8: Social Class in the United States

 Ah, New Orleans, that fabled city on the Mississippi Delta. Images from its rich past floated through my head—pirates, treasure, intrigue. 

Memories from a pleasant vacation stirred my thoughts—the exotic French Quarter with its enticing aroma of Creole food and sounds of earthy jazz drifting through the air. 

The shelter for the homeless forced me back to an unwelcome reality. 

The shelter was like those I had visited in the North, West, and East—only dirtier. 

The dirt, in fact, was the worst that I had encountered during my research. On top of that, this was the only shelter to insist on payment in exchange for sleeping in one of its filthy beds. 

The men here looked the same as the homeless anywhere in the country—disheveled and haggard, wearing that unmistakable expression of sorrow and despair. 

Except for the accent, you wouldn’t know what region you were in. Poverty wears the same tired face wherever you are, I realized. 

The accent may differ, but the look remains the same. 

I had grown used to the sights and smells of abject poverty.

 Those no longer surprised me.

 But after my fitful sleep with the homeless that night, I saw something that did. 

Just a block or so from the shelter, I was startled by a sight so out of step with the misery and despair I had just experienced that I stopped and stared. 

I felt indignation swelling within me.

 Confronting me were life-sized, full-color photos mounted on the transparent Plexiglas shelter of a bus stop.

 Staring back at me were images of finely dressed men and women, proudly modeling elegant suits, dresses, diamonds, and furs.

 A wave of disgust swept over me. “Something is cockeyed in this society,” I thought, as my mind refused to stop juxtaposing these images of extravagance with the suffering I had just seen. The disjunction—the mental distress—that I felt in New Orleans was triggered by the ads, but it was not the first time I had experienced this sensation. 

Whenever my research abruptly transported me from the world of the homeless to one of another social class, I experienced a sense of disjointed unreality. 

Each social class has its own ways of thinking and behaving, and because these fundamental orientations to the world contrast so sharply, the classes do not mix well. Hearing from Students Social Class in the United States Play Hearing from StudentsSocial Class in the United States