ABSTRACT
Throughout my college years both as a student and a professor, we talked about the positive gifts that come when you bond with someone different from yourself, from a different race, class, gender. It was the grand age of cultural studies. A positive politics of difference was the starting point for forming ties across boundaries, especially those imposed by systems of domination, by imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. While the theory was all about border crossing, there was little talk about actual practice, of what makes bonding possible across race, class, gender, and diverse politics. Our silence about practice surfaced because no one really wanted to talk about the difficulties of bonding across differences, the breakdowns in communications, the disappointments, the betrayals. While we talked openly about race and gender, not much was stated about the politics of class, even though more often than not it was differences of class that separated and estranged us from one another. Race and gender boundaries seemed easier to surmount than class 144 differences. Yet most of us were raised to believe that class does not matter in a democratic society.
