If you ain’t poor (by America’s low poverty standards), you are “middle class.” That is the current political and pundit mode of understanding the USA. Those below the middle class income standards have no claim to a class appellation—they are just “poor.” The president’s speech was largely about improving the situations of those already in […]
About S.M. Miller
A cross-class dating anecdote
At Brooklyn College, part of the City of New York’s public higher education system, I began to be acutely aware of class. I asked a co-ed for a date, she agreed and gave me her address to pick her up on Saturday. I noted that her address was in Flatbush, a middle income community unlike […]
Hiding the lunch ticket
I was an outsider at my junior high school. Why was I ashamed of my family’s poverty? When my family lost its small business and home in Philadelphia and was forced to move to Brooklyn to live with one of my mother’s sister, I was in the middle of the last term of the sixth […]
Illiterate in 3 languages
At a meeting in Amman, Jordan, high-powered social policy analysts from many nations were deploring the limited intelligence of illiterates and the effects on their offspring; I rushed to defend illiterates. Then, I suddenly realized that my mother had been an illiterate. Indeed, I quickly recognized that Mom was illiterate in three languages. But she […]
