I’ve been thinking about “isms” lately. You know what I am talking about — the three-letter suffix that when tacked onto the end of a word changes said word into something a lot more complicated.
Being an investigative kind of person (provided the investigation can be done on a laptop and in my jammies), I looked up “ism” and learned this: “an ism is a distinctive practice, system, or philosophy, typically a political ideology or an artistic movement.”
The online dictionary also said there are eight main isms. I will share. They are racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism (i.e., homophobia), classism, sizeism, and antisemitism. In other words, nothing anyone wants to consciously be associated with.
Of all those isms, there is one that I think is the granddaddy and the root cause of all the others. That would be classism.
Think about it for a moment. Don’t all the other isms stem from feeling superior to another human being? Classism, simply stated, is feeling a few steps — or several miles — above someone else for a whole host of reasons. It’s also the main ism that it is pretty hard to do anything about since it seems to be so deeply entrenched in the human spirit.
Classism can be a slippery little devil. Telling a coworker the “right” way to do a task might feel to you like you’re being helpful and to your coworker like you’re the teacher and they’re the kindergartener. You don’t intend to be classist, but what’s that saying about the kind of pavement on the road to hell?
Or feeling superior because your great-grandfather was a judge somewhere and your friend’s great-grandfather sold shoe horns. That’s nice, but who cares? Well, ideally no one should care, but that I’m-slightly-superior-to-you-because-my-second-cousin-delivered-bread-to-Harvard mentality is hard to shake.
We’re all guilty of it. I know I suffer from superiority pangs when I know a bit of show biz trivia someone else is unaware of. “You don’t know names of all of ‘The Brady Bunch’?” followed by a condescending chuckle when the person I’m talking to looks at me with pity. (In my defense, I don’t list the names — including pets — and I don’t share I also know the names of everyone in “The Waltons.” Hmmm. Maybe there’s something to that pitiful glance.)
Which makes me wonder if we’re hardwired to be classist. Is classism a survival instinct exclusive to humans? I think it might be. Visit any dog park and I challenge you to witness classist behavior among the pooches. Is it an ego defense? Or do we simply, deep down, truly believe we’re better than the next guy because we carry a fancy phone while they use — gasp — a flip phone.
The thing about isms, and I also got this from my online sleuthing, is that by not addressing them, they reinforce oppression and inequities, two things society has been supposedly battling for as long as I can remember. They also make people feel bad.
So how does one address classism? A good starter would be admitting it should be addressed. There isn’t a workplace in this country that would accept sexism or racism as common practice, yet most accept classism because “that’s the way it’s always been.”
Battling classism is an uphill battle. Perhaps beginning with basic respect for ourselves and others and being more aware of how we treat others, both in spoken and unspoken ways. Shirley Temple, a wise woman in addition to all her other talents, once said, “There’s a difference between being seen and being acknowledged.”
While we aren’t going to fix classism by saying hi every morning, we can all do better. Maybe the goal should be to follow Ernest Hemingway’s advice when he said, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
If you want further convincing, head to the nearest dog park and learn something there.
Nell Musolf is a freelance writer based in Mankato. She can be reached at nmusolf@gmail.com.