Class, Privilege, and Social Markers

[Medusa]

I meant to start this thread last week after something that I posted triggered something in me that I wanted to talk about but Im ever the procrastinator so here I am now.

I recently got a promotion at work and was pretty overjoyed and wanted to share the news with my friends. I went in the :| thread and posted something about getting my promotion and ended up going back and deleting a sentence where I referenced "making more money than I ever have in my life".
When I posted, I was pretty caught up in the joy-moment and felt like I was referencing a new freedom I would experience due to this promotion. When I went back and read my post, I deleted the reference to the salary because I had a sense of shame about talking about "the money".

I was discussing this with a friend and kinda teased it out a little to understand that my moment of shame was a throwback to the first time someone told me it was rude to talk about money. That only very poor people talk about money in this way. Im not really shamed by being seen as poor or talking about growing up on food stamps and homeless at random times.

I definitely grew up in a working class family. I definitely have a relationship with money where I dont have filters about what "should and should not" be talked about. Ive also noticed that people sometimes appear to be uncomfortable when I (or anyone else) talk candidly about getting something for $1 at a yard sale or etc.

With growing up poor, I think that many folks have different social markers and possibly a different access to privilege or even recognizing privilege. I can remember knowing the difference between the kids who had money and the kids who didnt in school, usually based on arbitrary things like clothing and shoes. As an adult, I dont really care how much money people have until Im in a situation where I cant financially keep up with their lifestyle (and here I am talking about being able to travel to expensive places with friends or friends who want to eat out at expensive restaurants)

Anyone wanna talk about this shit?

[Dylan]

I meant to start this thread last week after something that I posted triggered something in me that I wanted to talk about but Im ever the procrastinator so here I am now.

I recently got a promotion at work and was pretty overjoyed and wanted to share the news with my friends. I went in the :| thread and posted something about getting my promotion and ended up going back and deleting a sentence where I referenced "making more money than I ever have in my life".
When I posted, I was pretty caught up in the joy-moment and felt like I was referencing a new freedom I would experience due to this promotion. When I went back and read my post, I deleted the reference to the salary because I had a sense of shame about talking about "the money".

I was discussing this with a friend and kinda teased it out a little to understand that my moment of shame was a throwback to the first time someone told me it was rude to talk about money. That only very poor people talk about money in this way. Im not really shamed by being seen as poor or talking about growing up on food stamps and homeless at random times.

I definitely grew up in a working class family. I definitely have a relationship with money where I dont have filters about what "should and should not" be talked about. Ive also noticed that people sometimes appear to be uncomfortable when I (or anyone else) talk candidly about getting something for $1 at a yard sale or etc.

With growing up poor, I think that many folks have different social markers and possibly a different access to privilege or even recognizing privilege. I can remember knowing the difference between the kids who had money and the kids who didnt in school, usually based on arbitrary things like clothing and shoes. As an adult, I dont really care how much money people have until Im in a situation where I cant financially keep up with their lifestyle (and here I am talking about being able to travel to expensive places with friends or friends who want to eat out at expensive restaurants)

Anyone wanna talk about this shit?

Great topic. Classism has been an issue in my life since I can remember. I'll spare everyone the 'growing up poor' stories, but I find it interesting how classism is overlooked a lot of times.

I too grew up knowing my 'place' in society. I knew which kids in school had more money and which kids had less money.

I have recently instituted a new rule for my business, and it's class based. I will no longer take jobs from people in a certain (high) class bracket. I've instituted this new policy, because I've noticed a certain attitude I just don't want to deal with.

I've also noticed the way people with money talk about money as opposed to the way people without money talk about it.

Personal pet peeve: the term 'working class'. I find this term a 'whitening up' of the term 'poor'. EVERYONE is working class. Unless you're a trust fund baby, retired, whatnot...you're working class. Poor people know they're poor...whether they work or not, they know they're poor. I also think the term 'working class' creates this illusion that the only poor people are the ones who are 'just being lazy on public benefits', which in turn helps feed the bootstraps theory that the quickest way out of poverty is to 'get a job' or 'work more'...which we all know is bullshit. I think the term 'working class' also negates 'the working poor'.

I don't know exactly what you want to talk about, but I think this is a conversation worth having.


Dylan

[Medusa]

This is interesting to me Dylan, how you and I see the term "working class" differently. I have almost the exact opposite take on it (surprise!). I have always viewed "working class" as a term that kinda equates with "blue collar", as in "the people who actually get their hands dirty".
Albeit, Ive never thought about it in any super depth.

I do know that when I was growing up, I knew the difference between blue collar and white collar even before those terms were introduced to me. My Dad and Step-Dads went to work in jeans and a t-shirt and drove a beat-up Datsuns and old trucks to their jobs. They carried their lunch in a leftover paper sack from the grocery store and mostly came home dirty, sweaty, and grimy.
I remember spending the night with a friend from school one time and her Dad came home from work and was wearing a shirt and tie and drove up in something that I perceived to be a fancy car. He wasnt dirty and they had actual glasses at the dinner table instead of plastic cups from McDonalds.
I also remember my friend having her own room (I shared with a brother and a sister) and how clean everything seemed to be.

I thought of my Dads as "working class" and their Dad as some "other" kind of class. Higher class. Better. Because you know how kids like to compartmentalize and label shit :)

I do think you have a good point about how saying "working class" instead of "poor" negates the working poor. Its like it creates this invisible barrier where the working poor must not be working hard enough because they are still poor or something. And it probably causes some of that "well they can get a second job at Mcdonalds - They're just lazy!" stuff that people seem to be so fond of.

[Kobi]

Medusa,

Congrats on your promotion! And congrats on what sounds like some new found freedom....there is nothing like it and I personally find nothing wrong with it.

I hear what you are saying. It is difficult sometimes to feel comfortable sharing a success when it is unclear how people will react to it.

Personally, I enjoy watching my friends and family do well. I know a lot of hard work, long hours, sweat and tears went into what they accomplished. And, I am pleased to know the outcome was successful.

The only times I can remember success bothering me is when it changed the person i.e. a down to earth, humble person transforms into a corporate witch with an obsession with possessions, the accumulation of things, and little regard for people.

Having become much less materialistic as I age, I am enjoying staying out of the rat race I was in for decades. And I am learning more and more about bargain hunting so I can be more leisurely. It is a wonderful sense of freedom.

So, I say...be happy for what you have done and what it will do for you! It is ok to be successful.

[Andrew, Jr.]

I think today you are very blessed to have a job no matter what it is. There is nothing wrong with earning a ton of money or min. wage. It is what it is. And that goes along with promotions. If you work hard, and are able to do the work - go for it. There is nothing wrong with that. I always think of the movie "Working Girl" with Harrison Ford and Melanie Griffith back in the 80's.

This is a wonderful topic Medusa. Thanks for starting it.

Love,
Andrew

[Mrs. Strutt]

There is quite a distinction in attitude toward and approach to money between people who grew up wealthy because their parents busted their asses to make good, and people who have inherited a trust fund four, five, ten generations old.

I want to take that thought somewhere further, but I'm not sure exactly where yet.

[Medusa]

I'll add another little tidbit in here for something to think about.

It had never occured to me until several years ago that class is not a static thing. That it is interpreted by the person's own experience and process.
For example: A friend of mine a while back used to talk about how poor she was on an almost constant basis. She talked about being poor, about not being able to afford things, about being "working class", and about how important it was for events to be sliding scale. She lived in an apartment in a city with one of the highest costs of living in the entire United States. Her rent on her apartment was more than my mortgage, car payment, utilities, and food costs combined. She taught at a University and had no children and had about 15 years of University education.
She viewed herself as "poor working class" but I often wondered if she ever examined that her ideas on class were burried in privilege. I saw them that way at times.

Im looking at my own ideas and seeing some privileges even in my own views of being poor. Funny how that all intersects.

[SassyLeo]

Oooooh I have some stuff to share/process, but I am super busy at work.

Be back in a bit.

Great idea Medusa.

[Greyson]

Medusa, congratulations on your promotion. The class thing.... Initially as a child I thought much of what I saw as unfairness was more about race, ethnicity, not class. Honestly, I just did not see many poor white people where I lived. If you were poor, you most likely you were brown or black.

As I grew into my adulthood, I began to realize the big unspoken is class. Here in the USA there is the ethos of "Pull Yourself Up by the Bootstraps." This can be a hard one to live up to because one person's "boot straps" are anothers bare feet.

Something that impacted me greatly in the not so long ago past was when I took a position in the evenings and weekends as a security guard. During the day I have worked as an Planner for many years. This is a white collar profession. I have been in this profession since 89.

One day I was attending a meeting for my day job and at the other end of the table was an African American gentleman and graduate of Wheaton at this meeting. He came up to me during the break and asked me if I was not in fact the security guard that worked in the exclusive High Rise where he resided. I told him "Yes, it is me." He was clearly surprised. I tell you his interaction with me after that was very different. Subtle things. Now when he saw me at the security job, he would make a little small talk with me about my day ecetera. Previous to him realizing that the security job position was not my primary job, he never talked to me.

I am rambling a bit. The point that stayed with me is that here wan another "POC" and yet the perceived class differences did impact the nuances of our shared communication and I am sure our lives.

I just threw this out as an example. It is one incident but not exclusive to this one person or situation. "Class" is not something that has been openly acknowledged much in some cultures, but it is a marker that is defined and used in our institutions, decision making processes and so on.

[Dylan]

This is interesting to me Dylan, how you and I see the term "working class" differently. I have almost the exact opposite take on it (surprise!). I have always viewed "working class" as a term that kinda equates with "blue collar", as in "the people who actually get their hands dirty".
Albeit, Ive never thought about it in any super depth.

I do know that when I was growing up, I knew the difference between blue collar and white collar even before those terms were introduced to me. My Dad and Step-Dads went to work in jeans and a t-shirt and drove a beat-up Datsuns and old trucks to their jobs. They carried their lunch in a leftover paper sack from the grocery store and mostly came home dirty, sweaty, and grimy.
I remember spending the night with a friend from school one time and her Dad came home from work and was wearing a shirt and tie and drove up in something that I perceived to be a fancy car. He wasnt dirty and they had actual glasses at the dinner table instead of plastic cups from McDonalds.
I also remember my friend having her own room (I shared with a brother and a sister) and how clean everything seemed to be.

I thought of my Dads as "working class" and their Dad as some "other" kind of class. Higher class. Better. Because you know how kids like to compartmentalize and label shit :)

I do think you have a good point about how saying "working class" instead of "poor" negates the working poor. Its like it creates this invisible barrier where the working poor must not be working hard enough because they are still poor or something. And it probably causes some of that "well they can get a second job at Mcdonalds - They're just lazy!" stuff that people seem to be so fond of.

I think my views on 'working class' stem from the people I have seen use the term. They're mostly middle to upper middle class people using the term to describe either their own upbringings or The Poor. When used in their 'self descriptions', I've seen it used to downplay their own middle class upbringings, and when used to describe others, it's always The Poor.

I have rarely (you're probably the first) seen someone who actually grew up Poor use the term 'working class' to describe themselves. I (in my own experience) equate it to the term 'fat'. Fat people call themselves 'fat'...while Others refer to fat people 'overweight' or 'heavy set' or some other 'polite' term.

Blue collar and white collar are the terms I personally use to describe the difference in jobs you spoke of in your post. Also, I think there's this funny idea that 'blue collar' workers are 'poor/working class'. I've seen this attitude for years, and it always makes me laugh. Office workers always assumed I was a class 'beneath' them when I came out to fix their roof. Yet, when I was in the union, I was making a helluva lot more money than most of those people. In the late 80s/early 90s, I was making 33$ an hour...which is (even today) a far far cry from 'poor'. And it was a helluva lot more money than most of the white collar folks I knew. I had better benefits, a better retirement package, better overtime/double time benefits, etc. But, because I got dirty at work and worked outside, it was assumed, I was 'poor' or 'beneath' office workers. It's just interesting to me. It's interesting to me now, because I see comments (even on this site) that landscaping/outside work is still treated this way, and that's what I do now...not because I'm poor and it's the only job I can get...but because I love love LUV it. Yet, it's assumed I wouldn't be doing this work if we weren't in a bad economy, or this is a low-paying field, or some other classist somesuch.

It's also interesting to me how One's friends tend to also come from One's own class bracket growing up. And, if One's friend(s) falls out of The Specified class bracket, One will somehow (subconsciously even) find a reason to drop that friend. I even saw someone post in one of these online survey threads that the quality they most admire in the friends is money. It's just surprising to me.

I have partnered with people who tend to have more education than I, and who grew up with more money than I. This has caused some problems in the past. One area I've really seen this is in the area of 'food in the house'. For some of my partners, when there's not too much food in the house, it's not that big of a deal. "If there's no food, we'll just go out to eat". But I (me,me,me) go through something I call, Food Panic. Even if I have money in the bank, it freaks me out if there's no food in the house (or if the pile is getting low). I've only noticed this type of Food Panic in people who grew up poor...people who have experienced not eating for days (our of Poordom...not out of 'I don't feel like eating for a few days-itis'). Even my dog goes through food panic, and constantly checks the level of food in his bag (yeah, Mahhh Boo and I have been poor together). I also tend to hoard food. I'll do this in hotel rooms; I did this on a cruise. I have to have food with me. I even keep food in the car in case there's an emergency.

I've also noticed that sometimes when One falls from a certain class bracket, some people will immediately equate that with 'an issue' (drugs/depression/some reason to blame the One who fell from the class bracket they were in). Example: When I lost my job a few years ago (you know, with half the country who lost their jobs too), some people stopped talking to me, because I couldn't afford to go out to eat and do the same things I used to do. I heard all kinds of stories through the rumor mill that the reason I didn't have any money is because, "all he does is sit around and do drugs all day". Now...um...if I can't afford to eat, I certainly don't have money to buy drugs. I mean, I heard allllllll kinds of crazy stories about why I didn't have any money. But I never heard from Others about how we were in such a miserable economy, and how half the country had lost their jobs, and how we were in a recession, or any of that. It was always blamed on my fictitious drug problem. It's just interesting to me how being poor/doing drugs/alcohol seem to go hand in hand in some people's minds. I think the stigmas of Olden Days still carry on no matter how ridiculous they are. Being poor is (almost) always chalked up to something The Poor Person did. "They don't work hard enough"
"They're on drugs"
"They're lazy"
"They're just not looking for a job"
"They just don't want it bad enough"
"They'd rather just mooch off of other people"



I'm Rambling Now,
Dylan

[Medusa]

Medusa, congratulations on your promotion. The class thing.... Initially as a child I thought much of what I saw as unfairness was more about race, ethnicity, not class. Honestly, I just did not see many poor white people where I lived. If you were poor, you most likely you were brown or black.

As I grew into my adulthood, I began to realize the big unspoken is class. Here in the USA there is the ethos of "Pull Yourself Up by the Bootstraps." This can be a hard one to live up to because one person's "boot straps" are anothers bare feet.

Something that impacted me greatly in the not so long ago past was when I took a position in the evenings and weekends as a security guard. During the day I have worked as an Planner for many years. This is a white collar profession. I have been in this profession since 89.

One day I was attending a meeting for my day job and at the other end of the table was an African American gentleman and graduate of Wheaton at this meeting. He came up to me during the break and asked me if I was not in fact the security guard that worked in the exclusive High Rise where he resided. I told him "Yes, it is me." He was clearly surprised. I tell you his interaction with me after that was very different. Subtle things. Now when he saw me at the security job, he would make a little small talk with me about my day ecetera. Previous to him realizing that the security job position was not my primary job, he never talked to me.

I am rambling a bit. The point that stayed with me is that here wan another "POC" and yet the perceived class differences did impact the nuances of our shared communication and I am sure our lives.

I just threw this out as an example. It is one incident but not exclusive to this one person or situation. "Class" is not something that has been openly acknowledged much in some cultures, but it is a marker that is defined and used in our institutions, decision making processes and so on.


Oooh Greyson! This is a GREAT example.

I actually had a rather similiar experience about 6 years ago.

Jack and I were trying to save up money to move in together and between the $400 - $500 a month cell bills and the $4500 it was going to take for the Penske and move, I took a second job at Office Depot.

During the day from 8am-5pm, I worked in a very corporate environment state job as a Project Manager with a $10million budget. At night from 6pm - 11pm, I sold office chairs, stocked pens and pencils, and worked a cash register. Ive never thought of myself as "too good" for any kind of work and I didnt even think to be embarrassed the night a colleague showed up at Office Depot with one of her children to buy school supplies.

She was clearly embarrassed on my behalf and assured me that she "wouldnt tell anyone" about my 2nd job. I assured her there was nothing to hide and that I had no issues with anyone knowing I was working a second job.
Imagine my surprise when my then boss called me in his office a few days later to discuss with me why I was working a second job and how it "looked bad" to have a high-level manager working a "menial" job.

He also advised me in the same conversation that it was "inappropriate" for me to be so friendly with our janitor. Miss Jay had been at that job on the same floor for 30-something years at that point and was a fucking BAD ASS woman who was raising 4 grandchildren and who also didnt take shit from anyone.

After his tsk-tsk'ing, I advised him that he could either give me a raise or shut his trap and that who I associated with was really none of his damn business. (Did I mentioned I was fired from that job about a month later?) :)

I applaud anyone who does what they need to do to get where they want to be, whether it be pushing papers or dumping trash bins.
Edited to add: pushing papers and dumping trash bins example was not meant to imply that these are "menial" tasks, rather than a reference to my own experience of working to make ends meet.

[Diva]

Both my parents grew up very poor....children of the depression.

But from the time my Dad got out of the army, he was a banker. Eventually, he was an Executive Vice President for a bank here in Austin when I was in elementary/jr high/high school. We had money, but nobody knew it. And my Mom made all of my clothes.

NOW, I'm very proud of that fact, but when I was in school, I was ashamed of that and was made fun of because my clothes weren't store-bought. "Things" became important to me.

Then I married a man from a family with lots of money, and, for a time, I became one of those snobby rich wives who thought they were better than those people who make their own clothes. When I look back on that time in my life, it makes me nearly sick to my stomach over what I became ~ like my mother-in-law. It disgusts me even as I write this. I'm not proud to admit it.

Well now, I have been without a job for over a year, and, even though I have some money, there are times when I am overdrawn with only rice and a cracker and maybe some applesauce in my cupboards.

But You know what? I am the happiest I have ever been. Pride died a slow death for me, but I sang at the funeral and kissed it goodbye. It's all good.

Granted, I'm 57, and I just really do not GIVE a rat's ass, but that's another thread.....I am rich with friends, a daughter who loves me and a puppy who gives me kisses.

[SuperFemme]

I struggled as working poor for twenty years.

I had left a bad marriage with two girls, and later had my son but the relationship didn't even last until his birth.

The cost of just being able to go to work was astronomical. In SoCal, even earning around 100k a year we were no more than one month ahead in savings, aand believe me I didn't earn that kind of salary until the last few years I worked. I had worked two and three jobs to feed, clothe, and house my family and gone to school at night. It took me almost 4 years to earn my B.A. Degree.

I can do 100 things to top ramen to make it a meal.

So then I became disabled through a car accident, and man. Talk about being poor, but now I had the added layer of being disabled. I felt like people refused to look at me or see me.

So then came the settlement. Can I just tell you that I was happier when we had just what we needed? Money makes people weird. I know that sounds silly to say, but from the perspective of being poor to suddenly not having to worry? Things changed in some pretty fucked up ways.

[Andrew, Jr.]

My beloved Grandparents grew up during the depression. They knew what it was to go hungry at night, not to have the things we all take for granite - like shoes, or clothes, even food. My Grandmother used to cook alot of eggs, and from that point, my Grandfather lost his teeth because of it. Not because he lack food intake, but the nuitrition part of it. Later on in life, his teeth were fixed.

My Grandparents both came from large families. My Grandfather's family owned a very large farm that was broken down, and each of his siblings and himself got a portion of it. My Grandmother and Grandfather hired only blacks to work on the farm. Why? In the words of my Grandmother, it was the right thing to do. They saw the discrimination. They saw what was being done politically, socially, economically, and so on. It shocked the family. But it opened their eyes. They were the only farm in town that would hire a family in need. To me, that showed me what it was to be a human being. Not blue colar, white colar, black, white, asian, whatever. Just showing others compassion and justice in their small world while everything was crumbling down around them.

[Apocalipstic]

Congratulations on the promotion Medusa and on this very interesting thread.

I grew up in a weird situation in which my parents grew up poor due to the Depression but ended up being very well educated and in the clergy. My father had his PHD in Classical Greek and my mother was an English teacher and Principal until "God called them" to be Missionaries. As a missionary everything is paid for and in Argentina of the 60's and 70's US dollars went a long way. All types of church members entertained us from people with dirt floors to people with private helicopters and mansions. I feel pretty comfortable in any setting. My parents did not make much money, but everything including our schooling, insurance, home, car, utilities, vacation etc was paid for, so I grew up with zero idea of the value of money.

In college I worked and since school was paid for I always had money to blow. After college came the realization that I had no idea about money and my parents plan to marry me off to a preacher to take care of me was not gonna happen....and I majored in theater. :seeingstars:

I ended up very poor, and in some terrible situations. (I also am quite creative with Ramen noodles!) I charged up cards and was a financial disaster. Since then, I have worked in Grocery stores, ski lifts, hotel management, kitchens, sports catering and now for a production company.

My G/F Cynthia's family has always had a good income. She was until recently a 3rd generation General Motors blue collar worker, making 3 times as much as I or my parents have ever made.

Now I have a good job and she is in school. I do have to have a stash of food and money and it makes me sick to my stomach to owe any money. All we owe is the house. We renovate little bits as we can pay cash. I will not finance anything but medical stuff. I have nightmares of collections people calling me if I owe anything.

I have no idea what class I am, nor do I really care. But it burns my ass up when people act better than others based on what they do for a living, or what class they are perceived to be. It makes me feel sick when I see it.

If someone cleans your House, it is because they are a cleaning professional and enjoy working alone, not because they are not as good as you are. *rant*

We have decided we like to travel rather than have a fancy big house, and live in Nashville because the cost of living is great.
Great great subject Medusa, I look forward to the discussion!

[dreadgeek]

Medusa;

Firstly, congrats on the promotion!

Interesting topic and one I've been giving a lot of attention to of late. (I plan on going a panel about butch identity and class at Butch Voices Portland this fall)

I grew up upper-middle class although my father grew up poor (Depression-era poor) and my mother grew up in a farm family. I am *very* uncomfortable talking about my salary--even with friends--because it seems unseemly one of those things in the category of "not done". I am very uncomfortable talking about the things I own--again, it just seems unseemly. To give a sense of how deeply ingrained this is:

My mother died in 2007 and I inherited one of the rental properties they owned, my sister got the family home and the other rental property. There was also some cash as well. We paid off both our debts and bought a nice car (Audi A4) and did some traveling and furnished our house. The usual stuff.

A few things:

1) I'm profoundly uncomfortable even saying as much as I've said. Even when all the probate and escrow stuff was going on and I was participating at the dash site I don't think I posted much about all those trials.

2) It was the first time that Jaime really had any real idea what kind of money and material things I grew up around. I had told her about my parents, of course, and about my childhood. But until she first saw the house I grew up in, she really didn't have a picture. Driving back to Portland from Sacramento she commented that she hadn't really realized I'd grown up rich.

3) At this point in our lives, Jaime is living in a manner that is more comfortable than at any point in her life. I'm still not living in a manner that is as comfortable as what I grew up with while still being very comfortable. I am, again, profoundly uncomfortable saying what I make a year even amongst my friends. If they know the industry and what average salaries are, they can probably get in the ballpark but when I've gotten promotions (as I did in '08) or a raise (which I did in '06 and '07) I have mentioned the raise and perhaps the percentage without saying percentage of what. Again, it is this tape that if you have money, you don't talk about how much you have, how much you make and you don't draw a lot of attention to the things you own.

Jaime also observed that when she looks at my sister and I, we strike her more as 'old money' (without being trust-fund babies) than nouveau riche. I think the difference being that neither my sister or I throw the money around.

Then, there's the issue of middle-class people appropriating working-class identity. It bugs me. I mean really, seriously, nails-on-chalkboard, bugs me. It bothers me at the same level and for the same reason as cultural appropriation (by this I mean someone who is not Native American claiming that they are tribal because they have some Native blood dating back to around the war of 1812). It's obnoxious. At the same time, when I was first coming out in the late-80's/early-90's an ethic was developing in the SF Bay Area queer community that middle-class was one of the worst things you could be. It wasn't exactly being a Nazi but it was in the same moral orbit as being a Nazi or a Klansman. It has been a long road to a place where I recognize that--for better or worse--I am a product of the black middle-class. It is written all over my personality. I can't pretend (and have never tried to) that I grew up poor because I didn't. I won't pretend to know what it is like to grow up poor--even though Jaime has certainly told me about her childhood. I am finally at a place where I can be okay with being middle-class and not hang my head as if I had something to apologize about while, at the same time, not looking down my nose at people who did not grow up with my advantages and/or do not have them now.

One last thing, if war is the way Americans learn geography, I believe that race is Americans' language for talking about class. My experience of what it means to be black is *very much* mediated through my class background. It does not eliminate racism in my life, nothing does that. However, my day-to-day experience of racism is very different than my cousins on my father's side who grew up not quite as impoverished as he and his brother did but still with far less money than my sister and I.

Actually, truly the last thing--if you ever want to know why I am so passionate about education, why I believe that it is truly a liberating force and why I resist any rhetoric that would try to get people of color to doubt the value of an education, one need look no further than my father to understand the why of it. The ONLY difference between my father and his brother was that my father got a college education and my uncle didn't. That difference, a B.A., changed the trajectory of my father's life into an orbit that, at the end of his life in 1999, he had achieved a lifestyle that would have looked (and been) impossible when he was born in 1922. How different? Keep this in mind, my father was blue-black. He was so black that my maternal grandfather at first forbade my mother to marry him because he (my grandfather) thought that my dad was 'too dark to have any prospects'. So this man, from a little postage stamp in a town in Northern Louisiana (small enough that native Louisianans say "where?" when I mention Ruston), raised by a single-mother in the midst of the Great Depression, became a full-professor in one of the more respected (at the time) education programs in the country and was in demand as a educational policy consultant across the country. Education can make all the difference in the world.

Cheers
Aj

[Gayla]

This has always been a hard thing for me.

My family is very blue collar. My mother and I lived with my grandparents after she and my father divorced when I was very young. My mother worked at a bank. My grandfather was a finish carpenter and my grandmother was a seamstress, doing alterations at, what I always thought, was, a fancy clothing store in downtown Austin. My Grandma and my Mom made all my clothes and taught me to sew. Grandpa bought me honey buns off the roach coach and left them on the dashboard of his truck so they were warm and gooey when he brought them home for me after work. He taught me to fish out of stock tanks and how to correctly run a plane over a piece of wood. We lived in a rural area. Ate something from the garden for supper every night. I rode my bike through fields, down long country roads, played in the creek with my friends and had no idea that money was anything more then the quarter Grandpa would give me on the weekends so I could go across the street and get a Big Red soda water from the Creedmoor store. I also had no idea that everyone in the world didn't live this way because in my, very limited, world, they all did.

Then my mother remarried. The man that I refer to as my father, built houses for a living. We moved around quite a bit until he decided to go into business for himself. He was very good at it. We lived in an upper class area of a mid sized border town. My last name was plastered on billboards all over town. We had "live in help". My first car was a classic. We vacationed out of the country. We had a "cabin" in the mountains. I went to the right schools. Etc, etc, ect.

At the very core, I am privilege. It affects everything I say, think and do. I carry a huge amount of shame for having grown up with money because it's been often seen as "bad" in my community. I've had to fight my own -ism's and be even extra vigilant about how they influence the things I do.

I know that here, on the planet, there are threads I avoid and discussions I side step because I honestly don't know if I'm capable of participating without letting my privilege show. I'd like to think that the work I've done over the last 25+ years has left me in a position that I can but I think I will always question it and fight against it and will never truly know.

[Apocalipstic]

To jump off of what AJ said, often education is the marker, rather than how much money someones makes/has.

How many times have I heard, Ohhh, so and so works in a car or other type of factory, but for 100 years those have been stable middle class jobs that paid for education, families, very nice homes, amenities, boats, travel etc. But a factory worker or truck driver might be seen as lower class than someone who makes a 10th of what they make (or rather did until recently) who works at a museum or a high school or even in retail. It is somehow seen as more higher class since no one actually gets dirty.

In some other countries, the UK and Argentina that I know of, the Middle Class is actually wealthy people who work. Powerful Doctors, Lawyers, Government Officials, Captains of Industry are Middle Class, as is anyone who has a job no matter how much money they have. To be rich, one does not work at all.

In this scenario, most of what we call Middle Class in the US falls into "Upper Poor" maybe?

Thoughts on what actually is Middle Class?

[Blade]

I think sometimes poor choices put a person in a seemingly lower class, just as sometimes good choices put a person in a seemingly higher class. Just because a person seems poor to someone else doesn't mean they view themselves as poor. Just because a person seems higher classed doesn't mean they are or that they view themselves as such.

My Dad's family were dirt poor financially, but oh so rich in family and values. They had everything they needed, and really most everything they desired, because they were simple folks and didn't want all the expensive things in life. They didn't live on credit. They died indigent.

My Mom's family *chuckling*..well I think you've seen my posts about how frugal they were/are. Pa told me one time if you save half of everything you make, you'll be worth something one day. Now mind you, they got their money from working for it and saving half of all they made. Nannie made most of their clothes, they always tithed their 10% at church, and there are many "saving" things they did at their house. From the outside looking in you'd never know they are worth what they are worth.
My Nannie is very much a classism type person but my Pa was just an ole country boy done good.

More later maybe as I have a lot on my mind on this thread just not sure how to word it all just yet.

[Melissa]

[QUOTE=dreadgeek;140440]Medusa;



Then, there's the issue of middle-class people appropriating working-class identity.


Dreadgeek

Its wonderful that your parents were such educational role models. Neither of mine went to college. They were fine when I was an undergrad but got really weird when I started talking about wanting to go to grad school. My stepfather told me I would never finish. They suddenly became anti-education. So it must have been nice to have parents who supported your educational goals. Are you working on your MA or PhD? Anyway good luck in college. I know it can be very time consuming. I did have one question, I don't understand what you mean by the quote above. Can you give an example?

Melissa

[Melissa]

To jump off of what AJ said, often education is the marker, rather than how much money someones makes/has.

How many times have I heard, Ohhh, so and so works in a car or other type of factory, but for 100 years those have been stable middle class jobs that paid for education, families, very nice homes, amenities, boats, travel etc. But a factory worker or truck driver might be seen as lower class than someone who makes a 10th of what they make (or rather did until recently) who works at a museum or a high school or even in retail. It is somehow seen as more higher class since no one actually gets dirty.

In some other countries, the UK and Argentina that I know of, the Middle Class is actually wealthy people who work. Powerful Doctors, Lawyers, Government Officials, Captains of Industry are Middle Class, as is anyone who has a job no matter how much money they have. To be rich, one does not work at all.

In this scenario, most of what we call Middle Class in the US falls into "Upper Poor" maybe?

Thoughts on what actually is Middle Class?



I grew up in England and the class divisions in the US still confuse me. I have to admit that a lot of the posts here confuse me. I don't understand class shame.

Class for me always meant if you worked you were working class (plus there are issues of accents) if you owned your own business or worked for yourself you were middle class and if you didn't have to work or had inherited money/a title/ the right accent/education then you were upper class. Being upper class wasn't tied to income.

You could be poor but be upper class based on your accent, family, or if you had a public school education. To me, what is defined as middle class in the US is working class. Plus, the US is supposed to "classless" yet there is a huge obsesssion with class.

Can we exchange the word class for income? Because in the US class seems to be more about what income bracket you fall into than anything else. Also, your class status changes based on your income so you can move up or down. In England, you are the class you are born into or what your accent marks you as. So know matter how much money I might earn, my class status won't ever change.

Melissa

[Hack]

I think I was fortunate to have the upbringing I did. I had a foot firmly planted in two very different worlds.

First, there was my father's side of the family -- professional, solidly upper middle class (even called "rich" in our little town). I always like to say this is where I learned my table manners -- which fork to use when and all that.

Then there was my mother's side of the family -- loud, boisterious Polish-Catholics. Always a party. I like to say this is where I learned to respect women because Grandma was the center of the family, and the wives, moms and aunts were always upheld and respected. I like to say this is where I learned respect, especially for women.

I'm comfortable anywhere...at a fancy restaurant or at someone's kitchen table being served hot dogs and tater tots. Yet, when I am at some fancy event, you're likely to find me talking more to the hired help, and not my fellow partygoers.

My whole life is a study in dichotomy, but in this respect, I find it beneficial. I think my life is a good mix of the two.

Jake

[Medusa]

Im glad that a few folks have brought up the whole thing where folks appropriate a class history that doesn't really belong to them.

Im trying to tease out a parallel around the very rich and the very poor. There is almost some kind of....I dunno...."money ceiling"? where the very wealthy and very poor are concerned. Some kind of untouchable glamorization.
I think of the very wealthy as they are shown on tv and how there is this mythical unicorn feeling attached to them through tabloids and media. Movie stars and singers with gold-plated dog bowls and $30 million homes are elevated to this "untouchable" (or maybe unimaginable) status.
There is "celebrity" attached through wealth. The idea that human beings are worth more if they are "worth" more.

But then, there is this weird dichotomy where the very poor also have a mythical unicorn thing attached. Think of Nuns and Monks who have no earthly possessions; I think society oftens sees this life as "magical" or "untouchable". The celebrity attached here is one that says "This person must be magical in other ways because they have no money". Glamorized for what might seem like a perfected lack of desire?

[Nat]

Class for me was always a mixed bag. We were poor, but my extended family wasn't. My dad was absent and there was no child support, and my mom was a secretary. My clothes, my shoes often had holes. My mom would bring me clothes her coworkers' kids had outgrown, we ate cheaply, blah blah blah. But I was surrounded by books and art and music. My grandparents paid for my cello lessons from the age of 6. They didn't want to help my mother too much because they "didn't want to discourage her from finding a husband."

I was expected to graduate from college. A bachelor's degree was the minimum requirement to be a legitimate member of the family - it seemed. But my family did not contribute by either offering to house me or help pay for my education. I lived off an older boyfriend and student loans before I finally dropped out and became a graveyard-shift security guard at the age of 19.

I enjoyed my job. I read many books I otherwise never would have read and have now almost entirely forgotten (like Anna Karenina). I wandered through large, empty buildings. I attended the firings of volatile employees. I woke up homeless drunk men every morning in the parking garage before my boss got to work. The amount of sexual harrassment I received and the amount of people who talked to me like I was a POS or who ignored me completely was a big shock to me at the time - it was so different than I was treated by teachers, peers and family members in my old life.

It was very interesting seeing how differently people treated me depending on my perceived class.

I married into a wealthy family, I finished my degree (I still took out loans - which I will be paying off forever, but no longer qualified for financially based grants due to my marriage). He always seemed to translate me to his family as though I was a little too alien for them. We bought houses. I got to spend a summer at Oxford. But on a weekend trip to London, two classmates and I went to our first lesbian bar - the Candy Bar. When I walked into that beautiful, loud, shining, packed place, it felt like home. By the next summer, I had left him.

And I began eeking out my little life. I have had better salaries and worse salaries during my adult life. I'm currently on the "worse" side of things, but hopefully not forever. I'm alright though. I'm so thankful to have a job. I'm so thankful to have my degree. I'll be paying it off forever. I have lots of feelings about class and money. I know I have privilege. I also know that I am not polished, and that I feel awkward and unkempt and a bit vulgar among people who are more well-heeled.

I don't fit distinctly into a single class and I never have.

[Boots13]

The U. S. Department of Labor describes the working poor as

“individuals who have spent at least twenty-seven weeks in the labor force, but whose income fell below the official poverty threshold.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty threshold is $14,763 for a family of four.

So we are labeled and assigned a social class by our own government, no matter how fluid social class has become. I'm pushing 50 and cant remember a time (in my lifetime) the economy has been so unstable. All the biggies are affected..Tech, Pharm, Oil, Wall Street, Banking, Real Estate, Insurance...nothing seems stable.

Our economy is so unstable that my ideas of Social Class (re: money, assets, income, futures) are rapidly changing as well. Is the instability changing (or at least lending compassion) to our social structures? I hope so.
I don't know where I'm going with this, other than to reiterate that my perception of economic social class in North America is undergoing a huge shift. White Collar is no longer bastardizing our economy, that Blue Collar feels honest to me, and that the Working Poor with its broader base, is no longer thought of as a lazy population. Poverty and deficit has nested in places its never been in my lifetime (Wall Street, Real Estate, Tech, Oil) . Poverty and financial oblivion is a place that any of us are headed, at any time. And as our country continues to corkscrew itself further into economic distress I can tell you that the economic "markers" and expectations (old stereotypes) of social class seem to be changing.

[SassyLeo]

I'm white. My mother's parents came here from Turkey where they were very poor. My dad's grandparents had come from Ireland, and had lots of money until the depression hit.

When I was small, my mom didn’t work and stayed home with me until I was in 2nd or 3rd grade. She made my clothes until I started grammar school. We took the bus everywhere since she didn’t drive, plus we only had one car. My dad worked sometimes 2 jobs plus he became an expert “dumpster diver” and on the weekends we would have yard sales or sell at the flea market.

Most of the kids at my grammar school were white, with a few Hispanic and Asian kids. It was a range of poor to lower middle class kids. I don’t remember many of the kids having name brand clothes or nice toys, etc.

Our house had bad mold issues and crappy carpet. We had used everything; furniture, clothing, house wares, etc. We shopped at the local co-op, using the same bags and containers over and over…my mom made everything from scratch. We didn’t have a TV for years and then when we did, we rarely watched it.

My dad eventually finished his degree and got a well paying job. Then my mom went back to work. We moved into a more affluent neighborhood and I started Middle School in an upper middle class area. I was now attending classes with kids who had gone to a rich grammar school.

So here is where it got tricky for me. We now have 2 incomes and my dad was making good money…suddenly I am going from wearing 2nd hand and clothes from Kmart type places to Macy’s. I went to Summer Camp. I got a stereo for my birthday. We took a trip to the east coast.

Then my parents split and my mom and I moved to a duplex and attempted to pare down, but we had now grown accustomed to a “nicer” lifestyle. And slowly but surely she ended up in big debt.

My dad went on to be fairly successful, working as an executive for "big oil" (and then saw the fucked up crap going on) He consulted and now he has a successful eBay business. He’s been smart with investments and such, but he and his partner also like to travel and own some nicer things. However they are also very frugal. My dad constantly says “we are on a budget” “we need to be cost conscious” “no trips for us” even though they do take trips and never live hand to mouth…it’s so different than how I lived as a child.

When I left CA, I left a well paying job where I was responsible for $1M annual revenues. I was successful (trips, nice dinners, clothes, etc) but stressed out all the time. I moved to Portland to change and grow. I purposely did not take 2 job offers in my industry because I needed change. So for a few months I didn’t work and I started freaking out about money...so I took a temp job and it quickly turned into an opportunity for regular employment. However, it pays less and has less of a “title” than I was used to having. I used to be a Branch Manager for a huge staffing corporation with an Admin and now I am an Executive Admin. I know I made this choice on purpose, but I still struggle with my own internal crap about what I should be doing and making, etc.

I make enough to live on with a bit leftover that I put in savings, but not enough to take nice trips or buy “nicer” things…and don’t get me wrong, I am so grateful to be employed with a great company in this economy…but I still get stuck on the “I should be doing and making more” I still shop 2nd hand, clip coupons, shop sales, etc.

I feel like my relationship with class/jobs/money has been a roller coaster ...and my thoughts are ALL over the place, clearly.

I don’t feel like I had privilege until I was in Middle School, but others might say because I didn’t like on powdered milk, that I had it all my life. Can privilege be subjective?

[Dylan]

Im glad that a few folks have brought up the whole thing where folks appropriate a class history that doesn't really belong to them.

Im trying to tease out a parallel around the very rich and the very poor. There is almost some kind of....I dunno...."money ceiling"? where the very wealthy and very poor are concerned. Some kind of untouchable glamorization.
I think of the very wealthy as they are shown on tv and how there is this mythical unicorn feeling attached to them through tabloids and media. Movie stars and singers with gold-plated dog bowls and $30 million homes are elevated to this "untouchable" (or maybe unimaginable) status.
There is "celebrity" attached through wealth. The idea that human beings are worth more if they are "worth" more.

But then, there is this weird dichotomy where the very poor also have a mythical unicorn thing attached. Think of Nuns and Monks who have no earthly possessions; I think society oftens sees this life as "magical" or "untouchable". The celebrity attached here is one that says "This person must be magical in other ways because they have no money". Glamorized for what might seem like a perfected lack of desire?

I think the rich get glamorized...

while The Poor get romanticized.

I think there's a certain 'romantic notion' attached to The Poor...The 'simple' lifestyle...'living simply'. I see certain aspects of Appalachia romanticized a lot. The 'quaint' lifestyle. It seems like all of the 'crap' of being poor gets shoved out of the picture, so all that remains is this 'simple' lifestyle.

I was talking to someone a while ago, and she was so poor, she had to make her own hand soap out of soap chips. As I was talking to someone else about it, it became this 'quaint' thing that she made her own soap.

I also see the romanticism in comments like, "They were so 'ethical'" or some other somesuch comments discussing the high morals of poor people (usually long after they've died or long after they were young enough to work two jobs or whatever). I'm not being very clear here, but...when younger people are poor, they're normally villainized as being lazy/drug addicts/whatnot...when poor people get older, they're usually romanticized or pitied. It's interesting to me, because I never hear these same type of comments from actual poor people. I never hear poor people who are struggling actually say, "But we're rich with a good work ethic" or "We don't have much, but we have 'love'". I mean, the only actual poor person I've ever heard say something like that is Loretta Lynn, and it was wellllllllll after she was actually living poor. Again, it's that 'romanticized' version of Poordom. Like there's something enviable in going days without food, or making your own soap, or watching your kids go hungry, or some other somesuch like that.

And then, I see this 'outsider looking in' version of Poordom. Like social workers are sometimes sooooo fascinated with The Poor/Poverty. And books like "Nickeled And Dimed" make (already rich) people even more wealthy, while the actual lived lives of The Poor are completely ignored. Theories are studied, yet when those who have actually LIVED it, say, "Um, no that won't work, because..." they're dismissed while those with more class privilege discuss how to 'fix' it (which usually entails a good round of victim blaming and boot-strapping).

I think some of this romanticizing has to do with religion (especially/primarily catholicism-xtianity-protestant work ethic), and all of the brainwashing contained in the bible about being poor and how it's so godly. There's a lot of glorification in 'suffering'.


Dylan

[Apocalipstic]

When I tell people I had tea in London they ask if I wore a hat or white gloves.

People in England just have tea, every day, they don't dress for it.

We do romanticize the rich and the poor in this country.

Honestly, the only time I have ever wore white gloves, (other than the mud covered ones my mother made me wear to Easter when I was 3), has been as a banquet waiter. White gloves are worn by servants, not people drinking tea.

:tea:

[Martina]

i have had class privilege, and i have "suffered" in a way from classism. My parents were school teachers. They paid for me to go to college. They were both from eastern Kentucky, but i grew up in southwest Ohio. Where i lived, it was an everyday thing for people to make fun of Kentuckians. Sometimes i saw my mom cry because of cruel comments.

One neighbor, whose daughter was my close friend, seemed to especially enjoy hurting my mother. In his case, i think it came out of class resentment. He had not gone to college although he made a lot of money as a bricklayer. But he enjoyed taking down my mother who had, and he had this easy weapon. Half the teachers in the district came up from Kentucky colleges. And lots of other people too.

i run into or hear about a lot of creative and alternative folks who are second generation out of Appalachia. i think it gave us a perspective on class and culture. You were both inside -- no accent -- and outside. And you saw two different ways of life.

Appalachians always go home. Or back then they did. For me there were constant weekend and summer trips back to Kentucky. We had a cabin there where we spent the bulk of our summers. This going back "home" a lot was true for most of my generation. We saw the difference between rural poverty and whatever kind of "better" life we lived.

We also experienced other contrasts. Sometimes back home was more violent, sometimes less. Back home usually meant family feeling, good food, beautiful land, and, frequently, great music. Sometimes the cousins back home thought you were uppity for having the stuff you did and for talking differently.

Then i lived most of my adult life in Ann Arbor, Michigan. i got a graduate degree from the University of Michigan, but my previous degrees were from "lesser" universities. To my peers at UofM, i was too loud and clearly not Ivy League. It boggled some people's minds that i could still be smart. It always took people a while to get me. My closest friends were people like me -- people who had ended up at UofM in spite of the odds: a guy from rural Indiana, one from inner city Detroit, another from a border town in Arizona. i only made one upper middle class friend ever. And that was because she married one of my closest friends. It was a struggle, too. It was a struggle for them to overcome class differences. But she is a good friend now.

What is so ironic and interesting is that she feels like a poser in the upper middle class. While her parents were Georgetown educated lawyers, their parents were not -- not at all. So her parents were the unlikely to be at their school, in their world, folks. She went to an Ivy. And she never fit in. Even though she is very successful, when she went back to a reunion, the differences between her and her former classmates were even more marked.

i don't know. i see class boundaries as fairly powerful in our culture even though we can gain or lose wealth and access to class privileges.

Most of my friends all of my life have been people like me, people who have some sense of there being no place on earth for them. That is an exaggerated and self-pitying formulation. i think many queer people feel this way, but it's not exclusive to us. Plus we do have some enclaves. Most of them white and expensive to live in.

One of my closest friends is an African American gay man. He is from Flint, Michigan. Most of his family are auto workers, but his dad went to prison when he was young, and his mom raised their family on welfare. He had a tight and supportive extended family. He always had nice clothes and food and fun and, once his father was gone, safety.

He was the co-valedictorian of his high school class, but he came to the University of Michigan hoping to be a doctor and couldn't pass the freshman math classes. Flint schools were that bad. He also found very few African American gay men there and made friends and became lovers with white men. One of them is a trust fund kid and will never probably work. He got into med school and was too lazy to go. Another of his exes is a psychiatrist.

So my friend got his social work degree and became a therapist and activist. As accepted as he is in his family, being educated, successful and gay means he does not really have a real home back in Flint. Being working class and African American means he does not have a home in progressive, educated, gay-friendly Ann Arbor.

In time, he became more involved with helping African American gay youth and formed a group for African American gay men (some don't ID as gay) in Detroit. He started dating African American men. He eventually married one, a community college professor. He moved out of Ann Arbor and lives in Detroit.

He has found a place. But it was a long trip. For me the point is that for many, many Americans, there is some displacement in terms of class. And once that happens, it is very hard to find your way home again.

Not too long ago, i saw one of my cousins after years and years. He moved to a little town in a rural area of Ohio and found his home. He married a pig farmer's daughter and got a good job, which turned into a very good job. He volunteers. He raises pigs on the side. They have a huge piece of land they keep up.

They raised two kids, one of whom graduated from college and married a lawyer. He does have to travel for his job, and their little town recently was devastated when the major employer closed down. They are no anachronism. They are no rural ideal. But their lives and their personalities are congruent with most of those in their community.

For some reason, in my life, no matter how conventional appearing they are, the people i am close to do not have this congruence. They live with the double perspective of being inside and outside, or they have had to fight for and make their home. It did not come easily. Almost all my friends have had that displacement because of class and have lived with the consequences every day.

It's not something to feel sorry for yourself about or to be angry about. But it is something to acknowledge. My academic work was in the humanities. i had very little interest in gender theory. i worked on issues of class. i find it hard to think outside of that construct. Class differences and dislocations ramify through our lives endlessly. They are very complex. They don't have to haunt or disable you to affect you and be a huge influence on your life.

[Apocalipstic]

Jumping off of what Martina said, it KILLS me when people make fun of other states, when they don't have a leg to stand on. Ohio? making fun of Kentucky? OK, Vermont maybe (I have never been there but it sounds nice)can make fun of the South, But I have been several places in Ohio just as rural, redneck and Southern as anywhere in Tennessee.

All of California is not LA and San Francisco, all of New York is not NYC.

A woman in Upstate NY, who lives in a farm house sinking into a field near a very small rural town told me that as soon as she hears a Southern Accent, she assumes the person is uneducated and stupid. Really????? :praying:

Classism based on what state or town one lives in does not fly for me.

[Melissa]

The U. S. Department of Labor describes the working poor as

“individuals who have spent at least twenty-seven weeks in the labor force, but whose income fell below the official poverty threshold.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty threshold is $14,763 for a family of four.

So we are labeled and assigned a social class by our own government, no matter how fluid social class has become. I'm pushing 50 and cant remember a time (in my lifetime) the economy has been so unstable. All the biggies are affected..Tech, Pharm, Oil, Wall Street, Banking, Real Estate, Insurance...nothing seems stable.

Our economy is so unstable that my ideas of Social Class (re: money, assets, income, futures) are rapidly changing as well. Is the instability changing (or at least lending compassion) to our social structures? I hope so.
I don't know where I'm going with this, other than to reiterate that my perception of economic social class in North America is undergoing a huge shift. White Collar is no longer bastardizing our economy, that Blue Collar feels honest to me, and that the Working Poor with its broader base, is no longer thought of as a lazy population. Poverty and deficit has nested in places its never been in my lifetime (Wall Street, Real Estate, Tech, Oil) . Poverty and financial oblivion is a place that any of us are headed, at any time. And as our country continues to corkscrew itself further into economic distress I can tell you that the economic "markers" and expectations (old stereotypes) of social class seem to be changing.


It seems to me that the government is defining an economic threshold here, not a social class.

Melissa

[Apocalipstic]

It seems to me that the government is defining an economic threshold here, not a social class.

Melissa


How do you define Social Class?

It is very difficult to put a finger in it in the US.

[Melissa]

How do you define Social Class?

It is very difficult to put a finger in it in the US.

Well, social class, I default back to English definitions which aren't related to income. Plus the English class system has no meaning or equivalent in the US. This is why many people emigrated here, to free themselves from a rigid class system.

For me, in the US, there are no social classes, just income brackets. An individual can move through various income brackets in the course of his or her lifetime. I think people in the US make assumptions and create stereotypes about other people based on what they perceive they own or earn. In England I'm working class because that was the class I was born into. In the US I think I am considered middle class because of my income bracket and education level. I default back to working class because I don't know of any other way to think of myself. However, I guess people would look at me strangely in the US because by US definitions I am middle class. But since I work 60+hours a week I call that "working" class lol. But I do get confused when I see people saying they hate it when the middle classes approripate the identity of the working class. I can't wrap my brain around this statement. What does that mean? I think I am coming at this thread from a totally different angle so I am just going to keep reading.



Melissa

[Waldo]

While I agree that talking about how much money one has, spends or earns is often tacky - particularly so outside of one's closest friends. I also think that this "we mustn't discuss" attitude is part of the problem that lead to this most recent financial downturn.

Our inability to say "I don't have the money to do X" is often fueled by a misunderstanding about what other people really have.

My experience of those who have money is spot on with the adage that they rarely talk about it. Due to the industry I work in I would venture to say that I am on a first name basis with more millionaires than the average person and with most of them you would never know it. Not just because they don't talk about it, but they don't spend like it. They don't drive the latest cars, wear the flashiest clothes, take the most expensive trips.

Their wealth will likely last their lifetime and they'll have a nice large estate to pass down to their heirs.

I also know a good number of very rich folks who will likely wind up with nothing in relatively short order because of bad decisions and a lack of restraint. They DO drive the latest, and often multiple, cars. They wear designer clothing and exensive jewelry and they travel first class all the time. They consume constantly.

How interesting a world it would be if one's salary and net worth were publicly available. I wonder if that would change how we view money, things, wealth. Just a thought.

[Lady_Wu]

First, Medusa, conratulations on the promotion and second, congratulations on a great thread! I am on disability and make almost no money but do not consider myself poor. I am rich in education (MA in Philosophy), have taught University, and have been a librarian, paid and unpaid, for most of my life. I think that my attitude gives me enough. I study online at a Buddhist college and offline on my own. I have a roof over my head, food to eat, and cable internet. I have clothes I like to wear. So I do not consider myself "poor" at all. I do tend to bristle when I hear people talk disparaginly about people on SSD/SSI. I had 2 strokes at an early age, plus have MS, RSD, and fibromyalgia. This is not my fault-I would rather be working. So would most I've met!

[Apocalipstic]

Well, social class, I default back to English definitions which aren't related to income. Plus the English class system has no meaning or equivalent in the US. This is why many people emigrated here, to free themselves from a rigid class system.

For me, in the US, there are no social classes, just income brackets. An individual can move through various income brackets in the course of his or her lifetime. I think people in the US make assumptions and create stereotypes about other people based on what they perceive they own or earn. In England I'm working class because that was the class I was born into. In the US I think I am considered middle class because of my income bracket and education level. I default back to working class because I don't know of any other way to think of myself. However, I guess people would look at me strangely in the US because by US definitions I am middle class. But since I work 60+hours a week I call that "working" class lol. But I do get confused when I see people saying they hate it when the middle classes approripate the identity of the working class. I can't wrap my brain around this statement. What does that mean? I think I am coming at this thread from a totally different angle so I am just going to keep reading.



Melissa

Makes sense :)

I think in the US they wanted to be different from England in the beginning and not have the whole "Nobility" thing. So class is more based on money, education and what one does for a living, than on one's ancestral heritage. The US wanted to be a nation where anyone could make it rich and be "accepted" and a part of the "Upper Class".

I agree that it is very confusing and the more I read and study about it, the more I do not get where the lines are.

I do think it is insane that the poverty line in the US is less than $15,000 for a family of 4. I think one person would have severe difficulty with that amount, let alone four.

[Waldo]

Makes sense :)

I think in the US they wanted to be different from England in the beginning and not have the whole "Nobility" thing. So class is more based on money, education and what one does for a living, than on one's ancestral heritage. The US wanted to be a nation where anyone could make it rich and be "accepted" and a part of the "Upper Class".

I agree that it is very confusing and the more I read and study about it, the more I do not get where the lines are.

I do think it is insane that the poverty line in the US is less than $15,000 for a family of 4. I think one person would have severe difficulty with that amount, let alone four.

It's now a whopping $22k, as of 2009: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/09poverty.shtml

[Melissa]

Makes sense :)

I think in the US they wanted to be different from England in the beginning and not have the whole "Nobility" thing. So class is more based on money, education and what one does for a living, than on one's ancestral heritage. The US wanted to be a nation where anyone could make it rich and be "accepted" and a part of the "Upper Class".

I agree that it is very confusing and the more I read and study about it, the more I do not get where the lines are.

I do think it is insane that the poverty line in the US is less than $15,000 for a family of 4. I think one person would have severe difficulty with that amount, let alone four.

It's an insanely low amount. I keep thinking about some Senator who did this experiment to show that it was possible to live off minimum wage. He, his wife and two teenagers decided they were going to live on minimum wage for one month to prove it was doable. Urgh. I wish I could remember his name.

I think this notion of class comes into play when we start to lay meanings on top of the income bracket. We start to interpret what that income level says about a person. And this is where the danger lies and where all the assumptions and stereotypes start to accumulate. eg. the assumption that if you are poor you must be lazy. We start to layer income brackets with more and more meanings. Sometimes those meanings are romaticized as Dylan was saying (poor but happy, the noble poor etc) and sometimes they just villify (poor due to laziness, poor therefore uneducated, ignorant). But the meanings and assumptions, for me, don't equal class. I think we tend to lump anything related to income level together and call it class when we need to start separating out some of the issues related to the assumptions and stereotypes.

Anyway, hope I'm making sense :)

Melissa

[Boots13]

It seems to me that the government is defining an economic threshold here, not a social class.

Melissa

Hi Melissa - sorry I missed your response to my reply. I agree partly with you, in that the Government is defining an economic threshold...but I feel that with that definition comes a determination of class. And in this case, economic class.

But what rips me about our government are the inequalities that come with that determination (or threshold). Even though class is a fluid hierarchy in our society, it is full of inequalities, inconsistencies and contradictions (taxing middle America vs tax loops for big business, big money, old money, etc)

I think North America's class distinctions are complicated because they are fluid (we are not born and forever labeled by a Caste system) but still come with a stigma that my be detrimental to those being labeled. I have that bias as evidenced in my prior post (middle class is hard working, upper class are crooks..etc).

just my opinion on a touchy and complicated subject.

[Martina]

Class is very real. It's not just in our heads. It's who you know, who your parents know. It's the assumptions and categories you were taught as a child. There are things they know exist in the world for them, realities they accept as stable, that i have a hard time even believing in.

There are some things they don't have that my African American friend from Flint, Michigan has. My friend's family never ever disowns or cuts out a family member. They may be in jail. They may be queer (which is not approved of), but they are always welcome home. Their behavior is less important than the fact that they are family. They do not have to prove anything to anyone to be accepted. i have not found that to be true sometimes for people raised in the upper middle classes.

We enact class all the time. It's impossible to think outside of class without doing lots and lots of work. And we injure ourselves and others with assumptions and fears about class. Not necessarily brutally. i know lots of proud working class people. i think that if people are not desperately poor and they fit in with the people around them, they are as likely to be happy as anyone else.

Class does not determine happiness or satisfaction with life. But it is ever-present. It is relentless. Much harder to see outside of than racism, sexism, and homophobia -- although those are tough.

Class is determinative in ways that people constantly underestimate. Two and three generations in the upper middle class does not really turn you into a member of the upper middle class. It takes a long time to learn and unlearn the way of looking at the world that your social class created in you.

My parents came from world that distrusted outsiders. Outsiders were likely to despise you. We were vigilant about that in ways that have much more to do with living in poverty among a less respected class of people than any reality i lived on a daily basis. In fact, i was very privileged in my home town. i lived in a small house in the nicest suburb. i had educated parents doing a job that gave them some recognition -- for a while my dad was the high school basketball coach -- the town's only high school. i was an only child and felt pretty safe. i wandered around the neighborhood and the woods freely (it was the sixties). i had a good good life.

But i have had to tame that reaction to other people "mugging" me that causes my inner city students to get in fights with one another all the time. i have a lot of those same assumptions in my bones -- about the world looking down on me and mine.

i know that my friend whose parents worked their way up to great security and wealth from relatively lower middle class roots -- that their family is riddled with anxiety about losing it all. The people she went to college with -- at an elite college -- were not raised that way.

Class is, IMO, the primary prism through which we see the world.

[AtLast]

Class is determinative in ways that people constantly underestimate. Two and three generations in the upper middle class does not really turn you into a member of the upper middle class. It takes a long time to learn and unlearn the way of looking at the world that your social class created in you.


This so powerfully part of my experience and so much a part of the lens I look through. I sometimes have a good chuckle with the theory of upward mobility.

Often, I think of sayings like ... you can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl....

Or, you can give the working-poor class immigrant garbage man's daughter an education and upward social mobility, but can't take the immigrant garbage man's working-poor class out of the daughter. I don't know if this always serves me well. I do know, I am stuck with it. Yet, there is more for my family generations to work through.


Class is, IMO, the primary prism through which we see the world.

Yup, the primary prism.

[JustJo]

Class is very real. It's not just in our heads. It's who you know, who your parents know. It's the assumptions and categories you were taught as a child. There are things they know exist in the world for them, realities they accept as stable, that i have a hard time even believing in.

There are some things they don't have that my African American friend from Flint, Michigan has. My friend's family never ever disowns or cuts out a family member. They may be in jail. They may be queer (which is not approved of), but they are always welcome home. Their behavior is less important than the fact that they are family. They do not have to prove anything to anyone to be accepted. i have not found that to be true sometimes for people raised in the upper middle classes.

We enact class all the time. It's impossible to think outside of class without doing lots and lots of work. And we injure ourselves and others with assumptions and fears about class. Not necessarily brutally. i know lots of proud working class people. i think that if people are not desperately poor and they fit in with the people around them, they are as likely to be happy as anyone else.

Class does not determine happiness or satisfaction with life. But it is ever-present. It is relentless. Much harder to see outside of than racism, sexism, and homophobia -- although those are tough.

Class is determinative in ways that people constantly underestimate. Two and three generations in the upper middle class does not really turn you into a member of the upper middle class. It takes a long time to learn and unlearn the way of looking at the world that your social class created in you.

My parents came from world that distrusted outsiders. Outsiders were likely to despise you. We were vigilant about that in ways that have much more to do with living in poverty among a less respected class of people than any reality i lived on a daily basis. In fact, i was very privileged in my home town. i lived in a small house in the nicest suburb. i had educated parents doing a job that gave them some recognition -- for a while my dad was the high school basketball coach -- the town's only high school. i was an only child and felt pretty safe. i wandered around the neighborhood and the woods freely (it was the sixties). i had a good good life.

But i have had to tame that reaction to other people "mugging" me that causes my inner city students to get in fights with one another all the time. i have a lot of those same assumptions in my bones -- about the world looking down on me and mine.

i know that my friend whose parents worked their way up to great security and wealth from relatively lower middle class roots -- that their family is riddled with anxiety about losing it all. The people she went to college with -- at an elite college -- were not raised that way.

Class is, IMO, the primary prism through which we see the world.

As much as I might wish that what you say isn't true...I am inclined to agree with you.

I grew up somewhere below working class. We were that "deserving poor" family that was the recipient of the basket of food from the PTA ladies at Thanksgiving. Yes, my mother worked but haphazardly...because she was more focused on other enterprises that were important to her, but that left us unsupervised and dependent on the salvation army for clothes and the kindness of the parents of friends for normal "kid things" like trips to the movies or other outings.

I lived most of my childhood in a one-bedroom apartment...we lived 6 months without any living room furniture (until we found a rather startling orange couch at the curb one evening)...we were evicted a few times. We didn't own a TV. I never owned new clothes until I could buy them myself. My mother was also "too proud" (her words) to accept the "charity" of food stamps or welfare...so we just did without. Friends whose mothers collected welfare lived much better than we did. I don't say this as a "pity me"...just to illustrate the root of my perspective.

What I did learn, very young, was to work. To work hard, and to work long hours. I got my first babysitting jobs at age 10, my first "real" job at 15. I had a full time job by the time I was 16...and have worked ever since. I have always supported myself (and then my son), without assistance...even from husbands.

I also figured out that education was the only pathway that I could see out of poverty. I worked full time and went to college... getting a BA. That helped. I kept working. Other stuff intervened...and it was 20 years before I could go back to school for my masters. I got my MBA and things changed again, for the better.

I am now a little cog in a medium-sized corporate wheel and I love it. I like my work. I like the appreciation of my boss. I like my teammates. I love that I work from home.

But...here's the deal. I may have advanced degrees and all of the technical credentials for the job, but I will still never be senior mangement. I don't come from the same place those folks come from. I don't see the world the same way. I don't know the things and the people they do. They appreciate my creativity and my work...but they know I am not one of them, just as I know it.

Technically, I am middle class. My income puts me in that quartile. I have a college education. I live in a relatively affluent suburb in a top-rated school district. I drive a newer car. We go on a vacation every year.

I don't feel middle class though. I feel like a poor person with some money.

I tried to find the post and couldn't....but someone posted here about their food issues. Empty cupboards or a bare refrigerator will send me into an emotional tail spin. I will and can budget anywhere...except at the grocery store. I buy the expensive stuff there....fresh berries, dry-aged beef, the really good olive oil. These are the things that hold my old poverty mentality at bay. Doesn't make sense...but it's what's real for me.

The primary difference that I see is that the people I know who grew up middle or upper class appear to feel secure in their place in the world. They, at least appear, to have the sense that things will always be okay. If things go wrong for them, they have backup in family. It's not entitlement exactly....but just a feeling of mastery or rightness. Not sure if I'm putting that well...

What I feel is nothing like that. It comes from having lived on the edge for my entire youth...and of having only myself to depend on ever since. I feel like my survival (and my son's) is dependent on my education, my work, my vigilance. If I falter, we are screwed. I trust my own ability to survive almost anything (short of nuclear war) because I know how to work, how to get along, and how to make a living no matter what comes. That's a weird kind of security of its own....but it's different from the security that comes from growing up with enough.

[Greyson]

Speaking of Class, Privilege and Socail Markers.....


______________________________________________

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/opinion/12douthat.html?hp

NY Times

July 11, 2010

The Class War We Need

By ROSS DOUTHAT

The rich are different from you and me. They know how to game the system.

That’s one interpretation, at least, of last week’s news that Americans with million-dollar mortgages are defaulting at almost twice the rate of the typical homeowner. It suggests an infuriating scenario in which the average American slaves away to keep Wells Fargo or Bank of America off his back, while fat cats and high fliers cut their losses and sail off to the next investment opportunity.

That isn’t exactly what’s happening, most likely. Just because you have a million-dollar mortgage doesn’t make you a millionaire, and a lot of the fat-cat defaulters probably aren’t that fat anymore. Chances are they’re more like Teresa and Joe Giudice from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” tacky reality-TV climbers who recently filed for bankruptcy after their decadent lifestyle turned out to be a debt-enabled fantasy.

Still, watching the Giudices sashay through their onyx-encrusted mansion, and knowing that thousands of similarly profligate homeowners are simply walking away from their debts, it’s easy to succumb to a little class-warrior fantasizing. (Pitchforks, tar, feathers ... that sort of thing.)

The trick is to channel those impulses in a constructive direction. The left-wing instinct, when faced with high-rolling irresponsibility, is usually to call for tax increases on the rich. But the problem, here and elsewhere, isn’t exactly that we tax high rollers’ incomes too lightly. It’s that we subsidize their irresponsibility too heavily — underwriting their bad bets and bailing out their follies. The class warfare we need is a conservative class warfare, which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out.

Consider the spread that the Giudices currently occupy (pending potential foreclosure proceedings, of course). The first million of its reported $1.7 million price tag is presumably covered by the federal mortgage-interest tax deduction. Intended to boost middle-class homebuyers, this deduction has gradually turned into a huge tax break for the affluent, with most of the benefits flowing to homeowners with cash income over $100,000. In much of the country, it’s a McMansion subsidy, whose costs to the federal Treasury are covered by the tax dollars of Americans who either rent or own more modest homes.

This policy is typical of the way the federal government does business. In case after case, Washington’s web of subsidies and tax breaks effectively takes money from the middle class and hands it out to speculators and have-mores. We subsidize drug companies, oil companies, agribusinesses disguised as “family farms” and “clean energy” firms that aren’t energy-efficient at all. We give tax breaks to immensely profitable corporations that don’t need the money and boondoggles that wouldn’t exist without government favoritism.

And we do more of it every day. Take Barack Obama’s initiative to double U.S. exports in the next five years. As The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney points out, it involves the purest sort of corporate welfare: We’re lending money to foreign governments or companies so that they’ll buy from Boeing and Pfizer and Archer Daniels Midland. That’s good news for those companies’ stockholders and C.E.O.’s. But the money to pay for it ultimately comes out of middle-class pocketbooks.

This isn’t just a corporate welfare problem. The same pattern is at work in our entitlement system, which is lurching toward bankruptcy in part because of how much Medicare and Social Security pay to seniors who could get along without assistance. Instead of a safety net that protects the elderly from poverty, we have a system in which the American taxpayer is effectively underwriting cruises and tee times.

All of this ought to be grist for a kind of “small-government egalitarianism,” in the economist Edward Glaeser’s useful phrase, that seeks to shrink government by attacking Washington’s wasteful spending on the well-connected. And sometimes conservative politicians make moves in this direction. President George W. Bush’s Tax Reform Commission proposed sharply reducing the mortgage-interest deduction. House Minority Leader John Boehner, to his great credit, recently floated the possibility of means-testing Social Security. Many Republican senators have been staunch critics of corporate welfare.

In the age of Barack Obama, many rank-and-file conservatives have been more upset about redistribution of a different sort — the kind that takes money from the prosperous and “spreads the wealth” (as Obama put it, in his famous confrontation with Joe the Plumber) down the income ladder.

This kind of spending can be problematic. But conservatives need to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn’t from the successful to the poor. It’s from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich.

[AtLast]

Yes, I was listening to some reporting about this over the weekend. Makes one give pause!

Speaking of Class, Privilege and Socail Markers.....


______________________________________________

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/opinion/12douthat.html?hp

NY Times

July 11, 2010

The Class War We Need

By ROSS DOUTHAT

The rich are different from you and me. They know how to game the system.

That’s one interpretation, at least, of last week’s news that Americans with million-dollar mortgages are defaulting at almost twice the rate of the typical homeowner. It suggests an infuriating scenario in which the average American slaves away to keep Wells Fargo or Bank of America off his back, while fat cats and high fliers cut their losses and sail off to the next investment opportunity.

That isn’t exactly what’s happening, most likely. Just because you have a million-dollar mortgage doesn’t make you a millionaire, and a lot of the fat-cat defaulters probably aren’t that fat anymore. Chances are they’re more like Teresa and Joe Giudice from “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” tacky reality-TV climbers who recently filed for bankruptcy after their decadent lifestyle turned out to be a debt-enabled fantasy.

Still, watching the Giudices sashay through their onyx-encrusted mansion, and knowing that thousands of similarly profligate homeowners are simply walking away from their debts, it’s easy to succumb to a little class-warrior fantasizing. (Pitchforks, tar, feathers ... that sort of thing.)

The trick is to channel those impulses in a constructive direction. The left-wing instinct, when faced with high-rolling irresponsibility, is usually to call for tax increases on the rich. But the problem, here and elsewhere, isn’t exactly that we tax high rollers’ incomes too lightly. It’s that we subsidize their irresponsibility too heavily — underwriting their bad bets and bailing out their follies. The class warfare we need is a conservative class warfare, which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out.

Consider the spread that the Giudices currently occupy (pending potential foreclosure proceedings, of course). The first million of its reported $1.7 million price tag is presumably covered by the federal mortgage-interest tax deduction. Intended to boost middle-class homebuyers, this deduction has gradually turned into a huge tax break for the affluent, with most of the benefits flowing to homeowners with cash income over $100,000. In much of the country, it’s a McMansion subsidy, whose costs to the federal Treasury are covered by the tax dollars of Americans who either rent or own more modest homes.

This policy is typical of the way the federal government does business. In case after case, Washington’s web of subsidies and tax breaks effectively takes money from the middle class and hands it out to speculators and have-mores. We subsidize drug companies, oil companies, agribusinesses disguised as “family farms” and “clean energy” firms that aren’t energy-efficient at all. We give tax breaks to immensely profitable corporations that don’t need the money and boondoggles that wouldn’t exist without government favoritism.

And we do more of it every day. Take Barack Obama’s initiative to double U.S. exports in the next five years. As The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney points out, it involves the purest sort of corporate welfare: We’re lending money to foreign governments or companies so that they’ll buy from Boeing and Pfizer and Archer Daniels Midland. That’s good news for those companies’ stockholders and C.E.O.’s. But the money to pay for it ultimately comes out of middle-class pocketbooks.

This isn’t just a corporate welfare problem. The same pattern is at work in our entitlement system, which is lurching toward bankruptcy in part because of how much Medicare and Social Security pay to seniors who could get along without assistance. Instead of a safety net that protects the elderly from poverty, we have a system in which the American taxpayer is effectively underwriting cruises and tee times.

All of this ought to be grist for a kind of “small-government egalitarianism,” in the economist Edward Glaeser’s useful phrase, that seeks to shrink government by attacking Washington’s wasteful spending on the well-connected. And sometimes conservative politicians make moves in this direction. President George W. Bush’s Tax Reform Commission proposed sharply reducing the mortgage-interest deduction. House Minority Leader John Boehner, to his great credit, recently floated the possibility of means-testing Social Security. Many Republican senators have been staunch critics of corporate welfare.

In the age of Barack Obama, many rank-and-file conservatives have been more upset about redistribution of a different sort — the kind that takes money from the prosperous and “spreads the wealth” (as Obama put it, in his famous confrontation with Joe the Plumber) down the income ladder.

This kind of spending can be problematic. But conservatives need to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn’t from the successful to the poor. It’s from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich.

[asphaltcowboi]

this is just my opinion and my thoughts.
being raised wanting for nothing but expected to work and make something of ourselfs. just balrey got my GED i managed to retire comfertable from a union back breaking job.
i feel class has to do with more with a persons morals then a persons check book.
also touching on the privlages of the rich.. i know right now because our country is struggling financialy many that do have money are being audited and dinged by the IRS in many ways that were never an issue in the past.
just random thought.

[Corkey]

Yes, I was listening to some reporting about this over the weekend. Makes one give pause!


Anyone see me taking a cruse, or having tea time? Gives me pause alright, like if they do take away medicare and reduce my social security, just how am I going to pay my way in the world, or how am I going to pay for the prescriptions I need, or that next surgery that is coming down the line. Keep your hands off social security and medicare and stop paying for 2 wars. That is the friggen answer.

[Venus007]

I grew up very poor, not just my generation but for many extending back to our country of origin, Ireland, where my great grandpa was a worker in a coal mine and before that were tenant farmers on English land. I always heard “Just because you are poor doesn’t mean you can’t be clean” like a mantra growing up. I know it is cliché (lace curtain Irish) but we ALWAYS had beautiful curtains and it was practically a moral obligation to keep up appearances. Oddly enough one of the worst insults that could be heaped on someone’s head was that they had gone “Above their raising”, meaning that someone was putting on airs or acting as if they belonged to a higher social class than they did. Education and physicians were viewed with GREAT suspicion. Education because it would get you nowhere since a good woman just needs to be able to raise good god fearing children anyway and education pulls you away from god. Physicians were suspect because not only were they expensive but also they didn’t know what the heck they were doing and made too much money to be trusted.

Money was fleeting and to be spent while you had it and it was irresponsible and absolutely selfish to save since there was never enough to cover basic expenses and bills. Needless to say one of my core struggles is with money and my relationship to it. Also money and assets were to be shared with your family, period. No matter what you had it wasn’t yours it was ours, everyone was expected to throw whatever assets into the family pot (literally and figuratively).

The only acceptable way to get more money was to marry well, and even then you were expected to behave yourself appropriately and not get trapped into that higher class better-than-everyone-else behavior and of course marrying well also meant that the new wealth needed to be used to help the other people in the family.

I was shown not to be too flashy, not to dream unrealistically, not to save, not to dress too well, not to have too many books, that women only got ahead by aligning themselves with desirable husbands, family matters above all and the wealthy are NOT to be trusted because they are inherently different from the “salt of the earth” regular people and that god was the ultimate source of everything from food to healing.

I, personally, don't subscribe to these ideas any longer, but it has taken A LOT of work and way too much money in therapy to get to the heart of it and move beyond it. Even so, my base position is still reflective of my class, even after all that work.

Alright I am rambling here, I think. I have a lot of ideas bouncing around about this but I thought I would get started somewhere and voila.

[Nat]

iADtX2DJgpw

[rlin]

damn... twice i have written really long and heartfelt posts and had to erase them because they were just too revealing...

i need to say something to address this topic... it has impacted my life this year more than ever in my existence...

i should mention that i dont think class has anything to do with money... or income...

class and the distinctions that are very real related to it are extremely painful when you are on the lesser end...

it has an amazing ability to make your entire self worth go right out the fukn window...

i have learned my place i think... and that pisses me off more than anything else... i never would have believed that i could imagine that there was a 'place' that i couldnt rise above...

wtf.... its a process...

[Nat]

QRaskxVjkXc

eS6E_BEtSgE

[AmazonWoman1]

Congratulations on your promotion.I think what is really going on is people were raised with the Bible.In it there are references to the money changers in the temple as well as the eye of the needle comment about the rich entering heaven.This all was done to make for more compliant sheep like people.The eye comment actually refers to a very small gate used in forts for entries at night of people.The camel would have to crawl to enter.The shame about money stems from this.It was portrayed as a bad thing to have money.Our fables & myths control what behavior we want to see continue or stop.

[Venus007]

You can't imagine how many time I heard:
"The love of money is the root of all evil" 1st Timothy 6:10
The story of Ananias and Sapphira was a huge one too.*(link to the story if you don't know it) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananias_and_Sapphira)

It was assumed a way that you would show your gratitude to (and deflect the coming catastrophe (rare gift without curse)) was to give a gift to the church if you had a windfall or married well.

I need to think about this more

Congratulations on your promotion.I think what is really going on is people were raised with the Bible.In it there are references to the money changers in the temple as well as the eye of the needle comment about the rich entering heaven.This all was done to make for more compliant sheep like people.The eye comment actually refers to a very small gate used in forts for entries at night of people.The camel would have to crawl to enter.The shame about money stems from this.It was portrayed as a bad thing to have money.Our fables & myths control what behavior we want to see continue or stop.