Wit & Attitude Quote by Lynda Barry

Race and class aren’t named here as profound truths but as cheap tools: quick, legible categories that let a culture sort people with minimal effort and maximum payoff. Lynda Barry’s bluntness is the point. As a cartoonist, she’s fluent in reduction - in how a few lines can turn into a face, a type, a joke. She’s also warning how easily that same shorthand curdles into stereotype, hierarchy, and storylines that excuse cruelty. “Easiest divisions” isn’t admiration; it’s an indictment of a lazy social imagination.

Then she lands the punch: “It’s very stupid.” Not “wrong” or “harmful” - though it is - but stupid, which is a different kind of shame. Stupid implies incurious, uncreative, beneath us. It frames racism and classism not as complex ideologies only experts can untangle, but as the most basic, low-effort way to make sense of difference. The subtext: if you’re still relying on these divisions, you’re not just immoral; you’re boring.

The cultural context matters: Barry’s work lives in the messy, autobiographical zones of adolescence, poverty, and outsider status, where class is felt in your clothes and race is felt in how you’re watched. Coming from that vantage, her line reads like a refusal to let identity be used as a plot device. She’s not denying race and class shape life; she’s rejecting the smug simplicity with which they’re used to rank it.