Poverty Constrains Your Wardrobe – and You
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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”... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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.... Read More
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... Read More
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.... Read More
Trying to survive on $8.25 an hour
On Thursday December 5th in 130 cities across the country fast food workers walked off their jobs calling for $15 in wages and the right... Read More
Money is No Object: Over-representing the Upper Middle Class on TV?
As a child, I recall watching The Brady Bunch. Wow, they were rich. Although they had a large family, it never seemed to impact their... Read More
Race and Class: The more we get together the stronger we are
Labor unions, welfare rights campaigns, and the fight for pay equity are historical struggles for justice that have impacted the shape of the wealth distribution... Read More
A classist comment from a feminist publisher
I wrote a paper on the classism I experienced as a poverty-class single mother in the feminist movement, and it was selected for inclusion in... Read More
Need vs. Greed: Greed Wins
I’ve been interviewing people and carrying out research lately on housing affordability in San Jose, and what I’ve found has been both heartbreaking and enraging.... Read More
Cross-class College Interactions
College, they tell us, is the great middle class-making machine. When I think back on my own cross-class interactions at college, I mostly feel gratitude... Read More
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... Read More
“Is This for a Rental?”
Ever gone to a hardware store to buy a toilet, sink, or door and have the salesperson ask, “Is this for yourself, or for a... Read More
Ubuntu and The Self-Made Myth
We’ve all heard rags-to-riches stories about successful individuals who “pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.” Certainly, many successful business people owe their good fortune to... Read More
A haiku about money
Piled high, folded neat I hear money call to me Pilar, save me … please
How Much is Enough?
As we enter into the “season of giving,” it’s important to note that our decisions about how much to give are rooted in a deeper... Read More
Speaking of human rights, how many violations have I encountered in my life?
We never had enough food for all five children in our house and I don`t remember ever having an orange. My earliest memories are of... Read More
Misconception of debt
Like many college students, I recently took out my first loan for college. Although not a significant amount, it was still more than I’ve ever... Read More
I Love Money
Recently, my partner, who was raised working class, called me out about an emotional block I have around money. He said, “As long as you... Read More