Betsy Leondar-Wright is about as middle class as they come. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, has a Masters Degree in sociology, and is Executive Director of United for a Fair Economy, a national organization that works to highlight the policies that create ever greater divisions of wealth in America. But more than three decades ago, she dropped out of Princeton to pursue a lifetime of social justice activism, much of that spent working in poor people’s organizations. Being privileged, she writes, can be a big asset for everyone, if you know what you’re doing.

Now, she is sharing her insights in Class Matters, a timely book on cross-class alliance building for middle-class activists (New Society Publishers, 2005). Using her own ample experience as a guide, Leondar-Wright brings together more than 40 interviews with leading activists to offer nothing less than an owner’s manual for a powerful and broad-based movement for social change. She spoke to us from her home about class in America, and what progressives need to do to start winning.

Real Change: There’s this idea that Americans aren’t aware of class differences, and that everybody here thinks they’re middle class. What’s going on there?

Betsy Leondar-Wright: It’s a myth that everyone calls themselves middle class in this country. That’s only true when the pollster gives the option “lower class,” “middle class,” or “upper class” — because who wants to be low class, right? So, then in that case, 90 percent of everybody call themselves middle class. But when working class is one of the options, then 45 percent of everybody call themselves working class, which is not that far off from reality. I think the obliviousness mostly exists among middle-class people. People who are lacking in class privilege know perfectly well that we’re a very class- stratified society, but mostly don’t use the word “class” to describe that.

RC: So how do they talk about it?

Leondar-Wright: American culture is just permeated with it. Country music has a lot of anti-elite things in it. Hip-hop culture has a lot of class anger in it. I am a Bruce Springsteen fan myself, so, of course, Bruce always brings up a lot of working-class pride and class rage. So, I think that you see it everywhere — you see it in movies, on TV, in popular culture, and in the way people talk to each other — that there are a lot of little gestures and expressions. Some people kind of push their nose up to represent snootiness. I think that there’s talk about class and class unfairness going on all around us, but mostly not using the “c” word.

RC: One of the great ironies of our time is that the right is doing a really good job of tapping into class anger, but redefining it in cultural terms.

Leondar-Wright: That’s right. By describing the economy as something that just kind of happens naturally and isn’t an appropriate thing for the government to get involved in and thereby taking economic policy out of the political realm, then people’s anger at elites becomes all about the social issues: the guns, gays, and God kind of trio, and about cultural things. About how much swearing there is on TV, or about the Club for Growth ad against Howard Dean. That Howard Dean should take his latté-drinking, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs. They’re trying to make a wedge between the red and blue cultures and drive the wedge using working-class people’s — mostly working-class white people’s — class rage.

RC: And I think that it’s the feeling of being judged unfavorably that creates that anger. The left gets accused of elitism, and there is a large kernel of truth there.

Leondar-Wright: That’s right. If we want to build a political movement that sees it as intolerable that so many people don’t have health care, that so many people don’t have housing, and that you shouldn’t work full-time and be poor — almost everyone agrees with that — the thing that those of us in progressive and liberal circles have to do differently is to stop acting like the elitists the right wing is accusing us of being.

RC: I love where Barbara Ehrenreich says in your book, “For god’s sake, leave the health issues alone.” That we need to stop judging people because they’re not vegetarian or because they smoke or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Get over it.

Leondar-Wright: I see it as really coming out of the more harmful side of middle-class culture. Instead of keeping up with the Joneses, we have ‘I’m more simple living than the Joneses.’ The competition and the looking down at other people is still there just as much, and giving that up is tough.

RC: Why does any of this matter? Why do we need to do things differently? Why do we need to be aware of class differences and how that keeps people apart?

Leondar-Wright: Well, I think that for any of us who want to make a better society, or even just make an improvement in our community, having your group or your movement draw from just one kind of person, which is the most typical thing to happen, that that makes you weaker. It makes you less able to reach your goals. I think it’s important to realize that anybody who’s working for change has some self-interest in broadening the base. One of the first things I do in the book is to go through movements and talk about the limits in who their supporters were and the limits of their achievements. And sort of postulating that if they had been able to bridge those differences and draw in more allies, that they would have achieved their missions to a greater degree.

RC: What’s a successful cross-class movement?

Leondar-Wright: Well, I think the Civil Rights Movement is the most cross-class movement we’ve ever had in this country, and it was also one of the most powerful transformative movements we’ve ever had, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Some of the pioneers were the relatively privileged African Americans. The ministers and the students took some of the initial risks that were way-way dangerous for the sharecroppers and the lower-income African Americans.

They could have just stopped there and been an anti-segregation movement of the college-educated folks. Instead, people like Ella Baker and others went out and actually registered people to vote who were the very lowest income. If you get the stories, if you go beyond the big leaders, and look at who the groups were made up of, there was actually a wide range, including the very poorest people, and then they got allies from the North and from white people, that really spanned the whole range of classes in the United States, and that’s some of why it achieved so much, whereas other movements have had some class diversity, like the women’s movement, but were pretty quickly split by class and ended up achieving much less than they could.

RC: Why isn’t there more discussion of class by diversity trainers?

Leondar-Wright: Diversity training happens in a lot of progressive circles, and there’s a lot of really good stuff out there, but the way you make money doing it is by doing it for corporations. Other institutions, I think, are to varying degrees open to including class, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon in the corporations.

I don’t want to exaggerate how good we are on gender or race. We’ve only taken baby steps. But we have at least developed some language to talk about it. We have sort of an agreed-on goal that we want to have diversity, and most institutions in society now actually have that as a goal. They mostly fail at it, but in many cases they have that as a goal. With class, we don’t have any of those things. We don’t have vocabulary in common, we don’t have an agreed-on goal, and we haven’t taken any baby steps yet.

RC: So much of your book is about power: who has it, who’s comfortable with it, how to be aware of it. And you talk about boundaries and about having a sense of your limits and also being respectful while not making yourself a doormat.

Leondar-Wright: That’s right. That’s a good way to say it.

RC: Can you talk about that a little bit?

Leondar-Wright: There are stages you go through with any identity. We all start out oblivious to the oppression that’s around us. And then you suddenly wake up and see it everywhere around you and you’re just horrified and so angry, and there’s a tendency to swing to the other end of the pendulum — to make the opposite mistakes.

When you’re oblivious to your privilege, you make these mistakes of dominating, taking over, insisting that things be done your way, and hogging power and hogging resources, etc. And then when you wake up and you’re in your angry militant stage, you then tend to make the mistakes of romanticizing people who are less privileged and thinking that all knowledge and all wisdom comes from the oppressed group.

You kind of turn your common sense off. And you just kind of turn into this wimpy follower, which at best means you’re following somebody who is good to be following, but you’re not really contributing very much.

RC: You’ve been touring a bit on your book, and having a lot of conversations about class. What’s new and surprising for you — an insight that you hadn’t really had before?