Calling for social unity in the face of a perceived class division in the United States, 14 Dartmouth students participated in an interactive workshop on socioeconomic class on Tuesday afternoon in Cutter Shabazz Hall.
The workshop, titled "Divided We Fall," focused primarily on concerns about socioeconomic class divides in America and how these divides are exacerbated by conflict over social issues.
Felice Yeskel, the executive director of Class Action, led the discussion and activities. Class Action is a Massachusetts-based organization that works to educate the public about class-based issues, according to the group's website. Yeskel, co-author of "Economic Apartheid in America," has also served as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Massachussets-Amherst.
Yeskel began the workshop by reflecting on her experience growing up in a working-class Jewish family in New York City. She said she felt detached from those around her as a result of differences in social class. Discussing these divisions with friends from different backgrounds, she said, helped to relieve the tension.
"We found a tremendous sense of liberation from that," Yeskel said of her discussions with friends from both the "working class" and the "owning class."
After Yeskel's speech, students participated in a variety of discussion-based activities. Attendees were first asked to write down what they saw as indications of widening class divisions. These included rising debt, clothing and branding, youth violence and difficulties paying for college.
Yeskel then called on students from the audience to participate in an exercise that demonstrated disparities in economic growth among income categories. Five participants, each representing different income brackets within the population, were lined up and told how far to walk forward based on the economic growth enjoyed by that group in recent decades. The two students representing the wealthiest two categories moved the farthest forward.
"The economy grew, but the major beneficiaries of that growth were the top 20 percent," Yeskel explained. "Power shifted from ordinary people to people with money."
Discussion then turned to specific problems facing people that experience limited economic growth. A combination of changing economic conditions during the 1970s, as well as laws altering the tax code and weakening labor unions, Yeskel said, has resulted in growing financial insecurity, greater burdens on labor and increased stress and isolation for affected groups.
"I think inequality is inherently stressful, and it's stressful for everyone," Yeskel said.
A final activity, meant to symbolize this stress, placed 10 students in chairs, representing 10 percent slices of wealth distributed proportionally to the number of people that controlled them. One student was left to cover seven chairs, while nine were forced to share the remaining three, to their apparent discomfort.
The purpose of the exercise, Yeskel said, was to show that the wealthy control the majority of resources, but that middle and lower classes have the strength of numbers. Yeskel further explained that despite a larger population, the middle and lower classes are unable to unify for change because of internal divisions over narrow political issues.
"There are certain things that we as individuals can't do anything about," Yeskel said, adding that a unified social response is needed to generate effective improvements on socioeconomic divisions.
In her final remarks to the group, Yeskel challenged participants to learn to work together across the lines that divide them, expressing hope that change could come from the current generation of students.
"[Things] change because people come together with a vision," she said. "Think about what kind of legacy you want to leave."
The workshop was sponsored by the Economic Equality Initiative, a joint project between the Office of Pluralism and Leadership, the Tucker Foundation and the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity.
