Sarah Browning: Widening class divide on airlines

The growing class divide on airplanes feels a lot like America’s.

I recently had the occasion to fly first class. As a poet and director of a small non-profit organization, this was a rare treat indeed. So why couldn’t I enjoy myself?

It started with the warm nuts.

I’d settled in with my free cocktail, having mastered the complicated mechanism for the little drink tray that comes out of the arm, suffering the disdain of my obviously well-practiced seat mate. The flight attendant called me by name in soothing, dulcet tones.

And then they arrived: a substantial bowl of warm, salted mixed nuts — the fancy selection, with no peanuts.

We hadn’t even taxied onto the runway. I felt bad for the other travelers and the sad little packet of roasted peanuts they’d get later in the flight, if they were lucky. Some airlines aren’t even giving those out anymore.

Then came the hot meal, more drinks, and the huge warm chocolate chip cookie — followed by a blanket, a pillow, and a warm washcloth.

It’s not that I begrudge first-class passengers their extras. But the excess, along with the rich chicken primavera, was giving me indigestion. The indulgences those seven other first-class passengers and I got came at the expense of everyone else flying that day. It felt too familiar.

It felt like America.

According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the income share of America’s wealthiest 1 percent has climbed steadily since the 1970s, reaching levels not seen since the days of Gatsby. Yet while the rich have gotten much, much richer, the rest of us are much less comfortable than we were even a few short decades ago.

I remember flying in the ’70s, as a teenager. We all got blankets and free meals and pillows. On a flight across the country to visit my grandmother, the flight attendants even got on the microphone to help us while away the time, offering a free bottle of wine to the first person to show them an American flag.

It’s not that the coach passengers — of the plane or of our economy — are less deserving. Worker productivity has actually gone up since the ’70s. But workers haven’t reaped the benefits.

Instead, virtually all of the added wealth has gone into the pockets of the prosperous few: corporate CEOs, hedge-fund magnates, and “super managers,” whose lives are now staggeringly luxurious, on a scale the rest of us can’t even imagine. What’s a few warm nuts compared to $250 million yachts?

So how can we begin to reverse this trend? Inequality.org, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, offers some excellent suggestions, like shoring up the estate tax so that millionaires and billionaires actually pay it, and adding a tax on Wall Street transactions. They’ve done the math: Even a tax of 0.01 percent per trade would raise billions for the folks in the economy class.

Then there’s the federal minimum wage, that tiny pack of roasted peanuts. At $7.25 per hour, or slightly more than $15,000 per year for a 40-hour workweek, the federal wage is 24 percent below where it was half a century ago. Raising that rate to even $12 per hour would benefit 35 million workers.

These are modest steps, like borrowing some almonds from first class so the nuts in coach can be a little more satisfying. But it’s a start. If the airline had tried that on my flight, maybe my foray into the lives of the 1 percent wouldn’t have left me so queasy.

Sarah Browning is executive director of Split This Rock and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. SplitThisRock.org. Distributed by OtherWords.org. 

Sarah Browning: Crime against humanity sent me to Harvard

When I say publicly that I’m descended from slave owners, I almost always hear a gasp. I let the tension hang a moment and then I break it: “Well, someone has to be, right?”

This usually gets a laugh, or at least a humph of recognition. Because many of us white Americans are desperate to disassociate ourselves from one of the founding horrors of our nation’s history: slavery.

“My family didn’t arrive until after the Civil War,” some say. Or, “We were dirt poor.” Or Northerners. And who can blame them? It’s a profoundly shameful history.

But if we don’t face that history squarely — and acknowledge the ways it still distorts the structure of our society today — we’ll be incapable of undoing its legacy. White people will continue to believe that the extreme race-based wealth gap in this country has other causes — that they somehow deserve advantages denied to others based on their skin color.

So let me say it plainly: The unpaid labor of black people sent me to Harvard.

My great-grandfather was born into a slave-owning family in Virginia’s Rappahannock County during the Civil War. Like most Americans who enslaved people, his family held onto their land and barely compensated the freed black workers who stayed on after the war ended.

By the time my grandfather turned 25 or so, around 1915, his father was able to buy him a farm in Culpeper, in central Virginia’s fertile Piedmont region.

In the 1940s, my granddaddy started a real estate business. He bought up land surrounding Culpeper and put it into a trust for his grandchildren’s education. When it was my turn to go to college, my land was sold for a bowling alley and a Baptist church, covering most of my tuition.

My grandfather worked incredibly hard all his life, but he had an enormous leg up compared to his black neighbors and employees — land he’d been given by his father. And I inherited that advantage when I got a top-notch education at private schools and then attended an Ivy League university.

My story illustrates how the concentration of wealth in the hands of some folks and not others is perpetuated.

Of course, all white Americans benefit from the privileges accorded to us solely by dint of our skin color.

Even if your family came long after the Civil War, you can walk into a store and not be followed on suspicion of shoplifting. People won’t choose to move away if you buy a house in their neighborhood. You don’t worry every day that your son could be gunned down by the police.

It’s grown harder to ignore how our black sisters and brothers are denied basic rights we whites take for granted every day. We witnessed the murders of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner. We saw a white police officer violently subdue black teenagers at a McKinney, Texas, pool party.

And, motivated by an ideology of hate, a white man in Charleston, S.C., murdered nine black churchgoers in a horrific terrorist attack — in a state that still flies the flag of slavery in its capital.

How do we begin to dismantle this oppressive system? Part of this process must be a reckoning, a truth-telling about how we arrived at this state of radical inequality. During this 150^th anniversary of the Civil War’s end, let’s examine our history since that time. Let’s set ourselves on a new path, one that begins to make amends.

At the very least, let’s be honest with one another: My great-great grandparents may have taken your ancestors and held them as their property. It was a crime against humanity.

Sarah Browning is executive director of Split This Rock (splitthisrock.org) and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. This piece originated on otherwords.org.