> They can afford to hold this position, because they already live in safe, often gated communities. And they can afford to hire private security.
Evaluating income alone is a very poor indicator of relative wealth. $100k in even a small city ain't exactly upper class living, and it certainly ain't usually enough for most people to "live in safe, often gated communities" or "hire private security". The failure to breakdown by income v. cost of living is a glaring issue with this analysis, as is not including further thresholds (say, $500k).
Another analytical failure here is the ignorance of the urban v. suburban v. town v. rural differences exhibited in the table the author included. Support for police defunding drops dramatically in rural areas, and those areas just so happen to be the ones with the least exposure to police brutality (v. urban and suburban populations experiencing it regularly).
There's also the low sample size, but that's relatively minor of an issue compared to the above.
> They found that individuals with higher income or a higher social status were the most likely to say that success results from luck and connections rather than hard work, while low-income individuals were more likely to say success comes from hard work and individual effort.
Considering that (according to the article) the ones who believe that success comes from hard work and individual effort haven't found that success, while the ones who believe it results from luck and connections have found that success, that would rather strongly suggest that the latter assessment is correct. Duping the working class into believing they'll find success if they toil harder for their bosses is exactly how the ownership class maintains its control over the working class.
> When I was growing up in foster homes, or making minimum wage as a dishwasher, or serving in the military, I never heard words like “cultural appropriation” or “gendered” or “heteronormative.”
Neither had rich people, because these terms didn't enter the public discourse (outside of academic circles and other niches) until recently. Nowadays, these terms are not so confined. Per the author's argument, these are no longer status symbols; they were 10 or 20 years ago, but today you can find plenty of wage workers who have at least a vague idea of what these terms mean and use them. You no longer need to be an academic to know that some people have genders and sexes that don't match up or that sometimes cultural traditions end up adopted in caricaturized forms.