Class Lives

Stories from across Our Economic Divide

Chuck Collins, Jennifer Ladd, Maynard Seider, Felice Yeskel, Chuck Collins, Jennifer Ladd, Maynard Seider, Felice Yeskel

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780801479656
• eBook ISBN: 9780801454523
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Class Lives is an anthology of narratives dramatizing the lived experience of class in America. It includes forty original essays from authors who represent a range of classes, genders, races, ethnicities, ages, and occupations across the United States. Born into poverty, working class, the middle class, and the owning class—and every place in between—the contributors describe their class journeys in narrative form, recounting one or two key stories that illustrate their growing awareness of class and their place, changing or stable, within the class system.The stories in Class Lives are both gripping and moving. One contributor grows up in hunger and as an adult becomes an advocate for the poor and homeless. Another acknowledges the truth that her working-class father's achievements afforded her and the rest of the family access to people with power. A gifted child from a working-class home soon understands that intelligence is a commodity but finds his background incompatible with his aspirations and so attempts to divide his life into separate worlds.Together, these essays form a powerful narrative about the experience of class and the importance of learning about classism, class cultures, and the intersections of class, race, and gender. Class Lives will be a helpful resource for students, teachers, sociologists, diversity trainers, activists, and a general audience. It will leave readers with an appreciation of the poignancy and power of class and the journeys that Americans grapple with on a daily basis.

PART I

Poor and Low Income

TO BE POOR IN THE UNITED STATES OR CANADA is not just to be faced with material need on a daily basis, to be “born into the culture of hunger,” to be homeless, or to live without indoor plumbing or electricity. With it comes negative judgment from others and feelings of shame. As one contributor put it: “I understood everything— that I was less, and they were more.” Those feelings lead to attempts to hide one’s stigmatized condition, while living in fear that one will be found out.

The number of people who are officially poor in the United States, by conservative federal standards, continues to rise and now stands at over 16 percent of the population. For children, the figure is even higher, at over 21 percent.1

Most of the contributors in this section were born poor, but one, Wendy Williams, became poor through divorce and a stepparent’s unemployment. While all have moved out of poverty, the memories and feelings of their early years remain with them. For one, “Time and love and success have come my way, but I still feel marked and conspicuous.” For another, “I think about class all of the time.”

The stories have much in common for these seven women, whether they came of age in the 1950s or the 1980s. Often the clothes and shoes they wore became the subject of ridicule from young classmates (and even, in one case, from a teacher) and marked them as being “less than.” Or it could be the different-colored lunch ticket they used at school, or the lack of home address on the form, as there was no category labeled “homeless.”

For those born without white-skin privilege, issues of racism added to the class stigma they faced. The complications increased for one Mexican American woman, Geneva Reynaga-Abiko, who, while growing up poor in California, was accused of being “rich” by her extended family back in Mexico. Later, when she became a highly educated and successful professional, her own family accused her of “being white” for leaving the neighborhood to live in a more upscale setting. As Geneva observes, “I often feel guilty for not returning to Fontana, where much of my family still lives,” yet she is “confident that … they are unconsciously happy that I have been able to leave the crime-ridden city where we were all born…. I am sure they are proud of me.”

Such ambivalent feelings mark the upward mobility of many of these women. As with Geneva, it may come with visits to family members who have not done as well as their daughters. Even at the height of a career as a widely recognized organizer, leader, and author, Linda Stout admits that “even now, sometimes one person’s classist attitude can throw me back to that place of believing I’m not good enough, not smart enough, or strong enough.”

We are reminded that these seven women are not a random or representative sample of women born into poverty, as we learn about their journeys to higher education, well-regarded careers, and, for most of them, adult material security. They gain their own strength in various ways: from loving parents, from supportive extended families, from peers who understood their pain, and from kindly teachers and cafeteria workers. They have learned resilience and resourcefulness. As Fisher Lavell writes about her rural Canadian family, “Survivorship is a gift of my poverty-class upbringing. Resiliency, the ability to take the blows and come up swinging. Empathy, generosity, an open heart; things you acquire from being rejected, doing without, and carrying a burden alone.” For Linda Stout, a journey to Nicaragua helped her shift her understanding of poverty and to strengthen herself. There she “met people who acknowledged poverty, but who were proud of who they were. They were revolutionaries who knew that the poverty they suffered was a problem of the system—not their personal fault. I came back from that trip with a determination to ‘come out of the closet’ as a poor person.”

And so we can read the many stories of those who have come out of the closet, who now live their authentic lives and engage in the struggle to fight classism. Paradoxically, while their early experiences, often humiliations, stay with them at the level of feeling and remembrance, these experiences have also contributed to the consciousness they have developed and the progressive careers they have chosen.

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1. U.S. Census, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance in the United States in 2012,” http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2012/index.html.

Cleaning Up the Trash

Fighting Shame

LINDA STOUT

I grew up very poor in the rural South. My father was a tenant farmer, and by the time I was five my mother had become completely disabled from a car wreck. I didn’t really realize I was poor … at first. My parents were very loving, and I had a joyful life, working from the age of six, while at the same time being allowed to be a kid. I enjoyed my private time with my father when I got up an hour or two early to work in the fields before going to school. We didn’t have a bathroom or running water, but I don’t remember being dirty. My greatest joy was when we would have a warm summer rain and my mother would send us outside, naked with a bar of soap.

It was only when I started school that the differences began to show up. Another boy and I got made fun of a lot on the bus, especially by older kids. I never really understood why, but knew that the other boy was always dirty and felt that somehow that was the reason they lumped us together. I thought anyone who lived in a brick house, no matter how small and run-down, was rich. We lived the whole time I was growing up in a small ten-foot-by-forty-foot trailer parked on other people’s land, so my dream was always to live in a house.

My other dream was to be a teacher. I started playing at being a teacher at the age of six with all my cousins and younger sisters. I would make a desk out of a cardboard box and then make them sit and listen to me teach. My mother told me I had to do really good at school if I wanted to become a teacher. And unlike many kids in my situation, my parents were able to make sure we stayed in school during harvest times.

I loved going to school and learning to read, so, at the beginning, I excelled. In first grade they moved me and five or six other students ahead to second grade. We were still considered first graders, but because we were able to read, they would combine us with the next grade up. I did that until I reached the third grade, sitting in a fourth-grade class. The teacher openly ridiculed some of the students, particularly those of us who were poor. She felt I was way too “uppity” for my position in life, and one day she brought me in front of the class to do long division. When I told her she had never showed us how to do long division and I couldn’t do the problem, she mocked me in a singsong voice and told me I would never go to college or be a teacher. The other students joined her laughter. For many years I never told anyone what happened. I was so ashamed, and I began to believe that I could not be a good student. My grades went from A+ to average.

That same year, my best friend, Lou Jean, told me she wasn’t allowed to come to my house, because her father said I was “white trash.” I didn’t understand what it meant, but I knew it was something to be ashamed of. I would spend hours obsessively making sure there was not one bit of trash anywhere around our house. Like for many people who lived in the country and in poverty, there was no such thing as trash pickup. We carried our trash out into a pile in the woods and burned what we could.

It wasn’t until high school that my mother said to me, “If you want to go to college, you will have to make straight A’s and get a scholarship.” Luckily, my freshman year, I had a math teacher who believed in me and encouraged me to move out of the basic classes and into a college track. In order to get the credits I needed, I had to double up on many courses. The guidance counselor tried to tell me it was impossible and that I would not be allowed to do it. But between my math teacher, my mother, and my newfound determination, I persevered, graduating at the top of my class and getting a full scholarship into college.

After going to college for a year, I had to drop out because tuition went up $500 over what my scholarship covered. My father and I went to several storefront loan companies to try to get a loan, but because my parents didn’t have $500 in collateral, we were unable to get the loan. I dropped out of college, moved into a trailer with several other women, and went to work in the textile mill.

I carried the shame of poverty with me throughout the next several years. I believed the messages that society gave me that if I was poor, somehow something must be wrong with me. I started hiding the fact I grew up poor and tried to pretend that I was “middle class.” I began to live a lie that made me feel even worse about myself, and my self-esteem became even lower. I went on to become a secretary and eventually went to work for a civil rights attorney. It was a fit for me, having grown up Quaker, and I began to learn about civil rights and get involved in the women’s and peace movements.

I suffered some of the worst classism in the progressive movement, because I, unlike most of the activists, did not have a broad base of knowledge about the world, did not have a college education, and, most of all, “talked funny” in my Appalachian southern dialect. It was not the usual kind of overt classism that I had experienced in school, and I now know it was not deliberate. But there was always an expectation that everyone in the group had gone to college. A common question was, “Where did you go to college?” or “What was your major?” I was too ashamed to answer that I had not gone to college and would give the name of the college that I briefly attended.

There was also an understanding that I was not privy to what a leader or trainer was. I knew I did not fit that definition because I didn’t speak “right” or didn’t know enough by the standards held up to us in the various organizing trainings I attended. I was discouraged from thinking I could become an organizer or a leader. When I mentioned wanting to apply for an organizing job in the national peace movement, even friends who were activists discouraged me, saying the movement was looking for specific kinds of skills (implying that I did not have those skills). When I volunteered to speak to a local group of ministers, I was told by a person in the group they felt another man who was a doctor would be more accepted as a speaker. When I went to workshops on organizing, I would leave feeling like even more of a failure, because I didn’t fit the “ideal” of what a speaker or organizer was. The trainers used language and ways of being that were totally unfamiliar to me, and I began to believe that the peace movement was not for people like me.

In the end, I did become an organizer. Other southern organizers who worked with poor people recognized my passion and my skills, and believed in me. I still carried the shame of poverty and hid the fact I did not have a college education, and often would not admit to not knowing things that everyone else took for granted. For example, I remember once admitting in a local peace group that I did not know that the Japanese were held in internment camps in the United States in World War II. People were incredulous and laughed at me. They did not understand that I grew up where I was not taught these things— that my public high school substituted fundamentalist Bible class for U.S. history. So I learned to silence myself and not ask questions, pretending I knew things that I didn’t.

I became a different person—a powerful person—when I was working with poor people. I realized that my voice had a place. I was successful in organizing in my home community—a community where many outside organizers had failed to make any headway. We began to win real victories and make real political change in our communities. I found that poor people really did care about peace and justice when it was talked about in a way they understood. I found my voice and my power, and yet I still felt the shame and powerlessness of poverty in settings outside my own community.

It was only when I went to Nicaragua that I saw people who lived in severe poverty with many similarities to the way I grew up, but who felt very differently about it. Talking with organizers in Nicaragua helped me understand poverty better, and my beliefs began to change. In Nicaragua, I met people who acknowledged poverty, but who were proud of who they were. They were revolutionaries who knew that the poverty they suffered was a problem of the system—not their personal fault. I came back from that trip with a determination to “come out of the closet” as a poor person.

As I began to talk about the experiences of growing up poor and trying to overcome my shame that somehow it was my fault, many other people would come up to me admitting they carried the same shame and secrecy. Together we worked to shift our consciousness and helped each other rid ourselves of the classism we had internalized. The hardest part was that my mother could never handle me talking about growing up in poverty. She carried so much shame and guilt that when I would talk about it in front of her, she would say, “We tried to be good parents.” I could never help her understand that it was not her fault. Nor was it the fault of my father, who worked all his life sixty or more hours a week. My mother died carrying her shame with her.

It took many years for me to overcome all the messages that society tells us about poor people—messages that become part of our own beliefs about ourselves. And, even now, sometimes one person’s classist attitude can throw me back to that place of believing I’m not good enough, not smart enough, or not strong enough to be an organizer, an author, or a leader. And yet, I am all of those things, and some days I actually believe it about myself.

North American Peasant

FISHER LAVELL

“Mom?”

“Mm hm?”

“Why don’t people like us?”

That was me, about twelve years old, sitting at the kitchen table coloring a picture of a bird-dog pup. And my mom over at the sink, doing some kind of work, maybe peeling potatoes or doing dishes or washing plastic bread bags to be hung on the clothesline and reused many times over. That was the 1960s, so we didn’t have indoor plumbing, and she would have had to carry the water in pails from our neighbor’s place a city block away. Of course, we weren’t in the city but in a small prairie town in northern Manitoba, Canada.

“What do you mean, people don’t like us? People don’t not like us.”

“Sure they do.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. Just people. People uptown. People at church.”

“Well, people at church don’t not like us. They like us. They love us, just like Jesus taught. Love everybody. You know that.”

“Well, I don’t feel that they love us. I don’t feel that they like us. I feel that they don’t like us.”

“Well, I don’t know why you’d say that. They like...

Table of contents

• Introduction: Caviar, College, Coupons, and Cheese
• PART I. POOR AND LOW INCOME
• PART II. WORKING CLASS
• PART III. MIDDLE CLASS
• PART IV. OWNING CLASS
• PART V. MIXED CLASS
• Afterword: The Power of Story
• About the Contributors
• Resources
• About Class Action