I also enjoyed the games very much. Apparently I have a straight up "middle middle" class sense of style, as evidenced by my rabid love of frayed persian rugs and fold-out couches ;p
I seem forever to be including links in these posts, but I keep running across articles or stories online that parallel our discussions surprisingly well. Here's one about a guy in Arizona who refused to continue the "sensitivity training" he was made to undergo in preparation for being an RA:
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=82699
The article itself is interesting--he claimed that the sensitivity training was only reinforcing stereotypes of different groups--but I find the reader-supplied comments section at the bottom especially enlightening. Here, I think, you can see a general lack of awareness about social class and its
relationship to other factors such as race...what strikes me is that the comments seem overwhelmingly to be filtered only through racial/ethnic/sexual/religious categories, and where people think they're criticizing the "overly PC" liberal mindset in favor of pragmatic and/or merit-based models of society and success, to a large degree they seem totally unaware that the sensitivity exercise does have roots in reality, no matter how overly simplified and "stereotypical" this particular exercise may have been (and this does seem to be true). The basis of the exercise--socio-economic class, social difference, etc.--gets lost altogether because people start saying it's actually
the exercise that's responsible for perpetuating these stereotypes, and it's the perpetuation of the stereotypes by the sensitivity training that makes us keep having to go THROUGH sensitivity training in the first place! And you want to scream, No, stop! You're missing the point! You're actually making it harder for yourself to
see the point!! Your reaction is the point!
Of particular interest to me was the recurrence of the reverse-white-man's-privilege perspective, where white men talk about how they WISH they had it as good as all the PC liberals claim they do! In reality, the idea goes, the "minorities" get all the advantages, etc. etc. This is what my dad raised me to believe. He warned me that the white American male has it harder than any other group today. While I do certainly acknowledge that those stories exist where a white man doesn't get hired for a job or accepted to a school because of a "minority quota" of some variety or another, I find it interesting that these stories have, for what seems to be an enormous number of people, served to "debunk" the very real phenomenon of systemic white privilege altogether. That's what's so hard about issues like these--personal stories seem to affect people more strongly than statistical/sociological analyses, but unfortunately they don't usually refute the existence of the systemic phenomenon in question.