ABSTRACT
To understand social class disparities in educational and occupational outcomes, social scientists inevitably have looked at or hypothesized about poor people and minoritiesthose previously called “cultural deprived” and presently called “at risk.” Deficit-oriented scholars come up with theories about what poor people do wrong that keeps them in subordinate positions and what we-white middle-class professionals-can do to help them better themselves. Although the intentions behind such research seemingly are benevolent, recommendations that scholars be funded to seek solutions and/or professionals to provide services may ultimately be more self-than other-serving. The remedy is never to increase the money that the poor receive. Even champions of the left use such concepts as false consciousness in a partial way to explain how working classes are duped into subscribing to ideologies that strengthen the position of dominant classes-a theory that implies they are not as intellectually astute as their affluent and educationally advanced counterparts. Thus, the poor not only lose out in power relations and material distribution but also in negative aspersions about their intellectual attributes. To combat such injustices, in this book I show that false consciousness is common to dominant classes. To win educationally, and ultimately materially and morally, such classes use obfuscating ideology and rhetoric to convince Others, but perhaps mostly themselves, of their superior intelligence and work ethic, while still crediting themselves with the moral high ground of being benevolent toward Others and thus liberal. They negotiate win/win1 situations for themselves, which result in the ubiquitous lose/lose conditions for Others.
