Quiggin 

On the one hand, in the US as elsewhere, higher incomes are correlated with voting for the conservative/rightwing party, which seems to cut against the thesis. On the other hand, I’ve read that the average income of the US working class is the same as that of the population as a whole, which goes against the whole idea of “working class” as I understand it.

It's not only how much money you make, it's how you make your money.
What an asshole. What a fucking idiot.

repeats

[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts. Opponents, including Johnson, raised the same arguments that would be marshaled against affirmative action programs a century later, but well more than the necessary two-thirds of Congress concluded that the 13th and 14th Amendments authorized race-conscious legislation to ameliorate the social condition of blacks.

"to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts."

The road to hell.

repeat: Doormen

[D]oormen generally don’t have racist beliefs, but because their tenants are disproportionately white, and white people tend to have many more white than black friends, black visitors to the building will be checked or questioned more often than white visitors.

...All in all, well worth your time to read. Especially if you need to give your Doorman a bonus in the near future.

I missed the first quote the first time around (in 2005), even if I tried to explain the issue to Kieran Healy and the rest.
This is Healy more recently.



"...All in all, well worth your time to read. Especially if you need to give your Doorman a bonus in the near future."

If "doormen generally don’t have racist beliefs" regarding blacks, then generally they themselves are white, in a city where 56% of the population is not.

I never read the book but I looked through the index; I thought I'd mentioned that somewhere at the time. There's no reference to the stark differences in ethnic makeup of doormen on the the upper east and upper west side. As I explained in a comment, on the east side doormen are white, Irish or Eastern European. On the west side it's more of a mix. This is common knowledge to anyone who works in or around residential buildings in Manhattan.

Amazon

From Publishers Weekly
[Bearman] tends to spend too much time examining the obvious questions (e.g., why do doormen find their jobs at once "boring and stressful"?), while barely touching upon others that seem deeper and more fertile, such as the ways in which tenants tend to see their doormen as "socially dead."

Tenants and college professors.
I really thought I'd mentioned all of this but can't find it.

A good definition of the working class now is the subset of the community that technocrats and intellectuals never meet on social terms. A plumber who makes $150,000 a year is closer socially to a plumber's assistant than to a college professor. These assholes read that dumbfuck Bourdieu but still don't get the point.

There's only one use of the term "petty bourgeois" by any of the authors at Crooked Timber, though it defined Thatcherism: the end of noblesse oblige (though 30 years later it's come back).

Liberal professionals claim concern for the poor and disenfranchised, though without intimate contact concern devolves quickly into pity or its functional equivalent.  For the strivers just below themselves, or even above them financially,  the professionals show open contempt. That contempt is returned. Which came first?

From 2004:

This is a modern world - This is the modern world
What kind of a fool do you think I am?
You think I know nothing of the modern world
All my life has been the same
I've learned to live by hate and pain
It's my inspiration drive -
I've learned more than you'll ever know
Even at school I felt quite sure
That one day I would be on top
And I'd look down upon the map
The teachers who said I'd be nothing

Punk wasn't a rebellion against capitalism. It was capitalism, rebelling against both liberalism and the hereditary aristocracy.

5th Ave. 2005

"Whites out the front, Niggers to the basement."
I'm in the elevator with the electricians: two Puerto Ricans and a Pole.
"So how do you get out?"
The Russian pauses.
"I'm Superman, I leave from the roof."

---

addendum years later. Earnest liberals are now concerned about minorities and "microaggressions".  It's applied within the middle class: the bourgeoisie redefining itself. The same behavior towards the working class majority goes unnoticed. Piketty's graph amused me. We're well beyond the idiot petty bourgeois Bourdieu, but they still don't get the point.