[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