Where We Stand Class Gap Analysis

America claims to be a post-racial society as the people elect the first black president in 2009. The supreme court ruled gay marriages to be legal in all 50 states in 2015. Today, it is normal to talk about race and gender. Many schools even offer courses on subjects of race and gender. The subject that is often left out is class. In her novel Where We Stand: Class Matters, Bell Hooks notes that many citizens, including herself, avoid talking about class. “Our nation is fast becoming a class-segregated society where the plight of the poor is forgotten and the greed of the rich is morally tolerated and condoned” (p vii). This shows that the ever-widening gap of class between the poor and rich continues to expand because the subject is invisible, which makes it tolerable and gives more power to the rich. Amongst all race and

In Dr. Greene’s lecture slide from unit five, she supports this theory by saying, “People who are poor and White are doubly-blamed and stereotyped as being lazy, uneducated, immoral criminals, etc. and this often is viewed as being located in specific geographic areas, like the South, or as living in rural places.” The media almost always shows poor people as any race but White. In the article Media Images of the Poor by Bullock, Wyche, and Williams, the authors recognize that when the poor, or working class people, are visible in the media, they are often represented in a negative manner. In many instances, their stories consist of a dysfunctional relationship, drug use and alcoholism, or engagement in crime. This is often negotiated with people of color, more often with Black men. When thinking about how Black men are portrayed in the media, people usually associate them with low-class families and living in the streets of violence and drugs. Black men suffer oppression from both White and higher-class people because of how they are portrayed in the