I imagine analyses like Dominique J. Baker's of wealth and status in media in first year college seminars so that everyone is challenged to think about class inequalities, about who we understand merits public interest, and who remains invisible.
I imagine working with students to reflect on how their ideas about social class and merit were internalized in part by popular culture.
I imagine challenging them to analyze the near invisibility of media that critiques those worlds of "gauzy wealth" or that provides any informed perspectives on other lives.
I worked for years to find films, books, essays, poetry, popular music for my courses in which poor and working-class people spoke for themselves. I'd challenge students to bring in things from their favored pop culture that represented the lived experiences of growing up poor, of growing up working class. Almost always, they'd bring in a song they really liked and we'd get to work and find that the person who wrote the song and who performed it were raised in privilege, but sought to appear empathetic by assuming that they could speak for lives they did not know.
Anyway, I think I may rewatch Breaking Away this weekend. The screenwriter grew up in an industrial suburb of Chicago after immigrating from eastern Europe as an adolescent and did go to the state school depicted in the movie.
At least the white men in the film get to speak aloud about the dailiness of living under the judgement of richer others, being working class without work, the few options they see for fighting back, the dilemmas of "selling out" [and bike racing!].
