I will always remember December 2013. It was a particularly cold winter, and downtown Los Gatos was in the low 30s. My friend Jane rented a carriage and invited me to come along. I declined because I did not have a jacket. I was too ashamed to tell her why, so she was rightfully angry […]
Money
Weighing Every Cost: A Genteel Poverty
I am the youngest of 10 siblings. My dad built a successful plumbing business, bought his own shop and employed a few helpers at the height of his business. He even bought a summer home, a Civil-War-era farm out in the country, which he later sold to pay my sibs’ college tuition. My older sibs […]
Addressing Food Insecurity on Campus
The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Food insecurity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had been both poorly understood and oftentimes neglected until very recently. I think the overwhelming view of the administration was that students were, in general, […]
Trump’s First Year: Did the Working-Class Benefit?
Donald Trump ran for president on a populist and inclusionary platform. As he campaigned across the country, he appealed to increasingly larger numbers of Americans who felt forgotten by the country’s policies and politicians. Despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by three million, there’s no doubt that he tapped into the visceral […]
The Poverty Catch-22
The High Costs of Destitution Cause a Vicious Cycle Nothing is more infuriating than the ill-informed critique that “the haves” like to lob at “the have-nots.” Here’s a classic: “If you’re so poor and can’t afford to eat, then why are you overweight?” If you have ever been poor, you know the answer to that question […]
Surviving in the Gig Economy
As a creative person without a degree, the gig economy field has always appealed to me. I have had various jobs in customer service that have left me emotionally drained and unable to create art and enjoy my life, due to long hours and low wages. It seemed at first that gig economy jobs were […]
Affordable vs. Attainable Housing
When you think affordable housing, you think $600,000 for a condo, right? With a $12,000 down payment, that would be $3,557 per month for 30 years. Maybe that’s why a new term has arisen in the real estate market, attainable housing. Under the new rules, old safety precautions are ignored. Once, homebuyers were advised to spend no more than […]
Risk Telling the Truth
I thought I was going to be a career teacher. But after a decade, I hit bottom. Teaching in inner-city schools, I saw the barriers my students faced and confronted my own limits caused by my vastly different experience growing up. I had some positive, uplifting experiences, but I wasn’t very resilient, and I kept […]
Wealthy, Come Home
Here’s my invitation to those of you, like me, in the top of America’s income and wealth ladder. Come home. What I mean by “coming home” is to bring your whole self – your passion, your stake in a place, your wealth and sense of agency – and throw it fully into the movements to reduce […]
Graduate School and Kind Strangers
By the time August rolls around it seems like summer is pretty much over. School started on September first this year, that’s the earliest I can remember. If it weren’t for good people and programs that help, there is no way my family would ever have been prepared. I am a graduate student at the […]
Brexit – A Class Issue
Two weeks on, a lot of progressive people in Britain are still in deep shock or fury or despair – or alternating rapidly between all three emotional states. A full 51.9% of British people voted to Leave the European Union (Brexit), and 48.1% voted to Remain in the EU. It was 17.4 million votes to 16.1 million. […]
Choosing Not to Go Into Debt for College
Nicole Brown wrote the following after reading, and being so affected by, last month’s (May 2016) Classism Exposed blog post on the possibility that students are deciding not to attend college due to the fear of loan debt. After reading that low-income and working-class students may be choosing not to go to college for fear of taking on debt, […]
Forgoing College to Forgo Debt
In education, we are headed toward a perfect storm. Increasingly large numbers of capable students are so afraid of incurring debt that they are deciding not to go to college. I’m not talking about marginal students but successful students. These are not the students that lawmakers are likely to hear about. They and their families are too […]
Crowdfunding as Community
Crowdfunding, a type of online fundraising where many people come together to contribute small amounts of money to fund a larger project, is happening now more than ever. In 2014, a man named Zack Danger Brown started a fundraiser with an initial goal of $10 so he could make potato salad. People were so amused […]
When Pregnancy Is the Biggest Scare
Stephanie Jones, writing in Class Lives, says, “But poor girls are so strapped by their finances, we can’t imagine a pregnancy: the furniture needed, time away from work, the long-term financial costs, the exhaustion after a double shift, the food, the bottles, the formula, the child care.” The author is right. Being pregnant when poor […]
Can’t Buy Me Love
Being Poor in a Cross-Class Relationship We had just turned 18. We had just started dating after two years of friendship. We had just walked into one of my worst nightmares: Which friggin’ fork do I use first?!? My boyfriend was wealthy, and I was poor. It normally didn’t affect our relationship very much, because […]
When Love Crosses Class Lines
What’s it like to be married to someone who grew up in a different class? If you asked most of the 64 college-educated adults who I interviewed who did so, they would tell you that it was like being married to anyone else. Most said that they loved their partner deeply, and, like all couples, […]
How a low-income-led group handles fees for events
No Class and Resources for Organizing and Social Change (ROSC), our parent group, have a policy of always charging on a sliding scale for our events. In most cases, we just tell people the cost is $0-20 or, in the case of our organizer training weekend, a cost of $10-80, since we want everyone to have […]
Google, Hookers, and Heroin
I’ve been compelled, and I feel kind of sick about it, to read about the Google executive who died when a $1,000-a-time call girl—who found serial killers exciting and sexy— shot him up with too much heroin, on his yacht. The picture of decadence. Nine months earlier, his obit had pictured him as a father […]
Solutions for servers subsisting on tips
There are plenty of industries out there that we wish would do better by their workers, but the restaurant industry poses a very specific problem. Here’s the largest and fastest growing economic sector in the US producing 6 of 10 lowest paying jobs in the country. Why? The majority of their workforce don’t get paychecks. […]
