In this essay, Noah Smith articulates an important part of my own experience:
I grew up in the 1980s in a small house with only one bathroom shared between four people. The floor was linoleum. There was a carport instead of a garage, and we had one beat-up used Toyota Tercel hatchback. I don’t remember when we got our first color TV, but when I was young we had a black-and-white one that my grandmother gave us. Our furniture was all second-hand and we kept the couches covered up with worn old blankets.
When I was young, I mowed lawns for money. As a high school kid, I signed up to pick cotton by hand (!!) for an agricultural research project at Texas A&M University, for minimum wage. I have also worked as a cashier. Twice in my life, I have been a member of a labor union, and I have marched in a strike.
I have never once considered myself part of the working class.
Why not? Because I have never thought of class as being defined by a present snapshot of someone’s lifestyle or material circumstances. Instead, I always thought of class as being about someone’s potential. And I grew up always knowing that my economic potential went far beyond the rather humble circumstances of my early childhood.
Like Smith, I have at times been quite poor in my life: for the first three years after my parents divorced, when I left college and moved to Williamsburg, Virginia with no job prospects, during graduate school. But I was never a poor person; I was a middle class person who happened to have no money. I knew I would one day have a lot more, and eventually I did.
2 comments:
opposite experience... I grew up in similar circumstances in Spain (we didn't have a phone in my home until I turned 12), my parents were not even born working class but peasant class which in the 50s and 60s Spain meant living close to middle ages conditions, then they moved to big cities in the late 60s and became working class. I suppose I am now middle class by living standards but I am and will forever consider myself working class, even though I've never joined a union, am sorta proud of it and I don't have any wish to be anything else. I don't feel inferior to anyone and have found the upper class to be easy to get along with, more than middle class, who lives in constant fear of being mistaken for working class and therefore is terrified of being seen in its company.
I was once asked “what kind house does your family have” in boarding school. I replied “we have a chandelier over the dining room table” after a short thought. We did, but it was tiny, in a small house. As children we absorb our parent’s circumstances and relate it to our culture. My mother had two Masters Degrees, and it was assumed that we would at least get a BA/BS. In college I ate beans&rice, but didn’t think I was poor, just broke.
Post a Comment