Sammi Branch

The Symbolic Interactionist’s View of the Selective Nature of the Wealthy 

So far, the film People Like Us has given us much insight into the upper class WASP society. WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and is used to describe the white upper class in North America. In the film we have heard testimonies from people in many different classes. This essay will describe the sociology of the WASP community including how they are viewed and how they view other classes.

One younger male in the WASP community describes WASPs to the audience. He teaches us how to determine WASPs from fakers and outsiders. He is straightforward with his statements. He sounds more like he is reciting facts than listing the ways he and his community judge people they encounter. We learn that people identified as being outside of the WASP community are not welcomed. A Symbolic Interactionist would explain this behavior as the upper-class WASP community using symbols as a way to define people. Because of their clear cut criteria for WASP-ism they can easily pick out people that don’t fit in. Since the definition of a WASP casts negative connotations on people who differ from them, when a WASP identifies someone who doesn’t fit, they automatically see them as an outsider or someone they shouldn’t associate with.

As the young WASP describes the list of things that determine his social class from others it becomes noticeable that their determining factors revolve around symbols. These symbols hold meaning for the people using them as judging criteria. The WASPs learn from a young age visual clues to determining who is like them. Clothes, attitude, and mannerisms are all clues to social class. The woman who teaches people how to act “classier” explains to a client that a respectable wealthy person would wear designer clothes that did not obviously show off or accentuate the label – a wealthy person should/will just know that it is a nice item, a label holds no use. To a WASP wearing something with an obvious “Gucci” or “Prada” label is taboo because they do not need to flaunt their wealth. When they see someone trying to advertise their wealth with labels or symbols that are generally seen as expensive or “fancy”, they associate it with someone trying to prove their status.

Interestingly, it seems like the lack of symbols actually could be considered a symbol. The simple elegance that the young WASP man describes as keys to identifying a fellow upper-class man is the absence of symbols that identify wealth and yet becomes a symbol of the WASP community. It is almost as if they are too cool to show off anymore. This is the point at which people feel entitled rather than proud of the work they’ve done to achieve their wealth. Many times this is because the people in this social strata inherited their wealth or did very little to acquire they money they have.  

Symbols help to organize people into different categories. Symbols can be used as visual clues as to how to categorize other people, and once they are put into a specific category they are treated accordingly. Different statuses seem to be pre-associated with biases, assumptions, and feelings. For example, a homelessness is often associated with drug use or mental instability where as wealth is associated with success and motivation. A Symbolic Interactionist would say that symbols that people wear, associate with, or talk about help others to determine more information about them. Once someone knows or assumes more information they can associate the person with another group of people. If you meet someone who makes $50,000 a year and you know ten other people making about that much and they all smoke cigarettes you probably won’t be surprised when this person you just met pulls out a cigarette. For you this symbol, a cigarette, associates with people making that amount of money. It is not inherently bad that there are differences in class and that people fall into different categories, the problem begins when different classes receive vastly different opportunities or benefits.