This exercise was transcribed by Bint. Mark in bold the ones that reflect your experience.
ADULTHOOD:
If your father went to college
If your father finished college
If your mother went to college
If your mother finished college
If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
If you were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
If you had a computer at home
If you had your own computer at home
If you had more than 50 books at home
If you had more than 500 books at home
If were read children’s books by a parent
If you ever had lessons of any kind
If you had more than two kinds of lessons
If the people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
If you had a credit card with your name on it
If you have less than $5000 in student loans
If you have no student loans
If you went to a private high school
If you went to summer camp
If you had a private tutor
If you have been to Europe
If your family vacations involved staying at hotels
If all of your clothing has been new and bought at the mall
If your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
If there was original art in your house
If you had a phone in your room
If you lived in a single family house
If your parent own their own house or apartment
If you had your own room
If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
If you had your own cell phone in High School
If you had your own TV in your room in High School
If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College (When my grandfather died I got a small inheritance and opened a mutual fund account instead of blowing it all on stupid things — it’s still my only savings.)
If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline
If you ever went on a cruise with your family (sadly, yes)
If your parents took you to museums and art galleries
If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.
CHILDHOOD:
If your body does not bear long-term signs of malnutrition. (For example, teeth marked up from poor nutrition when they were forming.)
If you had orthodontia. (Unfortunately, or fortunately, I had about ten years of orthodontia.)
If you saw a doctor for anything other than emergencies or school-mandated shots.
If you heated your home with clean-burning fuels or had properly vented heating.
If you grew up in a house without vermin. (We did live in the woods, though, and mice and bugs are a common nuisance.)
If you had running water.
If you had a basement or foundation under your house.
If you had an indoor toilet.
If your parents and immediate family were outside the criminal justice system.
If you yourself remained outside the criminal justice system.
If your parents had a new car.
If you never went barefoot so that you could ’save your shoes for school.’
If your parents never argued in front of you about having enough money for food to last out the month.
If you ate hunted and fished meat because it was a recreational activity rather than as the major way to stock a freezer.
If your laundry was done at home in a washer rather than in a lavandaria. (When I was a teenager, Mom got a wild hair up her ass thinking that taking the laundry to the laundromat instead of doing it at home would save her a lot of time by doing it all at once. That lasted about a month.)
If your hair was cut by a professional barber or hair stylist instead of your parent.
THOTS:
I don’t deny at all that I come from relative privilege, and that this privilege affects my current economic and cultural status. But I can think of a few experiences that change the way I think about privilege, mostly the structure of my family and my parents’ experiences with privilege and how their legacy affects me.
- My parents were both from the rural South, and while Mom’s family were middle-class business owners, Dad’s family of poor farmers certainly was not. He didn’t have an indoor bathroom until he was in high school. When my parents married, if I recall correctly, Mom’s parents put both Mom and Dad through college, and Dad’s folks responded by accusing him of getting uppity. Upon graduation, Mom became an elementary special education teacher and my father became a salesman for an agricultural company that he stayed with for the duration of his working life. My sisters were born shortly after my parents married, and I remember one story Mom relayed that consisted of her agonizing over whether to buy my oldest sister a pair of cowgirl boots or the week’s worth of groceries. Mom chose boots.
Without telling their story for them, my parents clawed their way out of poverty through education, and in turn the expectation of achieving educated class status was paramount in my childhood. My parents never held back on buying books, visiting the library, going on class trips, participating in sports, whatever, because they valued the educational elements of these experiences — and I know that they allowed my much-older sisters the same educational freedom despite being in worse financial shape than they were by the time I came around. And although I racked up a huge amount of debt going to an in-state college (financed largely on my own with grants and loans), my parents filled in the money gaps knowing that Ethan and I would be far better off if I had a college education than if I did not. I also know looking back that some of my mother’s paranoia about “what will the neighbors think?!” is inarguably related to the appearance of higher class status and her fear of falling backward.
I never attended a private high school, but I did pay tuition to go to a different jr. high/high school for about four years. The change in expectation levels between schools was too much for my brain (and ego), and I soon found myself hanging with the burnouts smoking pot during the open campus lunches. After getting in an unreal amount of trouble during my sophomore year, the tuition was revoked and I ended back up in the county high school. Which, for the record, is still better off than most of the public schools in the country.
Educationally, I’ve been very privileged. I can say without a doubt that many kids I was raised with had the privilege of money and things without knowing the privilege of learning. It’s a value my parents imparted on me that I share without question.
- I had a TV in my room about five minutes. Shortly after allowing me to get a TV in my room, Mom took it away from me and declared that the television was the downfall of the American family. I mostly agree with her.
- Cell phones were still rare when I was in high school. I did have a beeper.
- Without trying to sound fatalistic, I’m not sure how well I will do financially compared with my parents. I had a child young, and while I did graduate from college, I have struggled to find a stable job, and now that I have a stable job, to make ends meet. Chef and I have only been married for a few months, but our combined income is still relatively small. We’re well below the median national income level and significantly below the Indiana state level, but then, we’re young. Who knows?
Depending on your field, another important one is “Your family paid your expenses while you did at least one internship.”
I work in politics, and I managed to self-finance three internships in college (one paid a small salary, I found a grant for another, and the third I paid for by saving my salary from the first.) But when that 4th internship came around (yes, future political operatives often have as many as 4 or 5 internships), my dad paid my rent for three months. And if I didn’t have that internship, I wouldn’t have the job I have now, working on Capitol Hill.
How’s that for class privilege perpetuating itself?
(Note to any rich Democrats out there: take one $2300 donation to a campaign, and instead give it to the advocacy group of your choice as a grant for a stipend for an intern. Groups are absolutely dependent on intern labor, and the only way you can get into the political field is through internships. And the only people who can take internships are those who can afford to not get paid for several months at a time. You want young people to become Democrats? Help them work for Democrats.)
Privilege really became clear to me in college; not only my own by virtue of the fact that I was able to go pretty much debt-free (though graduate school has produced massive debt for me now), but also when I saw those in socioeconomic classes higher than mine. For me, it was an excellent education in how people simply become accustomed to their status and don’t always think much about it; it’s because of how I could see class privilege that I could come to understand why I might not see the privileges I have due to my race and my sex.
It isn’t just my students who don’t always see their privilege, but also my graduate school colleagues. In my many years in grad school, it’s become obvious who generally goes to grad school and it’s interesting what cultural tastes and experiences you’re generally expected to have. There’s an interesting tension that’s created when you don’t fit into that framework.
ADULTHOOD:
If your father went to college
If your father finished college
If your mother went to college
If your mother finished college
If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
If you were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
If you had a computer at home
If you had your own computer at home
If you had more than 50 books at home
If you had more than 500 books at home
If were read children’s books by a parent
If you ever had lessons of any kind
If you had more than two kinds of lessons
If the people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
If you had a credit card with your name on it
If you have less than $5000 in student loans
If you have no student loans
If you went to a private high school
If you went to summer camp
If you had a private tutor
If you have been to Europe
If your family vacations involved staying at hotels
If all of your clothing has been new and bought at the mall
If your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
If there was original art in your house
If you had a phone in your room
If you lived in a single family house
If your parent own their own house or apartment
If you had your own room
If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
If you had your own cell phone in High School
If you had your own TV in your room in High School
If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College (If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline
If you ever went on a cruise with your family
If your parents took you to museums and art galleries
If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.
CHILDHOOD:
If your body does not bear long-term signs of malnutrition. (For example, teeth marked up from poor nutrition when they were forming.)
If you had orthodontia. (Unfortunately, or fortunately, I had about ten years of orthodontia.)
If you saw a doctor for anything other than emergencies or school-mandated shots.
If you heated your home with clean-burning fuels or had properly vented heating.
If you grew up in a house without vermin. (If you had running water.
If you had a basement or foundation under your house.
If you had an indoor toilet.
If your parents and immediate family were outside the criminal justice system.
If you yourself remained outside the criminal justice system.
If your parents had a new car.
If you never went barefoot so that you could ’save your shoes for school.’
If your parents never argued in front of you about having enough money for food to last out the month.
If you ate hunted and fished meat because it was a recreational activity rather than as the major way to stock a freezer.
If your laundry was done at home in a washer rather than in a lavandaria.
If your hair was cut by a professional barber or hair stylist instead of your parent.
I answered the top half as of my HS graduation. Our social position changed a lot. My dad was an immigrant tradesman and my mother was born into rural poverty, with malnutrition and no running water, vermin, abuse, brothers in prison …
So my formative experiences were lower middle class. My parents fought openly about money, we had a wood stove to save on heating. They had hand-me down cars until I was in HS, and I had hand-me-down clothes. We shopped in the second-hand store and got clothes from goodwill. If I took a class, it was at the rec center, and free or subsidized. But we had books. My mother read voraciously. I had a library card before I could read and my mom took out books a half-dozen at a time.
When I was young, we were broker than the ten commandments because my parents moved into a falling-down house they couldn’t really afford to get me into a good suburban school system. I got my ass kicked all the time by my classmates, who had new stylish clothes and whose parents belonged to the yacht club, and I actually, physically, lived on the “wrong side of the tracks,” across the railroad tracks down by the town docks.
I remember the union being out on strike; both parents out of work and on strike pay. I remember the big family meeting when my father told us he was unemployed and looking for pick-up work.
In the building boom of the mid-80s, things turned. I was working as a carpenter, drawing a paycheck in middle school and later. I’d pick up after-school work from other buildings cleaning up their sites for $50. I had a TV in my room: I went down to Radio Shack and paid $300 with my own money for it. I was 13. I kept that TV until college.
My parents once asked my sister and I to choose: vacation at Disney, or computer. We picked a computer. My mother couldn’t have been prouder.
I finished college early to save money; I worked as maintenance in the dorms because I got to live there free. I paid for much of my first year of law school out of carpentry earnings.
So, I had a lot of privilege. I was up out of the hell that is poverty. But I also had a long look up at the people that shit on me and my family.
I do work with a charity where a lot of the people are in financial services and went to private schools, etc. I look around sometimes and think, “who the fuck are these people?”
I remember one time, when I was outside nailing down boards on a deck, behind a house that neither me not my parents could afford. I was maybe 17. My father was the builder, because he had convinced the bank to give him a construction mortgage, but the house was over our heads. He came around back, and I was surprised to see him, because they were supposed to be pouring concrete on another lot. He said it was too cold to pour. I was banging in galvanized nails with no gloves on. Concrete makes its own heat as it sets, so it can be poured if the temperature stays above 25 — or, as we used to say, “25 and rising.”
When I have a tough day, I just try to remember that it’s always 25 and rising for me now, and hopefully for my kids.
I coded bolds in there which didn’t show up, and without which the list provides no useful information.
I should add that I have a blind-spot that I struggle to be aware of. I’m a lawyer. I make a lot of money, and I have things like contacts that go with that. I tend to see myself how I was as a boy: struggling to hang on to the bottom of the middle class, and I carry with me the resentments of my youth. But that’s not where I am today, and those will not be the experiences of my children.
I used to work with a guy who commuted from Northampton, Mass. every day to Connecticut, which is a haul. He loved the area, and his wife had a business there. One of his friends was an economics professor at UMass, who would take his Economics 101 class on a little field trip the first day — he’d march them over to Amherst College and sit them on the grass in the middle of campus. When someone would ask what they were doing there, he’d say, “Look around you. Those will be your bosses someday.” Then he’d march them back to UMass.
Mind you, this was in the late 80s/early 90s, when UMass still cost next to nothing, so a good chunk of the students were from working class and lower-middle-class backgrounds. It probably wouldn’t work as well today.