Class, Privilege, and Social Markers
 

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

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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?