In Tokugawa Japan, rich merchants officially ranked beneath the peasants who fed them
Which class sits on top is less natural than it looks. Medieval Europe placed merchants above peasants, while Tokugawa Japan put them explicitly below. Class hierarchies grew elaborate once farming produced food surpluses, and today prejudice by class tends to be quiet: victims often cannot tell why they were treated unfairly.
Classism means prejudice or discrimination based on social class, a ranking built from wealth, income, schooling, occupation and social connections. It covers both personal attitudes and whole systems of policy that favour those at the top. Simple class divisions existed among hunter-gatherers, but settled agricultural civilisations with surplus food built far more intricate ladders, sorting people by visible markers like profession or race into merchants, serfs, warriors, priests and nobles.
Colonial America offers an early Western case. Many people shipped to the colonies were poor and became indentured servants or wandering squatters, and the mix of poverty and racial prejudice left them treated as not quite white. In India, Singapore, Bangladesh and Pakistan, class overlaps with caste, and that pattern follows emigrant communities abroad even where caste discrimination is illegal. Modern class lines are looser, which makes bias harder to spot; psychologist Thomas Fuller-Rowell notes it is usually subtle rather than blatant.
Class rarely acts alone. Women are overrepresented in caregiving and retail and make up nearly two-thirds of workers in the 20 lowest-paid full-time occupations. As of 2022, Black women were 6 per cent of US workers but 32 per cent of home aides, earning about 23,803 dollars a year. In a well-known experiment by Bertrand and Mullainathan, identical job applications with names suggesting a white applicant drew significantly more callbacks. Deborah King's idea of multiple jeopardy holds that race, gender and class multiply one another's effects rather than simply adding up.
Scholars distinguish personal classism, an individual's prejudice, from institutional classism built into schools, laws and workplaces; some add a cultural category. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza coined kyriarchy for a pyramid of overlapping positions assigned at birth, in which whatever privilege dominates a society becomes the lens through which the others are felt. Media play a part too: many high-grossing G-rated films portray class bias, which children may absorb early.
Source: Class discrimination
