I am so fed up with people making assumptions about me, simply because of what they perceive to be my “social class.”
Whatever happened to America’s prideful claim of being a “classless society?” (not that it has ever been true.)
But, from the guy, seventeen years ago, who saw me looking at Noam Chomsky’s website and, because he knew I was a “welfare mother,” assumed that I must have somehow blundered onto the website by accident (and that I had no idea who Noam Chomsky was) – to the busybody upstairs tenant of one of my elderly in-home-care clients who actually*** hid the silverware ***when he went into the hospital (despite the fact that I’d worked for him nearly five years at the time, and that he’d gone in the hospital before she ever moved in, with no worries about me) – to the security guards in upscale shops who feel they must eagle-eye me – to the goofy insulated women in the affluent neighborhood where I work who clutch their shoulder bags tightly when they see me coming, even ***inside a Safeway store! ***-- to another client’s landlady, who assumes that because my client lives in one of the landlady’s lame-ass hinky-wiring roach-infested appliance-compromised no-fire-escape-having way way overpriced West Oakland apartments, that my client, and by extension myself as someone associated with the client, must be inbred deep-frying ass-scratching halfwits – I have to contend with far too many people who are far too sure that they know all about me, when they give all appearances of not knowing all about anything!
These people seem to have fallen for some of the more obvious lies extant in our society:
That affluent people are always affluent because they have earned it, or somehow deserve it because they are a “better class of people.” And the corollary, which is that poor people are all poor because they are lazy and/or intellectually challenged. I do not sit on my butt watching reality shows about moonshiners in the deep south, alligator hunters, or Honey BooBoo. I do not cook with “grease!” I do not have a whole litter of kids. (one grown son.) I read constantly, I am politically aware, I can hold my own in conversations about philosophy or physics or medicine or art or many other topics. I have a poem in a book which is in the Library of Congress. (OK, not that big a deal; but still, it’s something)
That all poor people are bitterly resentful about their poverty, and will always take any chance to get over, steal, rob, or otherwise take away things from the rich. You know what? I am not poor because I couldn’t have chosen to be otherwise. I have many salable skills, and various kinds of aptitudes that would make me (and have made me, and are making me now) an asset to an employer. I am in fact one of the most ethical and altruistic people one could ever meet. The simple fact is that I am just not that interested in spending the majority of my time in the pursuit of the acquisition of stuff. They just can’t wrap their heads around the fact that I will not steal the silverware or snatch their purse because I don’t want it! Even at the most hungry and desperate times of my life, there was never, ever any question of compromising my ethics, because then I’d have nothing. I would still be poor, but I’d be ***poor and a scumbag!
That the way they portray criminals as looking on television shows and in commercials is the way that criminals always really look. No. Many criminals look ***just like anyone else. *** And many of the people who “look like criminals” may actually be just like you.
I’m hoping John is joking, but if he is I confess I don’t get it. Anyway, I feel your pain. People can be total dicks sometimes, and being treated like a criminal repeatedly is so demoralizing. I’m sorry this happens to you.
Brujaja, I have read your posts for quite a while now, and know you to be a wise and intelligent person. I have never experienced the kind of classism you are enduring because I was lucky enough to be born the son of a middle-class white couple in the middle of the 20th century. However, I have watched while some of my dearest friends have had such horribleness happen to them, and sometimes the best response is to ignore the ignorant.
Of course, that is an easy thing to say when you aren’t the target of such maliciousness.
Too bad the middle class has alienated you, otherwise instead of resentment you’d find yourself bored stupid by their company: political discussions that always, coincidentally, support their perceived self-interest; arts and cultural pretentions stranded at the same 101-level where first encountered as an easy B elective while studying for career-track jobs; cooking with an olive oil that’s the exact same chemical composition of the less expensive brand on the lower shelf; and no matter how many or few kids they have, they alternate between bragging and complaining (that much is class-universal).
Preach it, brujaja. Oh, and criminals do look like criminals, because people who look like criminals are more apt to be suspects and get arrested.
You see what you expect to see.
Second, I’d read less into stuff like that. It probably has way less to do with you and more to do with the other person. I’ve had stuff stolen from me before and it affects me. Times when I’d prefer to be trustful, I no longer am. Most of the time when someone is deciding not to you trust you, you’re not the person they’re thinking about.
I don’t know about you, but if some Richie Rich looked over my shoulder in the library while I was reading Noam Chomsky’s website and haughtily snapped his ascot at my moth-eaten top hat, I’d have hiked up my wooden barrel and shoulder straps, tightened the bread bags around my feet and marched back to the soup line.
But what threw you may have been that John is rarely funny on purpose.