Previous
Ethylene Dichloride (EDC)
A competition between members of different economic classes over resources, services, money, opportunity, power, and/or cultural influence. Whereas Americans on the left see class conflict between the wealthy capitalist minority and the majority of increasingly precarious workers, those on the right see a conflict between “makers” who work in the private sector and “takers” who work in or gain from the public sector. Hochschild sees her blue-collar conservative interviewees as fighting a class conflict with the poor and destitute who receive government assistance.
Class Conflict Quotes in Strangers in Their Own Land
The Strangers in Their Own Land quotes below are all either spoken by Class Conflict or refer to Class Conflict. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 9
Quotes
You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are moving backward.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Missing from the image of blacks in most of the minds of those I came to know was a man or woman standing patiently in line next to them waiting for a well-deserved reward.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14
Quotes
How do you join the identity politics parade and also bring it to a halt?
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
For the Tea Party around the country, the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream had turned them into strangers in their own land, afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line. The undeclared class war transpiring on a different stage, with different actors, and evoking a different notion of fairness was leading those engaged in it to blame the “supplier” of the impostors—the federal government.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Afterword
Quotes
The history of the United States has been the history of whites cutting ahead of blacks, first of all through slavery, and later through Jim Crow laws and then through New Deal legislation and the post-World War II GI Bill, which offered help to millions of Americans with the exception of those in farm and domestic work, occupations in which blacks were overrepresented. And racial discrimination continues today.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Strangers in Their Own Land LitChart as a printable PDF.
Class Conflict Term Timeline in Strangers in Their Own Land
The timeline below shows where the term Class Conflict appears in Strangers in Their Own Land. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7 – The State: Governing the Market 4,000 Feet Below
...poor minorities. She wonders whether “the malaise I was seeing” might come from a disguised class conflict between the working-class and the poor. The right, it seems, resents the government for choosing...
(full context)
Chapter 9 – The Deep Story
...the term, she conceives the feeling of being cut in line as “an expression of class conflict .” In the past, she notes, such conflicts were usually between management and workers—both black...
(full context)
Chapter 16 – “They Say There Are Beautiful Trees”
Hochschild explains that the left and right focus on different class conflicts that follow from their different deep stories. For the left, the conflict is the 1%...
(full context)
