A Quote by Thomas Chatterton Williams
The cultural pressure for a middle-class Chinese-American to walk, talk and act like a lower-class thug from Chinatown is nil. The same can be said of Jews, or of any other ethnic group. But in black America the folly is so commonplace it fails to attract serious attention.
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There is a forgotten black middle class in America - a group which is huge but underrepresented in the media and in art. It's difficult to talk about these things, because it forces one to talk in generalities, but that's my view. I do think the idea of a blanket class for black people is unfortunately still present.
The American middle class always wants to be upper class and is scared to death of being lower class. It's a highly mobile group of people. They're not like the people that want to be shopkeepers forever, have always been shopkeepers and want always to be shopkeepers. These people mostly are insulted by being called middle class.
The Jews cannot be classed as a 'race' per se, they are an ethnic group. '...the Jews form an ethnic group; that like all ethnic groups they have their own racial elements distributed in their own proportions; like all or most ethnic groups they have their 'look,' a part of their cultural heritage that both preserves and expresses their cultural solidarity...they have developed a special racial sub-type and a special pattern of facial and bodily expression.
Recent events in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have reaffirmed for me, however, the complete folly of any Republican strategy to increase black representation in the Republican Party by appeals based on race. Whatever the name- 'African American Outreach' or 'Black Republicans for Bush'- any effort to attract blacks or any other ethnic group to the Republican party, based on explicit or implicit appeals to race or ethnic identity, are not only a waste of time and resources, but are also misguided and potentially quite damaging to the nation.
There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.
There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party.
For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing. Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages despite a huge increase in technology and productivity. And what we have seen during that period is a massive transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America
I was born in the United States, I'm proud to be an American, I'm an American first. But obviously, I'm a Chinese-American. And growing up, my family, my parents, and I think rightly so didn't put us in Chinatown, didn't put us with our other ethnic group, but put us in mainstream America. They're thinking was that will help us assimilate into the mainstream and be a part of it. And it did. It certainly gave me tolerance of other people, of other races, of other ethnicities and I think that's helped make me a better person.
When I was just 13, we went from being middle class to lower middle class and finally lower class, as someone close to my father took away everything he had, including his property. All of a sudden, I started working at the age of 13.
The anger from Occupy Wall Street is coming from this simple fact: America no longer seems to be a place where you can work your way up, from rags to riches, from lower class to middle class to upper class.
The Canadian middle class is under less pressure than any other middle class in any developed country on the planet. So they feel good. They feel optimistic. They feel secure.
I think one of the main differences between being an English actor and being an American actor is that we have things like the class system in England.I'm middle class. But I've got what some people might consider to be a working-class accent, so you've got those sorts of elements in this country to consider, which, in America, exist, but not necessarily in the same way.
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
They talk about class warfare -- the fact of the matter is there has been class warfare for the last thirty years. It's a handful of billionaires taking on the entire middle-class and working-class of this country. And the result is you now have in America the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on Earth and the worst inequality in America since 1928. How could anybody defend the top 400 richest people in this country owning more wealth than the bottom half of America, 150 million people?
'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.
When the Democrats are attacked for [inciting class warfare] they shrink back. They don't say what obviously should be said, "Yes, there is class warfare. There has always been class warfare in this country." The reason the Democrats shrink back is because the Democrats and the Republicans are on the same side of the class war. They have slightly different takes. The Democrats are part of the upper class that is more willing to make concessions to the lower class in order to maintain their power.
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