I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about class, mostly because I’ve recently become aware of what class means by moving away from the class I was born into. Class in America is often a subtle thing, but it is there, and it is strong.
My story is that I was born the welfare-baby of a nineteen year old waitress. My family was firmly part of the dieing working class- pipelayers and house painters. I grew up in a project around an increadable diversity of immigrants, and everyone I knew was pretty poor. Somehow my mother knew to emphasize education, and unlike most people I grew up with (whos parents emphasized hard work, family obligations, etc.) I ended up in University.
At University, I looked and acted like everybody else. But I knew I was different. I would talk about the great deals I got at the grocery store, much to everyone’s confusion. I’d shop at thrift stores because I had to, because thats what I was used to doing, not for the sake of hip irony. I became friends with the sons and daughters of lawyers and doctors and University professors, not janitors, waitresses and seasonal clerical workers. In a screenwriting class I took, one of my classmates’s mothers sat in, and in the end gave a bit of a lecture. She was a ballet producer and theorist from New York. I felt like an invisible alien. So many of the values I had growing up- resourcefulness, diversity, thriftyness- wern’t relevent. And yet everyone just assumed I was one of them. Class wasn’t a life-consuming thing for me or anything, but I was so much more aware of it than I was when I lived among only people of my own class
Now that I’m out of college, things are even weirder. I’m broke, and frankly working the same crappy jobs my mom worked at this age (albeit without a kid to support) and yet I’ve got an education and don’t belong with the people I work with who are worried about supporting their kids and paying for their cars while I’m dreaming of grad school and travel. And yet I don’t have the family connections so many of my friends had that landed them cushy jobs with their dad’s friend’s companies, nor the ability to not have to work for my supper and travel and do art to my hearts content. It feels like I don’t belong in any class.
It’s subtle. How they handle money is one thing. I recently got an inheritance that is about equal to my outstanding student loans. However, the interest rate on my loans is fixed at an absurdly low level. My family is pushing for me to pay off my loans immediately, because to a working class family, debt is slavery and ones’ first goal should be to make sure that you are not in debt. Most of my friends’ families advise that I should invest the money and keep making payments on my loans, since I will almost surely make more on the investment than I’m paying in interest.
Another example: two of my friends went to the same private high school. I overheard them reminicing about an assembly they had. The presenter was an author talking about how to manage your investments. That would never happen in a million years in my high school. Our assemblies are about how not to get AIDS and that sort of thing.
But there is more than just money. How do they decide what kind of car they drive or what house they live in? What do they do with their kids in the summer? What do their grocery shopping patterns look like? What kind of connections do their families have?
It’s not easy. I think most of the time, you are in your own class so you don’t worry about it too much. I don’t think you can even really become that aware of class until you are outside of your own class. I know nobody I went to school with really noticed how different I was class-wise and they all called me silly when I pointed it out.
It happens. But things like education, money handling and family connections tend to keep you in your own class.
Education is the big one. There IS a difference between what choices a graduate of a crappy high school that didn’t prepare them to go to college (telling them SAT dates, providing honors classes, explaning financial aid forms, workshopping personal statments and application essays in class) and one where they just assume you are headed to a four year college. There is a difference between the parent that sends their kid to science camp and the parent that sends their kid to work. There is a difference between the kid who gets books as birthday presents and the kid who has never seen their parents read. This difference is almost insurmountable. If you never learned the value of education, you are unlikely to just magically dicern it.
And of course, family connections are a big deal. My family could hook me up with a low-level state clerical worker job (and has often tried) but that really isn’t what I want for myself. Meanwhile, my friends’ parents are hooking them up with jobs at law offices and accounting firms and the like. I think there is also a tendancy for families to try to keep their children in their own class.
I think it’s important to at least aknowledge it and think about it a bit. We are so busy telling ourselves that it doesn’t exist that we miss out on a lot of ways to improve American society (for example, think about what class most often ends up in the military and what effect that has on politics and if that is all very fair at all). We need to look at how educational oppertunties and family connections make the playing field uneven and try to fix that if we want to live up to the American dream and claim “equality of oppertunity”.