I dedicated the last two weeks this past summer to being a student leader for the incoming class of 2019. I’m an academic peer tutor, meaning that I serve as a residence-hall-based resource who fosters academic and personal well-being in the hall. As a low-income, first gen college student, I noticed that the standard summer […]
privilege
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 […]
Visiting the Relatives: A Worthy Vacation
My nephew Christopher loaded his three kids and his partner Sam’s three kids into their 2004 passenger van and drove the 300 miles out of the city to visit me last week. He took Thursday afternoon and all day Friday without pay, which gave the family three-and-a-half days in total. This was their summer vacation. […]
A Hard Lesson about Free Money
“Congratulations, you have been awarded a scholarship by your high school foundation. You are invited to attend awards night and be recognized for your achievement,” the letter said. My daughter had applied to several hundred scholarships, four through her highly-ranked, public high school’s parent & legacy foundation. She received one scholarship from a community group […]
Health and Cost-savings through Class Privilege and Contacts
Recently our family had an experience of cheaper and easier health care, because of the people that we know and our current financial status. My 19-year-old son was diagnosed with an eye condition, kerataconus, that was causing his eyesight to degrade. His eye doctor recommended that he get surgery – but the surgery wasn’t FDA-approved, […]
Phony rags to riches stories
I just finished watching the movie Julie and Julia, and it irritated me in the same way that many books and movies have irritated me lately: they purport to be the story of extremely humble origins turned into ravishing success through pluck and persistence. But they aren’t. I didn’t mind, in fact I preferred the […]
How I Learned to Check My Privilege
My best friend texted me the other night. He was letting me know that he’d been asked to submit a micro-aggression that happened to him while at Bates College, and was picking between two things I said to him freshman year. The first was, “Wow! You just got so Black!” after watching him debate. The […]
Class Issues in “The Wretched of the Earth”
Frantz Fanon, in his classic account of colonialism and violence, The Wretched of the Earth, went to great length and detail explaining the elements needed to overthrow a colonial oppressor. Most obvious in his writing is his acceptance for, and at times the encouragement of, violence. This violence is to be directed at those foreigners […]
Parading Around in Privilege
Halloween is quickly approaching and low-quality polyester costumes are flying off shelves like Tickle Me Elmo on Black Friday. In the year of the Hipster, pricey immaculate store-bought costumes are out and pricey immaculate homemade DIY costumes are in. What is now the new Halloween trend is eerily evolving into an upper-crust high-cost arts and […]
The Ivy League: a class-based sorting system
Barack Obama’s election represented a triumph for African Americans who suffered years of race- and class-based oppression. Electing a black president was definitely a plus for African Americans and society as a whole. Among his opponents in 2008 were working class whites who were attracted to Sarah Palin. Many of these people seem to fit […]
Who Counts as Poor (and who gets to talk about it)
I had a bizarre and frustrating experience recently talking to an agent at a writing conference. My main interest was to pitch a novel, but when she said she wasn’t looking for fiction, I threw out a few nonfiction ideas, among them a book on what people don’t know about poverty. “What qualifies you to […]
Dropping the C-Bomb
When I brought up social class advantages in my classroom at Emory University (one of the colleges that calls itself “the Ivy of the South”), my students got furious. What did I do that got such an angry response? I stated that there were students in the classroom who did not arrive at Emory based […]
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 hard work and innovative thinking. But, to describe those people as “self-made” would be to dismiss a big piece of reality—the role of the commons. Would Bill Gates have enjoyed […]
Overlooking luck
Can someone please explain to Newt Gingrich that people not wanting a job typically doesn’t cause poverty; being unable to get a job causes poverty. I would strongly assert that very few people want to be unable to provide for themselves and their families. People who have only experienced privilege often do not recognize the […]
Guilt and Defensiveness vs Owning Our Privilege(s)
What follows is a very personal essay about my own learning about class, race and other “isms.” I use my own method of self-critique and observation and lived experience. Most of what I’ve learned is, of course, unfortunately, hindsight. I am from a poverty / lower working class background. Socially I have had many mixed […]
