Bridging Class Differences

Author Betsy Leondar-Wright will read from "Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists" (New Society Publishers, 2005).

Most of us interact across class lines every day, whether at our workplace or school, in our neighborhoods, or in restaurants and stores. In these interactions, we are often in roles that prevent much human connection, such as landlord/tenant, supervisor/employee, or customer/waiter. The difficult dynamics between people with different amounts of money, education and clout can be called classism, one ism that few of us understand.

Honest dialogue across class lines can be transformative. But if our friends and family all have similar education and income to our own, we rarely get the chance to have these deeper discussions. Betsy Leondar-Wright will open up this unspoken issue of class differences and discuss how we can keep them from coming between us.