Dialogue Description:

• 5 Classist Pitfalls to Resist in Your Activism: From Class Action, an introduction to the ways we re-create class oppression in our movement spaces.
• Every Part of Us Has Parts: From Working-Class Perspectives, an exploration of the dynamism and complexity of the many constituencies that compose the “working class”
• Want to be part of the next wave of activism?  Move to rural America. By founder of Occupy Micah White, an inquiry into the role of urban intellectuals in the current political moment.
• Against the Ally-Industrial Complex: Revisiting the Legacy of the Young Patriots and the Rainbow Coalition.  A brief history of one of the most powerful instances of white-working class organizing in the black freedom struggle.  For further information about white-working class organizing int he civil rights movement, check out A History and Prospectus of JOIN Community Union, by Peggy Terry; and Take a Step Into America, a document published by JOIN in 1967 to inform student organizers in SDS about cross-class organizing.  And for further inspiration, see some of our role model profiles of white working class organizers from this era: Kristen Anderson, Marilyn Buggey, and Peggy Terry
• What so many people don’t get about the US working class: An exploration of misunderstandings of the working class.

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

• rural/urban divide – what is our place of power from the Bay Area?
• how to be in conversation with people from where I grew up?  Often, when I have these discussions I get tired and stressed out – how to manage this?
• what can we learn from white working class histories of solidarity with POC led organizations, especially in the middle of the country?
• models of organizations that are working across class that are primarily working with white people
• running joke: white dude in multiracial organization asking “well what about class?” – how do we look at all intersections fully?
• notice ability to do code-switching, coming from mix-classed background – how do these arise in organizing spaces?  how do I silence myself, what is lost there?
• making more conscious effort to integrate class background
• does my class background determine what spaces it is appropriate for me to work in?  am I best suited to work with liberal white progressives if I come from a upper middle class background?  how much is this determining where I want to go, with working with white people?
• always had more analysis around race than class
• keyword: capacity – how much capacity do I have for struggle? for throwdown?  all of the labor that goes into being in relationship with people?
• noticing sharp decline in capacity – trying to tease out why that is?  are seeds of that somewhere in class conditioning?
• come from mixed-class background, creates a dynamic between parents; how do we recreate these dynamics in our own interpersonal relationships?
• how painful the disconnect feels
• want to be connecting my family to the things I am learning, want all of us to be together in the cause for justice in this world, feel kind of lost about it
• the election
• strangers in their own land, Arlie Hoschild Russell – trying to understand why people voted they way they did
• we need to find ways to understand and have empathy and connect with people, or we will be in a lot of trouble
• just coming back to the country after 16 years in Arab countries, just returning to the country and trying to understand it again
• interested in how people form opinions, how opinions differ in different groups
• why do my mom and I disagree about politics? how did we diverge over time?
• class has always been confusing for me: didn’t grow up here, grew up in a place with a different class structure than here, came from Soviet Union as a teenager
• class identity changes over time – what we grow up with, what we embody now
• wanting to understand other people and be conscious of how I am acting
• didn’t think a lot about class growing up; retrospectively realized that I grew up upper middle class, but parents grew up poor and working class
• parents with similar class backgrounds but very different reflections on it – is this a product of their gendered experiences?
• teaching – working in public school with students whose race and class backgrounds are very different.  should I work with students whose backgrounds are more shared?
• any time we can complicate intersectional identities is awesome
• stereotype: “well what about class?” is used to dismiss race and gender – but how do you get to actually explore class?
• Robert Jensen – importance of talking about class in the work of racial justice; our movements are always going back and forth about this – if we center class are we not holding whiteness as accountable as we need to?
• the precarity of capitalism – this experience is cross-class, whether you are really poor or really wealthy, you feel that it is going to slip away at any moment; how to have more compassion for this fear?
• grew up in relatively well resourced white middle class community which provided privilege and access, however this masked my own family’s struggles to make ends meet
• contradictions between different definitions of what working class is – don’t always mesh with my experience of pretty extreme poverty and precarity
• how to organize with people who have class privilege when we are supposed to share racial identity – whiteness
• working class POC – what does it mean to be working class from this perspective?  how different is it than for white working class people? identified by relationship to means of production, rather than educational accomplishment
• has class gotten more complicated over time?
• Professional class as ‘other’, class defined in relationship to formal education
• Relationship between education and class has gotten hazier? – historical connection between class and educational privilege
• Generational differences between class
• Both descendants of settler colonizers, one side benefitted from the GI Bill, the other side didn’t, class differences related to that one law, connected to white racial identity development
• Challenge of own self-perception of class identity
• Kind of assumed in the Bay Area, that we also share a class experience, and simultaneously, many of us are confused about our class backgrounds, or self-other compared to this norm around white middle classness in the Bay Area. In what way is it in service of power to have a lack of clarity? Or to not understand what our class background is? Maybe class isn’t less complicated, but the labor movement is way weaker than it used to be.
• IWW (International Workers of the World) – International mass mobilization of working class – no bosses, anyone else can join. Based on that definition, most of us are working class. All kinds of labor are labor – paid or unpaid. Weakness of contemporary anarchist organizing today, compared to this history of the IWW. Or IWAC – part of IWW in prisons. It is compelling because of the clarity around it.
• Class as privilege, what you’re able to do and what you’re able to get. For example, going to college offer opportunities otherwise not afforded. Entitlement to ask for things as one manifestaion of class privilege.
• Changes in class identity related to the type of labor people do and the availability of jobs.
• More concentrated wealth compared to historical patterns. The 1% narrative.
• College narrative as upward mobility has shifted related to student loans, ect.
• Income, education privilege, there is more to class than that. Hard to say what exactly it is – class conditioning that can sense all the time. Examples include: being stuck up, being removed, being isolated or unable to connect.
• Complexity of parents with different class backgrounds, how to understand how that impacts us and how we relate to others of different classes. Legacy of alcoholism as connected to survival strategies related to poor upbringing of father. Now manifests in hypervigilance, related to precarity of class status and learned fear/worry from father. How class conditioning is transferred in relationships. How transfers across generations.
• Queerness and complexity of class identity. Not feeling at home in working class queer spaces as someone from a working class background but coming into queerness in more middle class spaces.
• Cross generational reflections. Related to previous comment about working class parents, family of Holocaust survivors. All those things combined, connected to a sense of scarity and precariousness. Find a Jewish doctor or a lawyer – centering of heterosexuality, upward mobility and whiteness. Hope of parents as marrying rich.
• There is something about legacy – bootstrap mentality. Most educated person in all 6 directions of family tree, a lot of concerted effort and white privilege to make that happen. What a betrayal to family and ancestors sacrifices, and then to not live up their goals to make huge amounts of money. A part does want to hold on to the comfort they have reached. A deep ambivalence that shows up in the way they organize. What am I actually willing to give up? How does it show up in organizing spaces?
• Tend to assume people are straight when they are, people assume I am straight as well. When I meet other white people in the Bay, assume people are more middle class or owning. Complexity of class identity. How I assume about others in spaces – what that means. How much meaning is laid into my class perceptions. How to hold the nuance of class. How much steryotypes can lead to the disconnect many people expressed between people.
• Put in a group of people without class privilege when applying for college. When going to college, had people learn how to set the table, what forks to use. Those were seen as the most important skills. Without being able to be socialized into that behavior, what is able to be accessed. Messaging around class normativity. How exposed they felt going to college interviews. Even thinking about in meetings one person talks at a time, we are quiet, people are not yelling and drinking.
• Shame associated with not belonging, and self/other perception.
• Immigrant experience was more the focal point of shame, didn’t have a lot of the same references as other people. Learning that Americans don’t talk about money.
• Class erasure in the Bay Area, esp in punk and anarchist communities. Visual downplaying in terms of how people present and the kind of work people do. Upward mobility in terms of education. How do people navigate their class identity related to how they were raised versus current class identity? Trying to challenge themselves how to navigate having more money than they’ve ever had? How to interrogate comfort?
• Is the amount of money we make, and people not talking about that, determinate of your class? How much money are people making? Just found out that one of their coworkers who is an older POC woman, they make way more than her.  Connects it to being white and college educated. Supervisor said your time costs a lot more – despite having the same position.
• Why don’t we talk about money?
• Different cultures do it differently. Internationally, a white American getting paid a huge amount more than Arab colleagues in Arab countries where they live.
• In organizing, how often we do not talk about it? How do we discuss and disrupt?
• Uncomfortable conversations with people they are dating about money and the amount to spend for recreation.
• ECE undervalued, underpaid. Connected to legacies of being done by enslaved people and unpaid women.
• How much one makes as a man’s conversation. Thinking about things that are feminized labor. Supposed to do it because you ‘love it’, not for the money. There’s shame and guilt that we are getting paid at all.
• Feeling anxious because realizing been spending a lot of their life trying to figure out what their class placement is. Asks people when they first meet them what their work is to categorize them, also presentation.
• Sense of alienation related to people’s class ambiguity in presentation. Keeping from actually talking to each other.
• Never knowing what judgments someone else has – or being misjudged and projected upon based on class.
• If it is so hard to even figure out our identities, how do we show up in relationships and organizing? Socialization about how to advocate for your needs, how is that classed and gendered?
• Call of this political moment – how to show up?
• Should we move back to our hometowns? Complexity of reconciling. How much risk to take related to moving back?
• How hard to feel connected to anyone, and especially white people who are different than them. Tracking related to trying to stay connected to their dad, who is a white liberal.
• A lot of people distant from families related to radical politics. Is that a specifically white thing? It is sad to notice distance, and also very challenging.
• John Brown Revolt
• Following libertarian folks with similar politics in some ways, often also racist and homophobic, and also have some shared movement analysis. What is it like to be connected to people like that?
• Class as relative
• Discrepencies in wages at jobs because things are unspoken
• Orgs that have more transparency around who is paid what and why, difference between ED and lower level workers. Still not allowed to talk about how much paid. More common in corporate world.
• More resources and wealth, less generally people pay. How could we practice talking about financial resources? How to talk about redistribution?
• Hypervigilence and being really on top of it – not about working class – but about experience of having enough, being worried might not have enough.
• Productivity and worth and how it influences how we show up in our organizing spaces (ie that how much effort we put in should be related to how much we get, or that different jobs even make different amounts of money).. related to certain types of labor being devalued. Internalized ideas of not “deserving.”  
• Classism and how it influences who can show up to organize – who has time and access to volunteering
• Labor power diminishing .. jobs disappearing. Thoughts of universal income. Pilot program of basic income in Oakland. 40 people will get basic income. To study how people are affected. Interesting idea, but potentially shady. From same guy who wants to create the software for a Muslim registry. .. When capitalists ask this question, they are asking – will people still be productive? Will they be depressed? Will they be lazy? .. But how to solve that there just aren’t enough jobs.
• Silvia Federici says not that we aren’t losing jobs, it’s that fewer people are doing more work. Labor is not evenly distributed. Milton Freeman championed this idea that universal income will keep people complacent, ie so as to not have to imprison them. You are profiting from us.
• Referencing The Problem With Work: Discusses feminist argument that women should make the same as men, or that reproductive labor should be paid. But both re-ify the idea of pay for work, which comes from capitalist protestant ethic. Universal income as more radical because it separates the idea of work for pay.
• Twin Cities GDC (general defense community) offshoot of IWW. Mass mobilization based around working class identity.. Building community power to take down institutional power.  ie shared how they recognized the dynamics occupation of police and how college educated folks were getting centered and then actual neighborhood folks were there at night without press and actually experiencing police harm.
• Thinking of examples when class privilege was noticed in organizing work and handled proactively/accountably. APTP – when folks with privilege show up with certain skills, it should be with express purpose of divesting those skills to others. Have to be rigid and principled to prevent folks with privilege to access skills from ending up doing the work and having more influence in organizations. Sometimes nothing gets done, but they choose this over allowing dynamics to shift away from the goal. Another example – an organization where I work, I end up doing something that no one else wants to do – I could teach others to do it, but it’s a shitty job, and others are happy to let me do it, though it makes me (privileged person indispensable).
• Looking at the trajectory of my learning about racism and seeing my evolving understanding of my investment in it..  Vs class is so not talked about it. Similarities between centering POC voices and centering working-class voices. And my place in it.
• Is it colonial to think we should move from the Bay Area to rural areas to support organizing there? Need to think about the ways that is alienating. Calls weren’t about divesting from elitist practices, but about spreading them to others.
• Thinking about workplace conversations of trying to bring a college to low-income kids – POC recognized.
• Really complicated when call out came for white people to “go get your people” and surfaces confusion about who are my people, how do I bridge alienation that comes from my trajectory away from them?
• And have to get past the idea that we’re going to go “tell them what to do” – would need to have real conversations and be open to ending up somewhere else. Vs accountability of recognizing that whiteness and capitalism separates us.. oh, rural people aren’t my people. conservatives aren’t my people.. etc let’s us off the hook for the fact that in some ways they are.

Closing/thoughts we’re leaving with:

• Sitting with tension – looking at either/or that comes up in organizing/seeing more sides.
• Racism as a ploy to keep working class divided.. and how much my racial justice work and desire to bring down capitalism are so intertwined
• Thinking about redistribution, sense of betrayal to family to have the opportunity to conventionally succeed and declining – shame – so much wound up in that shame
• Divesting our skills
• Who is the boss? How can we build class solidarity when it’s slippery and nuanced? Exploring ancestry and whiteness
• Sitting with limitations of identity politics – finding a material basis for organizing with white folks that is a launching pad to work across identities
• Colonialism and how it teaches people with privilege to feel entitled to being right  – what it means to have real conversations vs just going to try to convince/save
• Getting folks in to the conversation – who are my people?
• My dad and imagining a conversation with him about class
• Appreciation
• Age. Hard to “not know what my place is” – actively trying to not be debilitated by not knowing