Dear Miss Manners: Is it rude to discuss class or even use the word?
It is my experience that people who insist that we don't have classes in America, just "cultural differences," are class-conscious hypocrites. The more they protest their egalitarian classlessness, the more they despise poor people in general and their own background in particular. They are also snobs who crave to impress people with appearances of wealth and other class status and to hobnob with upper-class people.I bring all this up because class consciousness and class snobbery involve dress codes. Humans advertise their class identity with dress, and they express class bigotry by despising the way lower classes dress. Open class discrimination is outlawed here, so dress codes are used to discourage lower class people from social events.
I am of working-class stock and occupation and not ashamed of it. Generally speaking, working-class men do not wear neckties. Indeed, not to do so is basic to our identity. Neckties are a class badge that distinguishes upper- and middle-class men from working-class men.
A very, very important reason why working-class men don't like neckties and don't want to wear them - even at weddings and funerals - is because this class badge misrepresents their identity. Honest working men don't like to pretend to be what they are not. We are not bankers or executives or rich people. Pretentiousness, which feels good to middle-class people (and may well be vital to their economic survival), is painful to us.
Gentle Reader: Uh-oh. Just when Miss Manners was about to deliver one of those class denials you despise, she picked up a telling clue about you.
Nobody who observed and understood the people you claim to represent would foist upon them that European idea of a proletariat class identity. The working people of America have never had the mind-set you describe - "We know our place, and we don't aspire to imitate our betters."
Rather, there is the properly egalitarian attitude of "We deserve the best." America has economic classes, to be sure, but not social classes sealed off from one another by the circumstances of birth. So yes, it would be rude to suggest that there is such a permanent identity.
Funny that you should mention dress. For several decades now, Miss Manners has noticed, the rich have aspired to imitate the casual styles of working people. Whatever started out as cheap and utilitarian clothing has been copied in expensive versions.
Yet high formality, in the form of fanciful elaborations of the comparatively plain late 19th- and 20th-century tradition, are more common at weddings at the lower end of the financial scale than at the higher. The funerals of poor African-Americans tend to be models of dignity, where every mourner is properly dressed; while the funerals of the rich are increasingly slovenly.
Miss Manners does have to agree with you that there is an unfortunate amount of snobbery present in society. She would only add that not all of it is by people pretending to be richer than they are.
Dear Miss Manners: I have a large, loving extended family living throughout the United States, and everyone will be traveling to my cousin's wedding. I was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and will be undergoing a bone-marrow transplant shortly, but if everything goes well, as I trust it will, I plan to attend the wedding also.
Because of treatments, I have not been able to have visitors. This will be the first time since my diagnosis that I will be seeing most of my relatives. My concern is that some well-intentioned guests, grateful for my survival, may be paying more attention to me than to my cousin.
How do I politely deflect the attention back to the bride and her big day, should this occur? I have thought of declining, but neither my cousin nor I want that. This has been a big year for both of us.
Gentle Reader: And an emotional year for that large, loving family, whom Miss Manners trusts to be able to handle two kinds of happiness at once. While she appreciates your delicacy, Miss Manners would be disappointed if your relatives did not greet you with open-armed joy.
This is not to say they have to do it by leaping across the aisle to you during the wedding vows. There will be some time when people are gathering before the wedding ceremony, and much more at the reception.
This does not short-change the bride. A wedding is a family event, and often also, as in your family's case, a reunion. It is not a zero-sum situation, in which only one person - or possibly one couple - should capture everybody's attention all of the time.