my thoughts of class and education, let me show you them

When my son was a little under a year old, me and my mom forgot him in the car for five entire seconds, or to translate this into motion, three steps from the car and the length of time it took to recognize that we could hear the sounds of nature around us and not the glorious descant of his unhappiness.

For those who know me, I considered leaving him there because of the effort required to retrieve him, but as he survived with only a few nightmares about being abandoned to die in a van, I'm pretty sure he's gotten over it, and what time does not cure, I daresay a therapist can fix. This brings me to the question that hits me every summer when children are left in cars and die. As this is not even uncommon, which in a variety of ways freaks me out and I can't talk about in any sensible fashion.

This is why I am thinking about this.

Raise your hand if you did not see that verdict coming.



Now granted, people who do social work for long periods of time tend to go either extremist or go numb; there's middle ground, but at least at the casework level, I've met very few of them. Anyone who reads here knows my virulent loathing of classism (and my own part in perpetuating it) isn't something I'm hot to hide.

So my bias is showing; my first reaction on any case is to check the job and class when something in the general family of child negligence occurs, because fairly often I can make a decent prediction based on that how the case will be handled. I usually don't need to dig for race--if they aren't white, the article will mention it, and you'd be amazed at the sudden intersection of race and class how accurate the prediction gets.

This bothered me because denying the racial aspect is kind of like denying Ike is coming down the Gulf. And it bothered me because I'm looking thoughtfully at the Dr before her name and wondering about bias when she faces her social and class peers--two lawyers, one judge, all of whom share that level of higher education. It's not like this is new--we've been not-talking about class bias forever, but I'm not sure anyone's gotten around to a crosscheck on education bias; they look a lot alike. And yet I don't think they are the same thing. And I could be convinced that they look a lot less alike than we think, simply because class and education can overlap so heavily that we can be looking at one and mistake it for the other.

Also:

In the past, Deters has said that he would have to prove that Edwards left her daughter in the minivan purposefully and that truly forgetting is not a crime.

You have got to be fucking with me.



I feel--well, I don't feel better. But I have more coffee.

Comments

[cottontail.livejournal.com]

I work for a government prosecutor and I've discovered that it all really comes down to who the individual US attorney or DA assigned to review the case is.

I've worked for two different prosecutors now, and each of them had their own standards for interpreting a case and the laws surrounding. One of them was more lenient towards certain defendants, the other is newer and much tougher. Especially on the richer, more educated defendants. His view seems to be that if you're educated or hold a high rank in society, you should be held even more accountable for your actions. I find it interesting that he takes this stance, because he's conservative Republican, which kind of boggles. o.O

[seperis.livejournal.com]

OOOh, interesting point. I hadn't really considered that as much as I should have.

[niqaeli]

It's not that baffling. It's an attitude of noblesse oblige -- the idea that richer, more educated people (the modern western equivalent to nobility) are duty-bound to rule well and wisely. And they are to be held more accountable because they have more responsibilities to fail.

It's not a bad attitude, necessarily, especially when the richer, more educated people themselves have this idea that they are bound to help those who are poorer, and less educated. But implementing it as being enforced by law is -- hm. Problematic. Of course I really don't think they should be enforcing the law less against them, either, which is far too often true.