- School of Education alumnae Felice Yeskel ’91G and Jennifer Ladd ’95G co-founded Hadley-based Class Action in 2004. Yeskel serves as executive director and Ladd is an associate trainer and a member of the development committee. (photo by John Solem)
Long before co-founding Class
Action, Felice Yeskel ’91G and Jennifer Ladd ’95G collaborated for more than six years in a cross-class dialogue group. This is how it worked: Each woman invited three people from different class backgrounds to meet and talk about issues of class and money. This was not a casual kibitz about heating bills and household budgets. These talks circled such issues as the intersection of personal and social responsibility, and imagining what fairer economic policies would look like on a national, regional, and local scale. Yeskel, Ladd, and their guests were committed to critical engagement with issues of class.
“For me, I think the most liberating thing about the group was to come to terms with my fears about what other people thought,” says Ladd who grew up in a wealthy family and inherited a six-figure sum when she turned 21. “It was personal, but it was through the personal that we looked at the institutional.”
Class Deconstructed - Economic
Apartheid in America
Seeking to raise consciousness about how deeply class permeates peoples’ lives, and to forge new alliances across class but on a much grander scale, Yeskel and Ladd founded the nonprofit organization Class Action (www.classism.org) in 2004. One thing Class Action does is to bring together an even ratio of working class and more wealthy individuals—people whose paths most likely would not cross—for an on-going dialogue. In talking, participants can begin to imagine the social and economic situation of someone not in their same class, and hopefully recognize the challenges, fears, privileges, strengths, and drawbacks that come with that situation. Subjects broached can include ingrained beliefs about class, the different meanings of financial security, the perceptions of earned versus inherited wealth, and how cross-class couples cope with their differences. When people talk about identity in relation to class, they can explore the fundamental ways that race, age, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity contribute to the shared experience of class.
Yeskel says that she’s known many people who have been financially better off—and worse off—than herself. With this recognition come different kinds of judgments and misunderstandings. But it’s painfully hard to talk about. It takes practice. “Money is liquid and comes up between people. Class comes up between people. Most of the time they choose not to talk about it,” says Yeskel. “Because of my participation in the cross-class dialogue group month after month, year after year, I’m much more willing to name that issue.”
Those in Class Action training workshops often participate in an exercise called Ten Musical Chairs, a human demonstration of wealth distribution. A row of chairs, each one representing 10 percent of U.S. wealth, is lined up. Each of 10 people represents one-tenth of the U.S. population. One person stretches out across seven chairs, while the remaining nine people crowd onto three. This demonstrates the wealth disparity in America using 2007 figures* that show 10 percent own 70-plus percent of the wealth, while the bottom 90 percent share only 28.7 percent.
“Even more extreme is the fact that the wealthiest one percent own roughly one-third of all wealth, more than the bottom 90 percent combined,” says Yeskel. When yearly income from all sources is considered, the top one percent of households received 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income in 2005**, more than double what that figure was in the 1970s. This is the greatest concentration of income since 1928. “But wealth, more than income, demonstrates how dramatically unequal we have become,” says Yeskel. “Wealth translates into economic security, a cushion that can help get you through the hard times and allow you to buy a house or a business. Wealth or the lack of it is passed on through the generations; wealth can generate income.”
Part of the problem is lack of awareness about the disparity. But semantics also contributes. Class and classism are terms that go largely unnoticed or ignored, says Ladd. “If you type classism into a document, it shows up as a misspelled word, it’s not in the dictionary,” says Yeskel. “But class is more than economics and the material level.” (See “Class Deconstructed”)
“I think of class as one of the last major forms of segregation that we’re totally unaware of,” says Ladd. She was aware of class at a young age. “Part of that had to do with the values that my parents had around social justice and sending me to camps and schools that had those values. But I learned those things in private schools, a place not everyone could go. It was a living contradiction.”
Yeskel says that class is highly pervasive in American society and calls it one of our last remaining taboos. “But we tend to define class in multiple ways. There’s no societal agreed-upon definition of class. Different fields describe it differently.”
Class Action defines it as a “large group of people who occupy a similar economic position in the wider society based on income, wealth, property ownership, education, skills, or authority in the economic sphere.”
Class Action works largely in the nonprofit sector utilizing a range of educational methodologies that address and seek institutional changes and economic justice. The group’s activities range from facilitating cross-class dialogue groups to offering consultation and training to individuals, social change organizations, educational institutions (kindergarten through higher education), and philanthropic communities. Class Action has a race and class intersections initiative in recognition that in the United States, race and class are inextricably interconnected. “As graduates of the School of Education, we’re using our training as educators to ‘teach’ in a very unique way,” says Yeskel.
The philosophy of Class Action emerged from the lived experiences of Yeskel and Ladd. They first met sitting next to each other at a potluck meeting to discuss the potential creation of a social justice center. Over lunch, they started talking, and quickly acknowledged their class differences.
“It was something about looks, how we moved in the space” Yeskel says about how they initially recognized their class affiliations. “We obviously shared a worldview and politics, but we didn’t share history,” says Ladd.
Yeskel grew up in a working-class Jewish family on the lower east side of Manhattan. When Yeskel was five years old, she recalls being sent to a school for intellectually gifted kids at Park Avenue and 68th Street, where she learned to pass as middle class. Early on, she recognized the distinction between her quality of life and that of more well-to-do schoolmates.
Ladd was born into a wealthy family, part of the owning class for a number of generations. Yeskel was the first in her family to go to college; Ladd’s father was a professor.
Despite their class differences, the women ended up in the same place at the same time, the School of Education at UMass Amherst.
Among the nonprofit’s ongoing roles is providing forums for people
to understand each other across class divides, in a way similar to
how Yeskel and Ladd first began. “How does class live in us?” Ladd
reflectively asks. “How do attitudes about class and money live in
our dreams and fears, our shame,
our vision, our desires, our actions? How does it get into the intricacies
of us?”
Before founding Class Action, both Ladd and Yeskel worked on changing
various economic policies, such as tax and wage policies, as a strategy
toward greater economic justice. While they saw some success, they
realized that changing the attitudes that allowed complacency in the
face of excessive
economic inequality was equally important. Class Action works in partnership
with other organizations on the macro level, but focuses largely on
organizational and personal levels of change.
With Class Action working on national and local levels, its mission of ending classism is unique. Class Action helps people actively understand that classism begins at a personal level and translates to complicated institutional structures. Thinking about the 2008 presidential elections, Ladd and Yeskel say that passing the Sensible Estate Tax Act, raising the minimum wage, instituting Single Payer Health Insurance, and lower interest loans and more grants for college students would be moves in the right direction. Ultimately, free education, preschool through higher education, would create a more level playing field.
“It might not be our fault that the situation is what it is,” says Ladd, “but those of us who are on the privileged side of any dynamic have to take responsibility for changing the system, not just being individually nice people.”
Class Deconstructed Felice Yeskel ’91G says, “People of different classes not only have access to different amounts and kinds of stuff, but also different cultures and values.” She borrows from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu when she describes class as being composed of four elements: economic capital— command over economic resources such as cash and assets; cultural capital—forms of knowledge, skill, education, and advantages a person has which give higher status in society; social capital—resources based on group membership, relationships, networks of influence and support; and symbolic capital—resources available to an individual on the basis of honor, prestige, or recognition.
In her book, Economic Apartheid in America (New Press, 2000, 2005) Felice Yeskel illustrates the structural changes in the rules that govern the economy that have occurred in the United States, and have affected the global economy, over the past three decades.
