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Introduction with Excerpts from Openstax, Chapter 9

You may remember the word “stratification” from an earth science or geology class. The distinct vertical layers found in rock, called strata, are a good way to visualize social structure. Society’s layers are made of people, and it is society’s resources that are distributed unevenly throughout the layers. The people who have more resources represent the top layer of the social structure of stratification. Other groups of people, with progressively fewer and fewer resources, represent the remaining lower layers of our society. The critical word, here, is resources which are always unequally distributed and, so, have consequences for life-chances and well-being.

Sociologists use the term social stratification to describe the system of social standing. Social stratification refers to a society’s categorization of its people into rankings of socioeconomic tiers based on factors like wealth, income, race and ethnicity, education, and power. These factors determine the status, or rank, of an individuals in the society. Also ranked are groups such as families/households; large populations such as ethnic and racial groups are also stratified. These sociological concepts comprise the language for the study of social inequality.

Status ranks are vertically arranged as grades that represent distinctions that range from high to low, superior to inferior. The Latin word gradis means “steps” which implies the possibility of movement in a status system. Think of the distinctive grades (A, B, C, D, F or, more precisely 4.0 to 0.0) that comprise formal education as students are charged with moving up in grades until graduation. Of course, students can be “left back” and denied the opportunity to graduate. Consider the rewards available to those who move up in grade.

For a general understanding of the concept of social stratification as a ranking system that assigns status to individuals as members of a social category, see the classic Frontline documentary film, “A Class Divided”. The film illustrates an ingenuous experiment conducted by an elementary school teacher in which students were stratified based on the color of their eyes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mcCLm_LwpE

And, in this article, David Brooks characterizes a prevalent view that human beings are “deeply driven by status”, perhaps by our very nature. Brooks contrasts it with a view that promotes universal love as found in religious world-views (e.g., Christianity) and the Hippie youth subculture (e.g., “Love is all you need”).

I’m a liberal arts type, so I see life as a story. Each person is born into a family. Over the course of life, we find things to love and commit to — a vocation, a spouse, a community. At times, we flounder and suffer but do our best to learn from our misfortunes to grow in wisdom, kindness and grace. At the end, hopefully, we can look back and see how we have nurtured deep relationships and served a higher good.

Will Storr, a writer whose work I admire enormously, says this story version of life is an illusion. In his book “The Status Game,” he argues that human beings are deeply driven by status. Status isn’t about being liked or accepted, he writes; it’s about being better than others, getting more: “When people defer to us, offer respect, admiration or praise or allow us to influence them in some way, that’s status. It feels good.”

High-status people are healthier, get to talk more, have more relaxed postures, get admired by their social inferiors and have a sense of purpose, Storr argues. That’s what we’re really after. The stories we tell ourselves, that we are heroes on journeys toward the true, the good and the beautiful — those are just lies the mind invents to help us feel good about ourselves.

Life is a series of games, he continues. There’s the high school game of competing to be the popular kid. The lawyer game to make partner. The finance game to make the most money. The academic game for prestige. The sports game to show that our team is best. Even when we are trying to do good, Storr asserts, we’re playing the “virtue game,” to show we are morally superior to others.

The desire for status is a “mother motivation,” and the hunger for status is never satisfied.

I think Storr has been seduced by evolutionary psych fundamentalism. He is in danger of becoming one of those guys who give short shrift to the loftier desires of the human heart, to the caring element in every friendship and family, and then says, in effect, we have to be man enough to face how unpleasant we are.

But I have to admit, the gamer mentality he describes pervades our culture right now. Social media, of course, is a status game par excellence, with its likes, its viral rankings and its periodic cancel mobs. Vast partisan armies fight wars of recognition.

American politics, too, has become more a war for status than a way for a society to figure out how to allocate its resources. Donald Trump’s career is not mostly about policies; it’s mostly about: They look down on you. I will make them pay.

Foreign policy sometimes looks like a status game with Vladimir Putin and his humiliation stories: The world does not see and respect us; we must strike back.

In an essay called “The World as a Game,” in the invaluable Liberties journal, Justin E.H. Smith points out that social credit systems, like China’s, literally turn citizenship into a game, awarding points or penalties depending on how people behave.

One of the features of the gaming mentality is that it turns life into a performance. If what you mostly want is status, why not create a fake persona that will win it for you? Some of the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were dressed like they were from some blockbuster movie or a video game.

People who see themselves playing a game often get lost in the make-believe world of the game and depart from the messiness of reality. In an essay called “Reality Is Just a Game Now,” in the equally invaluable New Atlantis magazine, Jon Askonas notes how much being active in the QAnon movement is like playing an alternate reality game.

QAnon players “research” through obscure forums and videos, searching for clues that will support their conspiracy theories. They show up at Trump rallies carrying signs with phrases that only other players will recognize.

Askonas writes: “For devoted players, status accrues to finding clues and providing compelling interpretations, while others can casually follow along with the story as the community reveals it. It is this collaboration — a kind of social sense-making — that builds the alternate reality in the minds of players.” He concludes that the role-playing game is to our century what the novel was to the 18th century, a new mode of experience and self-creation.

The status-mad world that Storr describes is so loveless — a world I recognize but not one I want to live in. Ultimately, games are fun, but gaming as a way of life is immature. Maturity means rising above the shallow desire — for status — that doesn’t really nourish us. It’s about cultivating the higher desires: The love of truth and learning and not settling for cheap conspiracy theories. The intrinsic pleasure the craftsman gets in his work, which is not about popularity. The desire for a good and meaningful life that inspires people to commit daily acts of generosity.

“Is Life a Story or a Game?, NYT (7.21.2022)

The American Class System

Stratification systems are vertical rank orders also known as status hierarchies. This is clearly illustrated in The Forbes 400. As “The Definitive Ranking of The Wealthiest Americans” which ranks the 400 wealthiest Americans.

Wealth refers to total assets minus expenses. It is the most critical measure of a person’s life-chances – the opportunity to realize the fullest expression of their social being. In theory, it is possible to rank every American based on their wealth, thus extending the short list compiled by Forbes Magazine.

In the United States, people like to believe everyone has an equal chance at success. Historically, Americans hold the belief that hard work and talent—not prejudicial treatment or societal values—determine social rank, or status. This emphasis on self-effort perpetuates the belief that people, rather than external factors (e.g., the way the society is structured), control their own social standing.

However, sociologists recognize that social stratification is a society-wide system that makes inequalities apparent – and perpetuates it. While there are always inequalities between individuals, sociologists are interested in larger social patterns. Stratification is not about individual inequalities, but about systematic inequalities based on group membership, classes, and the like. No individual, rich or poor, can be blamed for social inequalities. The structure of society affects a person’s social standing. Although individuals may support or fight inequalities, social stratification is created and supported by society as a whole.

Sociologists distinguish between two types of systems of stratification. Closed systems accommodate little change in social position. Status is ascribed and mobility is blocked. Open systems, which are based on achievement, allow movement and interaction between layers and classes. Different systems reflect, emphasize, and foster certain cultural values and shape individual beliefs. Stratification systems include class systems and caste systems, as well as meritocracy.

Unlike caste systems, class systems are open. People are free to gain a different level of education or employment than their parents. They can also socialize with and marry members of other classes, which allows people to experience social mobility, or to move from one class to another. The historical emergence of class systems is tied to the emergence of capitalism; status is a function of market value which explains why the best athletes or musicians are highly paid in their respective industries.

Our focus for this project is the American class system. A class consists of a set of people who share similar status with regard to factors like wealth, income, education, and occupation. The economic measures of wealth and income matter most for social status in a capitalist society like the U.S. because they more directly determine life-chances. This means that social status is a weighted sum of wealth, income, occupation, and education. See “Class Matters” interactive graphic below.

These status variables tend to be consistent, for example, higher levels of education occur with higher occupational status and income. Sociologists use the term status consistency to describe the consistency, or lack thereof, of an individual’s rank across these factors. Status inconsistency produces frustrations, for example, where income is lower than expected considering a higher level of education, while people with less education who make more. This can be shared with others and converted into political movements.

Status is Achieved and Ascribed

Meritocracy is an ideal system based on the belief that social stratification is the result of personal effort—or merit—that determines social standing. High levels of effort will lead to a high social position, and vice versa. The concept of meritocracy is an ideal—because a society has never existed where social rank was based purely on merit. Because of the complex structure of societies, processes like socialization, and the realities of economic systems, social standing is influenced by multiple factors—not merit alone. Inheritance and pressure to conform to norms, for instance, disrupt the notion of a pure meritocracy. While a meritocracy has never existed, sociologists see aspects of meritocracies in modern societies when they study the role of academic and job performance and the systems in place for evaluating and rewarding achievement in these areas. Meritocracy makes it possible to achieve a higher status in relation to parents. This is knows as social mobility. This is blocked when status is assigned, or ascribed.

See the example of the College Scholastic Ability Tests in South Korea. It is a meritocratic assessment which is the key that unlocks the door to status in the larger society. In this excerpt, note that performance on the test is impacted by the availability of family resources like money for tutors.

Nearly a half-million South Korean high school seniors hunkered down on Thursday to take an annual university-entrance exam they had been preparing for since kindergarten — a nine-hour marathon of tests that could decide their futures.

In this education-obsessed country, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of the College Scholastic Ability Tests, or suneung, in the life of a South Korean student.

Most universities select their students based largely on the test scores of the single standardized year-end exam. Diplomas from a few top universities like Seoul National can make a huge difference when applying for jobs and promotions. Many students who fail to enter the universities they covet take the tests again and again in the following years, often living and studying in institutes with militarylike discipline.

The importance of suneung can be traced back to the destitute decades following the Korean War, when families saw education as the ticket for their children to escape poverty. The country’s razor-sharp focus on education is often cited for helping its dramatic postwar transformation, going from one of the world’s poorest under dictatorship to one of its richest democracies.

Today, young South Koreans are among the world’s most highly educated. In 2017, 70 percent of the country’s population of 25- to 34-year-olds had a tertiary education, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Many families start preparing their children from kindergarten, enrolling them in after-school cram sessions or hiring private tutors to elevate their math and English-language skills. Wealthy families fork over thousands of dollars a month to help their children, creating a multibillion-dollar exam-preparation industry and eroding a once widely held belief among poorer families that college-entrance exams were a great equalizer for social mobility.

The exam has been linked, however, to troubling trends.

The soaring educational costs are often blamed for the country’s low birthrates, as families felt they could not afford to finance the education of multiple children. Suicide is the No. 1 cause of death for South Koreans between the ages of 10 and 29. And when analysts discuss the country’s suicide rates, among the world’s highest, they often cite the extreme level of stress caused by the exam.

“The College-Entrance Exam Is 9 Hours Long. Covid-19 Made It Harder”, Choe Sang-Ham, NYT (12.4.20). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/03/world/asia/south-korea-college-exam-suneung-coronavirus.html

In a class system, status is more open than closed. While achieved status is prevalent in open-class societies, there can still be powerful elements of ascription, or caste. In particular, parents’ tend to transmit their social position on to their children, specifically in the form of opportunities to attain their status if not exceed it (i.e., upward social mobility). Passing on parental status includes the cultural norms that accompany a certain lifestyle as well as economic capital (see article on the 2019 college admission scandal). They share these with a network of friends and family members. Social standing becomes a comfort zone, a familiar lifestyle, and an identity. This is one of the reasons first-generation college students do not fare as well as students with parents who attended college themselves.

A caste system based on race has been built into American society, specifically in reference to a slave economy established in the 17^th century and its subsequent racial formations. This has given rise to a system of racial stratification that ascribes privilege to a dominant caste and deprivation to the subordinate caste. Discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity (i.e., an ascribed status) constitutes an obstacle to achievement in leading ladders of mobility such as formal education, business, labor unions, and politics. See the caste boundaries built around privilege and deprivation that were readily erected in the “Class Divided” experiment.

Option 1: Class Rank

Interview someone to ascertain their subjective sense of status position, or rank in the status hierarchies that define American society as a stratification system. You will have to take into account the family household as a status unit for example if your subject is a dependent child (e.g., a college student living at home).

• Everyday people make “status claims”. How does your subject conceive of their social status or position in the social hierarchy (i.e., where they believe their status to be)? In particular, do they measure their status in terms of wealth and income, occupation, and education?
• Assess the degree of “class consciousness”. Do they explicitly describe their status in terms of social class? Take the opportunity to ask them about their overall picture of the class system including the extent of inequality and its causes.
• Does their sense of social positioning refer to racial/ethnic stratification, or inequality among entire groups defined by race/ethnicity? Elaborate.
• To what extent is their status relative in the sense that is measured against specific group others in the status hierarchy? This should furnish insight into their standard of living, which may be aspirational, as well as their cost of living.
• Intergenerational mobility: How do they conceive of their status relative to their parents?
• Income, wealth, occupation and education represent distinct status hierarchies. To what extent does your subject experience “status inconsistency”, or disparities in their status positions? An example would be high educational status and low income, or vice versa.
• How “objective” is their “subjectively” experienced sense of status? Here, you are asked to evaluate their “status claims” sociologically (e.g., Are they as “middle class as they say they are? Here, you are explaining what it means to be “middle class” in the US at this point in time). Refer to the model that we developed which recognizes class as a weighted sum of wealth, income, occupational status, and education. Use interactive tools like the “Class Matters” graphic and online budget calculators (see above).

Internet resources for Question 1:

*“Class Matters” (Interactive Graphic) NYT https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html

“Family Budget Calculator” https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/

 “Are You in the American Middle Class? Find Out With Our Income Calculator” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/are-you-in-the-american-middle-class/

“The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950”, David Leonhardt, NYT (6.25.20)

Question #1 is keyed to the “Class Matters” graphic which calls attention to the 4 major “status hierarchies” that comprise social class: wealth, income, occupation, education. Wealth and income are economic measures of status, important because they most directly determine life-chances, or the opportunity to afford available goods and services. The “Class Matters” graphic relies on a prestige scale (a national survey) to rank occupations, where prestige is largely a function of income but also reflects social values; so, doctors are ranked highest on the occupational prestige scale because of their work to sale lives (especially during a pandemic). Educational status is ranked according to the number of school years completed. Note: The “Class Matters” graphic yields measures of relative status – positions have more or less value in comparison to other positions, as when 2 years of college is of greater value than no college at all.

You should also rely on the income calculators like EPI (see above) to get a ballpark idea of standard of living, which quantifies or puts a dollar figure on how people expect to live (see Weatherby and Gelles article on spending pattern during the pandemic). These online tools are interactive. This allows you to plug in your subject’s budgetary numbers to arrive at a basic understanding of class status. You can arrive at a rough determination of how much income a family needs to live (e.g., pay rent or own a house). Income calculators allow you to adjust for local standards of living. Here, class status is a function of both cost of living, which is fundamentally a financial index, and standards of living which is a function of consumption tastes or class culture.

The article below is from the Pew Research site. You are to use it to help you assess your subject’s class status. Note that the Federal Government has established an official definition of poverty for the purposes of policies that address a “lack of basic necessities”. Defining what is “Middle class” is much more problematic because it is bound up with a “standard of living” rather than just a “cost of living” – that is, with cultural notions of what people see as “typical” or “aspirational” (or aspire to as an ideal).

How is poverty measured?

The poverty line, also referred to as the poverty threshold, is identified by the federal government and used to determine eligibility each year for federal programs, such as SNAP (formerly called “food stamps”) and Medicaid. The poverty line is determined based on what it costs to buy grocery essentials on a thrifty food plan and then multiplying that amount by three. These measures are calculated based on family size and composition, and they are adjusted each year to account for inflation using the Consumer Price Index. In 2020, for example, the U.S. poverty line stood at $26,246 for a family of four. Read more about when and how the poverty line was developed.

How is middle class or middle income defined?

Our research looks at the middle class both in the U.S. and in a global context.

For the U.S., we determine who falls into the middle class by using relative household incomes. For instance, middle-income Americans are adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median, after incomes have been adjusted for household size. Our analyses of the middle class in U.S. metropolitan areas and states also take into account different costs of living across the country.

In the global context, people who are middle income live on $10.01-$20 a day, which translates to an annual income of about $14,600 to $29,200 for a family of four (expressed in 2011 prices). This is modest by the standards of advanced economies. In fact, it straddles the official poverty line in the United States. Our analyses of the global middle class make sure to adjust for purchasing power parity, in which currency exchange rates are adjusted for differences in the prices of goods and services across countries.

Studying the middle class tells us about trends around economic inequality and adds context to other trends we study, including the labor market and personal and household finances.

Read more about our methodology for the U.S. middle class and how we calculate U.S. income tiers, our 2015 global middle class methodology and our 2021 global middle class methodology. Use our U.S. middle class income calculator or our global middle class calculator to see if your household falls into this group.

Why is income data often adjusted for the number of people in a household?

We adjust household income data because a four-person household with an income of $50,000 faces a tighter budget constraint than a two-person household with the same income.

At its simplest, adjusting for household size could mean converting household income into per capita income. So, a two-person household with an income of $50,000 would have a per capita income of $25,000, double the per capita income of a four-person household with the same total income.

We use a slightly more refined adjustment, in which household income is divided by the square root of the number of people in the household. For purposes of reporting, we then scale the resulting income to reflect a household size of three, the whole number nearest to the average size of a U.S. household, which was 2.5 in 2020.

“What’s the Difference Between Income and Wealth?”, Katherine Schaeffer, Pew Research Center https://medium.com/pew-research-center-decoded/income-wealth-poverty-a-brief-intro-to-common-economic-concepts-d20b13ca7619

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Social class should be seen as a weighted sum of education, occupation, income, and wealth. In open-class societies like the U.S., wealth and income matter more than education and occupation (i.e., weigh more). These economic resources are the primary determinants of life-chances with implications for the consumption of all goods (e.g., housing and food) and services (e.g., education and health care). Note, however, the important distinction between these two economic measures. The passage below is from the above Pew Research article:

What’s the difference between income and wealth?

Income and wealth are both key indicators of financial security for a family or an individual. Income is the sum of earnings from a job or a self-owned business, interest on savings and investments, payments from social programs and many other sources. It is usually calculated on an annual or monthly basis.

Wealth, or net worth, is the value of assets owned by a family or an individual (such as a home or a savings account) minus outstanding debt (such as a mortgage or student loan). It refers to an amount that has been accumulated over a lifetime or more (since it may be passed across generations). This accumulated wealth is a source of retirement income, protects against short-term economic shocks and provides security for future generations. As of 2016, upper-income families in the U.S. had 7.4 times as much wealth at the median as middle-income families and 75 times as much wealth as lower-income families. 

“What’s the Difference Between Income and Wealth?”, Katherine Schaeffer, Pew Research Center https://medium.com/pew-research-center-decoded/income-wealth-poverty-a-brief-intro-to-common-economic-concepts-d20b13ca7619

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I have also asked you to consider ethnicity – race, nationality, and religion – as ascribed status variables that intersect or overlap social class. As minorities, ethnic groups are overrepresented in lower status positions. Historically, this occurred to the extent that immigrants entered the U.S. at the bottom of the class ladder. While the latter struggled for social mobility, this was not available to Africans that were brought to this country involuntarily as slaves and subsequently experienced racial discrimination.

NOTE: The subject that is the basis for your case study is entitled to their own, “subjective”, view of their status in society. However, you have to assess their status “objectively”, in other words, sociologically according to the conceptual tools like the “Class Matters” interactive graphic and the theoretical model that we are using. See article below which addresses objective (i.e., governmental) measures of “middle class” status:

Perhaps the most striking difference between the middle class of 50 years ago and the middle class today is a loss of confidence — the confidence that you were doing better than your parents and that your children would do better than you.

President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar suite of economic proposals is aiming to both reinforce and rebuild an American middle class that feels it has been standing on shifting ground. And it comes with an explicit message that the private sector alone cannot deliver on that dream and that the government has a central part to play.

“When you look at periods of shared growth,” said Brian Deese, director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, “what you see is that public investment has played an absolutely critical role, not to the exclusion of private investment and innovation, but in laying the foundation.”

If the Biden administration gets its way, the reconstructed middle class would be built on a sturdier and much broader plank of government support rather than the vagaries of the market.

Some proposals are meant to support parents who work: federal paid family and medical leave, more affordable child care, free prekindergarten classes. Others would use public investment to create jobs, in areas like clean energy, transportation and high-speed broadband. And a higher minimum wage would aim to buoy those in low-paid work, while free community college would improve skills.

That presidents pitch their agendas to the middle class is not surprising given that nearly nine out of 10 Americans consider themselves members. The definition, of course, has always been a nebulous stew of cash, credentials and culture, relying on lifestyles and aspirations as much as on assets.

But what cuts across an avalanche of studies, surveys and statistics over the last half century is that life in the middle class, once considered a guarantee of security and comfort, now often comes with a nagging sense of vulnerability.

Before the pandemic, unemployment was low and stocks soared. But for decades, workers have increasingly had to contend with low pay and sluggish wage growth, more erratic schedules, as well as a lack of sick days, parental leave and any kind of long-term security. At the same time, the cost of essentials like housing, health care and education have been gulping up a much larger portion of their incomes.

The trend can be found in rich countries all over the world. “Every generation since the baby boom, has seen the middle-income group shrink and its economic influence weaken,” a 2019 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded.

In the United States, the proportion of adults in the middle bands of the income spectrum — which the Pew Research Center defines as roughly between $50,000 and $150,000 — declined to 51 percent in 2019 from 61 percent 50 years ago. Their share of the nation’s income shrank even more over the same period, to 42 percent from 62 percent.

Their outlook dimmed, too. During the 1990s, Pew found rising optimism that the next generation would be better off financially than the current one, reaching a high of 55 percent in 1999. That figure dropped to 42 percent in 2019.

The economy has produced enormous wealth over the last few decades, but much of it was channeled to a tiny cadre at the top. Two wage earners were needed to generate the kind of income that used to come in a single paycheck.

“Upper-income households pulled away,” said Richard Fry, a senior economist at Pew.

“It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and middle out,” Mr. Biden said in his speech to a joint session of Congress last week, a reference to the idea that prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the wealthy, but flows out of a well-educated and well-paid middle class.

He underscored the point by singling out workers as the dynamo powering the middle class.

“Wall Street didn’t build this country,” he said. “The middle class built the country. And unions built the middle class.”

Of course, the economy that lifted millions of postwar families into the middle class differed sharply from the current one. Manufacturing, construction and mining jobs, previously viewed as the backbone of the labor force, dwindled — as did the labor unions that aggressively fought for better wages and benefits. Now, only one out of every 10 workers is a union member, while roughly 80 percent of jobs in the United States are in the service sector.

And it is these types of jobs, in health care, education, child care, disabled and senior care, that are expected to continue expanding at the quickest pace.

Most of them, though, fall short of paying middle-income wages. That does not necessarily reflect their value in an open market. Salaries for teachers, hospital workers, lab technicians, child care providers and nursing home attendants are determined largely by the government, which collects tax dollars to pay their salaries and sets reimbursements rates for Medicare and other programs.

“When we think about what is the right wage,” Mr. Stiglitz asked, “should we take advantage of discrimination against women and people of color, which is what we’ve done, or can we use this as the basis of building a middle class?”

They are also jobs that are filled by significant numbers of women, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.

“Biden’s Proposals Aim to Give Sturdier Support to the Middle Class”, Patricia Cohen, NYT (5.2.2021).

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Also see G. William Domhoff’s article, “Wealth, Income, and Power” for additional perspective on the American class system. https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/wealth.html

Domhoff furnished useful charts that portray the extent of class inequality. I have reproduced some below:

Table 1: Income and net worth in the U.S. by class, 2013

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The first option in this project asks you to assess the possibility that ethnicity – race, nationality, and religion – can impact on your subject’s status. The article below can help you appreciate the way race can impact on the hiring process.

Twenty years ago, Kalisha White performed an experiment. A Marquette University graduate who is Black, she suspected that her application for a job as executive team leader at a Target in Wisconsin was being ignored because of her race. So she sent in another one, with a name (Sarah Brucker) more likely to make the candidate appear white.

Though the fake résumé was not quite as accomplished as Ms. White’s, the alter ego scored an interview. Target ultimately paid over half a million dollars to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Ms. White and a handful of other Black job applicants.

Now a variation on her strategy could help expose racial discrimination in employment across the corporate landscape.

Economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago this week unveiled a vast discrimination audit of some of the largest U.S. companies. Starting in late 2019, they sent 83,000 fake job applications for entry-level positions at 108 companies — most of them in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 list, and some of their subsidiaries.

Their insights can provide valuable evidence about violations of Black workers’ civil rights.

The researchers — Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters of Berkeley and Evan K. Rose of Chicago — are not ready to reveal the names of companies on their list. But they plan to, once they expose the data to more statistical tests. Labor lawyers, the E.E.O.C. and maybe the companies themselves could do a lot with this information. (Dr. Kline said they had briefed the U.S. Labor Department on the general findings.)

In the study, applicants’ characteristics — like age, sexual orientation, or work and school experience — varied at random. Names, however, were chosen purposefully to ensure applications came in pairs: one with a more distinctive white name — Jake or Molly, say — and the other with a similar background but a more distinctive Black name, like DeShawn or Imani.

What the researchers found would probably not surprise Ms. White: On average, applications from candidates with a “Black name” get fewer callbacks than similar applications bearing a “white name.”

This aligns with a paper published by two economists from the University of Chicago a couple of years after Ms. White’s tussle with Target: Respondents to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago had much better luck if their name was Emily or Greg than if it was Lakisha or Jamal. (Marianne Bertrand, one of the authors, testified as an expert witness in the trial over Ms. White’s discrimination claim.)

This experimental approach with paired applications, some economists argue, offers a closer representation of racial discrimination in the work force than studies that seek to relate employment and wage gaps to other characteristics — such as educational attainment and skill — and treat discrimination as a residual, or what’s left after other differences are accounted for.

The Berkeley and Chicago researchers found that discrimination isn’t uniform across the corporate landscape. Some companies discriminate little, responding similarly to applications by Molly and Latifa. Others show a measurable bias.

All told, for every 1,000 applications received, the researchers found, white candidates got about 250 responses, compared with about 230 for Black candidates. But among one-fifth of companies, the average gap grew to 50 callbacks. Even allowing that some patterns of discrimination could be random, rather than the result of racism, they concluded that 23 companies from their selection were “very likely to be engaged in systemic discrimination against Black applicants.”

“Discriminatory behavior is clustered in particular firms,” the researchers wrote. “The identity of many of these firms can be deduced with high confidence.”

The researchers also identified some overall patterns. For starters, discriminating companies tend to be less profitable, a finding consistent with the proposition by Gary Becker, who first studied discrimination in the workplace in the 1950s, that it is costly for firms to discriminate against productive workers.

The study found no strong link between discrimination and geography: Applications for jobs in the South fared no worse than anywhere else. Retailers and restaurants and bars discriminate more than average. And employers with more centralized personnel operations handling job applications tend to discriminate less, suggesting that uniform rules and procedures across a company can help reduce racial biases.

An early precedent for the paper published this week is a 1978 study that sent pairs of fake applications with similar qualifications but different photos, showing a white or a Black applicant. Interestingly, that study found some evidence of “reverse” discrimination against white applicants.

More fake-résumé studies have followed in recent years. One found that recent Black college graduates get fewer callbacks from potential employers than white candidates with identical resumes. Another found that prospective employers treat Black graduates from elite universities about the same as white graduates of less selective institutions.

One study reported that when employers in New York and New Jersey were barred from asking about job candidates’ criminal records, callbacks to Black candidates dropped significantly, relative to white job seekers, suggesting employers assumed Black candidates were more likely to have a record.

“Who Discriminates in Hiring? A New Study Can Tell”, E. Porter, NYT (7.29.2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/business/economy/hiring-racial-discrimination.html

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Relative Status: Class in the Hamptons

Class positions are relative. In other words, they are experienced in relation to the positions occupied by other groups. The Hamptons on the East End of Long Island has a disproportionate number of the very wealthy that own property along the beach. Their presence shapes the culture of the East End which is felt by those who are not wealthy. This includes working class fishermen that have been in the area for several hundred years (dating back to colonial settlement in the 18^th century). Relative difference in income and wealth, education, and occupation has fueled class consciousness and conflict on the local level. A locale called “Truck Beach” in Napeague has become symbolic of this class tension:

For as long as Nathaniel Miller can remember, he has spent every summer at a beach in Napeague, a once-remote strip of marsh, pine forest and dunes sandwiched between Amagansett and Montauk in the Hamptons.

In the 1980s, the Miller family would drive their truck right onto the beach. While his father fished and his mother sunbathed, Mr. Miller and his two siblings would frolic in the surf. At some point, the family befriended a doctor who owned an oceanfront home with a saltwater swimming pool. As Mr. Miller remembers it, whatever his father caught ended up in the pool until it was time to take it home and cook it for dinner.

Back then, that 4,000-foot-long stretch of Napeague (which rhymes with fatigue) was one of the least developed areas in the Town of East Hampton. The construction boom in the area, initially fueled by Wall Street bonuses, was just beginning.

As Napeague filled out with homes and residents, so, too, did Truck Beach, which is what most locals started calling the stretch of sand that begins at Napeague Lane and extends eastward to the western boundary of Napeague State Park.

By the early 2000s, hundreds of locals were driving to Truck Beach on sunny weekends, parking their four-wheel-drive trucks side-by-side, Daytona Beach style. It was a lively, festive scene.

Right around the same time, the peaceful coexistence between day trippers in vehicles and owners of oceanfront homes in the area started to show some cracks. Families with coolers would set up camp for the day, using their seaside tailgates as a home base. Many beachfront homeowners who had paid millions to escape the throngs in the city and enjoy unobstructed views of the Atlantic grew increasingly enraged.

For the past dozen or so years, the Town of East Hampton, its trustees, local residents and owners of summer homes have been ensnarled in a contentious legal battle over whether four-wheel-drives have the right to park, from dawn to dusk, on Truck Beach during the summer. The fight, which boils down to public versus private beach access, is also fraught with class tensions, pitting year-round residents against wealthy summer visitors.

In February 2021, a group of Napeague homeowners, who had been fighting in court to end the use of the beach as, in their words, “a de facto parking lot,” came away victorious. Citing a “preponderance of evidence,” a state appeals court declared that the homeowners did, in fact, own the beach up to the mean high-water line. The decision, which reversed a 2016 ruling that had sided on behalf of the town and its trustees, effectively privatized what had long been considered a public beach.

Last summer, a sign went up on Truck Beach declaring it private property — with no vehicles allowed. Soon after that, a caravan of nearly 40 trucks, many waving American flags, were driving down the beach in an act of civil disobedience.

Eastern Long Island is hardly an outlier when it comes to tensions over beach privatization. Similar legal fights are underway in states including California, Florida, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington, said Josh Eagle, a professor of property, environmental, natural resources and ocean and coastal law at the University of South Carolina.

Jaine Mehring, who has owned a home near Truck Beach for 20 years, blames overuse and overdevelopment. “Things have gotten very out of balance in this community,” she said. “The truck usage of the beach has exploded, with development along that shoreline continuing unabated.”

The court’s 2021 ruling is complicated by the terms of an old easement, or reservation, which allows the public to use the beach “for fishing and fishing-related purposes.” It is part of an obscure and somewhat recently rediscovered 140-year-old deed that helped the homeowners win their case last year. But the easement was written when East Hampton was a farming and fishing village, and when fishermen still depended on anything with wheels — horse-drawn carts, for example — to transport equipment to and from the water. The easement, both sides argue, is open to interpretation, which is why the 1880s document is once again making a star appearance in court this summer.

In March, the trustees joined forces with a dozen commercial fishermen, filing a class-action lawsuit, on behalf of the 28,000 town residents, in the Suffolk County Supreme Court against the five homeowners’ associations in Napeague which won the court battle last year. The lawsuit says that locals have been deprived of beach access for “fishing-related purposes,” which still requires the use of a vehicle. Although permitted vehicles are still allowed to drive onto most beaches of East Hampton before 9 a.m. and after 6 p.m. during the summer season, fishermen want all-day, year-round vehicle access to Truck Beach, a custom that, until a year ago, they had enjoyed for over a century.

Both sides are awaiting yet another verdict. And most likely, the decision will come down to how the court decides to interpret, once again, the 140-year-old fishing easement.

“This case is not just about who can fish and where. It’s about class. It’s about rich versus poor,” said Daniel G. Rodgers, the Southampton-based criminal defense attorney who is representing the commercial fishermen. “The homeowners want the trucks and the middle-class lowlifes to go away.”

But the homeowners, represented by Stephen R. Angel and James M. Catterson, argue that upholding the historical right to fish is merely an attempted workaround for increased — and out of control — vehicular access. What’s to keep anyone from parking his car on the beach, sticking a fishing rod in the sand and claiming himself a fisherman, many of them say.

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Mr. Rodgers, who has represented many local fishermen over the years, and who has sometimes been paid in bay scallops, said his clients had become marginalized and rendered nearly invisible. “They’re in the fight of their lives for their very existence as ocean fishermen,” he said. “If they lay down now, it’s over.”

But the Napeague homeowners caution that a history lesson is in order. Especially after Ken Silverman, one of the residents who has led the charge against the trucks, started to do some digging in the local archives. In 2005, Mr. Silverman began poring over trustee records and handwritten deeds going back to the 1800s at the Suffolk County Clerk’s office in Riverhead.

He discovered that in the 1880s, when the town’s trustees were debt-ridden and on the verge of bankruptcy, they sold some 1,000 acres of Napeague land to Arthur W. Benson, a real estate developer and avid sports fisherman. As a condition of the sale, the trustees retained a reservation — the famous easement still being debated in court today — to continue to land boats and spread nets and cart fish to and from the beach.

Mr. Silverman said that what he unearthed proved that the town trustees did not own the beach, and depending on how one interpreted the easement, did not have the right to allow people to drive on it.

Based on his discovery, the homeowners sued the town and its trustees in 2009, citing the 1880s sale, known as the Benson Deed, as proof that the deeds to their properties included ownership of the beach. In 2016, after losing that first lawsuit, 110 homeowners dug in their heels. Five years and one appeal later, the court reversed its decision and ruled on their side. The 2021 verdict: The homeowners own the beach and vehicular use is not permitted by the reservation.

“People had been told one thing for decades and decades and decades and decades, only to have someone uncover the truth,” Mr. Silverman said, noting that the town and trustees still claimed ownership of the area, according to other documents he had found. “But they’ve deflected it all onto the homeowners, blaming us for stealing the beach, when we actually had nothing to do with it.”

While Bill Taylor, who was elected to the East Hampton Trustee Board in 2013, can understand Mr. Silverman’s “personal obsession” with this issue, he becomes annoyed when the Napeague homeowners quote the first few words of the reservation but leave out the rest — the important stuff, he says.

“The trustees are bringing this lawsuit on our own for all the inhabitants of East Hampton to maintain their right to use that beach for fishing, as it says in the deed. This is not the old case. This is a brand-new case about what that reservation means,” he said.

As the debate continues to wend its way through court, legal fees, which are rapidly mounting, have been shared among the five homeowners’ associations in Napeague, Mr. Silverman said. Since 2015, the town has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal costs, according to its clerk and registrar. “Everyone says when you’re fighting city hall it takes a long time,” Mr. Silverman said. “One of the theories of municipal litigation is that if they can drag it out for long enough, people get tired, they run out of money, they move to Florida, they die.”

Litigation may be dragging on, but both sides remain entrenched, arguing over aesthetics, ethics, fairness and tradition.

“This isn’t about sunbathing and driving trucks on the beach. This is about men and women working for a living,” said Daniel Spitzer, a lawyer representing the trustees of the town. “The fishermen are entitled to their day in court.”

Mr. Catterson, a lawyer for the homeowners, disagreed. “At the last trial, when we put on a videotape, there were about 300 trucks on the beach and no one — not one person — was fishing,” he said.

While the lawyers for the homeowners assert that traditional forms of fishing, like using nets from dories, no longer exist, Dan Lester, a commercial fisherman, begs to differ. He said that he often uses gill nets to catch striped bass on Truck Beach, driving along the sand to determine conditions and migratory patterns. Over the years, as beach-driving rules in the Hamptons had become more restrictive, Truck Beach had always welcomed locals with vehicles such as himself, until that changed last summer.

To Mr. Lester, Mr. Miller and other local fishermen, what has happened in Napeague is just “another greedy land grab by the people from away,” Mr. Lester said. His family’s roots in East Hampton date to the 1800s. Mr. Lester’s great-grandfather used a horse and wagon to go fishing on the beach.

“I’m not asking anyone permission to do something my family has been doing for hundreds of years,” said Mr. Lester, a year-round resident of Amagansett. “As far as I’m concerned, they should go back to Manhattan and leave us alone. Everyone wants to come here because of the way it is. But don’t come here and try to change it.”

Some 13 generations ago, Mr. Miller’s ancestors settled in East Hampton. A commercial fisherman and father of two, he sells his catch on Friday afternoons from his property in Springs, a hamlet of East Hampton. “This is where I belong, and this is what I do. But I’m the last of it,” he said. “My kids will never be able to afford to live here.”

Last October, 14 local residents, including Mr. Miller and Mr. Lester, received tickets for unlawful trespassing during a protest on Truck Beach. This summer, both men vow to continue using the beach until they’re taken away in handcuffs.

“Truck Beach Was for Locals. Then the Oceanfront Homes Arrived”, Amanda Fairbanks, NYT (6.22.2022).

Supplementary Readings

Miller, C.C., “Class Divisions Grow Worse, From Cradle On”, NYT (12.18.15); “The Great Affordability Crisis”, Annie Lowry, The Atlantic (2.7.20); “Lives of Rich Are Longer, and Healthier, A Study Shows”, Heather Murphy, NYT (1.17.20); “How to Prove You’re Middle Class”, Karyn Lacy, NYT (1.22.20); “Does ‘Wrong Mind-Set’ Lead to Poverty, or Does Poverty Come First?”, Emily Badger, NYT (5.31.17); “The Nature of Poverty”, D. Brooks, NYT (5/1/15); “Southern Cal Will Offer Lower-Income Students Tuition-Free Admission”, Anemona Hartecollis, NYT (2.21.20); “Are You Rich? Where Does Your Net Worth Rank in America?”, NYT (8.12.19); “What Does ‘Middle Class’ Really Mean?”, Claire Zaloom, The Atlantic (11.4.18);“U.S. Middle Class Shrank in 20 Years, Study Finds”, Nelson Schwartz, NYT (4.25.17); “The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You”, David Leonhardt, NYT (10.7.19); “In An Age of Privilege, Not Everyone is in the Same Boat”, Nelson D. Schwartz, NYT (4.23.16).

Option 2: Types of Capital

Interview someone about the types of capital (economic, social, cultural) available to them as they position themselves in society.

• Define “capital” and what is its role in the attainment of social status and upward mobility?
• What are the principal types of capital?
• Assess relative amounts of each type, considering where this places your subject on a status hierarchy.
• How “consistent” are the types of capital? Explain.
• Differentiate for capital that is inherited (e.g., transmitted by family members) versus capital that is achieved by the individual.
• Where do they believe their sum of capital places them in society? In particular, how do they perceive their status relative to other groups? Consider the way “First Gen” students position themselves in relation to more privileged (by race and class) students on campus.
• Assess their views objectively: Where do you believe their capital places them in society? Your explanation should take account of all three types of capital.

Question #2 is a spin on the status hierarchies model. It focuses on the concept of capitals: status hierarchies are rank orders or gradations of capitals. Capitals are resources that can be invested in the attainment of status. Investment capital is necessary to compete for scarce rewards. However, capital is, itself, a scarce (zero sum) resource. For a humorous overview of status capital see this video clip:

“A Nation of Tribes” (People Like Us”, #1/YouTube); “ “Joe Queenan’s Tour” (“People Like Us”, #2/YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_Rtl3Y4EuI

Also see this article for a discussion of the concept of “capitals”: “Pierre Bourdieu – Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Distinction” (on “types of capital” as resources for attaining status) http://www.liquisearch.com/pierre_bourdieu/bourdieus_theory_of_class_distinction

You may already be familiar with the concept of economic capital. This refers to the wealth available to engage in a particular endeavor. Let’s say your subject wants to become a professional chef. How much money is needed to do this? Nowadays, chefs often have to enroll in expensive higher education programs like at the Culinary Institute of America or Johnson and Wales. It has become professionalized. There are extended apprentices. How much money is needed to open up a restaurant? Can a better location be afforded? Would a food truck be a cheaper option?

But, wait, other resources are necessary to attain status. Another type of capital is cultural, or the knowledge, skills, and values that are necessary to attain status. What credential does the aspiring chef have to have on her resume? How much experience is required? Annette Lareau’s work highlights the role of parents’ cultural capital in children’s academic success. For an appreciation of speech style as cultural capital see the video “You Talkin’ to Me?” (NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/1248069311927/you-talkin-to-me.html

There is, finally, social capital. This is who you know, or better who knows you! What names can be featured as “references” on a resume? Can the aspiring chef network his way into the profession and more specifically a position that is desired. These 3 types of capital are interrelated. For example, money can buy cultural capital and establish helpful connections. On the other hand, cultural and social capital can be cashed in, in other words, translated into economic capital. In any case, investing in status attainment requires “building bridges” for “connections” to “the right people”. An Ivy League College becomes important for First Gen students when there is no other network capital.

Keep in mind that capitals come in many shapes and sizes. The critical question is how capital matches up with the status to be attained. The video “Ivy League Trailblazers” is a good look at the different capitals at play in an elite university setting. Note the status inconsistency that characterizes the “First Gen” students. Also note that, in an meritocracy, the concept of capitals makes it possible to imagine upward social mobility. Graduating college furnishes the cultural and cultural capital needed to attain a job with greater rewards, in particular a higher income.

“Ivy League Trailblazers”, N. Osipova, (NYT 4.12.15) https://www.google.com/search?q=Ivy+League+Trailblazers&rlz=1C1AWFC_enUS755US755&oq=Ivy+League+Trailblazers&aqs=chrome..69i57.8118j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

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The article excerpted below examines the role of family capitals, in particular economic and cultural capital, and college admission. This refers to the resources that families can invest in the child’s opportunity to go to college. It focuses on the role of the college admission essay which has become controversial as another metric which reflects status privilege that is passed down from parents to children:

It’s hard to disentangle social class from the college admissions process. The University of California system says it’s trying, announcing recently that it’s dropping consideration of the SAT and ACT. (It was part of a settlement in a lawsuit alleging that the tests are biased along lines of race, wealth and disability.)

More than half of U.S. colleges have made the tests optional for fall of 2021 admissions, according to FairTest, a group opposed to college entrance testing.

Because those tests are receiving so much scrutiny, it’s easy to overlook the influence of socioeconomic background on other admissions yardsticks.

Take the college essay. It’s the most important “soft factor” and the fourth-most important overall factor — after grades, curriculum strength and standardized test scores — according to a 2019 survey of admissions employees.

But essays can be polished by a paid professional third party, or helped along by an upper-middle-class parent.

In another sign of the persistent pull of social class, a recent working paper from authors affiliated with the Student Narrative Lab at Stanford shows that essay content, when quantified through a computer program, is more highly correlated with household income than SAT scores are.

Researchers did not analyze whether these signs of status affect an essay’s quality, or speculate on whether they would make any difference in an evaluation by an admissions officer. But the research suggests that much of the socioeconomic information critics accuse the SAT of reflecting can also be found in essays.

The paper used software to classify essays written by nearly 60,000 applicants to the University of California system in 2016. The essays were quantified partly through syntax choices. The number of commas, total punctuation and longer words were correlated with higher household income, for example, although that doesn’t necessarily equate to better writing.

The content was also quantified by word choice patterns, which are associated with particular topics. Admissions officials might not look more favorably upon essays written on certain themes, but it’s still notable that there are significant differences in the topics associated with higher and lower household incomes.

The topics associated more with students from higher-income households tended to be “more thematically abstract: human nature, seeking answers and sensory experiences,” said AJ Alvero, an education Ph.D. candidate at Stanford and one of the authors of the paper.

Topics more associated with lower-household-income students “were about interpersonal relationships (e.g. multiple topics about family) and school issues like tutoring groups and time management.”

A prior study by the same authors found similar patterns in income difference. A co-author of the study, Sonia Giebel, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology of education at Stanford, stressed along with the other authors that the content they identified was not a marker of essay quality, but pointed to a broader theme: “Class patterns are likely to be present across all the elements used to make admissions decisions.”

Poorer students, beyond writing their reality, may also be more likely to write about “economic insecurity” and “abuse” because of trying to meet perceived expectations. Even without specific guidance from admissions offices, they might feel obligated to “sell their pain.”

In contrast with much of the rest of the world, American admissions officers have a lot of discretion. Relying on elements like the essay gives them leeway to judge merit away from close scrutiny. The history of the so-called holistic approach — looking at the whole applicant and not just academic metrics — has not always been encouraging.

As Jerome Karabel wrote in his book “The Chosen,” relying on nonacademic characteristics had its origins in policies starting in the 1920s that aimed to limit the number of Jews admitted to elite universities. More recently, the discretion and opacity in admissions have been seen by some as harming high-scoring Asian students by penalizing them based on “character” or “fit.”

“College Admissions Can’t Escape Social Class Leanings”, Arvind Ashok, NYT (5.27.2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/upshot/college-admissions-essay-sat.html

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See this article by Karyn Lacy which discusses the “cultural capital” that Black people have to possess – and perform publicly – to buy a home in middle class, white neighborhoods:

When I talked two decades ago with more than 50 middle-class blacks who lived in the suburbs of Washington, I learned that their awareness of racial stereotypes led them to take on what I call “public identities” — meaning they would strategically deploy cultural capital, including language, mannerisms, clothing and credentials in ways that brought their middle-class status firmly into focus. From their experiences attending integrated high schools, many of these people had come to believe this was key to managing racism in interactions with white people. They hoped it would tip the balance of their public interactions so that class would trump race and persuade white people to treat them fairly.

This is an idea related to “code switching,” a term used to describe the temporary shift from black English to standard English that some black people use to signal their appropriation of white, middle-class norms. But the public identities of the middle-class black people I studied involved more than language: They spanned everything from dress to conversation topics to the small details of workplace conduct.

As one of my subjects, Charlotte, put it, black people “have two faces. So you know how to present yourself in the white world and you present yourself in the black world as yourself.”

There’s good reason to believe that the public-identity behaviors I identified are as central a part of black middle-class life as ever. In a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, black respondents were more likely than any other racial group to report that they felt people were suspicious of them (65 percent), that people acted as though they were not smart (60 percent), that they were treated unfairly in hiring, pay or promotion (49 percent) and that they had been unfairly stopped by the police (44 percent).

In my research, several subjects told me that because of their awareness of the associations many make between black people and poverty, when they went shopping, they deliberately wore clothing that they hoped would convince white store clerks that they were not poor. To avoid being treated as potential shoplifters, they told me they would eschew attire that was at the time associated in the popular imagination with black culture — like oversize gold earrings, baggy jeans and designer tennis shoes.

One subject, Philip, told me that he would go as far as to wear a suit. His belief was that when he was dressed as a professional, whites saw his class status first and responded to him as a member of that social group. Once he began to make purchases, he hoped that additional signifiers such as the kind of credit cards he carried and his ZIP code would assure store clerks that he was a member of the middle class.

Another subject, Jared, had a similar theory. “When you’re out in the world, you can be wearing grubbies, and you’ll be perceived a certain way if you’re black,” he said. He told me he imagined white people operated under a different public dress code: “If you have money, it’s O.K. to wear rags.”

Michael, a corporate manager, reported that he asserted his class status at work by refusing to answer his own telephone, always allowing calls to go through to his receptionist. He believed that taking on administrative tasks would reduce his social status in the workplace to that of a subordinate and leave room for his colleagues to see his race before his class and treat him with less respect.

The people I spoke to said they paid a price when they failed to perform these public identities. Once, dressed in sweatpants and a baseball cap, one of my subjects, Lydia, decided to view a model home. Right away, the real estate agent asked if the house was in her price range. Lydia knew that preapproval was not required for a tour and suspected that, because of her casual clothing combined with her race, the agent had mistaken her for a poor person who couldn’t realistically make an offer. After learning the asking price, which was in her range, Lydia took charge of the interaction, putting on a public identity in the form of demonstrating assertiveness and knowledge of the market. “Basically, I told her I’ll take a look at the house and I’ll let her know when I’m finished,” she explained. And she did.

Lydia’s experience echoed those of other house-hunting middle-class blacks who told me that they relied on firm language and knowledge of the market to manage interactions with white realty agents, hopeful that if they conveyed that they were informed and authoritative, they would be seen as members of the middle class and treated with respect.

Lydia wanted a home with a fireplace and she got it. However, she and other middle-class blacks I spoke to had no way to systematically assess how their housing searches compared with those of their white counterparts. While these interviews took place some time ago, and much has changed in the country since, black people have just as much reason to worry today. Decennial audit studies conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as an investigation conducted on Long Island and published by Newsday in 2019 (in which black and white trained testers using comparable financial identities visited the same real estate offices) have uncovered overwhelming evidence of housing discrimination against blacks, decades after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made the practice illegal.

The people I talked to tended to focus more on their success in managing public interactions than they did on what these efforts cost them in time, energy and emotions. But engaging public identities exacts a psychological toll, as one study participant hinted when she described “a relaxed day” at work for her as one during which she didn’t have to care what white people thought. And it’s worth mentioning that while my research focuses on middle-class black people, there’s no doubt that black people of lower socioeconomic status who can’t tap into these public identities have daily encounters that are even more unfair and demoralizing.

“How to Convince a White Realtor You’re Middle Class”, Karyn Lacy, NYT (1.22.20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/black-discrimination-study.html

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Although status is achieved rather than ascribed in class societies, life-chances can be inherited. This question about “capitals” asks you to illustrate the transmission of status from one generation to the next. See the transmission of capitals for Kamala Harris:

Sociologists emphasize the importance of the family for placing the individual in the social structure. Kamala Harris cited the importance of her parents and wider family for shaping her as a person (i.e., her “self”) in her speech accepting nomination as Vice President. Her mother was an immigrant from India and her father had emigrated from Jamaica. Both ancestries figured prominently in who Kamala became:

The couple soon had two daughters: Kamala, meaning “lotus” in Sanskrit, and Maya, meaning “illusion.”…For Ms. Gopalan [Kamala’s mother], it was important to maintain her Indian heritage. She introduced her daughters to Hindu mythology and South Indian dishes such as dosa and idli, and took them to a nearby Hindu temple where she occasionally sang. She also stayed close to her parents and flew back every few years to Chennai, on India’s southeast coast, where her parents had settled.

But as Ms. Harris explained in her memoir, published last year: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls.”

“How Kamala Harris’s Family in India Helped Shape Her Values”, J. Gettlemen and S. Raj, NYT (8.17.20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/world/asia/kamala-harris-india.html

Social class as well as race/ethnicity create different “opportunity structures” as individuals grow up (see the work of Annette Lareau on syllabus). Wealthy parents tend to have better educations and often work in managerial positions or careers that require creative problem solving, so they teach their children behaviors that are beneficial in these positions. This means children are effectively socialized and raised to take the types of jobs their parents already have, thus reproducing the class system (Kohn 1977). Both of Kamala Harris’s parents had PhD degrees; her mother benefitted from a family tradition of encouraging women to pursue advanced professional education. Poor families usually emphasize obedience and conformity when raising their children, while wealthy families emphasize judgment and creativity (National Opinion Research Center 2008). This may occur because working-class parents have less education and more repetitive-task jobs for which it is helpful to be able to follow rules and conform. Children are also socialized to abide by, or conform to, gender norms.

Modern societies are characterized by the outsourcing of socialization. In other words, social institutions outside the family increasingly encroach on the family. This increased the likelihood of conflict between agents of socialization and for the individual. This also increases the likelihood of rebellion by individuals. Traditional cultures like the Amish and Hasidic Jews keep their distance from the dominant society by minimizing contact with mainstream education and mass media. The Amish, for example, do not make the electricity necessary for TV and internet connections available in their communities. Amish children meet only the minimum requirements for school attendance and are allowed to stop attending altogether at 14. Amish children learn to be Amish from their families. See article and book review below for the socialization of Donald Trump.

“Like Father Like Son: President Trump Lets Others Mourn”, Annie Karni and Katie Rogers, NYT (7.29.20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/us/politics/donald-fred-trump.html

“7 Takeaways From Mary Trump’s Book About Her Uncle Donald”, Elisabeth Egan, NYT (7.8.20). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/books/review/mary-trump-book-takeaways.html

Option 3: Consumption Style and Status Rank

3) Interview someone who is consciously styling their lives for prestige or “distinction” on the basis of consumption. Answer questions below to see this as a “social fact”.

• In general, what makes “style” and “taste” forms of cultural capital?
• In the case of your subject, what is the basis of prestige claims related to commodity consumption (e.g., clothing, cars, jewelry, cuisine, travel and vacations, address/house)?
• Situate your subject’s consumption socially. Do they consciously perform a style defining membership a status group? See Lo-Lifes and Guido as examples.
• Locate this group in a social hierarchy that ranks stylized performances like Guido in a conspicuous display (e.g., Hipsters and “foodie” culture, Lo-Lifes and designer cool; “players and haters”, “in crowd” and “losers”, “popular kids” and “wannabes”).
• Locate this status group in the society-wide class system. In general, how does this consumption style reflect class culture, specifically level of income and taste?
• To what extent does consumption style reflect or “symbolize” an ethnic identity, as with Guido and Lo-Lifes? For example, playing disco music on the car radio and always having a tan came to be symbolize “being Italian”.
• With Lo-Lifes and Guido in mind, how does consumption style become a claim to respect that is referenced to the mainstream society?
• Is there media representation and maybe validation for the style and the group, e.g., the MTV shows Jersey Shore and Cribs? Elaborate.

Question #3 focuses on a type of cultural capital known as style which is a visible marker and even conspicuous display of taste. Style is cultivated – it is acquitted in a cultural context and, therefore, reflects a dynamic of status (social power). The article below focuses on the “signaling” of class through fashion:

I wrote about Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s political storytelling the past couple of weeks. We covered why it is not only OK but incumbent upon us to talk about style as political craft, even when the politician is a woman. We also discussed some of the racial, gender and sexuality codes in Sinema’s bright, colorful style presentation. Some of you wrote that you have been looking for a way to understand what is fair game and what is out of bounds when discussing Sinema’s denim vest or purple wigs. One reader wrote that it helped to think of presentation as speech, with its associated coded scripts about norms and beliefs.

Some of the most enduring and powerful coded speech in public discourse has to do with class. Not the idea of being classy, but class as in one’s position in a social hierarchy. One of my most enduring essays is about how I learned the coded language of fine-grained class distinction and how those codes have real material impact on one’s life. For savvy readers, it should not go without saying that the specter of social class looms behind Sinema’s style choices.

I spoke with Ashley Mears, a Boston University sociologist and former fashion model, about how Sinema plays on our notions of class. Mears described Sinema’s style as “a middle-class kind of catalog look.” “Middle-class” does not just mean that the fashion itself is accessible, that you can buy it from a mall or online store. It also means that it projects a middle-class image.

The form-fitting dresses and retro color palette that Sinema favors are a way of broadcasting her bona fides as a middle-class politician and thus someone in step with middle-class values. One might laugh at how literal this sounds as political stagecraft, but consider that almost all people in this country think of themselves as middle class, regardless of how much (or little) money they have. It is our cultural default, and we see it as normative.

We use “middle-class” interchangeably with other powerful nationalist signifiers like “citizen,” “voter” and “American.” And, though my progressive comrades may balk at this comparison, if you compare Sinema to some of Congress’s best-known female politicians, her style is easily the most accessible to her constituents. I know enough about fashion, and how much it costs, to know that few American women can afford to dress like, for instance, the preternaturally turned-out Nancy Pelosi. In fact, part of what makes Sinema’s style performance so uncomfortable for many of us is how middle-class it is: She doesn’t seem to be trying to do better. But that does not mean her style story lacks aspiration.

Mears said that Sinema’s presentation reads like “someone who’s got a catalog budget but is trying to imagine what that high-end editorial looks like, someone who aspires to be cool and edgy.” One dimension of class in Sinema’s sartorial performance is that it is basic but aspirational, not in power, but in coolness. Mears writes extensively about the world of high fashion and how men and women negotiate power.

Mears’s background as a model gives her firsthand knowledge of how class is coded, not just in the clothes we wear but also in the bodies that wear the clothes. In elite nightclubs and social events where the beautiful people gather, women’s beauty is a commodity charged as the price of entry. “The normative body would be a white man,” said Mears, and in a world where white men are the default body, all other aspects of power — from race and gender to class and sexuality — have to negotiate with them for access to powerful places. In such places, being a beautiful woman is a condition of admittance.

The Beltway, with its culture of power and politics, is also a “masculinist place,” as Mears described it. One of the reasons that Sinema’s style stands out is that backdrop. There are a narrow number of roles written for women, just like in society more broadly. One can be an ingénue, a power broker, an elite or an outsider.

Each role comes with a performance that shapes the political message and, as Mears put it, “chooses her audience.” Sinema stands out for trying to combine different aspects of multiple roles for female politicians. The tightfitting clothes whisper ingénue, innocent of the rules. The bright colors and wigs and accessories scream outsider, someone who knows the rules and ignores them. The bold patterns, in any other silhouette from the one she favors, could signal power broker or elite. But altogether, they communicate someone who may be aware of the roles that female politicians are boxed into but does not play into any of them all of the time.

Mears offered one other read of class in Sinema’s looks. “She may not have access to the kind of high fashion designers and looks that political women prefer,” she said. Political style consultants are a thing, and they are not cheap. Which is fine because most members of Congress are not broke. Sinema is not even in the running for rich when compared to her colleagues, though. I cannot find any evidence that she uses a style consultant or dresser, but Mears’s read is the most provocative so far: Sinema may not have the clout to hire a style consultant to smooth over her outfits’ competing messages. It’s a generous interpretation, and really the most generous one I can imagine.

I spoke with Alicia Menendez on MSNBC this week about style, power and Sinema. Like many of you, Menendez wondered if talking about fashion makes her a “bad feminist,” to quote my friend and Times colleague Roxane Gay. I hope we put that idea to rest not by telling but by showing. When a public person’s message is encoded in one’s deviation from an institution’s normative style guide, then there is a reason it fails or succeeds. When that public person is a public servant, that message carries just as much political meaning as his or her stump speeches.

Just because a politician is a woman doesn’t mean we should leave parts of her politics unexamined. We did that kind of interrogation of women poorly in the past and do it abhorrently in the present. But that does not mean that it cannot be done well and to better ends. As I told Menendez, if the point of some people’s feminism is to produce more powerful women, then the public is going to have to learn how to talk about powerful women.

For the past two weeks, I have taken a turn sitting in for Ezra Klein on his podcast. Almost all of the guest host episodes have been stellar. I count my episodes among those only because my guests have been top-notch. Be sure to check out my wide-ranging conversation about student loan debt, loan forgiveness and the nature of the indebted citizen with the sociologist Louise Seamster from last week. This week, you can hear me talk with the writer Kiese Laymon about revision as a moral, political and personal act of being a good person in a world that makes that harder than it should be.

“How Kristen Sinema Uses Clothing to Signal Her Social Class”, Tressie McMillan Cottom, NYT (11.12.2021)

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In the article below, pay attention to the social dynamic of style, in particular the way that it makes the individual feel like “a somebody”, and how that is embodied in a “brand” promoting vicarious identification with media “celebrity”:

The first thing you realize, when holding the jacket, is that it is more than a jacket. Made in a Chinese factory out of recycled nylon and polyester fill, it’s also a collection of contradictions. Voluminous, but weightless. A puffer coat with no seams. Warm, but lacking buttons, zippers or any type of closure. A Gap jacket that is suddenly a status symbol.

This month, the Round Jacket — the first release from the lucrative, 10-year deal between the rapper-cum-fashion designer Kanye West and the American retailer Gap, which was first announced last year — has finally begun to land in the hands of fans who bought it for $200, through online pre-orders, during the dog days of summer. Available in shiny red, black or electric blue, the jacket is already being peddled on reseller marketplaces for nearly triple its retail price.

But how does it feel to wear such a sought-after fashion oddity on the streets of New York? It was a question I sought to answer over the course of several days in November.

Wearing the item, I learned a few things: Many people recognized the coat. And they wanted to talk about it.

Near Washington Square Park, the jacket was a hit. Two girls shouted out compliments as I walked past them.

“The coat is completely different and new, but still yum,” Karon Sanders, a 20-year-old from Florida, said.

Yum?

“That’s a new word I’ve started using for things I like,” she clarified.

“Yes, I second the yum!” said Cal Trucco, a 19-year-old from Argentina. “It makes my eyes feel good.”

Over at Flight Club, a consignment store for coveted sneakers, located near Union Square, the jacket prompted a sales associate to expound about his love of Kanye. “He’s a visionary,” Cavan Miller, 19, said. He compared subtle updates to the Yeezy models over recent years to the incremental tinkering of Air Jordans over the decades.

Despite its eccentricities, the Yzy Gap round jacket appears to have connected with the people it was meant to attract. Young shoppers. Shortly after the online release of the blue version, reports suggest that Sonia Syngal, the Gap chief executive, was more than pleased with the rollout.

“It’s had a great response,” Ms. Syngal said on a conference call with analysts. “We’ve had a much younger customer. We’ve had 75 percent of those customers being new to the Gap brand.”

After a week of wearing the jacket in public, I’ve come to believe that for consumers, it represents, most importantly, a link to Kanye and his creativity. It is the most democratic and accessible entry into the vision of fashion he has curated and built over the years. Wearing the jacket seemingly transforms you from a plebeian to a shapeless, off-duty celebrity ready for a paparazzi shot. If not visually, at least mentally.

“I thought you were someone famous!” a 16-year-old girl visiting from Pittsburgh with her family told me on the street. I didn’t believe her.

A few days later, walking through my neighborhood in Bed-Stuy, I saw a young man of color wearing the jacket, slinking down the street with confidence. He couldn’t have been any older than 18. He looked famous too.

“Feeling Rich in the Yeezy Gap Jacket”, Andre Wheeler, NYT (11.24.2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/style/yeezy-gap-jacket.html

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The excerpt below focuses on the social roots of “streetwear” as a “mainstream fashion”. However, it is vague about the precise origins of a named clothing style that can easily be traced to Hip Hop as an urban subculture:

In late 2019, Virgil Abloh, the boundary-smashing designer who died last year, gave an interview to Dazed in which he declared the end of streetwear.

“I would definitely say it’s gonna die, you know? Like, its time will be up,” he said, immediately engendering a mass freak-out, not just in fashion but among pretty much anyone who had seen him as the prophet of a new contemporary dress code, one that smashed the rules of the old establishment, finding power in sweatshirts and sneakers rather than suits. Suddenly he was changing his mind?

Mr. Abloh ended up walking his statement back a bit — he told Vogue he wasn’t saying streetwear would be gone, gone; it always comes back — but two years after he made his prediction, there’s little question he was right. “Streetwear” is indeed dead.

“I can’t even define it anymore,” said Arby Li, the vice president for content strategy at Hypebeast, the website founded in 2005 as a streetwear fan blog that became a lifestyle brand unto itself and went public in 2016.

It’s not that, as was assumed when Mr. Abloh first spoke, everyone has gotten tired of the hoodies and sneakers and T-shirts that were the basic building blocks of that sector known as streetwear, though not by any means its defining characteristics.

It’s that those hoodies and sneakers and T-shirts have become so fully absorbed by the high fashion establishment that the line between streetwear and fashion has effectively disappeared. Streetwear has become fashion — or fashion has become streetwear, depending on how you want to look at it.

“It has simply become the platform on which the whole system stands,” said Demna, the creative director of Balenciaga. Last July, Balenciaga held its first couture show in 50 years, to wild acclaim — and is also the sixth most popular brand on Hypebeast.

The people who buy one are buying the other; the designers of one have become the designers of the other; the values of each — cool, comfort, community — merged into one. The basics of streetwear are the basics of every fashion line, as much as jackets and ball gowns. (And jackets and ball gowns are starting to show up in many streetwear lines.)

“Streetwear Is Dead”, Vanessa Friedman, NYT (2.10.2022).

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Until recently, styles of leisure and consumption were monopolized by rich and powerful elites. In wealthy consumer societies, leisure and consumption have been disseminated to the bottom strata by a consumer economy that is perhaps the epitome of the “American Dream”. In this framework, style develops in the context of appropriation and adaptation. See the video below on the Lo-Lifes, an inner city Black youth style obsessed with Ralph Lauren’s Polo collection. The status claims made by these youth poignantly illustrates the power of commodity symbolism, in particular the Polo label, to salvage dignity, let alone to make status claims, in a consumer society when populations are marginalized by class and race. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fuyl1lwDWdE

“Lo Lifes (Documentary Trailer)” (YouTube).

When you see the Lo-Lifes video, reflect on the recent looting of upscale consumption items like Versace fashion and Invicta watches under the cover of BLM political protest; this later morphed into “flash mobs” bereft of ostensible political ideology and protest for the 2021 holiday season. Lo-Lifes, like the Guido youth culture that I have researched, want to “buy into” an upscale consumption culture.

Pay special attention to the role of reference groups in claiming status. The article below discusses the appropriation of style identified with upper status groups by lower status groups, in this case defined by race. In this scenario, style is transacted, emerging in a back-and-forth exchange, or negotiation, of distinct identities in a struggle for social power – a struggle to “matter” – between a dominant racial group and a stigmatized subordinate racial group.

It is a rare event when a volume comes along that skews our understandings of fashion as effectively as “Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style,” which will be published in the United States in December. Many images assembled in the coffee-table volume may be familiar — including iconic documents of the civil rights movement and magazine pictorials featuring literary idols like James Baldwin and the influential jazz album covers from the heyday of Blue Note Records — but it was not until Jason Jules assembled them in one place and under one rubric that a clear theme and thesis emerged.

In Mr. Jules’s telling, the adoption by generations of Black men of sartorial codes originating among a white Ivy League elite may initially have been a natural inflection point in the arc of men’s wear evolution. Yet it was also a conscious development, one with a strategic agenda that extended well beyond the obvious goal of looking good.

In two recent telephone conversations from Paraguay and London, where he has homes, Mr. Jules, a fashion insider who considers Steve Urkel, a preppy-nerdy character in the ’90s sitcom “Family Matters,” his style paragon, talked about the journey that deepened his understanding of Black Ivy style.

Guy Trebay: Jason Jules, you have a wild résumé, starting with your introduction to magazine writing when you sent a stick-figure fashion feature you’d drawn in grade school to i-D and they published it.

Since then you’ve done P.R. and club promoting, worked with Soul II Soul and Jay Kay of Jamiroquai, consulted for brands like Levi’s and Wrangler and are a ubiquitous presence on men’s wear style blogs, Instagram and Tumblr.

I think of you primarily as a stylist, yet here you’ve come along with a provocative book examining the historical relationship Black men had with what is thought of as the sartorial uniform of a white Ivy elite. How did you get here?

Jason Jules: I’ve always been into that particular style and look, even before I knew it was called Ivy. When I was 4 or 5, I was watching a Fred Astaire film — there was a whole series on British television at the time — and I sat with my nose almost against the screen, mesmerized.

When we went shopping later, I told my mother I wanted to dress like Alastair, and she had no clue what I was talking about. Who is Alastair? I was extremely nearsighted as a child — still am — and I got the idea that Fred Astaire was Alastair.

G.T.: I hope that cleared things up for her. Still, I’m not sure how that goes toward explaining your journey to an understanding of Black Ivy style.

J.J.: To me, the understanding of Black Ivy came about organically. As I got older, I began to draw connections between style and its contexts and began to understand how clothes could have meaning, how things can be adopted and redefined to serve a purpose or an agenda.

G.T.: Do you mean, in a sense, acts of appropriation, to use a loaded term?

J.J.: Yes and no. There is a clear parallel between the peak of Ivy style during a period when it dominated men’s wear in the ’60s and the growth of the civil rights movement. I had few preconceptions when I began my research, but as I went along, I began to to notice how the main activists in the movement seemed to have invested in some version of Ivy style. It struck me that it wasn’t just about fashion. It had very little to do with fashion, in fact.

G.T.: You mean it was strategic?

J.J.: If we recognize that Ivy style is the attire of a cultural or social elite and that people may have wanted to be seen as equal to anyone in the United States, then yes. It makes perfect sense to adopt that style. I am not suggesting anybody was so naïve as to believe that dressing it was being it. Still, you can see in this adoption of a very traditional uniform associated with, say, Harvard or Yale — a look steeped in heritage and history and that has these clear modernist connections — a strategy that might be attractive to activists.

G.T. Are you saying the optics did double duty? The style had a fashion basis and a political goal.

J.J.: It was both. Of course, people wanted to look good. But the embrace of Ivy style had to do with a desire to be seen as equal and not to allow particular prejudices and barriers to prevent you from doing that. I think of it as being a little like dressing rockabilly to get into a rockabilly club. There was an implicit challenge too, of assumptions about who gets to own a certain style.

G.T.: In a certain sense it was taking codes from the dominant culture and torquing them.

J.J.: One thing I’m trying to say in the book is that, if it wasn’t for the interruption of the Black activists, we probably wouldn’t be seeing Ivy League clothing as interesting or cool right now. And it is cool, very cool.

It’s similar, in a way, to how gay activists wore conservative clothing, Ivy League style, because on the one hand there was a real need to pass, and yet the act of dressing that way was undertaken with a sense of irony. It was as if they were saying: “You think of what you have as so precious and valid. Let me take it and show you how it’s really done.”

G.T.: Funnily enough, that is the fundamental premise of vogueing. Some people misapprehend it and think of as imitation. But if you have spent any time around the ball children — and I have a lot — you see it for the incredibly sophisticated critique that it is.

J.J.: Black Ivy guys were not necessarily performing a critique. Yet at the same time, their adoption of Ivy style was not meant to be comfortable for the dominant culture. It had elements of, “I’ll outdress you and outstyle you for the simple reason that, unless I’m using your language, I’m invisible.” There is always this question of how one makes himself visible.

G.T.: That comes clear in your choices of artists and writers that feature in the book. Many of them chose, albeit in a distinctive way, to conform to the establishment dress codes. James Baldwin may look fantastically stylish in his Ivy gear. But for you it’s notable that he chose those things and not, for instance, the more extravagant styles you may have seen on a contemporary of his like Iceberg Slim.

J.J.: As these individuals evolved, their style language developed. I was having a super-casual conversation recently with a friend, a middle-class white guy, and he was basically saying that the reason a Black person in the 1960s would dress this way was simply because he wanted to imitate a successful white person.

I disagree. Before we can fully articulate through language all that we aspire to be, we need our clothing to serve the function of making us socially legible. People read each other based on images. We build a narrative about each other from what we see.

G.T.: But the jazz musicians you focus on had no particular need to be seen through an establishment lens, did they? Yet you delve into how jazzmen took wholeheartedly to Ivy style. There is a section of the book devoted to what we’ll call the Blue Note look. Those guys were playing audacious new music, and yet some of them dressed as if they worked at an insurance office. The juxtaposition is part of what makes those album covers so cool and is certainly central to why designers have done entire collections based on that look.

J.J.: I really do think everything was considered to the most granular extent. There’s a story about how Miles Davis was hanging out with the Blue Note musicians, though before “Birth of the Cool.” The other musicians convinced him to drop the polite clothing he’d been wearing and get a suit with the broad shoulders and peak lapels, the kind of hipster clothes that riffed on stuff you might see in Hollywood gangster movies.

G.T.: But that did not last long. Like Malcolm X, Miles migrated quickly to this other uniform so starkly at odds with his own radical projects. Davis was making radical music and Malcolm radical politics and yet for a long time dressed in an exaggeratedly conservative way that functioned like a kind of camouflage.

J.J.: Both of them were hyper-aware of the stereotype of Blackness, and they were dressing in reaction to that. One of the things that made me start thinking about a common narrative around Ivy style was the famous story of Miles Davis going into the Andover Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts — this was during some jazz festival — and allegedly being converted in a single shopping session to the Ivy look.

The way the story is presented, Miles went in as an everyday jazzer and came out this shining example Ivy League style. Yet Miles grew up wearing Brooks Brothers clothing. There was no road-to-Damascus moment. His father was a dental surgeon. That part of the story is inconvenient to a pat narrative.

G.T.: And he proceeded to make it far cooler …

J.J.: Every style idiom needs to adapt and change. The mainstream view holds as truth that these people were affirming the supremacy of the culture whose clothes they’d adopted. But it isn’t that. This group — the civil rights leaders, especially — was trying to change the establishment while at the same time asking the fundamental questions: “Who says this is yours, and who says I can’t have some and can’t redefine it and include whatever other elements I want? Whose America is it, anyway?”

“The Making of Black Ivy Style”, Guy Trebay, NYT (11.18.2021). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/style/black-ivy-style-jason-jules.html

Consumerism is the ideology that makes consumption matter greatly in modern societies; thus, it is possible to refer to the latter as a consumer society – a society built on consumption. This means that people construct identities, and therefore lives, around the consumption of commodities like cars, houses, appliances, clothing, etc. Consumerism as a life-focus has become more important in the pandemic which has created a crisis of meaning; consumption has been put to the test for its capacity to give meaning to our lives. See “They’re Stuck at Home. So, they’re Making It a Sanctuary” Carl Zimmer, NYT (9.5.20).

Social media (e.g., Instagram photos of fabulous entrees and Hamptons beach scenes) seems to fuel the feeling envy and what has been termed “FOMO”: the “Fear of Missing Out” is essentially “status envy”.

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See the article below, relying on an interview with sociologist Juliet Schor, on the nature of consumerism as a structural feature rooted in the American “capitalist” economy. With option 3 in mind, pay close attention to the concepts of reference group and status competition:

What’s at the root of modern American consumerism? It might not just be competition among the brands trying to sell us things, but also competition among ourselves.

An easy story to tell is that marketers and advertisers have perfected tactics to convince us to purchase things, some we need, some we don’t. And it’s an important part of the country’s capitalistic, growth-centered economy: The more people spend, the logic goes, the better it is for everybody. (Never mind that they’re sometimes spending money they don’t have, or the implications of all this production and trash for the planet.) People, naturally, want things.

But American consumerism is also built on societal factors that are often overlooked. We have a social impetus to “keep up with the Joneses,” whoever our own version of the Joneses is. And in an increasingly unequal society, the Joneses at the very top are doing a lot of the consuming, while the people at the bottom struggle to keep up or, ultimately, are left fighting for scraps.

I recently spoke with Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College, about the history of modern American consumerism — what it’s rooted in, how it’s evolved, and how different groups of people have experienced it. Schor, who is the author of books on consumerism, wealth, and spending, has a bit of a unique view on the matter. She tends to focus on the roles of work, inequality, and social pressures in determining what people buy and when. In her view, marketers have less to do with what we want than, say, our neighbors, coworkers, or the people we follow on social media.

Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

When I think of the beginning of what I perceive as modern American consumerism, I tend to go back to the 1950s and post-World War II, people moving to the suburbs in the cookie-cutter homes. But is that the right place to start?

Scholars differ on how to date consumerism. I would say we need to go back a bit earlier to the 1920s, which is when you get the development of mass production, which is what makes mass consumption possible. This perspective differentiates the 20th century from the earlier period, in which you have shopping and you have consumer fads. But what changes beginning in the 1920s is that the production technologies make it possible to produce things cheaply enough that eventually you can get a majority of the population consuming them.

In addition to the things that are happening in factories, the automobile is the leading industry where you move from stationary production to a moving assembly line and big declines in costs. You also have the beginnings of the modern advertising industry and the beginnings of consumer credit.

Then it stalls out, of course, because of the Depression and the war. What happens in the 1950s is the model gets picked up again, this time with major participation by the federal government to spur housing, road building, the auto industry, education, and income. We get into durable goods and household appliances. As we know, that’s really confined to white people post-war.

Scholars have different answers to this question. Economists just assume that goods and services provide well-being, and people want to maximize their well-being. Psychologists root it in universal dimensions of human nature, which some of them tie back to evolutionary dynamics. I don’t think either of those are particularly convincing.

The key impetus for contemporary consumer society has been the growth of inequality, the existence of unequal social structures, and the role that consumption came to play in establishing people’s position in that unequal hierarchy. For many people, it’s about consuming to their social position, and trying to keep up with their social position.

It’s not necessarily experienced by people in that way — it’s experienced more as identity or natural desire. But I think our social and cultural context naturalizes that desire for us.

If you think about the particular things people want, it mostly has to do with being the kind of person that they think they are because there’s a consumption style connected with that. The role of what are called reference groups — the people we compare ourselves to, the people we identify with — is really key in that. It’s why, for example, I’ve found that people who have reference groups that are wealthier than they are tend to save less and spend more, and people who keep more modest reference groups, even as they gain in income and wealth, tend to save more.

Increases in inequality trigger what I’ve called “competitive consumption,” [the idea that we spend because we’re comparing ourselves with our peers and what they’re spending]. It can be hard to keep up, particularly if standards are escalating rapidly, as we’ve seen.

I want to dig into this idea of competitive consumption. How are we competing with each other to consume?

We have a society which is structured so that social esteem or value is connected to what we can consume. And so the inability to consume affects the kind of social value that we have. Money displayed in terms of consumer goods just becomes a measure of worth, and that’s really important to people.

How do we pick our “reference groups” if it’s not necessarily by wealth?

We don’t know too much about it. The argument that I made in [my book] The Overspent American was that in the postwar period, we had residentially-based reference groups. So it was really your neighborhood. People moved to the suburbs, and they interacted with people in the suburbs. Those were reference groups of people of similar economic standing because housing is the biggest thing that people buy, and houses tend to cost the same amount roughly within a neighborhood. Family and friends and social networks have always been really important.

Then the next big thing that happens is that you get more and more married women going into the workforce. That really changes reference groups, because they go from a flat social structure in the suburbs to a hierarchy in the workplace, particularly if you’re talking about better-remunerated work and white-collar work. People interact with people above and below them in the hierarchy. So people were exposed to the lifestyles of the people above them in the informal socialization that goes on in the workplace.

Then there is the impact of media, and increasingly now, social media. It’s the friends that you don’t actually know, the Friends on TV.

The reference groups change under different socioeconomic dynamics, but it mostly has to do with who you’re in contact with — what you’re seeing in front of you, so your neighbors, your coworkers, what you’re seeing on TV, in movies, on social media.

I think the key point here that differentiates this approach from that of many people who think about consumption is that it is not saying that it’s primarily driven by advertising. It’s not a process of creating desire where it didn’t exist. Critics of advertising say it’s just making people want stuff they don’t need and doesn’t have value to them. And you have to think, “Okay, why do they keep doing that? Why do they keep falling for the advertisements?” Many of the things that people desperately want are not particularly advertised. My approach is rooted in really deep social logic.

It can be very rational and compelling for people to do something that in the end doesn’t necessarily make them all that better off but that failing to do requires really a major effort and going against the social grain in a very big way.

Did the Great Recession change how we’re behaving and what we’re buying?

It really slowed down that cycle of acquisition and discard. From 1991 to 2007, the number of pieces of apparel people were buying, on average, went from 34 pieces of new apparel a year to 67. That number hasn’t really budged in the last 10 years.

We haven’t had a massive discontinuity in how the consumption system is operating, but people had less money. And that’s part of the rejecter dynamic — when it’s more difficult for people to participate in that system, either because of its growing cost or their own incomes stagnating, they are likelier to reject it.

It will be interesting to see whether there are any wider impacts of Covid and the fact that people lived with not much more than basic necessities for a while. My own view is that the work patterns are really key in driving consumption. The standard economic view is that it’s the consumer decisions and desires that drive work patterns, and I don’t think that’s the way it works. I think that work patterns actually end up driving consumption.

People make decisions about work, and the hours of work and the incomes associated with them are fixed with the decision. In general, if I decide to take my job as a professor, it has a salary that goes with it, and then that’s what drives my consumption decisions because it drives my income.

If I can’t work this hard anymore, I’m going to go part-time and my income gets cut in half, then I have to adjust my consumption. And that’s not to say it doesn’t go in the other direction — if I want to buy a house, I am going to work some more. But this is my analysis of how the work and spending sides fit together, which is that the work side is a little more dominant.

So we are entering a moment where lots of people have been sitting at home for a year and a half, and as you said, there’s a lot of pent-up demand. Plenty of people I know are ready to spend. Is it odd that we’re responding to the end of a crisis by spending money?

We’re just talking about the people who have it. One of the things about the pandemic is that it made the inequalities in income and spending power more visible to many Americans.

You had so many people who just were struggling through the pandemic to meet basic needs. If you think of that as a working-class phenomenon, you also had this middle-class phenomenon of people whose salaries continued. They were stuck in their houses, so the money was coming into their bank accounts every month and they didn’t have much to spend it on at all. There are people with considerable disposable income right now. We’re going to see a burst of spending now, and we’ll see how long it lasts.

“Why Do We Buy What We Buy?, Emily Stewart, Vox (7.7.2021) https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22547185/consumerism-competition-history-interview

Also see this discussion of status envy spun for a society in quarantine: “Quarantine Envy Got You Down? You’re Not Alone”, Nancy Wertik, NYT (8.10.20) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/smarter-living/quarantine-envy-pandemic.html

Style Referenced to Commodities

Automobiles are “vehicles” which, by definition, transport riders from one point in space to another. They are also preeminent status symbols, representing the rider’s relative position in a hierarchy based on commodity consumption. For the affluent, it is possible to “customize” their “ride” for status claims. See this article on the “next level” of “customization” for “status chasers”. Pay attention to the role of commodities and the relevance of celebrity consumers in making these consumer choices matter to those who “buy into” this style of consumption. The examples cited in this article create an “exclusive” status for extremely wealthy celebrities. As celebrities, however, their style choices become consumer guides for people who “follow them”.

It is, by its owner’s description, a “zombie killer” dream machine — a 2021 Mercedes-Benz SUV G-Wagon/Brabus, Frankenstein-built using organs from a sacrificial donor auto, custom portal axles, 16-inch lifts that elevate the roofline to Manute Bol height, tires so pneumatic that custom bumpers and fenders were machined to give them clearance, a roof rack resembling the launchpad for a drone fleet and two-toned honeybee-colored interiors as detailed as a Dutch still life.

The base sticker price on this particular vehicle runs around $135,000. But that would be before the fashion designer Kerby Jean-Raymond, the creative director of his own successful New York label, Pyer Moss, and of Reebok, began to collaborate on customizing it with the help of the Abushi brothers, four Palestinian American siblings who, in an industrial section of Queens, operate a luxury and exotic automotive facility that may well be to the average auto-body shop what the Hospital for Special Surgery is to a walk-in clinic.

Tucked between an enormous UPS depot and opposite some desolate rail tracks in Maspeth is the state-of-the-art 15,000-square-foot Abushi facility. On any given day, one would likely encounter there some of the world’s rarest, most costly and covetable rolling stock waiting its turn in the beautician’s chair.

Take the recent torrid Thursday when a $770,000 Rolls-Royce Cullinan Mansory SUV belonging to the Cleveland Browns wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. stood parked in the showroom, as a technician peeled away a poorly installed body wrap to replace it with another in Beckham’s signature traffic-cone orange. Nearby was a gussied up a 2021 Aston Martin UBX, a surprise gift from OBJ for his influencer girlfriend, Lauren Wood.

There at the curbside was a buglike $280,000 gold McLaren 720 S Spider sports car owned by a supermarket magnate, a member of what the writer Michael Thomas once called “the new tycoonery.” Decorated in an allover honeycomb grid, the car was also ornamented with crime tape reading “Crime Pays.” A capering figure silhouette on the door depicted Rich Uncle Pennybags, the Monopoly Man.

There, too, in the showroom’s arctic cool stood a passel of tricked out G-Wagons; a Lamborghini SVJ 63 roadster, of which only 63 were ever manufactured; and a Ferrari 375 GTB NART Spider, which is a convertible and has a market value of roughly $25 million. And there, in a service bay with floors clean enough for an “A” restaurant inspection rating, was Mr. Jean-Raymond’s G-Wagon, a piano-black hulk out of Marvel Comics, further steroided with its massive wide-body superstructure.

Excess inevitably springs to mind on a visit to the Abushi shop, a place that illustrates, as well as anything can, what those from the smallest percentile of wealth, in a country increasingly defined by its lack, do with money that’s often so new it is not just wet but crypto.

“People use social media and they see all the stuff that’s out there in terms of levels of wealth,” and the toys it can buy, said Steven Forkosh, a real estate developer and owner of a social media influencer agency. At 32, he has residences in four different places, a safe filled with rare Patek Philippe and Richard Mille timepieces, and a fleet of 40 luxury vehicles.

“Hypebeasts Hit the Road”, G. Trebay, NYT (8.19.2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/style/hypebeasts-hit-the-road.html

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Cities have historically been places where consumption related to status competition happens; the first big department stores were located in capital cities like London and New York in the 19^th centuries. Jacob Bernstein controversially maintains that the most affluent residents of New York City fled when the pandemic erupted because they could no longer conspicuously consume. See “Hisses for the Rich Who Fled”, NYT (4.15.21).

Even without final data from New York City about how many people remained in the city during the pandemic, an abundance of anecdotal evidence exists about the exodus of its wealthiest residents.

At the writer Molly Jong-Fast’s Upper East Side apartment building, less than half a dozen of the 47 units were occupied in April 2020, she said. Mark Armstrong Peddigrew, a personal trainer in Lower Manhattan, said that roughly 85 percent of his clients left town.

At Loaves & Fishes Foodstore, a grocer in the Hamptons where lobster salad costs more than $100 a pound, there were 30-minute lines on Thursday mornings during the off season.

Now, as the rate of vaccinations increases, the blooming bulbs around the city feel like a metaphor for more than just spring.

New restaurants are opening, stores are filling up, comedians are again getting heckled at the Comedy Cellar.

Rationally, most New Yorkers know these are good things. They want to conquer the pandemic, and that involves saving the economy as well as lives.

But the pride they take in their own toughness is superseded only by their propensity to complain. And these days, a lot of gripes are aimed at those who left.

Not the ones who departed because of lost jobs, underlying illnesses or the need to take care of aging parents, said Jeremiah Moss, 50, who in 2007 started “Vanishing New York,” a blog that chronicled the businesses that closed because of rising rents and gentrification.

Instead, Mr. Moss said that the resentments harbored by him and his friends relate to the “large group of people who left because they didn’t know how to be in New York without consuming, without being in bars and restaurants and stores.”

Nearby Brooke Lima, 27, was watching one of her two rescue dogs cavort with a Welsh corgi while the other begged for treats.

Ms. Lima had grievances of her own, namely the return of the golden doodles and “other dogs who look like they were grown in a lab.”

Some of the precious pooches arrive with “finance bros,” she said, who pace the run conducting business deals over AirPods. Others are tended to by young women with Gucci disco bags, an accessory that in her estimation is the only version “of haute couture or status that can be bought by a person who makes $50,000 a year and has six roommates,” she said. Usually, she added, these are the sorts of people who “get possessive about their dogs’ tennis balls.”

The writer Sloane Crosley, 41, speaking a few days later, was more measured about the millennials she knew who fled New York City.

“I didn’t take it personally,” she said. “I don’t want to be one of these people that blames an entire generation of millennials for things, but I do think there was a group of them who came to New York expecting a certain level of comfort and then, at the first whiff of Covid, upped and left.”

Then she would see their social media posts, which she said reeked of privilege.

“You have these people posting one slide of their beautiful country house — that’s what we’ll call them, slides — and then the next one up would be an image of them crowded into some restaurant for someone’s birthday party the year prior with the hashtag ‘miss this,’” Ms. Crosley said. “I just thought, ‘I don’t doubt that you miss this, but you know what else I miss? My neighbor, who was carted out on a stretcher.’”

Supplementary Reading:

“How the Age of Instagram Helps Keep the Debutante Ball Alive”, James Barron and Elizabeth D. Herman, NYT (2.13.20); “The Hipster in the Mirror” by Mark Grief, NYT (11/12/10); “’Jersey Shore’ Cast’s Guido Style Can Be Traced Back to ‘Saturday Night Fever’”, S. Roberts, NY Daily News (7/28/10); “They Taught Hip Hop How to Dress”, J. Caramanica, NYT (6.30.16); “The Gospel of Minimalism”, Jacoba Urist, NYT (5.4.17); “Island of Prep Perseveres”, John Caramanica, NYT (1.11.18); “What Hypebeasts Wore to the Hypefest”, John Ortved, NYT (10.12.18); “How a Hip-Hop Party Went From a Harlem Basement to Packing Barclay’s”, Aaron Randle, NYT (12.24.19).

“New Menus at Eleven Madison Park Will Be Meatless”, Brett Anderson and Jenny Gross, NYT (5.4.21).

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