Granted, rich and middle class people think they are better than poor people. A lot of Whites or Asians think they are better. There is still some ethnic chauvinism around.
Nevertheless, I have had a low income for decades. I talk to people who make very good incomes sometimes, and they are very friendly to me. Some of them were even quite close to me, as in relatives. My income situation is not brought up. I am intelligent and highly educated and polite, and a lot of higher income people think people like that are interesting people regardless of their income. So those wealthier people will treat me well because I act like a White middle class college educated American. They don’t care about my income. That’s not important. What’s important is if you walk the walk and talk the talk. That actual particulars are somewhat irrelevant. A lot of culture in the US is about display more than essentials.
Sure people think like this. It is considered in very bad taste to brag about how rich you are or even to visibly look down on people of lower classes. If you do so openly, you are going to get told to knock it off in one way or another. I guarantee that you will be very disliked.
There was a guy at my junior college whose parents were rich. I went on a ski trip with him and other students to Colorado. From early on in the trip, he bragged all the time about how rich his family was. It wasn’t long before everyone on the whole trip hated him. People talked about him a lot behind his back. Others started making subtle remarks telling him to knock it the Hell off.
I roomed with the guy and three other guys. Towards the end of the week-long trip, I made some oblique comment about how his bragging about being rich was really angering a lot of people in the group. I didn’t come out and say it. Instead I said it in a sort of hidden code. He figured out what I meant, and he told me in an annoyed tone that he had gotten the message loud and clear. And he did pretty much knock it the Hell off.
We are very much a class-oriented society, but we are supposed to pretend that we are all equal. It is almost as if America has actually achieved a classless state of Communism. In that sense, we are a Communist country. We have extreme class differences, but you are not allowed to mention class in the US, so there is this sort of idea that we are all the same somehow regardless of money.
I lived in a working class White community for a while. There were a lot of well to do people there who had high paying jobs. Everyone was very nice to everyone else, even the trashmen, the clerks in the 7-11’s, and gas stations, basically all of what you would call lousy, low paying jobs. It is quite amazing to see how polite an attorney will be to a trashman or gas station clerk in a town like that. There is also this attitude in White culture that “you never put down a man for working at a job.” It goes along with “any job is a good job.” If you had a good job and treated the trashman or gas station clerk with disdain, a lot of people would see you and think very poorly of you. It is just not something you are supposed to do.
I am aware that Chinese think like that, along with Asians in general. Indians are notorious for this thinking. It may be common in some other parts of globe.
Americans consider this sort of thinking to be a sign of a backwards culture.
