A question of class

One of the reasons I moved to France was to get away from the materialism of black American culture. By no means is materialism in the United States limited to black Americans. It’s just that I expect more from them. We should know better. During and since slavery and colonialism, blacks and browns have found other ways to affirm their worth, perhaps through moral behaviour, religious piety, or education – or some combination of the three. So why now in the United States have we chosen to use meaningless things as a symbol of worth?

In the United States, there is the epidemic of what is called “bling”, a penchant for large ornaments made of diamonds often spelling one’s name that are favoured by rap musicians. But among what WEB DuBois called the talented tenth, there is a similar proclivity for expensive material goods, like – well, actually, I don’t know which ones are popular. Let’s say Hermès because the extremely rich and famous talk show host, Oprah Winfrey, made a public hue and cry about the racism that kept one of the Parisian Hermès stores from letting her in after hours to affirm her worth by buying a $6,000 handbag.

KA Dilday worked on the New York Times opinion page until autumn 2005, when she began a writing fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs. During this period of the fellowship, she will be travelling between north Africa and France.

Also by KA Dilday on openDemocracy:

“The freedom trail” (August 2005)

“Art and suffering: four years since 9/11” (August 2005)

“Rebranding America” (September 2005)

“Judith Miller’s race: the unasked question” (October 2005)

“France seeks a world voice” (December 2005)

If you find this material valuable please consider supporting openDemocracy by sending us a donation so that we can continue our work for democratic dialogue

There is a current of the black bourgeoisie in America that likes to brag that it moves through both the moneyed worlds and the masses. But of course, black Americans are not the only ones. Materialism in the United States is alive and well and living in Donald Trump’s house and on the ring fingers of wealthy socialites. And I must admit that I find it somewhat cheering that both the poverty-born rapper Li’l Kim and the heiress Paris Hilton dress and behave like prostitutes in pursuit of the fame/infamy and wealth that such behaviour seems to bring. America’s love of celebrity and money is a great equaliser. But I would rather watch it from afar.

Lest one think I romanticise France, I want to say that this is far from the case. Despite the fifth republic’s claims to be a strict meritocracy, it seems to be a country as enamoured of its aristocratic class as any monarchy. I don’t find classism more to my liking but I do prefer its unattainable quality. One cannot change one’s ancestry except in fiction.

In France, a country that considers the question “what do you do” rude, I ask it all of the time. I tend to move in societies of people who have opportunity and what they choose to do as a profession says something essential about who they are. I don’t ascribe to that “aristocratic” notion that the need or desire to work is something dirty and pedestrian. Barred from ancestral titles, that spurious means of deriving self-worth, blacks and browns in Europe must find other methods of self-expression.

These topics are not new. They have been ably covered by Frantz Fanon and others, but fifty years after he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, these mindsets prevail in the rhetoric of the west and the actions of the east and south. I grow more and more convinced that the hatred of the west that produces Islamic fundamentalist terrorist cells within its old citizens is nothing more than ressentiment, the alternate value structure formed by a subordinate class as described by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (although his humiliated men and women fell back on Christian values.)

In 2005, two articles in particular struck me as affirming these themes. One on the New York Times op-ed page in December by the travel writer Paul Theroux began: “There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment.”

A letter responding to Theroux’s article suggested that being chided by a wealthy travel writer in a Hawaiian beach town might be just as annoying. In the article Theroux uses his credentials as a teacher in Malawi for the Peace Corps to state that contrary to what the musician, Bono might say, Africans don’t need more money or computers or such, things he suggest would be gobbled up by corrupt kleptocrats, but more people to follow his and his fellow Peace Corps teachers’ “example” of forty years ago when they sacrificed the good life in the west to teach in Malawi.

A quick check of Paul Theroux’s biography reveals that he was in the Peace Corps for scarcely a year. A quick review of his books and articles reveals that by his own admission, as a libidinous 20-something he spent much of that time having sex with numerous African women before marrying an Englishwoman he met in Africa a few years later. One wonders what example Theroux offered Malawi in his one year of teaching. What it gave him is numerous sexual partners and the right – for life seemingly – to lecture others to follow his good example. I don’t know enough about aid and development to comment on some of his practical suggestions (although knowledgeable colleagues disagree with him); but I do know enough about human nature to speculate on the lessons learned from his “example” by the African women women he so casually ran through before marrying a white woman.

In June 2005, I had read another article by the writer Aidan Hartley in the Spectator. He excoriates African leaders for spending millions of dollars, likely derived from foreign aid on expensive cars and jets while their people starve. And I was agreeing with his tone until I came to this observation by Hartley:

“Thanks in large part to anti-state corruption drives by the World Bank, a middle class of hard-working, talented entrepreneurs has emerged in Africa in the last two decades. They want to buy quality cars for the same reason successful Westerners do. As one Kampala businessman says, ‘I am a serious person and I want that to be portrayed even through the car I drive.’ But the WaBenzi prefer the traditional way of getting someone else to buy your German-built machine.”

And I realised that it’s not the need to affirm oneself through material possessions while others around them starve that he finds repugnant but the use of western funds for those purposes. And I wonder, if Hartley believes that one’s seriousness or worth is defined by the car one drives, why does he expect anyone in Africa when given a chance to be a “serious person” to turn it down, regardless of where the money comes from? As the writer Timeri N Murari pointed out in the Indian publication Business Line in 2003, you couldn’t hire a decent CEO in America for the kind of pennies a dictator makes when averaged per year.

Of course, I too am moralising from a privileged position. Not only am I American, but I am descended from slaves. In many ways this is one of the most liberating birthrights in the world. Would I have cared about class, would I have taken a sense of pride from the position of my ancestors if they hadn’t been slaves? I don’t know. And in the United States, blacks grow up knowing that no matter what, there is nothing they can do to prevent them from being treated at times as inferior. That’s life and the prudent ones among us learn not to look to society at large for a sense of self.

But because America is considered the land of equality, it confounds black and brown immigrants who come from countries where everyone looks like them and it is possible for them to be at the top of the class structure. I remember once sitting with an acquaintance in America, a 43-year-old India-born Muslim who had come to the United States from Canada. A media executive, he confessed that he was confused when he was treated as different. “But I feel white” he said.

I see the ressentiment, the resentment and anger at western societies that promise equality and cannot deliver, that take away something fundamental on which people have built their sense of self – and I predict that the angry violent cells in the west will grow.

The practice of communism didn’t work, but there was something inherently savvy in its desire to shift the derivation of self-worth from wealth or ancestry to personal activity – something within everyone’s reach. As the first few years of this century have shown us, unless we find a way to reclaim some of those principles, the material and class sickness that permeates societies world over may well destroy them.