A few years ago I went to a volleyball tournament in Dallas, Texas. While there my team, all girls in LOVE while shopping of course, decided to visited one of the malls in Dallas. One thing that you need to understand is that club volleyball is expensive and although there are some scholarships that girls can get to play with different teams depending on how good they are, usually the girls come from middle class to higher class families. Being girls of the age of 15 to 16 though we did not talk about how much money our parents had, only the one girl that our whole entire team didn't like, bragged about how rich her family was. To the rest of the team it did not matter how much money each others families had, we were all friends. Now when we got to the mall I started to notice that this trip to the mall was not going to be an ordinary trip to the mall instead it was also going to be an issue of class, because this particular mall had different sections. The sections were that of class. Each section had it's own color, and each color stood for a class section. Purple was for the expensive brand stores that only two girls on our team could go to and choose to leave the rest of our team for the day to shop. Another section was green and stood for the stores like Hollister, American Eagle, Abercrombie and Fitch, etc that most of our team went and shopped at, and the three girls on our team that had scholarships and who's families were a part of the lower class in society went to shop at the red color stores. This break up shopping trip that happened to my team opened my eyes to class issues happening all over todays society. Issues that effect politicians and their decisions on taxes, and health care issues, and how different brands advertise to their target audience. While searching the web looking for different ads targeted to the different classes in society I noticed a very surprising difference.
Ads targeted for what is seen as lower class and poorer people on the U.S. are with normal teens dressed in the product, with sales information about a sale for the product going on that month/week right next to the teens. While an ad targeted for upper class rich people have naked/half naked "gorgeous" people laying on top of each, usually not even showing the product. Just having the people looking glamorous. I bet you can tell which is which below. I feel like class is getting to be a bigger and bigger issue the bigger the class gap between upper and middle, and lower and middle/upper. And ads will get even more opposite as their target audiences get more and more separate.
One thing I think will help close the gaps between classes are the Unions that are forming all over the U.S. I personally am part of a Union because I work for Albertsons in the Butcher Block, and the benefits that I get for having a some what dangerous job make wanting to go to work so much better. My dad is also part of a Union, as he works for Boeing. The benefits and protection he gets from his Union has helped my family get all the American dream thing that we could ever want.
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This is a great example of how much we try to conceal our class in the USA and how shocking it can be when it is exposed. I have never heard of such a class segregated mall, but I have never been to Texas. Did realizing your fellow volleyball players class change how you treated them, either actively or passively?
ReplyDeleteFor me, not really. The players who had scholarships were still my really good friends on the team like they were before. It did make me think about how when we go to restaraunts as a team that they might not be able to afford always going out to eat. All in all though they were still my close friends who I laughed and hung out with. It did change how the richer girls looked at the rest of the team because then they teamed up and kinda looked down on the rest of the team, which started to seperate the team into cliques.
ReplyDeleteNatalie -
ReplyDeleteYou did a really great job in this piece tying your personal experience to the class concepts. I have heard of upper-scale malls, but never class segregation sections of malls. That is so strange.
I think that you could have improved this piece by separating out your paragraphs. Also, be aware of generalizations: not all girls like to shop.
Overall, nice work.
- Ruth