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”, which has been used 2,300 times.

Comparing Medium’s tags for capitalism, socialism, and communism isn’t helpful because they tend to be used for criticism of capitalism, the ideology that dare not speak its name. (Fact: In 2010, the Texas Board of Education decided to ban the word “capitalism” from text books and use “free enterprise” instead.) Still, we can see that in contrast to the 65,000 racism tags, capitalism has been used 13,900 times, socialism 7,400 times, and communism 3100 times. So we can draw one conclusion—Medium writers are far more willing to talk about racism than the profit system that creates and supports racism.

The reluctance of antiracists to talk about class always surprises me because Du Bois, King, and Malcolm X were very willing to connect prejudice and politics. But the subject is embarrassing for fans of capitalism who dream of a race-blind class system with themselves at the top. They don’t want to talk about whether Malcolm X was right when he said you can’t have capitalism without racism, or address the fact that because of the US’s limited class mobility, every racist could die today and the people of all races who are currently rich would continue to get richer and the people of all races who are currently poor would continue to get poorer.