Dr. Karen Bloomquist and Dr. Tex Sample will address these questions in the upcoming Hein-Fry Lecture Series.
Class has a foreign and arcane ring to North American ears.
We typically take it to describe an Old World phenomenon, something the immigrants deliberately left behind. Class structure is not part of our national self-understanding. While divisions according to race and gender have been openly celebrated and openly attacked, divisions according to class have only rarely been discussed. Elitist rhetoric and talk of class struggle seem equally un-American. But while class dynamics and structure have tended to be invisible and unspoken in North America, they have never been absent.