Spring break is coming up. That means hearing about Cancun and Barcelona while walking by students, seeing Airbnb and hotel tabs on 101 laptops, and seeing Snapchat countdowns every day. Spring break is a college student’s dream – one that comes with a hefty price to make it a reality. As a student coming from […]
privilege
Was the International Women’s Day Strike Classist?
What did you do for International Women’s Day? Did you strike? Well, I’m currently unemployed, and my partner has been supporting us while I’ve been more-or-less taking care of our home. We had a conversation in the morning about the kind of day-to-day work I do around the house, how a lot of it is unbalanced background […]
Social Class and a Writing Conference
Though not all writing conferences are expensive, many are. A number try, essentially, to take money from those who can afford it to subsidize those who can’t – a worthy policy. But one still tends to meet more wealthy people than poor at a writing conference. Last summer, I attended one on the East Coast that […]
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 […]
Charity vs. Solidarity Work
Settling in after a short but intense trip to Standing Rock, I took to Facebook, curious about what had transpired at the camp during my 10-hour drive home. Expecting to see updates regarding activities of the thousands of water protectors and their allies, I was instead startled by a Facebook post advertising tee shirts. The […]
Politics of Work, Socioeconomics, and Classism in Classrooms:
Education to Work to Live or Live to Work? I am a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Dhaka, Bangladesh, so I could make it big – so I would never have worry for my survival as they had and still have to, and to be able to take my life for granted as most to none of […]
Building Bridges, Not Walls
Class Action was founded by visionaries who realized that they had grown up at different ends of the class spectrum, but who had arrived in the same place when it came to their passion for advancing social equity and justice. Their commitment to building bridges across differences – instead of building walls – continues to inform […]
Beyond Trump: Building a Coalition for Change
Part of the White, Working Class, and Worried about Trump (#WhiteWorkingClassVsTrump) Campaign*: I grew up in South St. Louis City in a multi-racial, working-class neighborhood. My dad was a union carpenter, and my mom worked part-time at various jobs while maintaining the home. I’m the oldest of seven children. I remember the constant anxiety in our […]
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 […]
Being an Owning-Class Activist
All of us are more than a label, right? We each are more than one of our identities standing by itself. We are complex, changing, contradictory beings, and a mystery in many ways. And yet, our identities do matter – at the very same time as those identities are not all of who we are. […]
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 […]
Systematic Failure: A Recipe for Self-Doubt
What does it mean when our education system, “The Great Equalizer,” turns low-income dreamers into third-generation self-doubters? When a high-quality education system is built only to serve and advance the dreams of highly resourced, high-wealth individuals? Prior to my time at UC Berkeley, the formula to a successful college career seemed pretty simple. All you […]
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 – […]
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. […]
Poor Little “Not-So-Rich” Girls
It wasn’t until I began to write about class from the perspective of the 19th century women about whom I’ve written two biographies that I realized how much issues of class lie at the heart of my attraction to these women. Class Action asked me to explore the constraints that even upper class white women […]
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 […]
Health Equity: What’s Working
We have lots of ways to measure what’s not working in the United States. We can quickly pull the latest numbers that track growing inequalities in wealth and opportunity in our society, from displacement driven by gentrification and mounting student debt to low social mobility and gaping health disparities across lines of class and race. […]
It’s Not What You Say, but How?
Using Language as a Weapon of Classism A British friend of mine, who met and married his American wife in London, told me that he dreaded attending her job-related social functions in “The Square Mile.” As a bank executive, her coworkers were mostly upper middle-class, and they, along with banking and corporate elites, attended these […]
Language Matters, Too
My brother, sister and I were all brought up to speak a very clear, accent-less English with good grammar and syntax. We were not “perfect,” but we were obliged to try. Our mother harassed us constantly about the way we talked. And she stressed that we would never be able to get a job or […]
Election Day 2015
Despite “get out the vote” efforts by civic groups, nonprofit organizations, religious institutions and political parties, millions of registered voters in towns and cities across America won’t bother to vote tomorrow, Election Day 2015. Some will tell you that they are just too busy. Many will tell you that they see no value in voting […]
