The final days of summer always remind me of the time I left home for college. In an instant I can recall what I felt 25 years ago sitting in the back seat of my parent’s car, my belongings stuffed in the trunk, as we drove silently away from my home and toward my future. Home […]
Classism among Kids
Tis Better to Give than to Receive?
Every year in preparation for the holidays, there’s a lot of talk about how it’s better to give than to receive. Many people say we should “give to the needy” and make the holiday about “family instead of stuff.” The idea here is that to want gifts is frivolous, shallow, and greedy. While this could […]
Fugg Off
One wintery day I settled into my seat to enjoy a snack at a Finagle a Bagel not far from my office. The shop happens to be in a wealthy suburban neighborhood just outside of a major city, and there is an interesting mix of patrons there on any given day. On this particular afternoon, […]
Classism: Not Exactly Sporting
Cheering, Chanting, and Clapping – for Classism? My daughter went to public schools in Milton, Mass, which is an economically diverse suburb right outside Boston. While in school, she was on a lot of sports teams, playing basketball, volleyball, and tennis. Her schools and teams have always included kids from a variety of backgrounds, though […]
Summertime and the livin’ is (not always) easy
In many classrooms across the country this fall, students will be asked to respond to the age-old prompt, “What did you do on your summer vacation?” Though often used as a well-meaning way for teachers to build community and to better get to know their students, such a question can surface deep classist assumptions that […]
Holiday charity or year-round compassion?
‘Tis the season to be surrounded with warm fuzzy news stories about people volunteering at food banks or participating in clothing drives or raising money for non-profit groups. When a reporter for a nearby wealthy suburban newspaper called me this morning for my “expert opinion” about how to teach children a “sense of charity,” I […]
Children and mass culture
We can’t escape mass culture. Everywhere, children and adults are bombarded: TV, movies, video, radio, books, newspapers, toys, comic books, billboards, friends and neighbors, etc., etc., etc.. Through all of these media we are pounded with messages that glorify consumerism, reinforce sexual stereotypes, and trivialize and homogenize anything if it will turn a buck. We […]
Wealthy Kids Pulling Away: Accelerating Privilege, Compounding Disadvantage
How does the system of class advantage reproduce itself, generation after generation? Let me count the ways. I have an article in the latest issue of American Prospect called “The New Politics of Inherited Advantage.” I summarize the mountain of growing research demonstrating how affluent families engage in what sociologists call the “intergenerational transmission of […]
Jesse’s Choices
My youngest son is about to graduate high school. I am feeling a mix of emotions, as I am certain many others have felt and are feeling at this time. One of the more salient emotions for me is connected to a deep curiosity I have: did I teach him what he needs to know […]
Class & My Identity as a Woman of African Descent
Class was a confusing issue for me. Despite that, I never doubted for a moment that my race intersected with my class in a profound way. I experience class through the many different lenses of my identity. I am a Black Woman of Afro-Caribbean descent from Brooklyn New York. Class has been racialized in American […]
Poem: White Trash Beaner (to my 11-year-old confused self)
Grama says I’m Indian. Mama says my dad was “a Mexican” and that if he really loved me like “Mexican daddies do” he woulda found me by now. Grama says we’re Indian, mama says ‘no’. Sis calls me a “wetback” and a “beaner” (“mom said it all the time”). Brother teases me about getting pregnant […]
Leaving the Cafeteria: an Outsider’s Perspective on Intercity Students
One of my greatest privileges of my high school and college education was not the fact that I went to accredited institutions, nor the fact that I was simply educated, (though the latter privilege is certainly noteworthy.) It was the fact that despite being restricted to schools that were by design socially exclusive at-face, (my […]
Shame, School Lunch, and Passing
When I was in sixth grade, my family was eligible for free school lunches. I attended a small country school, without much class diversity, mostly farmers, some without indoor toilets in their homes. Even so, when I gave my lunch ticket to the student appointed to collect them, I noticed and she noticed that there […]
The Dreams of Poor and Working-Class Students
I was half-listening to the radio last week when I heard an interviewer ask a question that made me pause in my work to listen. “So”, the interviewer warmly asked, “You knew even as a small child that you wanted to be a concert cellist?” “Oh yes”, the woman answered. “Since I was eight.” I’ve […]
Class Reproduction by Four Year Olds
I watched how class played out in a preschool classroom, creating disadvantages for the already disadvantaged and privileges for those born into privilege. I spent eight months observing in a preschool classroom full of four years old. About half of the preschoolers in this classroom were from working-class families and were receiving scholarships to attend […]
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 […]
From a Teenage Class Action Fan
My name is Liora and I’m fourteen years old. I’ve attended public schools my whole life except for the last year and half when I went to a private school. At this school, the classes were small and there was support and help anywhere and anyhow we needed. Not the case in public school. This […]
Learning about Class in Private School?
Like parents everywhere, we wanted to give our teenage daughter advantages we never had. High on our list was to provide her a much clearer class-consciousness than what we got as kids. Class issues are so fundamental to understanding how things work, or don’t, in our personal lives and in our world. So it’s a […]
I’ll take the Highlander
It’s almost impossible to sell anything in the United States without reinforcing the social class hierarchy. But some ads are more explicit than others. The embarrassing thing in this ad isn’t riding the bus. No. It’s riding in your father’s previous-century station wagon. But it’s not just embarrassing. It’s utter humiliation, according to the blonde-headed […]
Middle Class Brats?
I fear I am raising spoiled-rotten, middle-class brats. I fear I am raising the very kind of children I would have hated as a child. Why? Because they are comfortable and cozy and have everything they need in their day-to-day lives. They do not go hungry. They do not wear shoes with holes or ones […]
