I cannot wait to listen to this. Even just reading the article and a few comments clarified something for me: it’s not just about what we have (or don’t), but how we feel about what we have or don’t. It seems obvious when I say it, but I don’t think that’s been totally obvious to me, even as I, too, have grappled with this stuff since I moved in 4th grade from a working class town that I loved, where I played in the creek and caught crayfish, a wealthy town that I hated, where I obsessed over esprit sweaters and pretended to fall asleep at slumber parties in ginormous houses just to get out of having to perform a role I didn’t understand. No matter what’s going on for any given individual, there’s the situation and how they feel about it. It doubles the complexity.
This makes me think of so many conversations with my best friend -- we met in sociology grad school. She grew up in a working-class community and family, and her mom, who was determined to get her out, had all these really interesting strategies for trying to prepare her. Like, every year they went to the opera, the ballet, and the symphony once, even when they were in the middle of going bankrupt. Her mom may never have read Bourdieu, but she intuitively got it. My friend went to a really good liberal arts college, but, you know, she gets to wilderness orientation and there are kids tromping through the woods in Benetton, and she had like two Benetton shirts that she kept carefully wrapped in tissue paper because they were so precious. So that's how she ended up being a sociology major -- she took a sociology course and all of her difficulties adjusting to college suddenly made sense, that it was class.
Meanwhile I'm the child of Marxist sociologists, so class was super salient in my house in different ways. (And at one point after I met my best friend, my dad comes to me with an article by someone he knows at the state school near her liberal arts college, going "Look, J was interviewed for this research about first-generation college students!" Because the ways her mom prepped her for a class leap were so distinctive, he could tell it was her through the pseudonym.) But one of the things that I really associate with my own class privilege is not having to know about certain forms of high culture and not feeling at all self-conscious about it. I don't like jazz and I don't feel obligated to pretend to know anything about it. I'm fine listening to a symphony but I wouldn't choose it and I hate opera. It's like my graduate degree: One of the most useful things about having an Ivy League PhD is being able to scoff at the idea that people with Ivy League degrees are any smarter than anyone else.
And then my friend and I both end up with high-income husbands (my husband just took a giant pay cut moving from BigLaw to government, but that's another story) and talking a lot about what it feels like to make that kind of financial jump and how it operates relative to class. So, long story short, if either of us had any time at all, we would need to organize some kind of long-distance joint listening to this podcast.
I think I have a chip on my shoulder about class because I grew up in a family that was very middle-middle class--we always had enough of what we needed, we weren't worried about keeping a roof over our heads or the lights on, and we got some of what we wanted but not all--but I grew up around people who were upper-middle class or flat-out rich.
I was very conscious of the differences between them and me: how the leftovers in our fridge were in re-used sour cream containers instead of fancy Tupperware, how our family collectively did a paper route when we wanted to save up to go to Disney World once time while my friends went every year, how our house was perfectly adequate to our needs but my sister and I shared a tiny bathroom while my friends lived in McMansions, how I wore hand-me-downs from cousins and my friends bought their clothes at the mall. How my parents frequently told me "no, we can't afford that" about things my friends didn't even have to ask for. I didn't really *want* their lives, I wasn't jealous most of the time, but I was aware that the way they lived was considered more desirable.
It made me hyperaware of those gradations of class, and it also made me hate the idea of being mistaken for someone whose had a lot of money. To this day, I'm horrified that people might think I grew up with more money than I did. Yes, I lived in a neighborhood that became trendy, but my parents had bought the house long before it became an expensive area! Yes, I went to a private school for high school, but I was on scholarship! Yes, my parents now live in a very, very nice and expensive house, but they built that like three years ago with money my granddaddy made in the last few years of his life and left to them--I did not grow up in a house like that!
And yet I am also hyperaware of how much I have, how much easier my life has been than many other people's, the way that my parents' college educations gave me privileges that so many other people do not have, etc.
I feel like I'm trying to constantly balance "please don't think I grew up rich" with "please don't think I'm ungrateful or unaware of all I have and have had!" And it seems a little silly when I actually analyze it, to be wasting so much energy on this! Why do I care how I'm perceived class-wise? I do not know! But I do.
I relate to much of what you describe here. I am a poster child Gen Xer who grew up in the 70s and early 80s with a hyper-awareness of class but without the language/framework to articulate that awareness. My father was an attorney who had gone to college on the GI Bill and came from NOTHING, and I do mean nothing: a childhood in the segregated South marked by violence and abandonment. His greatest legacy to his kids is intergenerational trauma. My mother had no college but grew up in an intact family on a working farm, and her own father, a dirt farmer with an eighth grade education, left her and her sibs considerable wealth. My sisters and I were never hungry, we took family holidays most years, and we all went to college. We are also all adult children of an alcoholic narcissist.
I took a Sociology class and later married that sociology professor, and all became clear. More than any other variable, what predicted our future success and stability was our whiteness. But in terms of class, my sibs and I express that differently. My "tastes" are different from theirs, and I did not learn them from my family or my experiences growing up. I think I learned them from books, which made me want to travel, and then from travel, which introduced me to the whole world of possibilities. I was a bookworm as a child in order to dissociate from the trauma in my house, and reading has made me want a richer life--richer meaning more experiential, interesting, filled with diverse flavors and people and landscapes.
My whole life people have made assumptions about my class background when they hear "father was a lawyer" and when they look at the things I am able to do now. Some of my siblings are not able to live the kind of life I live, so our "class" upbringing was not the main predictor of how we turned out. It's complicated and messy. I think a lot these days about childhood trauma and developing RESILIENCE AS A RESOURCE as very important to social class trajectory, but perhaps not discussed nearly enough. Sorry if I am rambling. This is such a great topic.
Oh my gosh yes! I feel very similarly and I'm often surprised by the intensity of my reaction to how people "read" me.
I went to a Waldorf school, then prestigious institutions for college and graduate school. My parents are educated and we grew up consuming what I guess some people would consider "high" culture. I got to travel abroad as a teen. That's all visible to other people.
What's not visible is the fact that my parents went into debt to send us to Waldorf, that getting new clothes was a rarity, that I learned how to handle creditors calling the house, that the travel was entirely funded by school related things, that I was sending my parents money in college from my work study job, that my parents filed for bankruptcy eventually. I am overdressed always because my sense of style was developed at a time when I was trying desperately to not stand out like a sore thumb at Wellesley. My brain shuts down about money things. There was one time my partner said "we have no money" and I went into full on panic, when what he meant was "we don't have much money left after paying our expenses." He never made that mistake again 😅
Ooof, yes! And the US class system doesn't really have room to understand people like you. You would make SO much more sense in the UK, where class is not as much about how much money you have but about all these cultural markers. You would read as bougie but "come down in the world" and people would have an understanding of that in a way they don't in the US, imo.
I'm also in an odd position where my "class" or maybe just my wealth has changed significantly over the course of my lifetime and I'm confused about! We grew up clipping coupons for Safeway but always had enough to eat, and increasing opportunities for things like school trips to Europe for language exchange (at my public high school) as I got older and my mom was back at work. But my grandparents had the Depression-era mentality about saving, things like my grandma would remove grandpa's shirt collars and turn them around to make them last longer. Then lo and behold last year my grandfather left us several millions in inheritance. I am not asking for sympathy and I am extremely grateful for the inheritance and for the sense of security it affords! I also used my class privilege to go to a good private university, grad school and have a well-paid consulting job, so some of it is "earned" wealth even though I understand that I had considerable help in getting there.
But it is difficult to reconcile this wealth with our lived experience, and especially difficult to think about how I'm raising my daughter. Do I also encourage the equivalent of clipping coupons with her to develop a "thrifty" mindset? How do I reconcile that with sending her to private Montessori school, which isn't fancy because they prioritize children making/doing things but clearly is a privileged community? I start to worry when she comes home from school complaining that she is the only one in her class that hasn't been on vacation to Hawaii--at 6 years old!!! Of course we have conversations about how some families can't even afford food and that's why we spend our money donating to the food bank rather than going on vacation to Hawaii but it still seems abstract for her.
When I was 12 I moved to a town where two cousins lived. I was super jealous of them because they had a mom and a dad and a big, two-story tract home that seemed like a mansion to me. This was pre-McMansion. It was a perfectly nice house but it wasn’t fancy at all except in comparison, perhaps, to the 1-bedroom apartment I shared with my mom. At the time, Schwinn bicycles were a big deal. I begged my dad to buy me a Schwinn because my cousins had department store bikes. This was the one arena in which I could maybe best them. I will always remember going to the bicycle shop with my dad in his ragged jeans. He was a mechanic who didn’t care about how he looked. I was embarrassed by him and also thrilled to get what I considered a fancy bike. I rode it a lot but realized pretty quickly that owning the bike I had wanted so badly didn’t actually make my life special or different, and it never would. Alas, I forgot that lesson quickly. I am mostly over status symbols these days but seeking status through objects is a deeply human activity. I remember reading many years ago about drivers being pulled over for using a cell phone while driving. This was in a nation poorer than United States. A surprisingly high number of the drivers were holding pieces of wood against their ears when they got pulled over. Class and status are both rich subjects worth exploring. Looking forward to the podcast.
Yep, this. It’s strange growing up in the in-between space, where you know many people have less than you do, and it’s very visible who has more than you do, and because you’re a kid, you don’t understand how it got to be that way. It’s been fascinating for me as an adult to do that understanding work of what it means to have money (wealth often comes generationally, or through privileged routes to capitalist power, or it’s not actually there and is just subsidized debt for maintaining aesthetics of wealth) and what it means to not (many people are one medical disaster away from poverty, recessions and layoffs can be super brutal, family trauma, etc), and how people do or don’t change their class these days. That logical approach doesn’t quite fix the weird balancing act you mention, but I find it helpful when my emotional response comes out.
My son’s middle school principal always signed off with “Keep it classy!” And I always read it back to myself as, “Keep it classist!” which is what she meant. This is the same school that had Country vs. Country Club spirit days.
This is such a great article! Class has always been interesting to me, because I grew up in like a very cultured, very educated family (of two people - me and my mom), but we were poor. My family is a Jewish refugee family and we had been poor back to the first single mother in a line of three - my great-grandmother. I didn’t mind being poor growing up because all my friends were also poor, many poorer than me (I had times with no heat or hot water, but I didn’t have food insecurity). So even though I never ate in a restaurant or bought clothes in a store, no one else did either and I didn’t really think about it. My mom always told me we were rich, compared to most of the world. Because we had health insurance and a house and weren’t refugees. So I grew up feeling rich. I do remember though being like obsessed with Tropicana orange juice and breakfast cereal. When I got my first full-time job I was 16 and I would buy and drink whole cartons of Tropicana. It was this iconic experience of wealth for me.
But I also didn’t really feel out of place other places. I got a scholarship to go to a fancy boarding school for high school, and even though my friends were other scholarship kids and we would laugh sometimes at the rich kid shit, I didn’t feel uncomfortable. And I think that comes from being white, but also comes from having this hyper cultured, hyper educated family. My mom was friends with lots of famous artists. Our house was full of books. We have a family tree back to 1860 and everyone (male) on there has at least a bachelors degree.
Now I work in agriculture and I get defensive because I get flagged as a rich kid. Because of how I talk. So these guys with $50k trucks think I grew up wealthy, and it’s interesting to me how mad that makes me. Like it would be a character flaw. It kind of is? Idk, I remember watching this documentary on Oasis and one of the interviews said something along the lines of - “I’m not saying I’m a better person than he is, because I grew up with nothing, but just fundamentally, [that means] I have a better soul.” 😂
I had to reply to this as soon as I saw the mention of Tropicana orange juice! I also grew up in a family that I would consider "culturally middle-class, but poor". My mom had a university degree (my dad didn't, but did do a couple of years of university before he dropped out - but my parents also divorced when I was 4 so they were in different households regardless), but due to a host of complicated circumstances, we were quite low-income for much of my childhood. Orange juice in my house was those frozen cans of orange juice concentrate that you mix with water, and we always added twice the recommended amount of water to make it go further. This meant that Tropicana was the *ultimate* luxury to me. As an adult (who is in a much more stable economic position than my parents were), it's the only kind of orange juice I'll buy, and it still feels fancy.
This was such a fascinating interview, and I can't wait to listen to the podcast. I grew up - until I was almost 23 - in the UK, and have now lived in the US for 29 years. My understanding of class, and my anxieties about it, are so muddled. Were I still in my home town, I would be working class no matter how much money I made - I was born to it; that's it, that's your class. And in lots and lots of ways I see that still shaping my world - I don't know opera or much classical music; I know very little jazz; I haven't read a whole bunch of "great authors"; I know nothing about ancient Greece and Rome; going to college was bewildering. There was just no access to that stuff. But over here, in the States, I carry so many markers of being middle class - not just my income (which is very low for my field, but so much more than so many people make), but my education and my location. Yet my m/c life is very much shaped by the experience of growing up working class, especially when it comes to how I relate to and use money. All by way of saying - I appreciate how complicated both of you made this in the interview, and how much food for continuing thought you've provided.
Class is so different in the UK than the US! I feel like it's framed as "class matters way more in the UK" but I don't think that's true---I think it matters just as much in the US, but it just manifests differently. And it's not evident by accent: in the UK, as soon as someone opens their mouth, you know what class they are. That is just not true in the US most of the time, so people can more easily fake it.
Plus, I think you're right that class is more fluid in the US, not in the sense of "it's easier to make money and move up a class" but in the very real sense of people *letting* you culturally move from one class to another.
I also think the gate-keeping mechanisms in the UK are SO unsubtle - all my professors at university were, for example, at least middle-class if not higher, because there was no funding for graduate study unless you were personally wealthy. It's just a giant f*** you to anyone who might want to enter that profession but who's working class. And there are a whole range of obstacles to the same professional trajectory in the US, but they are not *quite* so blatant, and perhaps all the more insidious for it.
You're right about subtlety. In the States, we all at least claim to believe that everyone is born equal and that anyone can achieve the American dream and move up in the world. We can't have the blatant stuff, because that would conflict with the story we tell about ourselves. We need plausible deniability.
I grew up working class until I was 10 and then my dad left me and my mom and then we were poor. I was poor all the way through college. But I consider myself culturally middle-class because of that college degree, which exposed me to many things (art, music, NPR, bagels!) that I had not experienced before. I learned nothing specifically useful during my college years, But I had experiences and met people that made it possible for me to build a professional career as an adult. My mother never made it to high school but she had a huge thirst for reading, which she passed on to me.
I think that is true. The UK (maybe more specifically England) has the trope of the autodictat: working class (men) self-educating in the arts / literature. That makes them culturally ‘the right sort’ of working class, but cunningly keeps them firmly working class even with culturally middle class interests / knowledge. How much that holds right now, I’m not sure, but that is definitely the historical trend
I am so excited to listen to this podcast! This was such a great interview too. I grew up in a upper lower class/lower middle class family and attended a private religious grammar school thanks to extensive financial aid. I quickly became aware of the differences between me and my classmates, from their huge houses, the clothes (who knew brands were a thing?!), the vacations they went on, and their hobbies. My parents scrimped and saved so I could go on a trip with my youth group—my first plane ride at age 14—and bartered for things like flute or art lessons. And I'm grateful for that. But I've had mixed feelings about going to that school because of the insecurities that developed there. I was the only one of my friends at college that was paying for my education (my parents paid for about a quarter, I paid half, the rest was scholarships and student loans) and that could lead to very complicated conversations about what I could or could not afford. And those conversations are still happening a couple of decades later as a single never-married woman whose friends have either high-powered careers or married wealthy men. I want to be supportive of the opportunities my friends have as a result but it can be so hard to examine the differences in our lifestyles.
I appreciate the push to reconsider our perceptions of rich people. it feels like a justified and okay hatred since I'm the one on the bottom. but Rachel is right that it's not about any individual rich people, the anger and pain I feel is because of what I lack, not what they have or how they act. when I feel angry like he did at the wedding, it's anger because I know it's unfair that I have to choose between replacing my holey underwear and eating vegetables this week. the anger comes out at people who never had to make that choice and own $100 dollar a pair underwear but it's not their fault as individuals that the system exists like this.
I feel so seen. Cannot wait to listen to the podcast. I grew up rural working class and my first full time job was in West Palm Beach, Florida, where I had assignments on Palm Beach. I was completely ignorant of class issues until then, which is shocking to say, but when everyone around you has fairly similar experiences and family dynamics, it can feel like we were all on the same page. But then Palm Beach—I was terrified of hitting a Bentley with my little Toyota Echo. I felt totally self conscious and like a total rube.
Such a great interview, thank you so much! “In my own life, the limitations of class meant that I often didn’t have access or the know-how to really get the things I wanted.” That has been the story of my life as well. I remember sewing a dress to wear to an event at my first job out of college. My housemate, a college friend, took one look at the dress and said the fabric looked like it was for quilts. It wasn’t but that didn’t matter. She was my fashionable friend and I was cut to the quick. I wore the dress to the event and never put it on again.
“In my own life, the limitations of class meant that I often didn’t have access or the know-how to really get the things I wanted.” -- this part really got me, too. I don't think I fully came to understand this until I had graduated from university. I remember watching a classmate of mine get a job that I had applied for, and when I asked him how it all came about he said that he had gotten it "because my headmaster from high school knows the editor." I (and my family) had so bought into the fallacy that going to college would make up for the shortfall of not having ever had a headmaster or whatever the fuck. It's like, I had the nice dress but the fabric was wrong and my eye was untrained.
Beautifully expressed. So sorry you had that experience. For my first job evaluation at my first job, the first question my boss asked me was what my parents did for a living. Those were the first words out of her mouth. She was from the East Coast and her parents had been academics. My parents didn’t even graduate from high school. I don’t believe this editor meant to be hurtful, but it was such a fucking irrelevant question. Needless to say, I was an enthusiastic participant in helping organize a union there a few years later. It wasn’t my idea, but it was a good idea.
One more story: That boss also tried to make me accept a Congressman’s son as a summer intern. I was the publication’s fact checker at the time. We had only one and then I found college students to help me. This boss just announced that this person would be interning with me and then told me his background. And like the guy at the wedding who felt such class-based rage, I too drew a line. I told my boss that if she wanted the politician’s son to be an intern, then he could work for *her.* I chose my interns, and she didn’t get to do that. The young man was, in fact, a great intern for her and a good guy. But he fucking wasn’t going to be forced on me because of some kind of network that I had never been a part of.
That really resonated with me too. While not technically a first gen college student (my dad went to college on the GI bill), I may as well have been. I didn't know how to navigate all the unspoken things and was/am very shy to boot. So while I knew of things like professor's office hours, I didn't know what I was supposed to do with so never used them, even when I could have really used some help because I didn't know that was part of what they were for, and I didn't know how to even ask for help.
Omg this! I was a very good student with high test scores but went to a working class high school in Brooklyn with super overburdened counselors. I truly did not know about college interviews, visits, office hours, etc. I was lucky enough to fake it well enough to get good jobs after I graduated and I am forever grateful to an early mentor who taught me 'business' presentation (how to dress/act/etc.) in a white collar office. I now realize there are so many ways the knowledge that upper class/upper middle class kids have of how to navigate college/professional jobs gives them a HUGE advantage!
Yes! I am friends with her still and friends with another roommate and buddy from college who told me that I should be drinking my beer out of a glass and *not* the bottle at the wedding reception of the first friend. And because he has the best manners of anyone I have ever met and always leads with kindness, I immediately scurried away to find a glass for my beer.
I know I repeat my mother’s lessons regularly here, but this is another one: “class is quiet.” It is not about elevating you or expecting credit for everything you do. It is about elevating others. It is not expressed in material things. It is expressed in behavior, acknowledging everyone and including everyone. That is old-school, of course, but it’s my yardstick.
I feel like framing character as class just derails the conversation though—it’s a way for people who don’t want to talk about how the class you’re born into is beyond your control and instead focus on character. Obviously it’s a good thing to judge people by character instead, but it’s not class.
I think this is a really fascinating thread to go down though! For instance, I no longer feel that I am polite in public spaces because of any innate consideration OR of instilled manners or social conditioning. I actually do feel it’s beneath me to engage with people who make disturbances in public. Why do I feel that expressing my displeasure publicly- rolling my eyes, scoffing loudly or making pointed remarks- would demean me in the eyes of a public audience who a) don’t know me from Adam, and b) are doing this same thing themselves? Why do I feel it would demean me to myself?
I cannot wait to listen to this. Growing up lower middle class in the rust belt, I often felt in over my head moving to NYC after college. I was introduced to Bourdieu in my first semester of grad school and suddenly my whole life made sense! I was also fortunate to take a class with Rachel Sherman when she first started teaching at the New School. Feel like I am still doing the dance between worlds.
I really loved the Terry Gross episode. Even if she hadnt been born bougie, her class status catapulted so far over her career that she was made bougie, and its rare to hear folks who’ve had upward mobility in that way acknowledge it. Can wait to listen to the rest of the season!!
"she was trying to sell me on is that focusing on individual rich people, and portraying them as entitled and selfish and bad, actually encourages that behavior in a way. That it’s a distraction from talking about larger policy fixes that might actually address wealth disparities. Like if we’re dumping on Jeffrey Bezos for wearing tight party shirts on his yacht or whatever, we’re not talking about raising taxes on the rich or passing laws that encourage mixed income housing."
I've made a (very) marginal career out of arguing that stereotypes around the working class and working poor -- around living in trailers, or lack of dental work, or working in resource extraction, and on and on -- are dangerous to democracy and a motivator of polarization. But you know what, I am 100% guilty of not checking myself on judging the wealthy in this way.
Extremely resonant, as my partner and I are about to go to a wine tasting thing with friends. I'm always forced to remember how my mother was shamed when she said she loved white zinfandel.
"That's a bimbo wine!" someone complained. And she replied that she was a bimbo, and owned it.
Anyhow I am not a podcast person but you had me at swap meet board shorts and Jarvis.
I cannot wait to listen to this. Even just reading the article and a few comments clarified something for me: it’s not just about what we have (or don’t), but how we feel about what we have or don’t. It seems obvious when I say it, but I don’t think that’s been totally obvious to me, even as I, too, have grappled with this stuff since I moved in 4th grade from a working class town that I loved, where I played in the creek and caught crayfish, a wealthy town that I hated, where I obsessed over esprit sweaters and pretended to fall asleep at slumber parties in ginormous houses just to get out of having to perform a role I didn’t understand. No matter what’s going on for any given individual, there’s the situation and how they feel about it. It doubles the complexity.
This makes me think of so many conversations with my best friend -- we met in sociology grad school. She grew up in a working-class community and family, and her mom, who was determined to get her out, had all these really interesting strategies for trying to prepare her. Like, every year they went to the opera, the ballet, and the symphony once, even when they were in the middle of going bankrupt. Her mom may never have read Bourdieu, but she intuitively got it. My friend went to a really good liberal arts college, but, you know, she gets to wilderness orientation and there are kids tromping through the woods in Benetton, and she had like two Benetton shirts that she kept carefully wrapped in tissue paper because they were so precious. So that's how she ended up being a sociology major -- she took a sociology course and all of her difficulties adjusting to college suddenly made sense, that it was class.
Meanwhile I'm the child of Marxist sociologists, so class was super salient in my house in different ways. (And at one point after I met my best friend, my dad comes to me with an article by someone he knows at the state school near her liberal arts college, going "Look, J was interviewed for this research about first-generation college students!" Because the ways her mom prepped her for a class leap were so distinctive, he could tell it was her through the pseudonym.) But one of the things that I really associate with my own class privilege is not having to know about certain forms of high culture and not feeling at all self-conscious about it. I don't like jazz and I don't feel obligated to pretend to know anything about it. I'm fine listening to a symphony but I wouldn't choose it and I hate opera. It's like my graduate degree: One of the most useful things about having an Ivy League PhD is being able to scoff at the idea that people with Ivy League degrees are any smarter than anyone else.
And then my friend and I both end up with high-income husbands (my husband just took a giant pay cut moving from BigLaw to government, but that's another story) and talking a lot about what it feels like to make that kind of financial jump and how it operates relative to class. So, long story short, if either of us had any time at all, we would need to organize some kind of long-distance joint listening to this podcast.
I think I have a chip on my shoulder about class because I grew up in a family that was very middle-middle class--we always had enough of what we needed, we weren't worried about keeping a roof over our heads or the lights on, and we got some of what we wanted but not all--but I grew up around people who were upper-middle class or flat-out rich.
I was very conscious of the differences between them and me: how the leftovers in our fridge were in re-used sour cream containers instead of fancy Tupperware, how our family collectively did a paper route when we wanted to save up to go to Disney World once time while my friends went every year, how our house was perfectly adequate to our needs but my sister and I shared a tiny bathroom while my friends lived in McMansions, how I wore hand-me-downs from cousins and my friends bought their clothes at the mall. How my parents frequently told me "no, we can't afford that" about things my friends didn't even have to ask for. I didn't really *want* their lives, I wasn't jealous most of the time, but I was aware that the way they lived was considered more desirable.
It made me hyperaware of those gradations of class, and it also made me hate the idea of being mistaken for someone whose had a lot of money. To this day, I'm horrified that people might think I grew up with more money than I did. Yes, I lived in a neighborhood that became trendy, but my parents had bought the house long before it became an expensive area! Yes, I went to a private school for high school, but I was on scholarship! Yes, my parents now live in a very, very nice and expensive house, but they built that like three years ago with money my granddaddy made in the last few years of his life and left to them--I did not grow up in a house like that!
And yet I am also hyperaware of how much I have, how much easier my life has been than many other people's, the way that my parents' college educations gave me privileges that so many other people do not have, etc.
I feel like I'm trying to constantly balance "please don't think I grew up rich" with "please don't think I'm ungrateful or unaware of all I have and have had!" And it seems a little silly when I actually analyze it, to be wasting so much energy on this! Why do I care how I'm perceived class-wise? I do not know! But I do.
I relate to much of what you describe here. I am a poster child Gen Xer who grew up in the 70s and early 80s with a hyper-awareness of class but without the language/framework to articulate that awareness. My father was an attorney who had gone to college on the GI Bill and came from NOTHING, and I do mean nothing: a childhood in the segregated South marked by violence and abandonment. His greatest legacy to his kids is intergenerational trauma. My mother had no college but grew up in an intact family on a working farm, and her own father, a dirt farmer with an eighth grade education, left her and her sibs considerable wealth. My sisters and I were never hungry, we took family holidays most years, and we all went to college. We are also all adult children of an alcoholic narcissist.
I took a Sociology class and later married that sociology professor, and all became clear. More than any other variable, what predicted our future success and stability was our whiteness. But in terms of class, my sibs and I express that differently. My "tastes" are different from theirs, and I did not learn them from my family or my experiences growing up. I think I learned them from books, which made me want to travel, and then from travel, which introduced me to the whole world of possibilities. I was a bookworm as a child in order to dissociate from the trauma in my house, and reading has made me want a richer life--richer meaning more experiential, interesting, filled with diverse flavors and people and landscapes.
My whole life people have made assumptions about my class background when they hear "father was a lawyer" and when they look at the things I am able to do now. Some of my siblings are not able to live the kind of life I live, so our "class" upbringing was not the main predictor of how we turned out. It's complicated and messy. I think a lot these days about childhood trauma and developing RESILIENCE AS A RESOURCE as very important to social class trajectory, but perhaps not discussed nearly enough. Sorry if I am rambling. This is such a great topic.
Oh my gosh yes! I feel very similarly and I'm often surprised by the intensity of my reaction to how people "read" me.
I went to a Waldorf school, then prestigious institutions for college and graduate school. My parents are educated and we grew up consuming what I guess some people would consider "high" culture. I got to travel abroad as a teen. That's all visible to other people.
What's not visible is the fact that my parents went into debt to send us to Waldorf, that getting new clothes was a rarity, that I learned how to handle creditors calling the house, that the travel was entirely funded by school related things, that I was sending my parents money in college from my work study job, that my parents filed for bankruptcy eventually. I am overdressed always because my sense of style was developed at a time when I was trying desperately to not stand out like a sore thumb at Wellesley. My brain shuts down about money things. There was one time my partner said "we have no money" and I went into full on panic, when what he meant was "we don't have much money left after paying our expenses." He never made that mistake again 😅
Ooof, yes! And the US class system doesn't really have room to understand people like you. You would make SO much more sense in the UK, where class is not as much about how much money you have but about all these cultural markers. You would read as bougie but "come down in the world" and people would have an understanding of that in a way they don't in the US, imo.
I should add that my parents are now in a stable position and I am incredibly privileged and learning how to deal with my shame about being so bougie.
The shame of being so bougie! Yes, this is it! I'm working on it! I don't want to feel it! But alas, I still do!
I'm also in an odd position where my "class" or maybe just my wealth has changed significantly over the course of my lifetime and I'm confused about! We grew up clipping coupons for Safeway but always had enough to eat, and increasing opportunities for things like school trips to Europe for language exchange (at my public high school) as I got older and my mom was back at work. But my grandparents had the Depression-era mentality about saving, things like my grandma would remove grandpa's shirt collars and turn them around to make them last longer. Then lo and behold last year my grandfather left us several millions in inheritance. I am not asking for sympathy and I am extremely grateful for the inheritance and for the sense of security it affords! I also used my class privilege to go to a good private university, grad school and have a well-paid consulting job, so some of it is "earned" wealth even though I understand that I had considerable help in getting there.
But it is difficult to reconcile this wealth with our lived experience, and especially difficult to think about how I'm raising my daughter. Do I also encourage the equivalent of clipping coupons with her to develop a "thrifty" mindset? How do I reconcile that with sending her to private Montessori school, which isn't fancy because they prioritize children making/doing things but clearly is a privileged community? I start to worry when she comes home from school complaining that she is the only one in her class that hasn't been on vacation to Hawaii--at 6 years old!!! Of course we have conversations about how some families can't even afford food and that's why we spend our money donating to the food bank rather than going on vacation to Hawaii but it still seems abstract for her.
Ooof, I hadn't even considered how it would be when you're raising children. That's rough and there's no clear answer.
When I was 12 I moved to a town where two cousins lived. I was super jealous of them because they had a mom and a dad and a big, two-story tract home that seemed like a mansion to me. This was pre-McMansion. It was a perfectly nice house but it wasn’t fancy at all except in comparison, perhaps, to the 1-bedroom apartment I shared with my mom. At the time, Schwinn bicycles were a big deal. I begged my dad to buy me a Schwinn because my cousins had department store bikes. This was the one arena in which I could maybe best them. I will always remember going to the bicycle shop with my dad in his ragged jeans. He was a mechanic who didn’t care about how he looked. I was embarrassed by him and also thrilled to get what I considered a fancy bike. I rode it a lot but realized pretty quickly that owning the bike I had wanted so badly didn’t actually make my life special or different, and it never would. Alas, I forgot that lesson quickly. I am mostly over status symbols these days but seeking status through objects is a deeply human activity. I remember reading many years ago about drivers being pulled over for using a cell phone while driving. This was in a nation poorer than United States. A surprisingly high number of the drivers were holding pieces of wood against their ears when they got pulled over. Class and status are both rich subjects worth exploring. Looking forward to the podcast.
Yep, this. It’s strange growing up in the in-between space, where you know many people have less than you do, and it’s very visible who has more than you do, and because you’re a kid, you don’t understand how it got to be that way. It’s been fascinating for me as an adult to do that understanding work of what it means to have money (wealth often comes generationally, or through privileged routes to capitalist power, or it’s not actually there and is just subsidized debt for maintaining aesthetics of wealth) and what it means to not (many people are one medical disaster away from poverty, recessions and layoffs can be super brutal, family trauma, etc), and how people do or don’t change their class these days. That logical approach doesn’t quite fix the weird balancing act you mention, but I find it helpful when my emotional response comes out.
My son’s middle school principal always signed off with “Keep it classy!” And I always read it back to myself as, “Keep it classist!” which is what she meant. This is the same school that had Country vs. Country Club spirit days.
We moved.
This gave me a good laugh this morning, thank you
This is such a great article! Class has always been interesting to me, because I grew up in like a very cultured, very educated family (of two people - me and my mom), but we were poor. My family is a Jewish refugee family and we had been poor back to the first single mother in a line of three - my great-grandmother. I didn’t mind being poor growing up because all my friends were also poor, many poorer than me (I had times with no heat or hot water, but I didn’t have food insecurity). So even though I never ate in a restaurant or bought clothes in a store, no one else did either and I didn’t really think about it. My mom always told me we were rich, compared to most of the world. Because we had health insurance and a house and weren’t refugees. So I grew up feeling rich. I do remember though being like obsessed with Tropicana orange juice and breakfast cereal. When I got my first full-time job I was 16 and I would buy and drink whole cartons of Tropicana. It was this iconic experience of wealth for me.
But I also didn’t really feel out of place other places. I got a scholarship to go to a fancy boarding school for high school, and even though my friends were other scholarship kids and we would laugh sometimes at the rich kid shit, I didn’t feel uncomfortable. And I think that comes from being white, but also comes from having this hyper cultured, hyper educated family. My mom was friends with lots of famous artists. Our house was full of books. We have a family tree back to 1860 and everyone (male) on there has at least a bachelors degree.
Now I work in agriculture and I get defensive because I get flagged as a rich kid. Because of how I talk. So these guys with $50k trucks think I grew up wealthy, and it’s interesting to me how mad that makes me. Like it would be a character flaw. It kind of is? Idk, I remember watching this documentary on Oasis and one of the interviews said something along the lines of - “I’m not saying I’m a better person than he is, because I grew up with nothing, but just fundamentally, [that means] I have a better soul.” 😂
I get this too. I'm not Jewish but have Silent Gen Depression era 2nd Gen immigrant parents who have more education than money.
I had to reply to this as soon as I saw the mention of Tropicana orange juice! I also grew up in a family that I would consider "culturally middle-class, but poor". My mom had a university degree (my dad didn't, but did do a couple of years of university before he dropped out - but my parents also divorced when I was 4 so they were in different households regardless), but due to a host of complicated circumstances, we were quite low-income for much of my childhood. Orange juice in my house was those frozen cans of orange juice concentrate that you mix with water, and we always added twice the recommended amount of water to make it go further. This meant that Tropicana was the *ultimate* luxury to me. As an adult (who is in a much more stable economic position than my parents were), it's the only kind of orange juice I'll buy, and it still feels fancy.
Omg I love that I’m not the only one! Even though I do far fancier things now (airplanes!), I also still feel decadent every time :)
This was such a fascinating interview, and I can't wait to listen to the podcast. I grew up - until I was almost 23 - in the UK, and have now lived in the US for 29 years. My understanding of class, and my anxieties about it, are so muddled. Were I still in my home town, I would be working class no matter how much money I made - I was born to it; that's it, that's your class. And in lots and lots of ways I see that still shaping my world - I don't know opera or much classical music; I know very little jazz; I haven't read a whole bunch of "great authors"; I know nothing about ancient Greece and Rome; going to college was bewildering. There was just no access to that stuff. But over here, in the States, I carry so many markers of being middle class - not just my income (which is very low for my field, but so much more than so many people make), but my education and my location. Yet my m/c life is very much shaped by the experience of growing up working class, especially when it comes to how I relate to and use money. All by way of saying - I appreciate how complicated both of you made this in the interview, and how much food for continuing thought you've provided.
Class is so different in the UK than the US! I feel like it's framed as "class matters way more in the UK" but I don't think that's true---I think it matters just as much in the US, but it just manifests differently. And it's not evident by accent: in the UK, as soon as someone opens their mouth, you know what class they are. That is just not true in the US most of the time, so people can more easily fake it.
Plus, I think you're right that class is more fluid in the US, not in the sense of "it's easier to make money and move up a class" but in the very real sense of people *letting* you culturally move from one class to another.
I also think the gate-keeping mechanisms in the UK are SO unsubtle - all my professors at university were, for example, at least middle-class if not higher, because there was no funding for graduate study unless you were personally wealthy. It's just a giant f*** you to anyone who might want to enter that profession but who's working class. And there are a whole range of obstacles to the same professional trajectory in the US, but they are not *quite* so blatant, and perhaps all the more insidious for it.
You're right about subtlety. In the States, we all at least claim to believe that everyone is born equal and that anyone can achieve the American dream and move up in the world. We can't have the blatant stuff, because that would conflict with the story we tell about ourselves. We need plausible deniability.
I grew up working class until I was 10 and then my dad left me and my mom and then we were poor. I was poor all the way through college. But I consider myself culturally middle-class because of that college degree, which exposed me to many things (art, music, NPR, bagels!) that I had not experienced before. I learned nothing specifically useful during my college years, But I had experiences and met people that made it possible for me to build a professional career as an adult. My mother never made it to high school but she had a huge thirst for reading, which she passed on to me.
I'm not sure there's such a thing as culturally middle class in the UK? That's one of the big differences.
I think that is true. The UK (maybe more specifically England) has the trope of the autodictat: working class (men) self-educating in the arts / literature. That makes them culturally ‘the right sort’ of working class, but cunningly keeps them firmly working class even with culturally middle class interests / knowledge. How much that holds right now, I’m not sure, but that is definitely the historical trend
I have a British friend who told me that class matters just as much in the US as in the UK, but in the UK they are just upfront about it.
I think that's true in some ways - but the class system in the UK is just very different from the one in the US!
Very true.
Well. I read this as “Am I a Casserole?” TWICE. I assumed there was a metaphor there that would reveal itself to me upon reading.
Joking aside, what a wonderful interview that will roll around in my brain all day. Also now I want my mom’s chicken and rice casserole.
Same!
I am so excited to listen to this podcast! This was such a great interview too. I grew up in a upper lower class/lower middle class family and attended a private religious grammar school thanks to extensive financial aid. I quickly became aware of the differences between me and my classmates, from their huge houses, the clothes (who knew brands were a thing?!), the vacations they went on, and their hobbies. My parents scrimped and saved so I could go on a trip with my youth group—my first plane ride at age 14—and bartered for things like flute or art lessons. And I'm grateful for that. But I've had mixed feelings about going to that school because of the insecurities that developed there. I was the only one of my friends at college that was paying for my education (my parents paid for about a quarter, I paid half, the rest was scholarships and student loans) and that could lead to very complicated conversations about what I could or could not afford. And those conversations are still happening a couple of decades later as a single never-married woman whose friends have either high-powered careers or married wealthy men. I want to be supportive of the opportunities my friends have as a result but it can be so hard to examine the differences in our lifestyles.
I appreciate the push to reconsider our perceptions of rich people. it feels like a justified and okay hatred since I'm the one on the bottom. but Rachel is right that it's not about any individual rich people, the anger and pain I feel is because of what I lack, not what they have or how they act. when I feel angry like he did at the wedding, it's anger because I know it's unfair that I have to choose between replacing my holey underwear and eating vegetables this week. the anger comes out at people who never had to make that choice and own $100 dollar a pair underwear but it's not their fault as individuals that the system exists like this.
I feel so seen. Cannot wait to listen to the podcast. I grew up rural working class and my first full time job was in West Palm Beach, Florida, where I had assignments on Palm Beach. I was completely ignorant of class issues until then, which is shocking to say, but when everyone around you has fairly similar experiences and family dynamics, it can feel like we were all on the same page. But then Palm Beach—I was terrified of hitting a Bentley with my little Toyota Echo. I felt totally self conscious and like a total rube.
Such a great interview, thank you so much! “In my own life, the limitations of class meant that I often didn’t have access or the know-how to really get the things I wanted.” That has been the story of my life as well. I remember sewing a dress to wear to an event at my first job out of college. My housemate, a college friend, took one look at the dress and said the fabric looked like it was for quilts. It wasn’t but that didn’t matter. She was my fashionable friend and I was cut to the quick. I wore the dress to the event and never put it on again.
“In my own life, the limitations of class meant that I often didn’t have access or the know-how to really get the things I wanted.” -- this part really got me, too. I don't think I fully came to understand this until I had graduated from university. I remember watching a classmate of mine get a job that I had applied for, and when I asked him how it all came about he said that he had gotten it "because my headmaster from high school knows the editor." I (and my family) had so bought into the fallacy that going to college would make up for the shortfall of not having ever had a headmaster or whatever the fuck. It's like, I had the nice dress but the fabric was wrong and my eye was untrained.
Beautifully expressed. So sorry you had that experience. For my first job evaluation at my first job, the first question my boss asked me was what my parents did for a living. Those were the first words out of her mouth. She was from the East Coast and her parents had been academics. My parents didn’t even graduate from high school. I don’t believe this editor meant to be hurtful, but it was such a fucking irrelevant question. Needless to say, I was an enthusiastic participant in helping organize a union there a few years later. It wasn’t my idea, but it was a good idea.
One more story: That boss also tried to make me accept a Congressman’s son as a summer intern. I was the publication’s fact checker at the time. We had only one and then I found college students to help me. This boss just announced that this person would be interning with me and then told me his background. And like the guy at the wedding who felt such class-based rage, I too drew a line. I told my boss that if she wanted the politician’s son to be an intern, then he could work for *her.* I chose my interns, and she didn’t get to do that. The young man was, in fact, a great intern for her and a good guy. But he fucking wasn’t going to be forced on me because of some kind of network that I had never been a part of.
That really resonated with me too. While not technically a first gen college student (my dad went to college on the GI bill), I may as well have been. I didn't know how to navigate all the unspoken things and was/am very shy to boot. So while I knew of things like professor's office hours, I didn't know what I was supposed to do with so never used them, even when I could have really used some help because I didn't know that was part of what they were for, and I didn't know how to even ask for help.
Omg this! I was a very good student with high test scores but went to a working class high school in Brooklyn with super overburdened counselors. I truly did not know about college interviews, visits, office hours, etc. I was lucky enough to fake it well enough to get good jobs after I graduated and I am forever grateful to an early mentor who taught me 'business' presentation (how to dress/act/etc.) in a white collar office. I now realize there are so many ways the knowledge that upper class/upper middle class kids have of how to navigate college/professional jobs gives them a HUGE advantage!
Yes! I am friends with her still and friends with another roommate and buddy from college who told me that I should be drinking my beer out of a glass and *not* the bottle at the wedding reception of the first friend. And because he has the best manners of anyone I have ever met and always leads with kindness, I immediately scurried away to find a glass for my beer.
I know I repeat my mother’s lessons regularly here, but this is another one: “class is quiet.” It is not about elevating you or expecting credit for everything you do. It is about elevating others. It is not expressed in material things. It is expressed in behavior, acknowledging everyone and including everyone. That is old-school, of course, but it’s my yardstick.
That doesn't sound like class to me, though? That just sounds like character.
Agreed! But as this thread shows, class has different interpretations.
I feel like framing character as class just derails the conversation though—it’s a way for people who don’t want to talk about how the class you’re born into is beyond your control and instead focus on character. Obviously it’s a good thing to judge people by character instead, but it’s not class.
I think this is a really fascinating thread to go down though! For instance, I no longer feel that I am polite in public spaces because of any innate consideration OR of instilled manners or social conditioning. I actually do feel it’s beneath me to engage with people who make disturbances in public. Why do I feel that expressing my displeasure publicly- rolling my eyes, scoffing loudly or making pointed remarks- would demean me in the eyes of a public audience who a) don’t know me from Adam, and b) are doing this same thing themselves? Why do I feel it would demean me to myself?
I’m not accusing you of derailing, btw. I know that’s not what you’re trying to do. But I think that’s where that framing comes from.
This is class, like someone Has class, or is a class act. Not their socioeconomic class.
I cannot wait to listen to this. Growing up lower middle class in the rust belt, I often felt in over my head moving to NYC after college. I was introduced to Bourdieu in my first semester of grad school and suddenly my whole life made sense! I was also fortunate to take a class with Rachel Sherman when she first started teaching at the New School. Feel like I am still doing the dance between worlds.
Oh that is so cool that you took a class with Rachel - you’re going to love the first ep!
Already deep into Ep 3 thanks to a long morning subway ride to and from a doc appt in Midtown this morning.
I really loved the Terry Gross episode. Even if she hadnt been born bougie, her class status catapulted so far over her career that she was made bougie, and its rare to hear folks who’ve had upward mobility in that way acknowledge it. Can wait to listen to the rest of the season!!
I was humbled by this part:
"she was trying to sell me on is that focusing on individual rich people, and portraying them as entitled and selfish and bad, actually encourages that behavior in a way. That it’s a distraction from talking about larger policy fixes that might actually address wealth disparities. Like if we’re dumping on Jeffrey Bezos for wearing tight party shirts on his yacht or whatever, we’re not talking about raising taxes on the rich or passing laws that encourage mixed income housing."
I've made a (very) marginal career out of arguing that stereotypes around the working class and working poor -- around living in trailers, or lack of dental work, or working in resource extraction, and on and on -- are dangerous to democracy and a motivator of polarization. But you know what, I am 100% guilty of not checking myself on judging the wealthy in this way.
Extremely resonant, as my partner and I are about to go to a wine tasting thing with friends. I'm always forced to remember how my mother was shamed when she said she loved white zinfandel.
"That's a bimbo wine!" someone complained. And she replied that she was a bimbo, and owned it.
Anyhow I am not a podcast person but you had me at swap meet board shorts and Jarvis.