Class Matters Workshops
Download this brochure for more information on Class Matters workshops.
If you're interested in hosting a workshop, please click here for a brochure, or contact me about booking an event.
Order Class Matters
Order Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists by Betsy Leondar-Wright (New Society Publishers, 2005).
Press Coverage of CM
- Tim Harris interviewed me for Real Change: Read the interview
- Marc Cooper interviewed me for The Nation magazine's Radio Nation: Listen to the interview (MP3 file)
- Ben Merens interviewed me for Wisconsin Public Radio: Listen to the interview (Real Audio file)
What Do We Mean by "Class?"
Resources
Learning more about cross-class alliances...
Classist Comments
What's the most classist thing you ever heard someone say?
(I'm not talking about someone like Bill O'Reilly or your right-wing uncle. More specifically, what's the most classist thing you ever heard a liberal or progressive person say?)
Read five interviewees' answers — and my own.
Class and Other Identities
How do you experience class differently because of your race, ethnic group, religion, gender, age, or other identity? What class dynamics do you notice within your identity groups?
Here's how a few ClassMatters.org visitors answered those questions:
- White women from working-class backgrounds
- White middle-class women
- Middle-class women of color
- White male labor activists
- White middle-class activists
- Christians and class
And answers from the Class Matters book:
What's the Most Classist Comment You Ever Heard?
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Survey Responses
As soon as I posted the survey question about classist comments, the stories started pouring in.
I ate out with a friend — someone proud to call herself a Massachusetts liberal — and the waitress got her order wrong. My friend said, "Well, if she was smart, she wouldn't be a waitress."
—Jenny Levison
I heard an African-American university president say that she could not support home-based childcare for low-income families because "we have to get those little children out of those neighborhoods."
—Kathy Modigliani
Click here to read more classist comments.
Classism as an Obstacle to Cross-Class Alliances
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Article
Invisible Walls: What keeps working-class people out of coalitions?
Why haven't we yet learned to build more effective multiracial, multiclass organizations in the United States?
Excerpts from Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing, by Linda Stout
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Interview
Reaching across the walls
In my interview with Linda Stout, she suggests ways to bridge the invisible walls that low-income people and people of color often encounter when joining middle-class and white organizations.
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Article
Classism from Our Mouths
We've all learned classist prejudices, and none of us has completely eradicated them from our minds, or from our speech.
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Article
Diversity Training and Classism
Among diversity trainers, a lack of attention to class becomes problematic.
By Felice Yeskel
| Find the Invisible Working-Class People in these statements: |
| Women still have to choose between career success and children. |
| I bought some land in Vail and built my dream house. |
| Everybody got burned in the stock market crash. |
| I run an institute at the university. |
| When I was a girl, every family had a cook. |