using Sentence Stems Such as One Takeaway or One Next Step (15–30 min)2 Option B: Asking and Offering (15–30 min) | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO236QUADRANT 1: OPENING THE SESSION AND INTRODUCTORY MATERIALLearning Outcomes for Quadrant 1:• Participants understand that this is an SJE approach to classism• Participants understand principles of participating in an SJE learning community• Participants can explain deinitions of “class” and “classism” by drawing on multiple class indicators• Participants can describe some key features of the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S., and how they have changed over two example periods in recent U.S. history• Participants can deine a set of class categories• Participants begin to relect on their own class backgrounds, and locate themselves in the macro- and meso- level discussions that followKey Concepts for Quadrant 1: Class, classism, class indicator, income, wealth, ruling class, owning class, professional middle class, buffer class, working class, poverty class.Activities and Options for Quadrant 1• Opening the Session and Introductory Material The two icebreakers—Option A: Common Ground and Option B: Meet and Greet—are activities through which participants learn something about each other and get a sense of who is in the group. “Assumptions, Goals, and Agenda” are brief presentations that establish some parameters for the classism workshop or course. Frameworks: Instructors briely explain the SJE approach and how it applies to classism, drawing on Chapters 1–4 as well as this chapter.• Group Norms and Guidelines Option A creates group norms and guidelines, and uses a brainstorm to generate the guidelines. Option B begins with participants’ hopes and concerns, and then uses a group discussion to create norms and guidelines that address those hopes and concerns.• Self Relection and Sharing about Class Background “Class Background Inventory” is a relection and discussion activity that helps participants begin thinking and talking about the multiple layers of their class background. “Deining Class Brainstorm” is a brainstorm and guided discussion that draws out and formalizes participants’ implicit deinitions of class, and establishes a shared deinition for the course/workshop.• Income and Wealth Distribution Distribution of Wealth Activity, Option A: 10 Chairs, is a participatory activity that uses a spatial metaphor to demonstrate the distribution of wealth in the U.S., and to introduce functional deinitions of class categories. Distribution of Wealth Activity, Option B, is a video and discussion. Distribution of Income Activity: Quintiles is a participatory activity that uses a spatial metaphor to demonstrate changes in the income growth of different class groups as quintiles during two recent periods of U.S. history, and to begin to make connections with policies that impact income inequality. CLASSISM |237QUADRANT 2: CLASS CULTURE ACTIVITYLearning Outcomes for Quadrant 2:• Participants can deine and explain these class indicators: Class culture, cultural capi-tal, and social capital, and they understand how each indicator is related to the repro-duction of power• Participants understand some historical context for the current class system• Participants locate themselves and their families relative to each class indicator and the historical context they’ve learned• Participants note intersectionality of other manifestations of oppression with classismKey Concepts for Quadrant 2: Class culture, cultural capital, social capital, power, unionization.Activities and Options for Quadrant 2• Class Culture Activity Option A: Discussion of Class Culture Readings. These readings are assigned ahead of time or distributed as handouts during the session. Option B: Class Culture Guided Relection. This activity uses guided relection and discussion to explore participants’ experiences of class culture mismatches and to discuss implications for cross-class relationships, cross-class situations, and the reproduction of class.• Cultural Capital Activity Option A: Cultural Capital Questionnaire. This activity helps participants under-stand how our personal/familial culture and cultural assets intersect with class, class privilege, and class inequality. Option B: Cultural Capital Brainstorm. This activity helps participants think about the relationship between cultural capital and class cultures.• Social Capital Activity Option A: Exploring Your Social Network. This activity helps participants identify the people in their social network and who they can go to for certain kinds of con-nections, resources, and advice. Option B: Quantifying Your Social Network. This activity helps participants iden-tify recognize the relationship between cultural capital, material capital, and social capital, and how class inequality is perpetuated.• History Option A: History Lecture Presentation. The facilitator presents “historical lega-cies” described earlier in this chapter, supplemented by the U.S. Class and Clas-sism History/Timeline Handout located on the website. Option B: Participant Activity to Accompany a Lecture Presentation. The facilita-tor presents an overview (as above) and engages participants in an activity. Option C: Family History in Context. This option is used as an in-class activity or as a homework assignment. This activity leads participants to either relect upon (in-class activity) or interview (homework activity) their own extended fam-ily members and to place their extended family history in the historical context from the lecture (Options A or B) as well as their readings.• Integrate learning—Session Closure Activity: This closing activity assists participants with bringing together the session’s themes and integrating their learning, and pro-vides an opportunity to air remaining questions and highlight additional themes to inform facilitators’ planning for the next session. | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO238QUADRANT 3: BRING IN UNREPRESENTED VOICESLearning Outcomes for Quadrant 3:• Participants incorporate unfamiliar examples from class positionalities that are un- or under-represented in the group• Intersectionality• Participants can identify manifestations of classism at different levels and in different formsKey Concepts for Quadrant 3: Individual, institutional, and cultural levels; Five Faces of Oppression.Activities and Options for Quadrant 3• Bringing in Unrepresented Voices Option A: Multimedia Activity. Video and Internet resources are set up in dif-ferent rooms and stations so that participants can watch and respond to various depictions of class and classism. Option B: Discuss Assigned Readings. If reading assignments have been com-pleted, this provides a small-group opportunity for participants to either respond to guided questions about the readings, or generate their own questions, for whole-group discussion.• Bringing It All Together—Classism Examples Five Faces of Oppression Classism Activity: This interactive small-group activity draws out a variety of examples of manifestations of classism and explores some overlaps and interconnections with other systems of oppression. Follow-up Option A: Web of Institutional Classism. This option is a visual and kinesthetic demonstration of how various manifestations of classism in institutions work together. Follow-up Option B: Identifying Opportunities for Coalition. This structured problem-solving discussion in small groups highlights the overlaps and intersec-tions between classism and other systems of oppression, and begins to transition participants toward thinking about steps for effective action.QUADRANT 4: CLASSISM IN YOUR [INSERT CONTEXT]Learning Outcomes for Quadrant 4:• Participants apply concepts of class and classism to a speciic organizational context of their school, workplace, etc.• Participants apply concepts of class and classism to their own behavior as an “ally” to those with less class privilege than them• Participants consider elements needed for an effective action planKey Concepts for Quadrant 4:Acting as allies, advocates, in coalition, network building, spheres of inluenceActivities and Options for Quadrant 4• Classism in your [insert context] Option A: Classism in Your . . . (school, workplace, etc.). This activity helps par-ticipants recognize manifestations of classism in their context, and to begin prac-ticing effective ways to take action against classism in everyday situations. CLASSISM |239 Option B: Organizational Classism Assessment. This activity helps participants apply concepts and information around classism to their speciic organizational context.• Taking Action Acting Accountably (4A’s). This activity helps introduce a framework for helping participants to think about accountable action for liberation. Action Continuum. In this activity, participants go to stations around the room to discuss where individual participants are in relation to addressing classism, stand in groups and share examples, and share a few examples publicly. Participants then move to the station that describes where they would like to be and discuss ways of achieving that goal. Action Planning. This activity helps participants identify ways to take action against classism in everyday life as well as in their organization; to relect upon their spheres of inluence and potential risks; to identify the skills, knowledge, and coalitions or networks needed; and to make commitments to carry through the change.• Closing Activity Option A: Sentence Stems. This closing activity is for groups that have come together only for this workshop/course. Option B: Asking & Offering. This closing activity is for intact groups that brings closure to the learning experience and helps the group integrate new learnings into their ordinary work together.NOTES FOR PEDAGOGY, DESIGN, AND FACILITATIONIn classism workshops, as with any other social justice topic, there are challenges speciic to the topic itself. Some are dilemmas related to overall pedagogical frameworks, others relate to design and sequencing decisions, and still others are facilitation challenges; many are a combination of two or more of these. In this concluding segment of the Classism chapter, we present speciic issues of pedagogy, design, and facilitation that, in our experi-ence, are important considerations for instructors and facilitators.CLASS AS CATEGORY AND IDENTITYAs noted above, the public discourse on class tends to obscure economic realities, in part through encouraging nearly everyone to identify as “middle class.” As a result, participants will have different relationships with their own social group memberships as members of class categories. Some may not “identify with” their class category; it may feel like a situa-tion they are in and not part of who they are as a person. Others may identify with a class category that does not describe their current or previous class position. As a result, facilita-tors may ind ourselves in the awkward position, when teaching about the realities of the class divide, of challenging participants’ class-based self-identity. Although in general it is usually inappropriate (and, especially when in a position of power as an instructor/facili-tator, unethical) to challenge someone’s self-identity, in the case of classism, self-identity based on misunderstandings of the class-based categories may need further probing or clariication. Yet one of the ways classism is internalized is that people often misunderstand what their relative class ranking is. | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO240For participants, being told or realizing during the workshop/course they have been mistaken about their class can come as a shock. As facilitators, we must balance respecting the ways in which participants have made sense of their experiences with supporting them to challenge those understandings with new frameworks and information. It is helpful to distinguish carefully between when we are speaking about class identity per se—meaning the class group with which someone identiies—and when we are speaking about class category—one’s relative social ranking in more objective or at least describable terms.The issue of class identiication brings up a particularly acute facilitation dilemma around deining class categories. On one hand, participants may be anxious for deinitive meanings with which to categorize themselves and others. Yet, since people’s implicit dei-nitions of these categories often include value judgments about the desirability of belong-ing to different class categories, participants may also be reluctant to categorize themselves honestly. Participants’ processes of sorting themselves and their experiences into these categories—as ill-deined and emotionally laden as the categories are—can forestall open inquiry into class experiences. In addition, some participants may simply lack awareness about relevant class markers and/or analytic frameworks that would help them make sense of their experiences. For example, some participants may not have accurate information about the quantity, type, and origins of their family resources.One way to address this challenge is to postpone deining class categories, and irst encourage participants to discuss their own class backgrounds and situations with regard to speciic class markers rather than general class categories. This approach creates space for important conversations about the range of experience (not just identity categories) in the group, and gives participants opportunities to discover and interrogate their own implicit deinitions of the categories. However, it can be time-consuming. For shorter workshops, especially workshops with a speciic goal that isn’t served by such conversations, deining the categories at the beginning may be preferable.Another way that class identiication comes up is when participants have internalized beliefs about meritocracy. For example, a middle-class student may insist that their academic success is a result of their own hard work and cannot be attributed to class advantage. Or, a working-class student may insist that class barriers won’t limit them and that their hard work is going to pay off in inancial success, despite well-documented trends to the contrary.Participants’ beliefs about class expressed on a micro-level may seem like resistance to acknowledging the realities of classism, and may have the effect of distracting from macro-level discussions. At the same time, these beliefs are sometimes deeply ingrained parts of who participants understand themselves to be, and may serve important functions for them psychologically. The stories people tell themselves about meritocracy can help them to feel worthy and hopeful rather than guilty or hopeless. Rather than engaging with participants’ beliefs about themselves as individuals, it is often most helpful for facilitators to distinguish between what may occur at a micro-level with any given individual, and the macro-systems that create trends, likelihoods, and overall inequity. As participants process their learning about macro-systems, their understanding of their own identities and roles will likely evolve as well.WHO IS AND WHO IS NOT IN THE ROOM?The class diversity among participants makes a signiicant difference in the overall experi-ence of the course/workshop, along with diversity of other social identities, generation, family immigration history, and individual experiences. Since some activities have been designed to take advantage of the diversity of experiences and viewpoints in the group, it is important that facilitators be aware of the relative diversity or homogeneity of a group and plan accordingly. CLASSISM |241In terms of generation, the economic moment in which people experience major life milestones, like inishing school, getting a irst job, and retiring, have a large impact on their experience of class. Someone who grew up in a blue-collar family in the 1950s, when many blue-collar workers were unionized and well-paid, will have a markedly different experience of being “working class” than someone who grew up in a similar class situa-tion in the 1990s. The difference is not only about their ages now, but also about their generations.Families’ immigration histories impact their experiences of class, both in terms of where they stand in the generational sequence since their family’s entry to the U.S. as well as changes in the larger economic context that affect their class. For example, some immi-grants who are highly trained professionals experience a drop in status and income upon immigrating because their credentials are not valid in the U.S.Many class markers vary across region and urban/suburban/ruralness because of differ-ences in the cost of living and the different resources needed to live comfortably in differ-ent contexts. For example, in some major cities, owning a car for each adult in the family is a luxury, while in most rural areas, it is a prerequisite for being able to work outside the home.To account for these factors, facilitators should learn as much as possible about the group in advance of inalizing design decisions. In some cases, a pre-survey may be pos-sible; in other cases, facilitators will have to make educated guesses based on the popula-tion of the school, organization, or community from which participants are drawn. If some class categories are likely to be very underrepresented or unrepresented, facilitators should explore ways to bring perspectives and issues relevant to those groups into the course/workshop. Additionally, facilitators should be cautious about assumptions or generaliza-tions that may confuse or alienate participants based on differences in region, immigration, generation, and so on.In some cases, a majority of participants may be within a relatively narrow range of class backgrounds, with a few outliers who have far more or far less class privilege. Facilitators should take care to address the needs of outliers, and avoid teaching only to the needs of the majority. It is especially important to consider those participants who are likely to experience themselves as “the only” representative of a particular class group (or other social group). Avoid appointing these participants as “experts” or examples for other par-ticipants’ learning; yet do consider how the whole group might be served by discussions that seem at irst to be mostly for/about the outliers. Often there are larger themes that might be elucidated by dedicating time to the perspectives and experiences of participants who are not in the majority.In many college contexts (and some other groups as well), it is likely that a majority of participants will identify as middle class, whether or not they are middle class according to the “working deinitions” of class indicators or class deinitions that have been devel-oped during Quadrant 1, either in the “Deining Class Brainstorm” activity or through the parameters of income in the “Distribution of Income Activity: Quintiles.” It will be impor-tant that the group has agreed to stipulate “working deinitions,” however they are arrived at through the activities in Quadrant 1. If participants identify as “middle class” without nuance or qualiication, the facilitator can remind participants that this assumption occurs partly because of the society-wide norm of describing practically everyone as middle class, and partly because of the class segregation that shapes student bodies and many workplaces to be relatively class-homogenous.If a participant expressed the opinion that all or most of the participants are middle class, it may be dificult for participants who know they are not middle class to speak up and dis-rupt that normalized narrative. When someone says, “we are all middle class,” facilitators can (1) remind participants that they do not know the experiences of others in the room, | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO242(2) initiate discussion of why the group might not be as homogenous as it seems (that is, what institutional and societal forces lead to some groups not being represented), (3) initi-ate discussion of why people might believe that the group is more homogeneous than it is, and (4) remind the group of the multiple factors that shape class location and the dificulty of precision because of these factors. If this conversation occurs before more nuanced dei-nitions of class categories are introduced, it can be useful to return to it later to ask partici-pants to reassess their own class category in light of the new deinitions, and to relect on how that changes their understanding of the range of class experiences in the group.One speciic way the “we’re all middle class” trope comes up is when participants assert that the fact of being a college student (or a student at a particular college) is such a privi-lege that it overrides any class differences. This statement often serves to silence discus-sion of the inequities within the student body and the micro- and meso-level classism that less-privileged students face on campus (see the Education section of this chapter). Facilita-tors can address such statements by briely acknowledging the partial truth they contain, and then providing and/or asking for examples of how/why they are not true.CLASS CULTURE AND CULTURAL CONGRUENCEIt is important to ensure that the course/workshop is culturally relevant for all partici-pants. Instructors/facilitators should give particular attention to known class culture pat-terns, and should consider how they might unconsciously bring professional-middle-class assumptions to their pedagogy, design, and facilitation. Because of the normalizing and privileging of professional-middle-class culture in many organizations, this is a risk even if the facilitators/instructors did not grow up professional middle-class! Considerations of cultural congruence can come up in many ways, and they are addressed in the next several sections focusing on guidelines, risk and taboo, personal vs. academic understandings of class, and action.GUIDELINES FOR PARTICIPATIONEstablishing guidelines or group agreements will enable participants to feel more com-fortable approaching challenging topics and give them a sense of ownership of the group process. For classism courses/workshops, it is especially important to set clear guidelines around conidentiality and participation, since participants may be invited to disclose sen-sitive information about their inances or family situations while participating in group activities. In order to address some participants’ need for privacy while still encouraging relection and participation, one guideline to consider is that when someone chooses not to participate in a particular activity, they should instead relect, and if possible share their relections, about the reasons for their choice.The Case Against GuidelinesAs valuable as guidelines can be, there are arguments against using guidelines in certain situations (Hunter, n.d.; Lakey, 2010). One of the potential pitfalls of group guidelines is that they tend to relect the dominant culture of the group, the facilitators, and/or the organization (see Chapter 3). In a course/workshop about classism, it can be particu-larly counterproductive to establish guidelines that relect professional-middle-class or owning-class cultural values as if these values are universal. Since most participants and many educators have little practice thinking about class culture, and since those cultural norms are reinforced in many organizations and in college and university settings, this is all CLASSISM |243too likely to occur, even when the facilitators do not come from middle-class or upper-class backgrounds.Guidelines addressing how participants should manage conlict are one example. For many reasons, including cultural patterns and speciic family experiences, participants may or may not view conlict as potentially positive or productive. In a classism course/workshop, it is important to acknowledge and value class culture differences about conlict. What we know about class culture patterns in general will not hold true for everyone, since personal experi-ence and other identities also play a role; nevertheless, it is useful to be aware of the patterns.Speciically, there is research that suggests that poor and working-class cultures value con-lict and express it openly. For some people with those backgrounds, it may be productive for group members to explicitly express disagreement with another’s perspective or actions (Lakey, 2010; Leondar-Wright, 2014). This contrasts with many professional-middle-class cultures, which tend to be conlict-avoidant. To many poor and working-class partici-pants, professional-middle-class expectations of how to communicate disagreement may feel formulaic, or like “sugar coating.” People from poor and working-class backgrounds who participate in majority-professional-middle-class settings (such as higher education) are already accustomed to having their communication styles stiled, especially around conlict, based on enforced professional-middle-class norms. To create a similarly stiling environment in a workshop/course about classism is an unfortunate and counterproduc-tive contradiction. Instead, we encourage noting the variety of approaches to conlict (and other aspects of group communication) and supporting participants to communicate across differences as relevant, without norming or enforcing any particular communication style over another.Knowing some of the pitfalls and complications of group guidelines, it is important that facilitators be thoughtful and deliberate in deciding whether to establish guidelines, and if so, how to use and revisit them. These choices have important implications for different expressions of class (and/or ethnic, racial, gender, and other) cultures. When guidelines are not used, the facilitators need another plan for how to keep the course/workshop produc-tive for all participants. For example, they should build in more time for group process and/or for teaching communication and feedback skills that participants can use to help the course/workshop go well.RISK AND TABOOIn considering sequencing, we generally encourage facilitators to start with those activi-ties that present relatively low emotional risk for participants, and progress to higher-risk activities that ask participants to step farther out of their comfort zones. With regard to classism, participants will often have widely varying senses of how risky a particular activ-ity feels, because of their class backgrounds and other factors.To some participants, describing their class experiences at all may feel like a high-risk activity. Participants at the lower and higher ends of the income and wealth spectrum may be reluctant to disclose out of shame, embarrassment, or guilt, or out of fear that other participants will judge them. Many middle-class participants may believe that it is inap-propriate to talk about family inance based on the widely held taboo against talking about class differences, especially in quantitative terms.On the other hand, for some participants from poor and working-class backgrounds, it may feel normal and comfortable to discuss inancial struggles in frank and speciic terms. These participants may feel impatient with what feels to them like an unnecessarily cau-tious pace, especially if they see it as accommodating the discomfort expressed by partici-pants with more privilege. | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO244Disclosure about class tends to feel risky in different ways depending on whether partic-ipants are an intact group (who already know each other before the course/workshop) or a new group (who come together for the course/workshop). With intact groups, participants may feel nervous about disrupting existing assumptions and patterns in their relationships; on the other hand, they may have a base of trust that makes disclosure feel like less of a stretch. With new groups, the lack of established trust may make disclosure feel like a forced intimacy that participants may not immediately be ready for. In an ongoing course that focuses on classism for some sessions and other topics in other sessions, the group may be more like a new group or more like an intact group, depending on when in the course the classism section comes.When considering activities and sequencing decisions, we urge facilitators to imagine the range of perspectives that participants may bring. Craft a sequence in which all participants are encouraged to push their comfort zones in different ways. Although different participants may feel challenged at different times, try to mix it up such that no group of participants spends a long time feeling far more or far less vulnerable than another group.Additionally, consider initiating a discussion about the taboo itself. Questions to address include what is considered “private” information and why; what purposes shame and guilt play in maintaining the class system; for whom and in what contexts it is taboo to talk about money, and for whom and in what contexts it is not taboo; and in what ways the taboo serves and/or undermines justice.TENSIONS BETWEEN ACADEMIC AND PERSONAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF CLASSISMMost participants come into classes/workshops about classism from one of three different perspectives and positions about class and classism. First, some participants have thought very little about class or classism in any context prior to the course/workshop. Second, some participants may come with signiicant academic knowledge about class and classism (often gained from classes in Economics or Sociology), while having limited if any relec-tion on their own class background, classed experiences, or personal participation in the system of classism. This second group’s understanding of class may be highly structured but impersonal, and they may exhibit unconsciously classist behaviors while articulating an anti-classist analysis. Finally, others may come motivated by their personal experiences of being class straddlers (i.e., people who grew up in one class category and later experienced class mobility putting them into another category) or of being outliers in relation to their peers. Their understandings start from the personal, may be emotional for them, and may or may not also include some systemic analysis stemming from learning in school or the community.With participants coming from such different perspectives, the questions arise: Which kinds of knowledge are considered real and valid? Whose views and experi-ences are given credence? What is the value for the second sort of participant of add-ing personalized relection to their understanding of classism, and what is the value for the third sort of participant in adding structured theoretical knowledge to their understanding?As with all the curricula in this book, we believe a balance of personal and theoreti-cal learning is most effective. Facilitators should acknowledge and appreciate the various kinds of knowledge participants may bring to the group, and participants should not be allowed to use any form of knowledge as a “trump” to discount or delegitimize other participants’ perspectives. At the same time, it is important to highlight and interrogate the ways in which academic and impersonal knowledge is privileged over that drawn from CLASSISM |245personal experience—both in the sense that the former is taken more serious by the power structures, and in the sense that a level of class privilege is required to have access to it.Participants with academic understandings about class may need to be reminded that their knowledge does not exempt them from learning about practical, everyday, micro-level impacts of classism; in fact, it may oblige them to approach the learning opportunity with particular openness. Participants with more personal understandings about class may need to be reassured that their lack of academic learning about it (for those for whom that’s true) does not take away from their real lived knowledge; at the same time, they can be encouraged to explore what they might gain from also learning about classism on a more theoretical level.FOCUSING ON THE SYSTEMIC/CULTURAL LEVELS TO AVOID THE INDIVIDUAL AND INTERPERSONAL LEVELS OF CLASSISMA related but slightly different facilitation challenge comes up when some participants may tend to focus only on broad-scale structural analysis—the macro level—as a way of avoiding micro-level discussions that would feel too personal. This tendency may let some participants “off the hook” of examining their own experiences of privilege and/or oppression, and can silence other participants who could contribute insights based on their micro-level relections.Focusing on the macro level is important, but it should not be used to distract from or avoid other issues. If discussion seems to keep drifting back to the macro level while meso- and micro-level topics go unexplored, or if participants say or imply that macro-level issues should take precedence over other parts of the discussion, facilitators should steer the conversation toward a more balanced micro/meso/macro approach. It can be useful to remind participants that classism as a system relies on all three levels; the purpose of the course/workshop is not only to identify classism that happens “out there” in macro trends, but also to notice its manifestations “in here”—in our everyday lives, cultures, and institutions—and to seek ways to address it on all three levels.Similarly, some participants may want to focus on a global context in a way that avoids or masks classism in the U.S. For example, someone may argue that, relative to people in many other countries, everyone in the U.S. is privileged economically. Such statements contain some truth, and can be an important part of the conversation. Yet too often they have the impact of obscuring the reality of classism and inequality within the U.S. Partici-pants should be encouraged to consider the global context, and should also be urged to recognize and grapple with the reality of inequality and classism in the U.S., which is more extreme than they probably realize.TAKING ACTIONAs in any social justice course/workshop, it is important to address how participants can apply the new awareness and knowledge they have gained. In a successful course/work-shop, participants’ learning will generate a lot of energy and feelings. Reactions may include distress at the injustices they have become aware of, feelings of helplessness at the enormity of the systems they confront, relief at being able to articulate and explain some-thing that they had previously noticed but not understood, and a desire to do something to make it better. A well-designed workshop gives participants options and tools with which to channel this energy into useful action.Too often the question of how to act on new learning is relegated to a short segment at the very end of the course/workshop, but there are many ways to incorporate it throughout. | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO246A beneit of starting to think about action earlier in the course/workshop is that partici-pants’ learning can be more solution-focused, and any helplessness they may feel upon confronting the scale of injustice in the world is less likely to be shorter-lived. On the other hand, if participants know very little about classism, starting to talk about action too soon can generate resistance from participants who are not convinced that classism is a problem. In group-action assignments, differences in understanding and analysis among participants can lead to dificulty agreeing on a project, especially in the beginning when participants may not yet have common vocabulary, knowledge, and skills to move their conversation forward. In these cases, introducing an action project in the second half or even toward the end of a longer course may be preferable.In short one-time workshops, the action segment may be as simple as a closing relection asking each participant to share one thing they will do next. Allotting even ive minutes to relection on next steps is far preferable to not addressing it at all. However, we urge facilitators to allocate as much time as is feasible to taking action. In the included design, we devote signiicant time to action, mostly in the fourth quadrant.In some contexts, action will be built into every step of the design. For example, a training with an intact group may begin with acknowledgement of a speciic problem the group is hoping to address through learning about classism. The problem can be revisited at different points throughout the training to make note of how participants’ learning adds to their understanding of the problem and possible approaches to solving it, and the training can culminate with a more in-depth problem-solving and action-planning session. Similarly, in a course spanning multiple weeks, an action project may be assigned near the beginning or middle of the course, with periodic touch points and a culminating presenta-tion or report due at the end of the course.INTERSECTIONALITYAn intersectional framework should inform every aspect of a course/workshop, from plan-ning to design to content to facilitation. Before planning a course/workshop on classism, facilitators should consider the possible impacts and implications of doing so in their particu-lar context. Without a doubt, most groups need to learn about classism, but they also need to learn about and address many other systems of oppression. Which voices and conversa-tions are ampliied, and which might be talked over or silenced, by offering a course/work-shop primarily focused on classism? Are there other topics that should be offered or at least announced simultaneously, in order to make the intersectional approach of the project trans-parent? Whose voices are centered and whose are marginalized in the planning process itself?As the course/workshop begins, we encourage facilitators to introduce intersectionality from the very start. Doing so helps to set a tone of inviting complexity, and can reassure participants that a focus on classism does not preclude discussion of racism, sexism, or other systems of oppression; on the contrary, a robust exploration of classism requires that other systems be considered.In terms of content and facilitation, many of the activities in our design include informa-tion and opportunities for discussion about classism’s intersections with other systems of oppression. Even when intersectionality is not explicit in an activity, facilitators should be alert to opportunities for deepening discussion by giving examples and asking follow-up questions that highlight intersectionality.For example, on an individual or interpersonal level, if participants are describing their class experiences in one-dimensional terms that only acknowledge class and not other identities/systems, saying things like “as a middle class person, I . . .,” facilitators can fol-low up with questions like: “What other aspects of your identity might contribute to that CLASSISM |247experience? In what ways is that experience about class, and in what ways might it also be about your race, gender, age, religious background, . . .?” Similar responses are appropriate when participants make generalizations about class groups to which they may or may not belong. Intersectionality reminds us of the dangers of saying “all poor people experience such-and-such manifestation of classism.” Rather, we should be holding as an ongoing question for participants to explore, “Which poor people experience such-and-such, how, and why?”Similarly, on an institutional level, if participants describe examples of institutional clas-sism in one-dimensional terms, a facilitator could ask, “How is racism (and/or another relevant system) also showing up in that example? How does the racism of that institu-tion contribute to its classism, and vice versa? What could it look like to examine/address both the racism and the classism of that example at the same time?” On a macro level, if participants are discussing broad trends in culture or history in one-dimensional terms, a facilitator can add complexity with questions like, “What else would we learn about that story if we used an intersectional lens? In addition to class, what else is going on there?”A common and unfortunate pitfall that many participants and facilitators fall into on the way to intersectional analysis is conlating race and class such that discussions hinge on combined categories, as in statements like, “Poor people and people of color are under-represented in the sciences.” The phrase “poor people and people of color” often comes from a well-intentioned desire to acknowledge both racism and classism and to avoid leav-ing anyone out. Unfortunately, such statements fail to distinguish between the different mechanisms and impacts of racism and classism; used sloppily, they can imply that classism impacts poor white people identically to how racism impacts people of color (all of whom are assumed to be poor also). The conversations thus framed tend to focus primarily on those groups that come to mind easily because they represent large numbers of people or highly visible groups, or because they match our stereotypes—such as “poor black urban mothers” and “owning-class white men.” Meanwhile, many other groups—“poor white rural elders,” for example, or “professional-middle-class Latinas,” are ignored.Instead of conlating race and class, we should help participants to learn to specify how racism and classism each function, how they function together, and how they have similar and different impacts on different groups of people. In addition to offering a more robust analysis and leading to richer conversation, this framework helps to ensure that no par-ticipant’s experience or identity will be invisible in the room because it doesn’t match the stereotypical combinations of identities.HISTORYIn a course/workshop that primarily focuses on the present day and on taking action, it can be dificult to justify spending time on history. Yet historical perspective is necessary for understanding the legacies that have led to current economic inequality, as well as traditions of resistance and change that activists draw on today. Since many, if not most, historical manifestations of classism are directly relected in current manifestations, incor-porating history does not mean having only a separate activity about it. Facilitators (and participants) should bring up relevant historical connections throughout the course/work-shop. Additionally, the design we provide here includes a brief historical review to provide information that participants can then draw upon to make connections with their own experiences and contemporary manifestations of classism.In addition to the societal-level history, it can be useful to bring in local or organization-speciic history. For example, in a college course, facilitators might consider including historical material related to the college’s inancial aid system and/or the college’s | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO248role in the economy of the community in which it is located. In a community-organizing context, a history of class in the speciic city, profession, or demographic that unites that group can be compelling and instructive. It will sometimes be beyond the facilitators’ capacity to research and provide such information; if so, consider incorporating an assign-ment in which participants research the issue and report back on both the information gleaned and the process of inding it.SEQUENCING: INDIVIDUAL TO SOCIETAL/CULTURAL LEVELSOne of the key design decisions facilitators need to make is whether to start with an explo-ration of personal experiences (micro-level) before moving on to institutional (meso-level) and societal (macro-level) examples, or vice versa. There are strengths and liabilities of each approach, which vary depending on the nature of the group. Speciically, we’ve found that the micro- to macro-sequencing tends to work best for intact groups that already have a common base of knowledge (whether from reading assignments, from previous sessions in an ongoing course, or from the group’s shared culture that has included talking about class outside of the course/workshop). Macro- to micro-sequencing tends to work best for shorter sessions with new groups in which participants don’t know each other, have not completed pre-reading, and/or have little shared experience to draw on.The four-quadrant design presented here adopts a hybrid model. We start by fram-ing classism as a social justice and intersectional topic, which is itself a macro approach. The irst few activities encourage micro-level relection, before switching to meso- and macro-level activities to establish some shared understanding. Later we return to further, deeper, micro-level relection incorporating the contextual factors participants will have learned about in the meanwhile.BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHERWhether the course/workshop starts with macro-level analysis or micro-level personal tes-timonials, there will come a point when the levels come together and participants are asked to generate examples at all levels and/or of various types, and to recognize the con-nections among the different manifestations. Facilitators face pedagogical decisions about how much to rely on the group’s own knowledge, how much to insert new information, and how to integrate the two.Because this social justice approach to classism may present a new framework for so many people, some participants may initially be unable to generate examples of classism. It is not that they are unfamiliar with the manifestations of classism, but rather that they may be unused to thinking of them as classism, or unused to thinking of class inequality or devaluation as being problematic. It can be helpful for the facilitator(s) to seed the discus-sion with a few examples to get started. The examples could be manifestations of classism and/or manifestations of other systems of oppression. In some cases, the latter may be even more generative: When participants see an example that they recognize immediately and obviously as racist, sexist, or heterosexist (for example), it may lead them to think of parallel or related manifestations of classism that would not otherwise have occurred to them.The design we include here uses Iris Marion Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression” to structure participants’ brainstorm of examples during the second half of the course/work-shop, after a series of activities that will provide many examples for participants to draw on and add to. CLASSISM |249FACILITATOR PREPARATIONEven with the best design, there is some individual work that every facilitator will need to do in order to facilitate effectively about classism. In particular, it is important for facilitators to explore their own hot buttons on issues of classism and class as well as their assumptions about their own and participants’ class positions. Ideally, facilitators should develop this self-awareness in conversation with one or more co-facilitators or colleagues.CLASSISM IN THE CLASSROOM OR WORKSHOPSimilarly, all our preparation and design cannot keep classism out of the classroom. Even as we articulate and explore the many manifestations of classism, we can count on it mani-festing right there and then in the course/workshop. At the very least, facilitators should be aware of such manifestations and seek to mitigate their impact on participants. In some contexts, facilitators may choose to draw attention to the classism in the room as a teach-able moment, to enrich the discussion with real-life, real-time examples. Such discussions can be challenging to facilitate precisely because they are so “real” and present; for the same reason, they can be among the most powerful learning moments of a workshop/course.Note* We ask that those who cite this work always acknowledge by name all of the authors listed rather than either only citing the irst author or using “et al.” to indicate coauthors. All collaborated on the conceptualization, development, and writing of this chapter.ReferencesAlexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New York: New Press.Allan, J., Ozga, J., & Smith, G. (Eds.). (2009). Social capital, professionalism and diversity. Rotter-dam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.Apple, M. W. (Ed.). (2010). Global crises, social justice, and education. New York: Routledge.Bartlett, D. L, & Steele, J. B. (1994). America: Who really pays the taxes? New York: Simon & Schuster.Biddle, B., & Berliner, D. C. (2002, May). A research synthesis: Unequal school funding in the United States. Beyond Instructional Leadership, 59(8), 48–59.Bishaw, A. (2013, Sept.). Poverty 2000–2012: American community survey briefs. (ACSBR/12–01). Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr12-01.pdfBourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge.Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York: Greenwood Press.Boushey, H. (2014, Oct. 15). Understanding economic inequality and growth at the top of the income ladder. The Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Retrieved from http://equitablegrowth.org/research/economic-inequality-growth-top-income-ladder/Brantlinger, E.A. (1993). The politics of social class in secondary school: Views of afluent and impov-erished youth. New York: Teachers College Press.Brantlinger, E. A. (2003). Dividing classes: How the middle class negotiates and rationalizes school advantage. New York: Routledge Falmer.Brodkin, K. (1998). How Jews became white folks & what that says about race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). (2014 Jan. 24). Union membership summary. Retrieved January 11, 2015, from http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO250Burnham, L., & Theodore, N. (2012). Home economics: The invisible and unregulated world of domestic work. New York: National Domestic Workers Alliance.Callahan, D., & Cha, M. J. (2013). Stacked deck: How the dominance of politics by the afluent & busi-ness undermines economic mobility in America. Demos. Retrieved from http://www.demos.org/stacked-deck-how-dominance-politics-afluent-business-undermines-economic-mobility-americaCollins, C. (2012). 99 to 1: How wealth inequality is wrecking the world and what we can do about it. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.Collins, C. (2014, Dec. 15). Echoing in the streets: A growing racial wealth divide. Hufington Post. Retrieved January 17, 2015, from http://www.hufingtonpost.com/chuck-collins/echoing-in-the-streets-a-_b_6319740.htmlCollins, C., & Yeskel, F. (2005). Economic apartheid in America (2nd ed.). New York: The New Press.Cookson, P. W. (2013). Class rules: Exposing inequality in American high schools. New York: Teach-er’s College Press.Daniels, R. (2002). Coming to America: A history of immigration and ethnicity in American life. New York: Perennial.Domhoff, G. W. (1983). Who rules America now? A view for the ’80s. New York: Simon & Schuster.Emelech, Y. (2008). Transmitting inequality: Wealth and the American family. Lanham, MD: Row-man & Littleield.Espenshade, T., & Radford, A. W. (2009). No longer separate, not yet equal: Race and class in elite college admission and campus life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA, 1938). Chapter 676, 52 Stat. 1060 (29 U.S.C. 201 et seq.), passed June 25, 1938. Short title, see 29 U.S.C. 201. Ithaca, NY: Legal Information Institute, Cornell University. Retrieved from http://www.law.cornell.edu/topn/fair_labor_standards_act_of_1938Fair Labor Standards Act Amendments of 1966 (FLSA, 1966). Pub. L. 89–601, 80 Stat. 830, passed Sept. 23, 1966. Short title, see 29 U.S.C. 201 note. Ithaca, NY: Legal Information Institute, Cornell University. Retrieved from http://www.law.cornell.edu/topn/fair_labor_standards_ amendments_of_1966Federal Reserve (2015, April). Consumer credit—G.19 (Federal Reserve statistical release). Retrieved from http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/current/default.htmFiske, S. T., & Markus, H. R. (Eds.). (2012). Facing social class. How societal rank inluences interac-tion. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Folbre, N. (2001). The invisible heart: Economics and family values. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Foner, E. (1998). The story of American freedom. New York: Norton & Co.Fry, R. (2014, Oct. 7). The changing proile of student borrowers: Cumulative student debt among recent college graduates. Pew Research Center. Retrieved January 18, 2015, from http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/10/07/cumulative-student-debt-among-recent-college-graduates/Fry, R., & Kochhar, R. (2014, Dec. 12). Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession. Pew Research Center. Retrieved January 17, 2015, from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/Garcia, J., Lardner, J., & Zeldin, C. (2008). Up to our eyeballs: How shady lenders and failed eco-nomic policies are drowning Americans in debt. New York: New Press.Gordon, C. (2013). Growing apart: A political history of American inequality. Institute for Policy Studies. Retrieved from http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american- inequality/indexGorski, P. C. (2005). Savage unrealities: Uncovering classism in Ruby Payne’s framework (EdChange Working Paper). Retrieved from http://www.edchange. org/publications/Savage_Unrealities.pdf.Guglielmo, J., & Salerno, S. (2003). Are Italians white? How race is made in America. New York: Routledge.Hacker, J., & Pierson, P. (2010). Winner-take-all politics: How Washington made the rich richer—and turned its back on the middle class. New York: Simon & Schuster.Heitzeg, N. (2009). Education or incarceration: Zero tolerance policies and the school to prison pipeline. Forum on Public Policy Online: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table, 5(2), 1–21.Henwood, D. (2003). After the new economy. New York: New Press.Hopkins, L. (2014). Beyond the pearly gates: White, low-income student experiences at elite colleges (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Doctoral Dissertations 2014-current (Paper 96), http://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/96Hunter, D. (n.d.). Break the rules: How ground rules can hurt us. Philadelphia: Training for Change. Retrieved from http://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/break-rules-how-ground-rules-can- hurt-us CLASSISM |251Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. New York: Routledge.Jacobson, M. F. (1998). Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Jensen, B. (2012) . Reading classes: On culture and classism in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-sity Press.Kamenetz, A. (2006). Generation debt: Why now is a terrible time to be young. New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin.Kandel, W. (2008). Proile of hired farmworkers: A 2008 update (Economic Research Report Num-ber 60). Washington, DC: Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/559Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (Eds.). (2007). Cutting class: Socioeconomic status and educa-tion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleield.Kochhar, R., Fry, R., & Taylor, P. (2011, July 26). Wealth gaps rise to record highs between whites, blacks, Hispanics. Pew Research Center. Retrieved January 17, 2015, from http://www.pewsocial trends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/ Korten, D. C. (2010). Agenda for a new economy from phantom wealth to real wealth. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York: Crown.Lakey, G. (2010). Facilitating group learning: Strategies for success with diverse adult learners. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Lamont, A. (2000). The dignity of working men: Morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Lardner, J., & Smith, D. A. (Eds.). (2005). Inequality matters: The growing economic divide in Amer-ica and its poisonous consequences. New York: New Press.Lareau, A. (1987). Social class differences in family-school relationships: The importance of cultural capital. Sociology of Education, 60, 73–85.Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and famly life. Berkeley: University of California Press.Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods: Class, race and family life (2nd ed.). Los Angeles: University of California Press.Lareau, A., & Calarco, J. M. (2012). Class, cultural capital, and institutions: The case of families and schools. In S. T. Fiske & H. R. Markus (Eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank inluences interaction (pp. 61–86). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Lareau, A., & Conley, D. (2008). Social class: How does it work? New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Lavelle, R. (1995). America’s new war on poverty: A reader for action. San Francisco: Blackside KQED Books & Tapes.Leondar-Wright, B. (2005). Class matters: Cross-class alliance building for middle class activists. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers.Leondar-Wright, B. (2014). Missing class: Strengthening social movement groups by seeing class cul-tures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Leondar-Wright, B., & Yeskel, F. (2007). Classism curriculum design. In M. Adams, L. A. Bell, & P. Grifin (Eds.), Teaching for diversity and social justice (2nd ed., pp. 309–333). New York: Routledge.Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people proit from identity politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Long, G. (2013). Differences between union and non-union compensation, 2001–2011. Monthly Labor Review, April 16–23. Washington, DC: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdfLui, M., Robles, B., Leondar-Wright, B., Brewer, R., & Adamson, R. (2006). The color of wealth: The story behind the U.S. racial wealth divide. New York: New Press.Macartney, S., Bishaw, A., & Fontenot, K. (2013, Feb.). Poverty rates for selected detailed race and Hispanic groups by state and place: 2007–2011. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11–17.pdfMantsios, G. (Ed.). (1998). A new labor movement for the new century. New York: Monthly Review Press.Martin, A., & Lehren, A. (2012, May 12). A generation hobbled by the soaring cost of college. The New York Times.Matos-Daigle, J. (2011, Jan. 1). Fulilling their dreams: Latina/o college student narratives on the impact of parental involvement on their academic engagement (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Proquest (Paper AAI3465047).Mayer, G. (2004). Union membership trends in the United States. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/174http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/174 | ADAMS, HOPKINS, AND SHLASKO252McDonough, P. M. (1997). Choosing colleges: How social class and schools structure opportunity. New York: State University of New York Press.McNamee, S. J., & R. K. Miller, Jr. (2004). The meritocracy myth. New York: Rowman & Littleield.Mishel, L., Bernstein, J., & Allegretto, S. (2007). The state of working America: 2006/2007. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Mohr, J., & DiMaggio, P. (1995). The intergenerational transmission of cultural capital. Research in Social Stratiication and Mobility, 14, 169–200.Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family: The case for national action. Washington, DC: Ofice of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor. Retrieved from http://www.domestic workers.org/National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). 29 U.S.C. §§ 151–169. Passed July 5, 1935.National Organization on Disability (2000). Harris survey of Americans with disabilities. Retrieved from www.nod.org/assets/downloads/2000—key—indingsNg, J. C., & Rury, J. L. (2006). Poverty and education: A critical analysis of the Ruby Payne phenom-enon. Teachers College Record. Retrieved from www.tcrecord.orgNicholson, P. Y. (2004). Labor’s story in the United States. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Ornstein, A. (2007). Class counts: Education, inequality, and the shrinking middle class. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleield.Patterson, J. T. (2010). Freedom is not enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s struggle over black family life from LBJ to Obama. New York: Basic Books.Payne, R. K. (1995). A framework for understanding poverty. Baytown, TX: RFT.Phillips, K. (1990). The politics of rich and poor: Wealth and the American electorate in the Reagan aftermath. New York: HarperCollins.Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-irst century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Piketty, T., & Saez, E. (2003). Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998. Quarterly Jour-nal of Economics, 118(1), 1–39. Data updated to 2013 in January, 2015; available at http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/Piketty, T., & Saez, E. (2012, Nov.). Top incomes and the Great Recession: Recent evolutions and pol-icy implications. Paper presented at the 13th Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference hosted by the International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC, Nov. 8–9, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.imf.org/external/np/res/seminars/2012/arc/pdf/PS.pdfQuintana, N. S., Rosenthal, J., & Krehely, J. (2010). On the streets: The federal response to gay and transgender homeless youth. Center for American Progress. Retrieved from http://cdn.american progress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2010/06/pdf/lgbtyouthhomelessness.pdfReich, R. B. (2007). Supercapitalism: The transformation of business, democracy, and everyday life. New York: Random House.Roediger, D. R. (1991). The wages of whiteness (revised ed.). London: Verso.Schmidt, P. (2007). Color and money: How rich white kids are winning the war over college afirma-tive action. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Sears, B., & Badget, L. (2012, June). Beyond stereotypes: Poverty in the LGBT community. TIDES/ Momentum Issues 4. Retrieved from http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/headlines/beyond- stereotypes-poverty-in-the-lgbt-community/Shierholz, H., & Mishel, L. (2013, Aug. 21). A decade of lat wages: The key barrier to shared prosper-ity and a rising middle class. Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved January 17, 2015, from www. epi.org/publication/a-decade-of-lat-wages-the-key-barrier-to-shared-prosperity-and-a-rising-middle-class/Shiller, R. J. (2008). The subprime solution: How today’s global inancial crisis happened, and what to do about it. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Shlasko, D. (2014). Class inequality and transgender communities [Blog]. Classism Exposed, the blog of Class Action. Retrieved from http://www.classism.org/class-inequality-transgender-communitiesShlasko, D., & Kramer, T. (2011). Class culture and classism in campus and community organizing. Presented at the Pedagogies of Privilege Conference, University of Denver.Smith, L. (2010). Psychology, poverty, and the end of social exclusion: Putting our practice to work. New York: Teachers College Press.Smith, L., & Redington, R. (2010). Class dismissed: Making the case for the study of classist micro-aggressions. In D. W. Sue (Ed.), Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestations, dynamics, and impact. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Soederberg, S. (2012). The U.S. debtfare state and the credit card industry: Forging spaces of dispos-session. Antipode, 45, 493–512. doi: 10.1111/j.1467–8330.2012.01004.x CLASSISM |253Steinberg, S. (1989). The ethnic myth: race, ethnicity, and class in America. Boston: Beacon Press.Stevens, M. (2007). Creating a class: College admissions and the education of elites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Stiglitz, J. E. (2013). The price of inequality: How today’s divided society endangers our future. New York: Norton.St. John, E. P. (2003). Reinancing the college dream: Access, equal opportunity & justice for taxpay-ers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.Streib, J. (2013). Class origin and college graduates’ parenting beliefs. The Sociological Quarterly, 54, 670–693.Sullivan, L., Meschede, T., Dietrich, L., Shapiro, T., Traub, A., Reutschlin, C., & Draut, T. (2015, Mar. 11). The racial wealth gap: Why policy matters. Demos. Retrieved from http://www.demos.org/sites/default/iles/publications/RacialWealthGap_1.pdfSwartz, D. (1997). Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Taibbi, M. (2014). The divide: American injustice in the age of the wealth gap. New York: Spiegel & Gray.Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little Brown.U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Ofice of Immigration Statistics (2014). Yearbook of Immi-gration Statistics: 2013. Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/iles/publications/ois_yb_2013_0.pdfvan Gelder, S. (Ed.). (2011). This changes everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.Williams, B. (2001). What’s debt got to do with it? In J. Goode & J. Maskovsky (Eds.), The new poverty studies: The ethnography of power, politics, and impoverished people in the United States (pp. 79–101). New York: New York University Press.Williams, J. C. (2012). The class culture gap. In S. T. Fiske & H.R. Markus (Eds.), Facing social class: How societal rank inluences interaction (pp. 39–58). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Wilson, W. J. (2009, Jan.). The Moynihan Report and research on the black community. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 621, 23–36.Wolff, E. (2009). Finding the causes of educational debt. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 235, 3.Yosso, T. (1996). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. In A. Dixson & C. Rousseau (Eds.), Critical race theory in education: All God’s children gotta song. New York: Routledge.Young, I. M. (2011). Responsibility for justice. New York: Oxford University Press.Zinn, H. (2003). A people’s history of the United States: 1492–present. New York: Harper-Collins. This page intentionally left bla 8Religious OppressionMaurianne Adams and Khyati Y. Joshi*Almost daily, we read or hear news about religious conlict and violence, globally as well as locally, including the murder of three Muslim students in North Carolina, the vandalism against two Hindu temples in Seattle and Virginia, and violence against Jews and Muslims in the U.S. and Europe. Attacks in the U.S. against non-Christian faith traditions lead us to ask these questions: How does U.S. religious difference impact who we are as a nation? Why do some Americans believe that Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs pose a threat to the American way of life? Why are atheists and agnostics considered immoral or unpatriotic? Is this sense of threat a recent response to religious diversity or do these issues reach back into a long historical debate about U.S. national and religious identity, and about the mean-ing of our Constitutional “separation of church and state”?Christianity was integral to U.S. national identity well before the colonial period and it remains important today. The signiicance of Christianity in U.S. life and the challenges it poses for minority religions is a social justice issue that requires the kind of historical knowledge and structural/cultural analysis we use to understand other forms of oppression that stand in the way of social justice.In this chapter, we explore the role of religion in U.S. cultural, social, and political life. We consider how religion in the U.S. has served the needs of a dominant religious, ethnic, racialized majority by ensuring their access to institutional and cultural power. We explore the contradictions within U.S. traditions of religious freedom. We examine the historical legacies that survive in current manifestations of Christian hegemony, and their intersec-tions with other forms of oppression in the U.S. We then raise some of the key concerns for religious pluralism as a form of social justice going into the future. The chapter concludes with a design for teaching about Christian hegemony and religious oppression with some discussion of pedagogical and facilitation issues. Materials and activities that support the design can be found on the website for this chapter.DEFINITIONS OF KEY CONCEPTSReligious oppression in the U.S. refers to the systematic subordination of minority religious groups, such as Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Native American spiritualities, and those who are atheists, agnostics, or freethinkers. The subordination of non-Christian religions occurs at all levels of society through the actions of individuals (religious preju-dice), institutional policies and practices (religious discrimination), and cultural and soci-etal norms and values associated with Christianity (Joshi, 2006).The social structures, federal and local policies, and cultural practices that maintain and reproduce Christian norms in the U.S. through “the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society” result in Christian hegemony (Young, 1990, p. 268). Hegemony generally refers to a society’s unacknowledged and/or unconscious adherence to a dominant world view, without any need for external policing, through assumed cultural norms, policies,