SNOB STORY B
Yes, the elite has specific cultural tastes. But is it true they use them to exclude the lower classes?
IS what ails America’s struggling middle class a kale chasm? A breast-feeding barrier? A Pilates pitfall? Is having a grasp of these things required to be a full member of the New Upper Class?
It’s becoming a common view that the taste codes of the cultural elite are making it harder for those beneath them to climb the class ladder. A simple question can decide whether or not someone is allowed to ascend the ranks: “Do you know what ‘pomodoro’ means? If not, sorry. Proceed no further.”
This theme was seized upon by New York Times columnist David Brooks in his now-infamous July 11 column. In that essay, Brooks concluded that a friend of his who, lacking a college education and the sophisticated knowledge of elite-speak that goes with it, appeared utterly baffled at a fancy sandwich shop offering items such as “pomodoro,” “padrino, “soppressata” and “pretensimento.” (OK, I made up that last one.)
Brooks kindly offered to take his friend elsewhere for lunch, and social media exploded with ridicule at his alleged condescension, even as we all admitted we didn’t really know what soppressata was either. (It’s dry salami, but faking your way through a menu is something you pick up at college.)
Brooks’ column was inspired in part by the book “The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class” by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, published earlier this summer by Princeton University Press and written in a state of alarm that isn’t quite justified. USC professor Currid-Halkett launches the book with statistics showing that the middle class is spending a greater share of its income on “conspicuous consumption” than the so-called “aspirational class.” (Sociologist Charles Murray terms this group the New Upper Class. I call them the “nuppies.”) Conspicuous consumption is stuff you buy to show off even though it isn’t any more functional, like fine china, Louis Vuitton handbags, Manolo Blahnik pumps or flashy cars. (The Audi A3, the author writes, is just a dressed-up VW Golf.) The nuppies, though, are spending more on intangibles — services like education, health care, child care and housekeeping.
Below the elite level, “other income groups,” writes CurridHalkett, “may choose to spend on status goods rather than on things that may shape their and their children’s well-being in the future” even as nuppies have shifted their spending to what she calls “inconspicuous consumption,” and for some reason this really worries her. The nuppies are biking to work, discussing documentaries, reading The New Yorker, buying handmade stuff on Etsy and eating local zucchini from farmers markets. None of this costs so much money that the other classes can’t afford it, she argues, but all of these tastes and signifiers together — sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it our “habitus” — builds a barrier between classes that is increasingly hard for outsiders to penetrate.
Nuppies, Currid-Halkett writes, are not solely defined by high in- comes. Their membership includes struggling screenwriter-baristas in Brooklyn who went to Wesleyan. It excludes, say, the uncouth if wealthy Rodney Dangerfield character in “Caddyshack,” Al Czervik. “The aspirational class,” writes CurridHalkett, “may not be the 0.01 percent, but they live in an entirely different and more privileged cultural universe than almost everyone else.”
AND here’s the rub: The nuppies may be “different,” but in what sense are they “more privileged?” Some may consider it a “privilege” to have tickets to the ballet. Others would rather be beaten on the shoulders with a rusty shovel.
Currid-Halkett detects a “pernicious divide between the elites and the rest” but only the op-ed columnists of the world seem to think this is a problem. What non-elites hate more than a lack of access to satirical adult puppet shows is being condescended to, the sense that all of those smartypants college types in the big cities think their interests are deplorable.
Maybe ordinary Americans have found ways to earn a solid living without ever having heard of Bowdoin. Maybe some do feel ill at ease in an Italian sandwich shop, but how at home would Currid-Halkett feel at an evangelical church in Houston or a gun show in Tennessee? If the Williamsburg baristacum-performance artist looks down his nose at a guy who earns five times as much working in natural gas in Oklahoma, I can hear the gas man say: Keep your hip factor, I’d rather have the money. His children probably wouldn’t trade their dad for a beardy guy playing in an indie rock band, either. “The practices of inconspicuous consumption . . . offer a freedom and mobility that conspicuous consumption can’t buy,” the author writes. Really? Tell the Swarthmore grad carrying $75,000 in student loans that he’s got lots of “freedom.”
It takes a huge rhetorical stretch for the Currid-Halketts of the intelligentsia to prove that these taste differences are actually class barriers. Consider her argument about why farmstand tomatoes, so beloved of the elites, are actually racist: “The idyllic depiction of the farmers market and local-food movement in general over-valoriz[es] . . . white farmers and vendors [and] hides the under-represented minorities who are the actual laborers . . . allow[ing] these customers to feel good about them- selves without meaningfully engaging minority groups.”
Currid-Halkett expends another chapter wringing her hands about “Ballet Slippers,” the delicate shade of $7.99 pink nail polish favored by upscale women. “Ballet Slippers” has a sinister element to CurridHalkett, who calls it an example of “objectified cultural capital” — one of the objects that “gain cultural or symbolic value that transcends, and is often greater than, any monetary value assigned.”
Taste in nail polish is a way we “sort different groups from one another,” she says. Maybe workingclass women prefer brighter colors on their nails, and maybe they’d feel out of place on Park Avenue, but they’d probably find Park Avenue ladies insufferable anyway.
REAST-FEEDING is another example of an elite habit, according to CurridHalkett. It bothers her that so many more aspirational women are breast-feeding, while the middle and working classes seem to give up on it too early. She argues that the class divide starts early, separating breast-fed babies, who are said to grow up healthier and have higher IQs, from those who are bottle fed. It’s true that richer women breast-feed their children for longer. And it’s here that CurridHalkett finally gets closer to the point, which is that choices about health and education (unlike knowledge of obscure Italian menu terms) actually matter and can lead to widening income gaps between elites and others. Yet even in this instance the evidence isn’t clear-cut. A 2014 Ohio State study indicated that, in the words of The New York Times, “many of the longterm benefits attributed to breast-feeding may be an effect not of breast-feeding or breast milk itself but of the general good health and prosperity of women who choose to breast-feed.” In other words, you’re probably better off if Mom is rich and it’s better to have a mom who is rich and healthy. (Didn’t we already know that?) Breast-feeding could turn out to simply be a quirk of being a rich woman instead of a barrier between the rich and everyone else.
Currid-Halkett correctly points out that wealthy people invest more time and money in raising their children. “The most educated and most affluent have, in absolute terms, much less free time than the less well-off,” writes Currid-Halkett. “They are so accustomed to being overproductive in their work lives that it carries over into their leisure time, including their intense and active focus on child-rearing.”
Tutoring, expensive extracurriculars and fancy private tuitions are all ways in which Americans who have climbed to the top pull up the ladder behind them (pursuing yoga instead of bowling isn’t one of them). But worse than that is the linkage between house values and the value of a kid’s education, which is wrong and should be broken. We’ve grown used to a system in which parents essentially buy top-level schooling for their kids when they buy an expensive house, and kids whose parents can’t afford a posh neighborhood have no choice but to attend whatever school they’re offered in their own areas.
Allowing more kids to choose their schools is the single most obvious step we could take to level the playing field for American children. Yet the well-off white people who think of themselves as the kindest, most compassionate Americans and live in expensive cities or inner-ring suburbs have a tendency to vote for the political party that fiercely opposes school choice.
Even so, all families can push their children, regardless of whether they themselves are nuppies. Stuyvesant High School, for instance, a Manhattan public school for the gifted and talented, is one of the best high schools in America. It is an absolute meritocracy, accepting students solely on the basis of how they do on a standardized test, and is now and has been for decades a haven for the children of immigrants who not only didn’t grow up rich in Bronxville and spend summers studying Renaissance art in Florence but came to New York with hardly a dollar to their names. Graduates of Stuyvesant typically go on to competitive colleges and successful lives. You can still climb up the American ladder in a single generation. Mastering the names of salami is not a prerequisite.
The aspirational class may not be the 0.01 percent, but they live in a more privileged universe than almost everyone else. — Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, author of “The Sum of Small Things”