Class Identity -- The Background Post

i spent a lot of last weekend at the idyllic ancestral home not only living in the female world of love and ritual, but also pouring over spreadsheets figuring out how i'm going to finance a car, a cat, and a period of unemployment. what does this say about my class identity? it says that it's complicated. i'm a middle class kid who grew up worrying about money in a working class town.
my mother had parents that were well seated in the working lower middle class. her father worked for a large company for most of his life, and her mother stayed home with the kids and worked as a secretary. fairly standard for that era. she moved to New England State with my father in the mid-seventies to go 'back to the earth' and raise their children. Neither of them counted on the ways in which capitalism, the patriarchy, and the dissolution of their marriage shunted them both away from those dreams.

suffice it to say that through the problems of divorce, home-ownership, and a bad job market, and raising three children, my mother is not a wealthy woman. she has lived most of her adult life, on that edge between being poor and having debt and also having stuff and just being poor. when i was nine she decided to move farther away from her job to be closer to better schools. over and over again she has prioritized the three of us over herself. there was a long period of time when i was in elementary school when she was unemployed, and a period of time in high school where she took a couple of jobs that made her so unhappy that it was better to be unemployed. including one with a boss who made lewd jokes about women in her presence, and who made me feel distinctly slimey. we always had enough to eat, our house was always warm. we didn't always have the clothes we wanted and we rarely go on vacations. i remember the shame of not being able to explain to classmates what my mother did with her time or describing my vacations to them. so maybe i'm not quite middle class.

but i learned latin. my mother encouraged me to read voraciously, listen to music, dream about my future, learn anything i wanted to learn. she taught me about red wine, world religions, and impeccable grammar. so my cultural capital is high, and if you saw me walking down the street you would put me in the liberal white middle class.

New England State. is not all pretty postcards. rednecks and poor white trash don't just exist below the Mason-Dixon line. it just isn't as important to say that they are white in NES -- in fact, it's almost redundant. there are houses in my town which have several cars in various states of total disrepair rusting out on their lawns. i remember my father talking about a family near our house when i was little, he said that they were poachers, meaning that they hunted deer out of season. usually my father would have been a stickler about the regulations and reported them, but he knew that they needed to meat to eat and so let it slide.

class and class identity is very much about how you interact with people in the small interactions of the day. i never really questioned the way that i was taught to interact with people, until i realized that i did it radically different from my peers at Elite Liberal Arts College in another New England State. i talk to everyone, especially when i see the same person every day i really want the answer to "how are you?". i also can slide between languages. i can slip into a rural way of talking and discuss the planting, talk about where i was for sunday dinner, slide into a whole set of assumptions. it's this very specific way of being bi-cultural.

most students at ELAC treated custodians and food service workers as invisible. when we would talk about class issues they would say that if they were in the city they would be doing some activism, but they were "in the middle of nowhere" and therefore there was nothing to do. this infuriated me since i had grown up in the middle of nowhere. the same class issues that i had dealt with in high school and middle school were right there again, and in some ways i was on the other side of them, because ELAC was so wealthy in that particular structure my family was more on par with the employees that with students, at least in monetary terms. so i started to identify with the working class mothers at ELAC, with their children. i had a class identity for the first time.

now, living in HarborCity my class identity is in flux, and is much harder to separate from my racial identity and privilege. more on this soon.