Class consciousness: all I can do is write my own story
Instead of constantly writing from a place of “what if” and “what does it mean” and trying to find the right words when talking about class and privilege (yes, the two are different and distinct), I thought I’d write down some memories that shaped my class consciousness, as you might call it. Some of the comments on this post by Hugo Schwyzer inspired me to go ahead w/ this. And, yeah, I agree: if your parents can pay your way for seven years of college and grad school, that’s not “comfortable,” that’s rich. And I say this as someone who has problems w/ the word “rich” and the reductive way in which it’s often applied. But it bugs me when people try to act like they’re not as well-off as they really are. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. Here are the notes I wrote down when reading the comment thread there:
What does it mean to be rich
When you *are* rich, do you try to deny it to “fit in” or “get cred”
And is your perspective skewed?Or is everyone’s perspective skewed w/ their own experience at the center? (other than the VERY poor and VERY wealthy)
Back to why I was so uncomfortable at the financial planner’s officeWas I poor? Working class? Middle class?
I’ve come to identify as working class bc all the descriptions I’ve read, that one seems to “fit” best with the way it feltBut idk
“As for teaching, I have to admit that the maxim “If you do what you love, the money will follow” is intensely dangerous and irresponsible if not qualified with supplemental information.”
Yes, this quote has ALWAYS bothered me
It has always reeked of so much privilege it’s painfully obviousMy own experience mirrors this, somewhat
http://hugoschwyzer.net/2009/02/12/the-thoughts-of-six-hundred-pounders-professional-feminism-class-privilege-and-the-responsibility-to-teach-wisely-and-well/#comment-498164 (except UGA was actually a *good* school, not second-rate; I felt the quality of my education there was excellent)
So, memories:
First class-related memory. I’ve written about this one before, so I’ll just quote what I wrote then.
When I was about 6 years old, there was this girl who was my age who my parents wanted me to play with. They knew her parents (don’t remember how) and I guess they figured since we were the same age, we should play. We only played twice that I remember – I went to her house once and she came to my house once. Her house was huge, had a pool, a guesthouse, they had a maid, and she had a pony FFS. Her room was very pink and had a bunch of stuff to do with ponies in it; she was very into ponies, which I found boring as hell. I wanted to play games where we ran around the backyard and got dirty and dug in the dirt and such, but she wanted to play all these girly games and not mess up her clothes. (Not that I wasn’t into my share of “girly games” – I liked to play house, and I had lots of dolls – but something about her was way too frou-frou for my taste.) She annoyed me. When my mom picked me up from her house, I asked about her family: “Are they rich?” My mom replied, “No, they just have a higher income than we do.” And being 6 years old and not knowing what that meant, but just knowing that it sounded like big adult words and a good enough explanation, I accepted it and that was that. It wasn’t until years later that I realized my mom had cleverly fooled me.
My mom was a bartender until I was 7 or 8 years old. When I’d go spend the night at friends’ houses, I’d take my toiletries in a purple Crown Royal bag (we always had tons of them around the house). We also had a lot of extra beer/liquor T-shirts that I used as nightshirts (e.g., my mom is wearing one in this photo). As I started to get old enough to perceive adults’ reactions, I noticed some of the parents seemed… subtly disapproving. I didn’t understand why, and it made me uncomfortable. I don’t remember every saying anything to my mom about it. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that it dawned on me why the parents might think it’s weird for a 7-year-old to carry a Crown Royal bag and sleep in a Finlandia T-shirt.
In 6th grade, the meme of the moment was making fun of K-Mart. Kids would tell K-Mart jokes just as often as they’d tell “your momma” jokes – sometimes going for the gold, a joke that referenced both. In retrospect this was really bizarre because the middle school I went to wasn’t, to put it delicately, in a ritzy area. At the time, though, I simply made a mental note not to let anyone find out my mom and I shopped there all the time. I started to refuse to wear clothes from K-Mart which really pissed off my mom.
The summer after 7th grade, I went to TIP for the first time. I don’t know how much it cost, but looking back I’m sure it wasn’t a light financial burden for my parents to send me there. But my education was the most important thing to my parents, so they were more than happy to pay for me to go. And am I ever glad they did – the four summers (well, 3-week sessions, not full summers) I spent at TIP were some of the best times of my life, and some of the few bright spots in some very dark years. (Later I found out about the lien on our house during this same time. Not sure if the two things were related or not.)
I met some wonderful friends at TIP. Kate, in particular, I had a connection with that bordered on the telepathic. And in that way teenage girls do, we latched onto each other, each an extension of the other. Don’t mistake me, I’m not saying it was silly or anything like that. Our friendship is one of the only things that helped me survive some awful years, and I’m not exaggerating. Even though I lived in Georgia and she lived in Kansas, we were always in touch. We wrote massive letters to each other constantly. I think the longest one I ever wrote was 26 pages (both sides). I could barely fit it in the envelope.
Anyway, that first year after TIP, I told my parents what I wanted most for Christmas was to go visit Kate. If I remember correctly, they worked it out with her parents to pay half of my plane ticket. And off I went to visit Kate, pleased as punch. She and her mom picked me up at the airport, and when we got to their house, I was gobsmacked; the house was huge! It had two floors and a full basement (the basement itself was bigger than my parents’ house – no exaggeration) and they had a satellite (this was before the little DirectTV satellites; they had a big-ass satellite dish, which in retrospect is really pretty white-trash Southern! but they lived in the middle of nowhere outside Wichita, KS… anyway, in my mind it equated to “expensive”). I remember as we were driving up the (long, winding) driveway, I was blubbering some stupid comment about how they have a garage and a side door, and my house didn’t have either, and aren’t they lucky when it rains. Even as I was saying it, I though, “Shut up, Amber, you’re sounding like an idiot.”
With a start, the thought entered my mind that Kate was rich – and I couldn’t understand that, because she was so… normal. In my mind, rich equaled snobbish. I found it difficult to conceive that the two didn’t have to go together. -Although, later at some point in the visit, Kate’s mom told her not to chew gum because it was “low class.” That confused the hell out of me (and still does!).
A few months later Kate came to visit me and I was embarrassed about the size of my house, for the first time. I was flustered for a reason I didn’t fully understand, and I didn’t know how to put my feelings into words. I don’t remember if I said anything or not. Probably not.
Later, I think Thanksgiving of the following year, I went to visit another TIP friend, Reagan, who lived in Dallas, TX. She and her parents picked me up at the airport in a BMW. I tried to act casual about it. We got to her house and… again, huge! I didn’t know how to act. Like Kate, they had a maid – although their maid came every day and wore a uniform, whereas Kate’s family’s maid came only once in a while. They also had a guest house in the backyard where her brother’s soccer coach lived (??), a triple car garage, the biggest kitchen I’d ever seen, and front and back stairs in the house. At one point we went to her friend Sarah’s house and it was equally huge. Sarah’s brother was home from Harvard on break. I went to school w/ Reagan one day while I was there – it was a private school where they wore uniforms, the plaid skirt and everything. I was having a great time with Reagan and Sarah, and I distinctly remember thinking, “These people are rich, and they don’t know they’re rich.” I still had that association of rich == snobbish in my mind.
When I was in 11th grade, I transferred to a private school. Again, one of the best things I ever did, during a really awful dark period in my life when I frequently had suicidal thoughts. At that point I was old enough to be aware of financial matters, and even at the time I wondered how the hell my parents were affording this. I never asked. But again, my education was the most important thing to them (well, aside from my dad spending god knows how much money on alcohol, but that’s another story), so they apparently made the tuition a priority. During the first few weeks of school, when I was starting to become friends with a guy named Charlie, he said something to me about everyone thinking I was there on scholarship. I wasn’t insulted, really; if anything, I was slightly flattered… “scholarship” to me meant something earned from merit. But mainly I was confused. Why would people think that? What would make them think it? They didn’t know anything about me. I still don’t get it, actually.
Going to that private school was the biggest thing that helped dispel my still-lingering prejudices about rich people being snobbish by definition. At that school, I encountered more tolerance for diversity and maturity in attitudes than at my public school. And most importantly, intelligence wasn’t stigmatized and mocked. Aside from a few exceptions, the students seemed genuinely interested in their studies and motivated to learn and do well in their classes. It helped that we were treated like people and not under lock-down all the time, always suspected of trying to get away with something. (Which, to be fair, that attitude was not unearned at my public school. We had a metal detector and a school cop for good reason. It just sucked that those of us who gave a shit were punished for the majority who didn’t give a shit and put guns in their lockers and dropped acid during homeroom.)
The private school didn’t feel like “school” to me, because to me, school was… well, all the shittiness I had come to know and loathe. It was weird not to wake up with a feeling of utter dread. It was so refreshing to be treated like an intelligent person capable of critical thinking. For once I was challenged in my classes… I loved it! And college was something that they prepared you for rigorously; it was assumed everyone would go to college. Not like at my public school where it was an afterthought at best (plus there were 4 guidance counselors for 2,000 students, so that didn’t help matters).
I became good friends with three people that year; the four of us were a clique, of sorts. Christina and Loren lived in gigantic houses across the river in South Carolina. Charlie lived in more normal-sized (that’s how I thought of it) house in a slightly fancier version of the neighborhood I lived in. He and his mom lived there while his dad was in Connecticut; they were just staying there until he could graduate from high school (long story). One time he told me his mom made over $100,000 in her job doing something-or-other at the hospital. I was floored. So he was rich, too!
On New Year’s Eve in 11th grade, Christina’s mom dropped Christina and Loren off at my house. Again I was embarrassed that my house was so small in comparison. I was mainly embarrassed because Christina’s mom had seen the house, not Christina or Loren (they’d been there before). I didn’t like the feeling and didn’t really understand it, because come on, my house was a normal size; hers was gargantuan. Right?
After going to private school for the last two years of high school and having such a great time there, I would gladly tell people what’s what when they’d start with a lot of ignorant shit about private schools being walled gardens and public schools teaching kids more about “the real world” and “diversity.” Public school taught me how to keep my head down and try to disappear, and that I was either invisible or a laughingstock for never studying and still getting all A’s and being bored as hell. Public school, in combination w/ some family shit, damn near made me kill myself. Private school saved me. I started to get the sneaking suspicion that when some people said “diversity,” what they really meant was “black people.”
Senior year of high school, I duly applied to colleges. By then I’d had a falling out w/ Charlie, Loren, and Christina, and was spending more time w/ Jenny and Niki (yay!), who were still going to my old public school. We were all applying to colleges, and filling out a FAFSA and searching for other sources of loans and piddly scholarships was naturally part of that process. I got accepted into NYU and decided to go there. My parents had always said I should not worry about money when thinking about college; I should go to the best school possible and we’d figure out a way to pay for it. At NYU I was offered a $20,000 academic scholarship. With out-of-state tuition, room and board (even in the cheap dorm), and all the various other expenses, that still left a good $10,000 unpaid for the year – but that’s what student loans are for!
Side note about the falling out w/ Charlie, Loren, and Christina: this is one of many pieces in the puzzle of why I don’t trust people easily and there are only a small handful of people I completely trust. Apparently at some point the three of them decided, for whatever reason, that they didn’t like me anymore. It was all very high school (fittingly enough) but it was not something that can be dismissed as just, oh, high school kids, and you get over it. I later realized that during the summer between junior and senior year, Charlie was basically just pretending to still be my friend in order to use me for my car (he’d gotten in a wreck and his was in the shop for a long time). Once he had his car back there was no need to keep up the charade.
One day, this guy Eric at school who I liked a lot and considered a friend and trustworthy and in retrospect I should have made that clearer to him, came up and very concernedly told me that Charlie was telling people I had let a 26-year-old Army guy fuck me with a beer bottle. I was pissed – not because what he was telling people was false (it wasn’t), but because of his motivations; he was obviously telling people this because he thought I’d be embarrassed or ashamed. But I was neither of those things, and I was pissed off at the language employed; I didn’t “let” a 26-year-old Army guy do anything, I encouraged it. I didn’t know the phrase “enthusiastic consent” at the time but I was already plenty pissed at the way the sexual discourse was set up: women were cast as passive recipients to whom things are done, men were the “do-ers.”
And it happened again the other day. I got played, again – and I’m getting a complex again about who my “real friends” are. But I won’t get off on that tangent, not right now anyway.
The people I encountered at NYU were like me – kids from working-class and middle-class families, taking out a shit-ton of loans to pay for the place. There were two girls who lived on our hall freshman year, who we never saw much of; they apparently ordered steak dinners every night. We thought they were weird, aloof, and snobbish.
After my third semester at NYU, I did the math – if I stayed there for the full four years, I’d be so deep in six figures worth of debt that I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever dig out of it; monthly payments alone, even on the most budget-friendly (i.e., highest interest bearing) payment plan would be a major chunk out of whatever paycheck I’d end up with. I quipped, “Well, I could finish school at NYU – or I could buy a house.” That’s how the numbers worked out. Since I could transfer to UGA and get the HOPE scholarship, and then take out comparably small loans to pay for books and living expenses, and since UGA had a better linguistics department than NYU, it was a no-brainer at that point.
When I got to UGA and walked across the Tate Center plaza on my first day of classes there, my first thought was, “Look at all the white people!” I was used to a much more racially diverse crowd in New York. Also? At UGA, I encountered way more people who came from wealthy families and were there as part of a family tradition than at NYU. A lot of people have a perception of schools like NYU that it’s all a bunch of rich kids who have lived a life of luxury, whereas state universities are where the working-class and middle-class kids go and put their nose to the grindstone. Actually? My experience was quite the opposite. So again, there stereotypes don’t always hold up, and ignorance is rampant.
But I had a great time at UGA. I’m glad I transferred there. And I’m glad I spent 3 semesters at NYU. I think I wouldn’t have appreciated either one of them nearly as much without experiencing the other.
It wasn’t until I was at UGA that I met people whose parents were paying for their college education. I had honestly thought going to school without student loans was impossible. Everyone I associated with had student loans; it was just seen as a part of life, something that you naturally have to do to go to college. Not a big deal. (Later when I reconnected w/ Charlie after having lost touch for a few years, I discovered his parents had been paying for him to fuck around at several different universities, travel abroad, etc.)
During the summer of 2001 I got a job at an off-campus bookstore. It paid minimum wage. I remember a girl there who was my age (21) talking about how she’d just gotten laser eye surgery. Everyone else who worked there seemed to be sorority girls and frat guys. I felt very out of place. I remember talking to the manager and asking if I could have more hours. She took me aside and told me maybe this wasn’t the job for me, since I was actually trying to support myself, and everyone else working there just had a job a few hours a week for “something to do.” So I quit and went to work at a call center selling clothes to old people over the phone.
I could go on but this’ll do for now. Next I need to finish my potentially long-ass post about this whole brouhaha, and all the bullshit I smell surrounding it.
ROCKING post — thank you so much for sharing. Talking about our perspectives on class and where they came from is so important and intimate.
There’s a whole lot of things I want to say, but I’m rereading this. I think it’s really interesting how our perceptions of wealth and class status can really change when we look back on our lives. Some of the things you talk about in here remind me a lot of how I saw things as I was growing up, too.
I think that most children are brought up thinking that they’re middle class. When my family moved in first grade, I didn’t think anything about the fact that we stayed with Grandma for months. We camped out in one grandma’s yard for a few weeks, and it was like an adventure, and then we went down to Georgia and stayed with the other grandma, and it was just like a fun trip. It’s only when I got older and look back that I realize: Holy crap. We lost our home.
And, you know, we were lucky in that my parents had resources to fall back on. We had been renting our home, and the owner sold it out from under us, and we didn’t have the money to get a new place to live in time, but we had family to help us, and, ultimately, we got really lucky and my parents found a ridiculously cheap fixer-upper that my father spent the summer making livable while the rest of us stayed with my family. But if we’d had fewer resources, or if my father had lost his job or been unable to work (as happened only a few years later), things might have been very different.
And I definitely remember the K-Mart jokes. We must be about the same age, or the traditional carries on. I definitely wore my share of K-Mart clothes, and went through a phase, roughly 6th through about 10th grade, where I did everything I could to try to cobble together outfits that at least looked like they were the same as the “cool kids” were wearing. It was… not very successful.
Anyway, there are probably a million things to say, but I think I’m in danger of turning your comment section into my personal narrative. I was sort of immediately struck by those thoughts, though.
This was really interesting to read; it made me consider writing my own similar post.
I also attended private school, and I agree 100% with what you said about private schools saving you. I know I wouldn’t be the same person (or maybe wouldn’t be around at all?) if I hadn’t had the option to attend my private high school.
Well done, M@ber. The only way to break the silence is to talk about our own experience.
Did our school have metal detectors? I don’t remember. Of course, I remember Roxanne, the cop, though. She gave me shit once when I hurt my ankle and I had missed some hairs while shaving my legs. :P
One thing I have learned during my quest for financial freedom (notice I didn’t say get rich, wealthy, or fortune) is that it doesn’t really matter how much money you make, it matters what you do with what you’ve got.
Like a poker game, we are all dealt a certain hand. Some, like the rich kids who sponge off parents for 7 years, are dealt a good hand. Others, like you and I who worked through school are dealt mediocre hands. Still others are dealt much worse hands.
Anyone can win. Those with good hands and bad skills will always be trumped by the person with a bad hand and great skills. The skill of recognizing opportunities, taking calculated risks, and being nimble enough to cut losses is one way to win.
I hate to be like, oh, interesting, but it is interesting.
I realize I kind of have no idea what “class” my family were. I know that my parents SAVED a lot of money, and we lived like working class people for much of my life. My parents are also both super smart and intentionally sought out the best deal on the kind of place they wanted to live, so I spent the 2nd half of my childhood on a farm (with PONIES! :) ). However, my perception of the pony issue was messed up by the fact that my dad was a farm boy, and so to me animals=farm=not rich/monied. I suppose we were either upper-middle-class or we were lower-upper-class; I have no way to tell. I never asked my parents how much money they made, but I was aware that we were not “rich” like the Elliots (yes, as in Bill Elliot, the NASCAR driver) and we were not poor like some other people I went to school with.
However, I knew that we made money when I didn’t get financial aid to go to Davidson, and then I really knew we made money when my mom and dad actually effing paid for it. I’ve never taken that for granted. NEVER. I know how lucky I am that my parents paid for my education flat-out and I will never, ever underestimate how good that’s been for me. I’m godawfully lucky.
However, all that said – due to the way my parents were about having money at all, I am very, very leery of conspicuous consumption. I don’t think I will ever own a BMW. I will never be comfortable driving such a thing. I will never live in a “ritzy” neighborhood, because it would make me feel creepy about myself. And I will always be one of those people who does her own home repair, because my dad would lose his shit if I was paying someone to do something that I could very well do myself. Hello, baggage. :)
I really enjoyed this post.
I wasn’t insulted, really; if anything, I was slightly flattered… “scholarship” to me meant something earned from merit. But mainly I was confused.
Yes! At my high school there was always financial aid available (usually if you were already on it for tuition) for things like trips, music lessons, etc. and they always made a big deal out of the fact that all requests for financial assistance would be completely confidential. This really confused me because at my elementary & middle school, my friends and I were all on financial aid (mostly with single parents too) and we had a sort of sense that a lot of the full tuition kids were there BECAUSE they could pay full tuition, as opposed to us who were there because we could be, like, “oh, her parents are DEFINITELY paying full tuition” if we thought a girl wasn’t so smart (in retrospect I cringe at that sort of elitism; but we were like 12).
My private school was also mostly unsnobbish (the students anyway; the parents… eh), for the most part; there were a couple kids who walked around oozing HI I HAVE MONEY out of their pores, but for the most part it was pretty chill. I definitely had a couple shocks where I realized a friend of mine must have had way more money than I’d previously supposed (“so we’re living there until the brownstone we just bought finishes getting renovated” “I feel like I should apply for the National Merit Scholarship, but I feel sort of bad because I don’t really need it” or my favorite, a friend who told me to reconsider teaching as a career because teachers get paid, and I quote, “no money,” because apparently $40,000 = no money. this is somewhat more understandable, I grant, in NYC, BUT STILL).
(speaking of understandable in NYC: I definitely had a moment of confusion reading this post all “how could someone who is BUYING A HOUSE possibly describe herself as working class???” and then I remember “oh right, the rest of the country =/= NYC, where studio apartments go for half a million.”)
It wasn’t until I read this post that I realized there was actually a period of time where I probably qualified as if not rich definitely upper middle class (I’ve always identified as comfortably middle class) – when my parents got out of grad school and my father started working for a major law firm (ages 6 to 8, about). In retrospect he was probably making a lot of money. But, then my parents split up and he decided he’d rather piss off his chronically ill grad-student ex-wife than support his two kids. mm, family values.
When I first started hearing about “class”, I asked my mother what class we were. She said, “Upper-middle-class.” If she’d said “rich” I would have been shocked.
I try to be as class-conscious as I can, but I was raised pretty well-off. Am I supposed to feel guilty despite my best efforts to do important things with my life? Well, according to some people, yes.
My mother spent my entire childhood doing volunteer work, running nonprofits, etc. As an adult I have done a lot things like that myself. Does that “work off” the guilt I’m “supposed” to feel?
My associations with the word “rich” all involve feeling ashamed. The only people who ever called me rich were people who made me feel as if it was a flaw — the friend from the other side of town who would say disgustedly, “Whatever, rich girl,” and when I cried, “I’m not rich!” would just sneer and point out the “rich” things about my life until I almost cried. Or the college boyfriend who would shut me down by saying, “You’re from the other side of the tracks, and you’re deluded.”
Let me make it clear that I’m not trying to tell a “poor little rich girl” story, or say that people “should” have been nicer. I just think that there’s othering going on, on both sides of the tracks. I think you acknowledged that in your post, which is good, and it’s clear that you generally see the problem, which is great.
Pragmatically, my major question is this: How do we get upper-class people to engage with the class question, when they usually see no reward except guilt?
Thanks for comments, all!
Niki,
What?? Jesus! What a way to give a teenage girl a complex!
The only thing I remember about her were suspicions of her being a lesbian.
And yes, we did have a metal detector; I believe they installed it in 10th grade. I remember it being only on the door closest to the side of the building where Mrs. Cody’s room was, which seems weird; they must have had it on both doors..?
Nikki (two K variety!),
Yep, great point, and just goes to show how the same thing can signify very different meanings depending on context, location, etc.
Same here. I’ve had people make the argument to me before that BMWs are very good, reliable cars; and yet, I don’t see myself ever driving one. Like you said, it would just feel weird. I wonder if it’s a class background thing that makes me see it in those terms, or just a personal idiosyncrasy.
Isabel,
When I said “working class” I was not talking about now. I was talking about my experiences when I was growing up and when I was in college. As I mentioned in an earlier post, during the past 2-3 years I feel like I’ve been entering a new world; I guess it’s the world of the middle class! Or something. Class status isn’t static. On the other hand, I always come back to what Bitch|Lab said, because I think it’s really important: “Class isn’t a sweater you take on and off.” Someone may have ‘entered the middle class’ in terms of their income or whatever, but that doesn’t mean they’re instantly comfortable or knowledgeable w/ all the accoutrements of middle class living. I feel very out of place and unsure of myself w/ many things. A little over a year ago I wrote a whole post about stressing out about hiring a cleaning lady. I think our class background colors our perceptions going forward; and if you come from a less-fortunate (monetarily speaking) family, honestly, I think it’s a good thing to have that perspective once you start making some money. It keeps you grounded and you realize this isn’t “normal” and that people who are poor aren’t necessarily just lazy.
More later… heading out for a friend’s birthday party now.
I grew thinking there were public and Catholic schools. My mother chose public. I didn’t know there were any others.
When I first saw LOVE STORY (age 13) and Ali MacGraw called Ryan O’Neal “preppie”–I asked my mother what that meant, and she said “prep school”–and told me that’s what people who went to Ivy League schools did. Like the Kennedys, or the guy in the story. I certainly never knew there were “prep schools” right in my hometown, or what they were. I never knew there were local private schools (not on the coasts or in New England) that were not religious, until I was already OUT of high school…
Makes me sound so stupid, hate to talk about class. That’s why. :(
Thanks so much for sharing this Amber. I think I was conscious of class in grade school right around second grade. That’s when I started in the city’s gifted program and attended two to three elementary schools simultaneously. My “home” school was in a mixed socio-economic neighborhood, but the other schools I attended were always in more upper crust neighborhoods. Add to that the de facto segregation which still persists in my hometown, and I got a rather harsh and racist introduction to class. Perhaps what mad the introduction and continued experience more interesting was that I was known citywide for being a whiz kid, yet my intelligence was contrasted against my race and where I was class-wise (lower middle class). Even when I went to college on scholarship (which I loved b/c Morehouse is hella expensive), class invariably came up as a contrast to my intelligence. I still get that today (even though I’m doing better financially than my parents were at my age).
Great post. I’ll have to re-read and catch all the diversity points you made.
Daisy,
Well where I grew up that’s not much of a stretch! The private school I attended for the last 2 years of high school was the only non-religious private school in the Augusta area.
“they had a big-ass satellite dish, which in retrospect is really pretty white-trash Southern!”
Ha! That’s not just restricted to white-trash Southern, though!
he was obviously telling people this because he thought I’d be embarrassed or ashamed. But I was neither of those things, and I was pissed off at the language employed; I didn’t “let” a 26-year-old Army guy do anything, I encouraged it. I didn’t know the phrase “enthusiastic consent” at the time but I was already plenty pissed at the way the sexual discourse was set up: women were cast as passive recipients to whom things are done, men were the “do-ers.”
Good for you, Amber! You were leaps and bounds ahead of most young women that age who are sexually shamed into silence. I remember at my second high school, a female classmate admitted to masturbating in front of our graduating class (only 50 kids). She never lived it down but she never let the teasing, mostly from the guys, shame her or embarrass her.
I’m inspired to follow your footsteps to do a post about the privilege I have had in my life. Good job, interesting read.
[...] What I am motivated to write about is… ME! Because I’m so selfish, you see? But here’s a few things I wanted to add after the last post about class consciousness. [...]
[...] Class consciousness: all I can do is write my own story "Instead of constantly writing from a place of “what if” and “what does it mean” and trying to find the right words when talking about class and privilege (yes, the two are different and distinct), I thought I’d write down some memories that shaped my class consciousness, as you might call it. Some of the comments on this post by Hugo Schwyzer inspired me to go ahead w/ this. And, yeah, I agree: if your parents can pay your way for seven years of college and grad school, that’s not “comfortable,” that’s rich. And I say this as someone who has problems w/ the word “rich” and the reductive way in which it’s often applied. But it bugs me when people try to act like they’re not as well-off as they really are. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective." (tags: politics privilege) [...]
[...] Street Bookstore (I’ve mentioned this one before. I think my chronology was off [...]
[...] much to say about this one since I already mentioned it in one of the shitstorm-predicating class posts. I worked at Baxter Street Bookstore in Athens for [...]