Despite attending college in an economically depressed district of a small Midwestern town, every day we are surrounded by immense privilege.
This is unsurprising, considering that the annual cost of attendance of Wooster is greater than the entire annual household income for more than 70 percent of Americans. When we sit down in Lowry for meals, we share a room with the heirs of the elite capitalist and propertied class, the children of trust funds and individuals of extreme privilege far beyond humble lower and middle class imagination.
It is important to acknowledge class privilege not to shame students who come from wealth, but to be honest about the politics and vested interests of capital that control our government. While it is popular, and for some even fashionable, to claim to advocate for social justice, many students at Wooster fail to acknowledge their own material interest in upholding the current political and economic order.
This failure of acknowledgement is evidenced by the striking lack of discussion on campus about the role of capitalism in maintaining and reproducing oppressive social structures.
These heirs of capital benefit immensely from the privileges awarded to them by our government and by neoliberal economic policies. I have personally known such students. There was once a student here whose father owns 60 percent of all the properties of a medium-sized U.S. city.
From a social justice perspective, that kind of wealth concentration and inequality is unacceptable, especially considering how racial composition and class divisions largely determine the dynamics of injustice in our cities. I’ve also met a Wooster student who is the grandson of Charles Schwab, whose bank and brokerage firm is one of the largest and most powerful in the country.
While not directly linked to social justice, the consequences of the financial sector’s recklessness and utter disregard for humanity will always be most dire for historically marginalized populations.
The descendants of the richest and most powerful are not the only ones who benefit from the current system. The economic structures required for mass consumption in rich countries necessarily entail the exploitation, suffering and poverty of billions globally. Examples of such atrocities include the contamination of natural resources that rural and often indigenous peoples rely on for subsistence, the forced displacement of rural peasants to clear fertile land for industrial agricultural production, the assassination of trade unionists fighting for the rights of workers and the destruction of the soil by monoculture and heavy pesticide use, to name a few.
All of these crimes against humanity are perpetrated by our corporations with the help of our government, perhaps even by the fathers and mothers of our Wooster classmates, so that we in the U.S. can consume our goods cheaply.
In the face of liberal acquiescence to corporate power in government, questions of class and power are as relevant as ever. Because social justice issues are intrinsically linked to the systems of production that guide our economy, the interests of capital and the expansion of the global economy has significant implications for social justice around the world.
Although it will take much more than acknowledging class privilege to fix these problems, such acknowledgement is a necessary step for any group of people, or higher educational institution, committed to fighting for social justice.
To advocate for social justice without acknowledging the role of capitalism, “free” trade and neo-imperialism is a dishonest and ineffective praxis. If we are to live up to Wooster’s mission and become “leaders of character and influence in an interdependent global community,” we must explicitly acknowledge and actively discuss capitalism, how it benefits us and how it reproduces social injustice around the world.
Dylan Pederson, a Contributing Writer for the Voice, can be reached for comment