Dude Has Class…
By You can take the entire ’08 class of any school and put them in suits and no interviewer would know what their class background is.
No.
At Patterson, we actually do line up thirty-five or so students and put them in suits, and it’s really not all that hard to make educated guesses about social class. Since we cost quite a bit less than our competitor schools, we tend to have a considerable amount of diversity in class and social background. For starters, it’s pretty easy to differentiate between someone who’s comfortable in a suit and someone who’s not. This isn’t a 100% proxy for class, but it’s an indicator, because people who are unaccustomed to wearing really nice clothes tend to look uncomfortable in them. You get more clues when you start talking to the students. A straight regional accent doesn’t tell you very much, as we have more than a few well-off Southerners. But a lower class Southern accent is much different than an upper class, and in any case upper class Southerners will deploy the accent differently. With Northerners it’s a bit different, but you can still find clues to class in the accent, speed of speech, and in the word choice. Finally, lower, middle, and upper class people talk about different things in different ways, even when the subject is international security. This has nothing whatsoever to do with how smart the students are; rather, it concerns the kind of discussions that they regularly have with their friends and families. Once you get to the resume and recommendation stage, the game really is up, because school and connections provide are a fantastic shorthand for class. Do you think that a Harvard education is 18 times better than a University of Oregon education straight on its merits? Assessments of class are never scientific and often aren’t even really conscious, but I would guess that most people have some sense of the class background of people they meet without ever seriously investigating the subject.
Adam’s point is that race and gender are more obvious signifiers than class, and consequently that race and gender are more likely to produce bias in hiring decisions, and finally that affirmative action is thus more necessary to remedy race and gender distinction than class distinction. There is much truth in this, but I think it understates the degree to which class becomes evident through social interaction. The genius of George W. Bush (such that it is) has been in mastering the indicators of class to the extent that a product of New England aristocracy looks and sounds like a lower middle class Texan. Bush is, within a very narrow set of limitations, a fantastic actor, so fantastic that I suspect he’s internalized the created persona. Then again, this may reinforce Adam’s point; George W. Bush was capable of transforming his class persona, but Barack Obama will never be able to convince anyone that he’s white.