Class: some thoughts
I’m middle class; I’m privileged. I know this, and I appreciate the privileges and the luck that I have had. I feel guilty about them, though it’s not like I could really change the fact that I do have a safety net, barring cutting myself off from my family entirely. And even that wouldn’t work, really, since they’d still be there, and presumably if I killed them all, I’d be safe in jail.
But I read things like this:
The second thing, though, is that, I do not entirely trust someone who’s never held a shit job that he or she needed to keep in order to make the rent or buy food. A summer job making photocopies in the law offices of daddy’s best friend does not count. Waiting tables three nights a week and weekends so you can pay the rent and eat while you do an unpaid internship does. I can eventually overcome my mistrust, sometimes, but, to me, if you’ve never had a shit job ever in your life, then you’ve experienced a fair amount of privilege, and chances are pretty good that you’re unaware of that privilege. You’ve never had the joy of someone treating you like shit, simply because of the work that you’re doing, and knowing that you can’t really object too much because you need that job. The feeling that goes along with that is neither hopeful nor positive.
Now, I agree that if you’ve never had a shit job, you’ve been very privileged (as well as quite lucky). I’ve never had a shit job. I’ve had shitty jobs that I needed to pay the rent, but they were shitty jobs that required at least a university degree. (I couldn’t have taken a proper shit job at the time, since I was in the US.) And I didn’t need a shit job before that because I chose (deliberately, for financial reasons — but I am lucky to have been able to make that choice, to have a place I could live in while in school without paying rent, the luck of being a Canadian and living somewhere with low tuition) to stay home during undergrad, and then my jobs were all office or researchy jobs, which paid enough. And so on.
So it’s been a combination of privilege and luck, and some choices I made, which were informed by both of those. (I also never needed to worry about health care.)
There are a lot of people who don’t see the privilege they have, who think that they succeeded by nothing but their own hard work. And, of course, I did succeed by my hard work, in part; I did work hard, and I wouldn’t've managed had I not — we’re middle class, not super rich: I didn’t have any jobs I could have just walked into, the safety net wasn’t *that* big. But I had a leg up already, and to think that this played no role would be foolish.
The concern about having enough money to pay rent and food over summer in grad school was, even at that, a privileged sort of fear: I knew I’d have money in September again; I knew, too, that I could have asked my parents for money, or my grandparents, or even the department. (As it turns out, I had jobs and didn’t need to.)
And yet I want to say: don’t write all of us off so quickly. Many of us in the middle class have had parents who had on years and off, know the fear of not having enough money. It’s a less acute fear, certainly; there’s safety. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to work, don’t understand anything about having this privilege. (Especially if you’ve seen what it’s like to be really rich. The gulf is shocking, frightening.)
Add that, when I’m hanging with someone who’s never had a shit job, I make damn sure to be the one who does the talking (and leaves the tip).
Just like it is wrong to assume that if you’re poor, you’re lazy or stupid or both, it’s wrong to assume that if you’re not, you’re heartless and rude, untrustworthy until you prove that it’s okay, you’re good. I’m exaggerating this, I know: but I am not quite so insulated, and to a great extent the reason I am safe is because I am Canadian, not because I am rich.
I am polite to waiters. I leave good tips. If you’re impolite to service people and cheap with tips, it’s not because you’re privileged, it’s because you’re an ass.
I don’t want to be feeling bad or wrong for being lucky with money, lucky where I was born, lucky with my family, and yet I always feel this defense mechanism, as shown in this post: see! I’m a good person! I understand, a bit. (I don’t entirely, obviously: I couldn’t possibly.)
This is poorly written, I know; I’m not getting my point across. I know that there is class. I know I am lucky. I know that it’s important to make sure people see where they are privileged. I know I am responding to blog posts, personal things, where people take all sort of rhetorical stances (this is one, too).
So I will leave this incomplete and inarticulate.
March 14th, 2005 at 2:45 am
I hear you. I have had some really crappy minimum-wage jobs. The worst was delivering for a deli (minimum wage, no tips, and a really crappy boss who would “forget” to give me my paycheck at the end of each week, so my MOTHER would have to march into the deli on Fridays to bully my boss into paying up!). I had folks be nice to me, and others yell at me for late deliveries (boss’s fault for agreeing to accept deliveries 20 miles away, and he’d yell at me for not speeding to make the delivery in 15 minutes, round trip!).
And when I was finishing grad school, I had a really horrid job that required a high school diploma and the ability to make the good ol’ boys look intelligent (not an easy task) while fending off their roving hands.
But even now, when I’m in that low-income category of “The IRS actually feels sorry for me,” even though I’ve had my share of truly crappy jobs, the post you quote kind of bugs me. It suggests that the wealthy can’t be trusted to do the right thing, and that someone who never had a crappy job isn’t trustworthy. What, someone has to suffer in order to be a decent human being who can be trusted to treat others well?
My mom, for example, has not held a horrible, horrible job. But she’s a stunning example of compassion. Who lobbies for the church custodian to get a raise? My mom. Who buys his family school clothes at the start of each school year, and pays for their music lessons? Yup, her again. Need someone to raise $3K in a week to pay single moms’ electricity bill during a particularly cold winter? Same lady, who has never held a “shit job,” and who tips 20% no matter what the service is like, “because we don’t know what kind of a day she’s had.” But she has never apologized for her lack of suffering. She has too many other things to think about. Is she a saint? Nope…human like the rest of us. But she refuses to be burdened with “middle-class-privilege guilt,” which is how she has the energy to work for change.
OK, rant over. Thanks for providing the forum for this issue.
March 14th, 2005 at 9:20 am
Good post. I agree with you, and as someone who has never had a really lousy job but has ALWAYS worked hard and tried to work for positive change, I too resent being judged on the basis of my work or economic history rather than how I actually act, speak, and feel. (Frankly, the friend of mine who acts the worst to waiters is someone who was born in a pretty poor family and clawed his way up into wealth - he acts like a jerk in restaurants to show he is “superior”. I don’t think that’s so common, but it happens. The point is - judge not.)
March 14th, 2005 at 11:46 am
I was going to say exactly what Beth said: having held a shit job doesn’t guarantee that one is going to be nice to minimum-wage workers. Some background: both of my parents grew up in working-class families, and both held shit jobs. I grew up at the high end of middle class (though not upper-middle-class), and my mom’s brother’s family is wealthy by any standards. I have never had a crappy job.
My dad and uncle, despite having grown up poor-ish, seem to have learned nothing from the experience. Watching my dad deal with people in the service industry is downright upsetting. He’ll cop an attitude when they did nothing wrong (seriously, why are you yelling at the woman at the ticket counter when your flight is delayed? Or at the waiter when your meal is taking too long?), and will talk to them in a way that reminds them (as if they could ever forget) that they are working in lesser jobs than his. And he’s BEEN a waiter. My uncle, meanwhile, seems not to understand that there are people in this world who are not wealthy. I don’t mean “poor” - I mean not wealthy. Once, both of our families were out of town to attend a funeral, and my uncle’s wife asked my mom, in all seriousness, why we hadn’t gotten a hotel room in the penthouse next to theirs. Um, maybe because we’re not about to pay $1000/night to stay in a hotel?
There are aspects of being poor that I can’t relate to, to be sure. So, it’s not out of empathy that I don’t insult waiters and yell at salespeople. It’s out of not being an asshole that I don’t insult waiters and yell at salespeople.
And, what terminal degree said about her mom “refusing to be burdened with middle-class guilt.” Never saw the point in that; I’m not going to apologize for having it pretty damned good. What good would that do? (Also, I’m suspicious of people who pat themselves on the back for recognizing their privilege - what, do they want a cookie for their trouble?) I’m just going to be a decent person instead.
March 14th, 2005 at 12:15 pm
Oh, but I am very good at feeling guilty for all sorts of things: this is the least of the absurd things I feel guilty about. (I didn’t intend to be patting myself on the back, though, and this isn’t something I say to waiters or whatever — “look how nice I’m being to you, even though I’m middle class! Aren’t you grateful that I am being like this! I am so special!”) I am not particularly virtuous: I am polite, and I leave nice tips unless the service was really terrible, which is, really, the minimum, I think. But I’m not bad or untrustworthy, and I’m not blind to privilege, even if bringing this up sounds like I’m expecting praise (or a cookie! I like cookies, and will take them for any or no reason).
I don’t know many people who are terrible to service workers, ex-shit-job-holders or not, though most of the ex-waiters I know are fairly willing to give small tips when the service is terrible.
MS, we seem to have grown up in much the same circumstances, though I was more bottom end of upper middle class. My parents held shit jobs. My mother’s father was a travelling salesman, but, oddly, her sister married very supremely super wealthy and seems to have forgotten that she wasn’t, always. (Her husband, on the other hand, despite having grown up very supremely super wealthy — his is a name that the other superrich recognise — is more understanding, though — well, they’re weird.) I wouldn’t've believed what it’s like to be wealthy if I hadn’t seen a lot of it — it just amazes me.
March 14th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
Just wanted to say that I very much agree with this too. I am thinking about posting my own response to this, but may not take the energy b/c it just gets me annoyed. There are lots of different kinds of privileged classes. Yes, I was raised very middle class, and very privileged, and I acknowledge this and am very grateful. But my parents both came out of the working class. Does this make me “better” or “worse” than someone whose family has been middle/upper class for generations? No, but it does make me different. What about the fact that my parents are both depression babies, not baby boomers? “Middle class” is one of the last great unexamined labels - there’s no one middle class. (I would imagine people who grew up working on a farm and people who grew up in the middle of a city, for instance, are going to be very different kinds of working class.)
Moreover, intellectually I have a big problem with the attitude in the post you cite because it implies that you have to be something to understand it. Which means that I and all historians should hang up our hats and go home. No, I’ve never had the shit job of waiting tables (thank God). It’s true that I am privileged; it doesn’t mean I can’t be aware of that privilege. If we don’t believe that people can learn to understand/empathize with people of different backgrounds to their own, then what exactly are we doing when we talk to each other?
And like you, WA, I run into the thing of trying hard to talk about this without sounding defensive and without sounding like I’m trying to say, “I’m middle class, but at least I’m enlightened!” I mean, I don’t think I’m somehow oppressed by being middle class, but it does get me annoyed when people feel free to snipe about my privileges (for instance, being told that I went to “country club,” not college, because I went to a small private liberal arts school and didn’t have to work to put myself through school. Okay, already, I was lucky - how many times do you want me to say it? Why does it give you the right to make assumptions about me? You don’t know anything about my experience there.) Sorry, that ended up sounding much more defensive than I meant!
March 14th, 2005 at 12:43 pm
PS - I am willing to acknowledge that someone who grows up working class and then finds themselves in (say) academia (b/c that’s what I know) probably encounters a lot more hostile environment than I have, “country club” comment notwithstanding. But I don’t think that therefore justifies making assumptions about my own experience. It kind of reminds me of the finslippy post you linked to, about penis-measuring who’s got the worst pain?
March 14th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
Wolfangel, now I’m thinking that our wealthy relatives probably know each other: mine live in Montreal. (Well, not Montreal proper, but rather that enclave of wealthy angophones that is still part of the megacity.) (And, ack, I’m not accusing YOU of wanting praise - you’re defending yourself against another blogger’s suspicions of you, which is different and entirely understandable.)
Aside - my own family history has given me some perspective on class issues, though not quite the perspective that many of my enlightened classmates at Hip West Coast Grad School supported: I’m two generations removed from a family that took $10 with them on a boat from Poland to settle in Canada. My grandfather was on that boat, and a generation later, he and his wife were making a comfortable (though not lavish) living running their own corner store. I grew up, as I said, at the high end of middle class - my parents are both professionals. Today, I make more money than my mom. So I’m a big believer in class mobility, at least in this country.
March 14th, 2005 at 1:47 pm
NK: I am also not arguing that I have had it *harder* than people who’ve had shit jobs! Certainly I haven’t. And this is a much easier hostility to brush off, and will not cause me that many problems in my life, if it even causes me any. (I was irritated when someone was bitching about having to take out loans in grad school, and I didn’t have to because my parents paid for my car. Well, she didn’t have a car; she was a citizen so paid less taxes; she chose not to work that summer; she chose to use a lot of alcohol, smoke, and take scads of illegal drugs. I mean, sorry, but maybe that’s why you needed money and I didn’t, not because my parents paid for my car so I could visit home. I’m still irritated by this.)
The other part of me wants to say: yes, I’ve been lucky with my jobs, but I’d've traded that luck for luck in other things I’ve not been so lucky with (but this is the penis-measuring contest again). I mean — it makes life *easier* to have money, but it doesn’t make it easy.
I’d never considered the point about history and “live something to understand it”, but it’s another interesting point. Because that’s what we use literature for, too.
MS:If I recall correctly that we share a religion (possibly I am imagining this, since I don’t recall why I think it), then, yes, our wealthy relatives almost certainly know each other (not that they mightn’t otherwise, of course); they also share a city-to-be-again-real-soon. How odd.
Yeah, my grandparents on one side moved here from an internment camp somewhere in the UK — though my grandfather’s family had been wealthy in Germany for a generation (not long-term). I know there’s class mobility, though not to the highest levels (you can marry into it, but — and there are different groups, the French, the English (split up into Jews and Christians) and so on).
And I wasn’t feeling accused, I just was trying to make it clear: because I do feel guilty. I don’t want praise, but I’ll still take that cookie.
March 14th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
Nope, you’re not imagining the shared religion (assuming that that’s the one you’re thinking of, which I assume it is, given the region).
So, in addition to our weatlhy relatives sharing a city and a religion, we might be related by marriage or something. Weeeeiiiiiird….
March 14th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
That is sort of weird, especially since I almost never do well on Jewish geography; to have a probably-hit between two pseudonyms is odd but amusing.
Which region? Westmount isn’t particularly Jewish. Eastern European immigrants with no money in the 40s, on the other hand . . .
March 14th, 2005 at 4:59 pm
Lately there’s been several posts like the one to which you linked. They always trouble me because the insistence on shared experience does nothing but exacerbate class differences because it limits discussion and assumes the worst of one group while idealizing another.
Awareness of others and compassion are greater guarantees of humanity than holding a crap job.
March 14th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
It’s not *that* Jewish, but there’s almost definitely a higher proportion of Jews in Westmount than there is of other minority religious groups.
Small world, this one.
March 14th, 2005 at 10:03 pm
Zh:
There have been some such posts. And perhaps that part also upset me: this isn’t *helping*, saying that not only do people not understand, but they can’t anyways.
And I regret something I said in a comment: the fact is that people can be nice or assholes, and it’s not correlated with how easy or hard their lives have been. I don’t know what makes people compassionate or not, but working as a waiter doesn’t seem to be the necessary & sufficient condition. (And, of course, I know people who worked as waiters only in those super snotty restaurants where you can earn a very good living. So I’m using the description casually.)
I was reading the beginning of one of those “why is it that the Europeans took over the world instead of [group X]?”, and it started with a “plus, people in PNG (I think) are smarter than Europeans!” Which was just — look, it’s silly to do that for any group.
MS: Ah, yes, as not-WASPs go, Westmount is more Jewish than anything else; as enclaves for the Jews go, I’d be thinking other soon-to-be-their-own-town-agains, first (CSL, DDO, offhand).
But this is definitely a small world.
March 14th, 2005 at 10:22 pm
Late on the conversation, but just wanted to say class has always been an issue for me too. I grew up upper-middle class, but went to public school with project kids. 1% of our school was kids from my neighborhood; the rest were the working-class and those on welfare. It was a great education for me.
I think sometimes wealth or privilege can insulate you. I have a brother-in-law and his wife, both of whom grew up very working class, but both families were very insulated. They didn’t travel much; they mostly associated with family. So they kind of solidified a world view and a way of always having blinders on. When they both became doctors and ended up with a lot of money, they kept a very narrow perspective. They now associate with either family (all living in the same area) or other doctors. Every once in a while, I have conversations with my sister-in-law about money and it’s very surreal. She also has a similar reaction to MS’s relatives; she doesn’t get why we aren’t jetting around the country with the kids. Well, maybe because it costs us $1000 to fly anywhere and that takes some planning for us.
So my point is that it’s not really the money that makes them oblivious to class issues; it’s their narrow focus. Even when they travel, they don’t really see the culture around them. They don’t absorb anything. They’re very self-centered and kind of going through life with a plastic bubble around them.
March 14th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
Ha, one of my (Jewish) parents grew up in CSL, the other in DDO. :)
-MS, who’s gonna stop hijacking this comments _right now_
March 14th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
It doesn’t bother me — this rather amuses me, actually. (We don’t live in either, though my father’s parents live in CSL and his brother in DDO, and we live close enough to CSL that it’s my local library — and a very good one, too.) I wonder who we know in common.
Must! Stop! Myself. But it’s so very *weird*, somehow.
March 14th, 2005 at 11:42 pm
Middle Klass
Now that I drive a Mercedes-Benz, I should acknowledge the reality of my comfortable middle-class status. Which would be a much funnier thing to say if I actually had a picture of my car to go with it. But seriously, this is a long and rambling post ab…
March 15th, 2005 at 9:10 am
I think that perhaps for people who are on the other side of the coin from most of your commenters, these thoughts are motivated (in part) from two sources:
1. The individual’s varying ability to empathize. If one feels empathy rather easily for others in different plights, perhaps it is conceivable that other people may accurately recognize their experiences regardless of whether they are shared. For people, however, who are incapable of true compassion if they cannot identify with the experience, perhaps it’s more difficult to “buy” that someone who’s not walked in the same shoes can truly relate.
2. Overlapping somewhat w/the ability to empathize is the experience itself and what it involves and what is taken away from it. What exactly do we mean by “shit job?” Is it the job that’s shitty, the circumstances, the boss, a combination? Regardless, the common characteristic is possibly that it is shitty because it is in some way a humbling experience and therefore, out of this is a test of endurance, a mark of ability, a test of character.
Of course, humility comes in many forms, not just in shit jobs, as does a test of endurance, but it’s closely related to the notion of suffering and although it’s a valid and rational point that of cousre one w/should not feel compelled to apologize for a lack of suffering, that same lack of a common experience may point to the sentiment expressed.
Just some thoughts…
March 16th, 2005 at 7:22 am
Just in case any of you are interested, the original posts (there are five, so far, with a sixth on the way) are at this site. Also note that the first quote was from my post, and the second quote was a Bitch.Ph.D. comment; a post of hers was what inspired the first of mine.
Second, I nowhere equated being an asshole with being middle-class–hell, at this point, I am firmly middle-class, and so is most of my family. What I’m trying to explore is how our own life experiences shape our notions of work, our expectations of life, our habitus, really. (I thought Moebius Stripper’s comments above were quite interesting in that regard.)
Third, I actually think that some of the jobs that wolfangel describes qualify–i.e., jobs that are really shitty, but that require a college education to get or do. What I think is relevant there (and I’ve only touched on this one vaguely) is whether one has an expectation of eventually getting something other than that shit job. I pretty much always have–my shit jobs are in the service of not having to have such jobs–and that puts me in a different (and more privileged) place than someone who’s only ever going to be working at Wal-Mart.