On Labor Day 2018, it’s hard to maintain hope. Many will labor on Labor Day (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Growing up in a blue-collar union household, working on holidays was considered a boon). Many labor in worse conditions than our parents and grandparents. The Gig Economy The gig economy leaves millions on their […]
middle class
Breaking the Silence about Class in One Liberal Denomination
In 2012, I was lucky enough to attend a remarkable weekend-long Class Action Train-the-Trainers mega-workshop. I did not attend to learn techniques to raise awareness about class and classism but instead to improve my skills as a trainer on the topic of communications and marketing. While the focus of the Class Action workshop was, of course, on social class […]
Class Background and Life Choices
For years, I defined class in the traditional way: Class is the relative social rank in terms of education, income, wealth, status/position and/or power. But more recently I have added the final phrase “life expectations/choices.” In the last two years I made a conscious decision to be, I hope temporarily, “downwardly mobile.” I have seen how […]
Four Ways Nonprofits Can Address the Classism Within
Several years ago, I was sitting in a diversity training of a nonprofit I helped manage. We’d spent the morning talking about inequality within the organization around the issues of race, sexual orientation, gender and even political leanings. All of a sudden tears began to roll down one woman’s face. Despite obviously trying to hold […]
Class Diversity Improves Your Nonprofit Board
Nonprofit organizations, which are legal entities that must be approved by state governments, allow people to join together and combine resources to achieve common goals. Most often nonprofits are started by people who are passionate about addressing social problems or responding to needs in their communities. So why do so many nonprofits fail to address […]
Trump’s Presidency: What We Deserve
Type “Trump voters deserve” into your search bar, and the two suggestions that pop up are “Trump voters deserve what they get” and “Trump voters deserve to lose healthcare.” To me, and I’d guess probably to you, this logic is completely unsurprising. In the Northeastern city where I live, we hear it every day – […]
Living “Relatively Visible”
I am born to a Tamil, working class, OBC (Other Backward Caste) couple who immigrated to North India to earn their livelihood in the mid-1980s. My father had begun working with an American cultural agency, a full-time job that he would continue to do for the next three decades. My mother, by default, stayed at […]
Spring Break?
When I think of spring break, I think of MTV and early 20-somethings soaking up the sun. I believe that this ideal spring break is becoming more and more mythical with the rising costs of education. Classism enables wealthy students to obtain degrees debt free while low-income and working-class students are faced with more and more debt. I […]
How Class Affects My (Breaks from) Class
As a teenager, I became acquainted with our modern society’s expectation of “spring break” through MTV’s spring break specials. I remember as a teen feeling an acute sense of “fear of missing out“ when seeing slightly older peers dancing on the beach and swimming in the ocean. Growing up in rural Ohio, I was nowhere […]
Five Classist Pitfalls to #Resist in Your Activism
In a moment of potentially revolutionary activism and mobilization, don’t let classism undermine your efforts. The past few weeks have been both terrifying and inspiring. In the midst of ascending totalitarianism and the drastic, likely unconstitutional roll-backs of basic rights, we are also seeing a swift mobilization from both new and established activists. Organizations and […]
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 […]
Changing Classes, Changing Vacations
I was born to two African-American strivers. My dad had been born poor and my mom came from people who had “clawed their way up,” according to my maternal granddad, from “dirt poor to lower-middle-class.” Family difficulties early in her life, however, meant that Mom grew up working-class instead. My parents shared a great love – […]
Housing Is a Right not a Luxury
While most of us know that housing in the Boston area is getting more and more expensive, you may not have realized that between 2000 and 2007 Boston was the most rapidly gentrifying city in the country, outpacing both New York and Washington, D.C. And the rate of gentrification is not the only challenge that Boston residents face. […]
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. […]
First in the Family: Social Mobility as a
First Generation College Student
As the first in my family to pursue a college degree, I have found challenges in navigating the privileges and isolation encompassed in the system of higher education. Both of my parents moved to the United States in the late 1980s – my mother from Hong Kong, China and my father from Monterrey, Mexico. Neither […]
African Americans and Classism:
It’s Complicated When I started this post, I thought it would be a straight-forward musing on classism on and in African-American communities. A few minutes in, and I found that I didn’t know where to start. Should I write about the devastating effect that the intersectionality of classism and racism has on individuals and communities? Should I […]
Championing Postal Workers Is Good Class and Economic Sense
I watched the second Democratic debate hoping that Senator Bernie Sanders would clearly articulate an economic policy that would differentiate him from Hillary Clinton, that would advance the interests of American workers and that would easily resonate with the millions of debate viewers. Unfortunately he didn’t. Instead he continued to lash out at the one […]
Seeing the World: The View from Above
Ever since I was a little girl, my parents have taken me traveling all over the world. They have always told me how lucky I was to have been exposed to these different cultures, how open minded it made me, and how it made me unlike “those other kids” who had never traveled outside their […]
Who Are the Despicable Racists?
We all know that a young white man murdered nine black worshipers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, S.C., just two weeks ago in an act of terrorism. After a wave of murders at the hands of police across the country, it is the most recent acute attack on black lives and […]
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, […]
