When we walk into a meeting, we notice the race and gender of the people there.
Once in a while we guess wrong, but mostly there’s a shared understanding of members’ races and genders, and shared terms to describe these identities. Because of this we can have conversations about the group’s race and gender composition and dynamics.
None of this is true of class identities.
Most activists don’t even think about the class backgrounds of other members. We very often guess wrong – even about current class. Many people in the US don’t have conscious class identities, and if we do, we don’t share vocabulary to name them. It’s hard to talk about the class dynamics of a group without knowing who has had what class life experience.
In researching Missing Class, three of us went to meetings of 25 social justice organizations. Almost everyone filled out a survey about their parents’ and their own education level, occupation, housing and other class-related questions. I scored the survey answers and clumped 362 people into categories – working-class, professional-middle-class, upwardly and downwardly mobile.
To research the book Missing Class, Betsy Leondar-Wright observed meetings of 25 varied social justice groups in 5 states, surveyed 362 diverse members and interviewed 67 of them. The class cultures patterns on this website come from analysis of those meetings and interviews.
(For more information on the groups and the study, see the Methodology appendix of Missing Class.)
To research the book Missing Class, Betsy Leondar-Wright observed meetings of 25 varied social justice groups in 5 states, surveyed 362 diverse members and interviewed 67 of them. The class cultures patterns on this website come from analysis of those meetings and interviews.
(For more information on the groups and the study, see the Methodology appendix of Missing Class.)
Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures by Class Action's Betsy Leondar-Wright, published by Cornell University Press in 2014, is the first comparison of class culture differences in progressive social justice groups in the US today.
Missing Class describes class differences in paths to activism, attitudes toward leadership, methods of conflict resolution, ways of using language, diversity practices, use of humor, methods of recruiting, and group process preferences. Too often, we miss class. Missing Class makes a persuasive case that seeing class culture differences could enable activists to strengthen their own groupsand build more durable cross-class alliances for social change.
“Organizing for change is hard work, but it gets easier when there’s honest talk about difference and solidarity. I think this groundbreaking book will likely start some transformative conversations!” - Bill McKibben, author, founder of 350.org
Betsy Leondar-Wright, PhD, is a long-time economic justice activist. She was Class Action’s Program Director from 2010 to 2015 and currently serves on the board. Before Missing Class, she authored Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists and co-authored The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide. She teaches social movement strategy and race, class and gender inequality at Lasell College.
Class Action, founded in 2004, is a national nonprofit organization that raises awareness about class and inspires action to end classism. For more information about workshops to reduce organizational classism, click here.