My family and I are walking-talking refutations of the idea that being smart and working hard really matters all that much without luck and starting position making significant contributions.
Despite very high intelligence, not a single one of my relatives on my mother’s side was able to go to college. No money + having to work to support the family = no chance for higher education. In a just world, my grandmother would have gotten a PhD. She was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. With her family circumstances, gender, and era, along with being a single parent for several years after she kicked my grandfather out, the best she could do was to be such an efficient secretary that they literally hired two women to do her job when she retired.
The average intelligence on my father’s side wasn’t that great, but mechanical aptitude was pretty high. Despite my grandfather being the kind of machinist the engineers talked to to figure out how to make the parts they drew, none of his kids were able to go to school. My dad had a chance at college because of the GI bill, courtesy of 2 tours in Vietnam (including a fun little time called the Tet Offensive) but he struggled all his life with academics. Judging from his writing, I know for sure he had an undiagnosed learning disorder. He wasn’t stupid, he just had a hell of a time reading and writing properly, and given his blue-collar background and the time he grew up in, no one gave enough of a shit to recognize his problem, much less offer therapy to correct for it.
My mom was also very intelligent. She graduated high school 2 years early (skipped grades), but made it through less than 2 years of veterinary school because she had to work full time to support herself, having moved out at 17 due to family problems.
Skipping over the several years where we were dirt poor — farming in our back yard, hunting for meat, government cheese and food-stamps, shopping for school clothes at Goodwill poor — my mom and dad worked their asses off and we kinda-sorta made it to middle class. My dad was eventually able to get a job with the county which provided health care (important because I almost died as a kid from pneumonia when they were poor as shit) but which necessitated long commutes to remote work sites and irregular days off. Mom ran a dog grooming business that they saved, borrowed, and begged enough money to start.
My dad was a functional alcoholic, his first descent was triggered by getting laid off from GM when I was very little, so there were a few hiatuses where he wasn’t living with us. He always worked hard and took extra jobs on his few days off even when they were separated because he tried his damndest to support his kids.
I had a few years of stability after elementary school; I’d attended 4 different schools from kindergarten to 5th grade because we moved due to family stuff and job availability, etc. I was IQ tested at least twice that I remembered. (Mom told me that they tested me after the first couple of months at kindergarten too, but I don’t remember that myself.)
Most of the schools had no idea what to do with me. I remember being moved to two higher grades for reading and writing classes (attending 6th grade classes when I was in 4th) and they stuck me in with much older kids for “enrichment” like computer classes, but I honestly don’t think any of the public schools I attended were equipped to handle really bright kids. The first time I didn’t feel like a freak was when I was in GATE classes in middle school. I had shitty study, organization, and time-management skills since I’d never really had to work at anything academic.
Not coincidentally, that was when we were finally able to live in a house in a decent(ish) neighborhood. Mom worked 12 hour days 6 days a week at the dog grooming business, dad worked long hours in shitty conditions. We were latch-key kids. Neither of them were home before 8pm most nights. I often made dinner for us from about the time I was 11 or 12. I worked at the shop on weekends and holidays to help out.
Mom got cancer when I was between 15 and 16. After an initially positive response to surgery and chemo, she started seizing one day and upon examination was found to have several advanced brain tumors. Dad’s insurance was pretty good, but treatment was still expensive, and without Mom, we had to sell the business at a loss. She died a couple of months before my 18th birthday.
I was seriously fucked in the head for years, and didn’t really realize it at the time. My grades hadn’t been that great because I didn’t do any homework, but pulled As on tests. I hadn’t realized yet that school was kind of a game, and that grades were keeping score, so you had to do the work even if you didn’t actually need to study.
Partly because of what was going on with my mom, I didn’t even try to apply for college, and later, even if I’d had my shit together, I probably couldn’t have paid for it. I was in AP classes, but by the time you could test for college credit, the $60 per test was ridiculously expensive. I was worried about getting enough gas for school, and maybe buy some food. We were well on our way back to being dirt-poor.
Dad was devastated by my mothers decline and nearly destroyed by her death. Even with life insurance money, he couldn’t really afford the house; mom had been the main breadwinner, his job was stable, safe, and provided health insurance, but wasn’t high paying. He had to put our house on the market less than a year after she died.
I went from dreaming when I was 13 or 14 about going to school at Berkeley, Stanford, or Cal Poly someday, studying engineering or biotech, to staving off homelessness by using the money I’d earned helping out at the shop from the time I was 12. In high school, my classmates were doing internships and study camps and other middle-class shit when I was squeezing dog anal glands, putting in 11–12 hour days alongside my mom. The money I earned (my mom paid me like I was a regular employee) which was supposed to be for school was basically all I had when my family imploded and everything my parents had worked so hard for was stripped away by circumstance.
I was the first person in my family on either side to graduate from college. It took me 8 fucking years to do it too. I worked part-time and did classes at community college for a while, then had to start working full-time to actually earn enough to live and save a little bit for transferring to a real school. My income was right at the poverty line ($10,000–12,000 a year) for most of that 8 years. I qualified for basically no “free” financial aid, and even had to write a petition letter stating that I received no support from my family to get any aid. I ended up with $22,000 in student loans for the 3 years of university I transferred to when I’d finished everything I could do at community college, even though I worked at least part-time while taking a full load (12–18 semester units) the entire time.
Fuck you if you don’t think privilege is real. Fuck you if you think poor people don’t work hard. Anyone starting out poor and ending up even in the lower end of middle class is very unusual. It takes not just brains and hard work, but almost always luck or some other advantage to get there. It’s even harder now that tuitions have increased roughly 4x since I was in school.
I’m smart, very smart, and stubborn as hell, and I just barely managed to get an undergrad degree. I couldn’t get into some of the competitive majors because my high school grades were mediocre; due partially to seriously fucked up shit that I couldn’t control, personal failings that I fully recognize now and have mostly corrected but had no prayer of being able to fix when I was a kid, and often just not having enough time to do my best even when all other factors lined up.
Given a normal middle-class upbringing, I have no doubt that I’d have a Masters or PhD. I’m lucky to have even the relatively low-paying white collar job as a teacher right now. I could easily have ended up being a blue-collar worker with even less pay and chance of advancement. If I’m really lucky, and nothing happens to me in the meantime, I might, possibly be able to send my kids to university. My dreams when I was young were to do something significant. I’ve had to settle for just a little bit better for my family than I had growing up, and hope that it’s enough.
For the record, I’m mostly of European descent, with some Native American admixture that’s so far back it doesn’t show. After I graduated, I went to Japan on the JET Program with the intention to learn Japanese and practice martial arts. I’ve since spent most of my adult life in Japan, so I fully understand both wealth and race privilege (as Damuri Ajashi pointed out earlier).