Reply #36: AP, you're talking more about class entitlement than race entitlement.

[QC]

Like you, I have grown tired of these tearjerkers in places like Salon and the Times about professionals who have had to suffer the indignity of manual labor. Yes, it really is bad that these couples used to make $300k together and now have had to give up the McMansion and Lexus and take jobs painting houses and the like. Seriously, I really am sorry for them. They got shafted. But there are plenty of people in this country who have never had a shot at anything but menial labor and know better than to expect anything different.

The thing is, I think the attitude we're seeing here is class entitlement. The unemployed former miners in Appalachia that were profiled in the Boston Globe a few weeks ago, whose life expectancy is dropping to around 50 thanks to lack of access to health care, drug addiction, the daily stress of extreme poverty, etc. are not the ones who feel entitled to yuppie status. They know that the establishment couldn't care less about people like them. You'll probably never see them complaining about some inconsiderate person who had the unmitigated gall to leave a bloody mess in their rental house.

Likewise, those people who just lost their jobs when PillowTex closed in North Carolina, many of them white, do not have the sense of entitlement that this NPR story assumes. I come from generations of people like them, and I can assure you that these people do not have half the sense of entitlement that my affluent students have. You want to see real entitlement? Talk to a rich, white college kid who was set for life the moment he was conceived.

Not all white people are middle class, and I think it's best to call bourgeois entitlement what it is, rather than lump the Appalachian poor in with the McMansion set simply because they're both white.

Class still matters in this country. If anything, given Bush's campaign to turn America into a feudal society, I think class matters more now than ever.