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Medium Tags show Class is Still the Last Taboo in Politics
Medium’s tags make it easy to know what people are happy to talk about. The tag for racism has been used 65,000 times, and race has been used 25,000 times, but the tag for class has only been used 3,900 times, and classism has been used less than 400 times. On Medium, writers are more than six times willing to talk about race than class, and 170 times more willing to talk about racism than classism.
Since classism is a relatively new word and many socialists hate the way it frames the class war as a matter of personal prejudice, it is undoubtedly used less than it might be. But the numbers for the older name for class prejudice are even worse—snob and snobbery tags only show up 37 times each. Though the gap between the rich and the poor has been steadily growing under neoliberalism, Medium’s writers are far more comfortable talking about race prejudice than class prejudice.
The man who is currently number 9 on Forbes’ list of billionaires understands that class matters most in a capitalist society:
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” —Warren Buffett
Yet the tag for “class war” has only been used 90 times. “Class warfare” is a bit more popular at 110 uses. Neither comes close to “race relations”…
