Final Draft: Barriers

Barriers

            Though I grew up in the poorest area of Ohio, my notions of poverty stemmed from books that glorified the condition.  Oliver Twist and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory gave me the ideas that a life of hardship and austerity were always met with good attitudes and morality.  This indoctrination blinded me to the very real poverty all around me.  But what effect does this one-sided rhetoric have on a middle-class child?  In the following sections, I hope to explore the ways in which my background and experiences have constantly blocked my understanding of poverty, and how I can move forward with a new understanding of my privilege.

My family on a trip to Japan.

A Child’s Look at Poverty

            It is impossible to ignore the economic segregation that took place in my public schools.  Where I grew up, I had two options: East Elementary, or West Elementary.  The difference seems utterly trivial, especially since we would be going to the same middle school, but I realized only recently how very different they were.  Everyone seemed to acknowledge that East Elementary was diverse, but their notions of diversity were only about race.  West Elementary, on the other hand, was almost entirely white, but it encompassed children of all economic backgrounds.

            Even so, West Elementary was sharply segregated.  My friends, for example, were all the children of university professors.  This did not strike me as odd.  We all took piano or dancing lessons, and we talked the same way, and our parents raised us in similar comforts.   We got all the teachers’ attention, and were trained for success. 

            I had a conversation once with a child from an underprivileged background, after I had mentioned my piano lessons.

            “Oh, I wish I could play the piano,” said the girl. 

            “Why don’t you just take lessons?” I asked, oblivious.  It doesn’t get more bourgeois than piano lessons.

            Even worse, I can I remember distinctly a conversation I had with a young boy in my class.  “Where are they going?” I asked him, pointing to a block of elementary schoolers going in the same direction. 

            “They’re going to the Garden Apartments,” he said pointedly, as if that ought to mean something profound.  I didn’t understand.  “They’re poor,” he emphasized. 

            Ohhh.  The word “poor,” suddenly, meant a whole host of new things.  This boy was suggesting to me that there was a way to easily categorize my peers—there was suddenly an “us” and a “them,” and that them could be easily identified as poor.  It was simple, and seemed to my third-grader mind perfectly reasonable. 

            When we got to Middle School, the differences in our backgrounds became more pronounced.  Children of the middle-class took Honors classes, and we already felt like we were being prepared for college.  Meanwhile, the teachers were focused on keeping the non-privileged children out of trouble. 

            I also remember something a teacher said to us in class.  He made a reference to the historical significance of the stamp on the bottom of cigarette boxes, and then laughed at us for our reactions.  This, of course, is a school that prohibits saying “dice” in math classes, preferring the term “six-sided number cubes.” Suffice to say that a teacher mentioning cigarettes was quite strange.

            “You AP kids are always like, ‘oh, cancer sticks!’” he joked.  “But the Basic and College Prep just look at their cigarette boxes and say, ‘oh, I never noticed that stamp there before.”” He was met with uneasy laughter—surely there was something strange about that joke, wasn’t there?  But if it was true, how could it be a stereotype?  How could it be harmful if it was just a fact?

            It eventually became too easy for me to identify them—a way of talking, a way of dressing.  There was a sense of superiority that came with these methods of identification.  These differences were so deeply ingrained in the social sphere that I took them for granted.  And yet, I continued to be blind to what class and poverty actually are—I saw class as only a matter of income, and not a construction that was evident in everything I did.  My notions were superficial and flawed, and it took a long time for them to change.

Nickels, Dimes, and Realizations

            I continued on with my stereotypes regarding these “other” kids until my Junior year of High School.  I consider this to be embarrassingly late, given that my parents are political scientists who have studied poverty extensively.  My previous two years of High School had given me a little more information: poverty is dangerous, poverty is terrible, poverty surrounds us.  But it still seemed so very remote and unimportant.  Poverty may have been everywhere I looked, but it belonged to an entirely other world.  Poverty was the problem of the poor—I’d just go to college and never think about it again.

            Then, in my AP Government class, my teacher assigned us two books: Nickel and Dimed and Scratch Beginnings.  These books both detail the struggles that the poor face.  The former, and more famous one, details the experiences of Barbara Ehrenreich, a scholar investigating the poor.  She describes how difficult—impossible, really—it is to raise oneself from poverty.  The latter is a book I grew to loathe.  Written by a young man named Adam Shepard, it says that anyone with a good attitude and work ethic is able to live the American Dream, and that lack of success just the “apathy of the lower class” (Shepard).  It neglected, of course, any conversation about race and gender, and never had a real discussion about what class was.  Throughout the book, he never discussed how class can affect and shape one’s entire being.  As Marx so famously posited on the subject: “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (Marx 4). 

            So, I read Nickel and Dimed.  The rhetoric was familiar to me, so I idly agreed with it and moved on to other schoolwork.  Yes, yes, the poor are poor and isn’t that awful.  But then we had to discuss it in class, and my peers’ comments were eye-opening.

            Other than the usual, “I just don’t like her,” which I have come to expect from them, I also heard things like, “it’s just unrealistic.  She’s not working hard enough.”

            “I wish she’d just stop complaining.”

            “She’s misrepresenting it.  It’s not that hard.”

            “Well why didn’t she just go to a homeless shelter?”

            Something seemed deeply flawed about what I was hearing, but I wasn’t able to pinpoint it until later.

            One night, my parents and my brother were talking about someone who had been raised in the middle class, but ended up making a sizeable income from MIT. 

            My brother made a comment about the middle-class, then corrected himself, “well, I guess she’s hardly middle-class now.  I wonder how much she makes a year.”

            “Well, class isn’t just about income,” my mother said.

            My mind was blown.  What?  What does that even mean?  Class isn’t about income?  There was more to it than that?  I was stymied.  It wasn’t until I read Scratch Beginnings that I began to understand, on a basic level, what class is.  And for the first time I can recall, what I was reading made me deeply angry.

            In Scratch Beginnings, Adam Shepard, a young, white, middle-class man declares that he is frustrated by rhetoric that claims the poor are stuck in their positions.  He decides to recreate Ehrenreich’s experience.  He goes to a homeless shelter, with just twenty-five dollars and a great attitude. He has no acknowledgement of his gender’s effect on his experiment, and he never acknowledges any of his advantages that he has over his peers.  When he ends up succeeding in the end (i.e., he gets an apartment and has some money saved up), he says that anybody could do it.  Goal-making and attitude were the most important things.  He only briefly notes that some people “need a little guidance.” Everything else amounts to poor decision-making and a bad attitude.  I went into class, ready to hear the same things about this Shepard individual that I heard about Ehrenreich’s book.  I didn’t.

            “He’s just so…honest.”

            “I really like his tone.”

            “He works so hard!  It’s really inspirational.”

            I left the classroom with several of my friends.  None of us had spoken in class, and I was hoping against hope that they had felt the same way about the book that I had. 

            “I guess that’s what happens when a guy talks about his experiences,” said one of my friends pithily.  We agreed—we should have predicted that the class would have this reaction.

            But what more could be bothering me?  Wasn’t this book just a manifestation of everything I had thought previously?  I tried to talk about it with my friends, but they had little idea either.  So, I sidled up to my parents one day, figuring that if anybody knew, they would.

            “So, we finished Nickel and Dimed,” I announced while my parents were cooking dinner.

            “Oh, I teach that in my class,” said my father said.  “I always introduce it with, ‘what do you think you’re worth?’ And then I make them read it.” He gave a little chuckle. 

            Ah-ha!  The affirmation I was looking for.  Maybe I was on the track to some sort of realization.

            “And now we’re reading Scratch Beginnings,” I said. 

            Both parents looked confused, so I explained the book, and was met immediately with eye-rolling.

            “And this kid thinks he refuted Barbara Ehrenreich?” asked my mother, a wry half-smile on her face. 

            “And my classmates agree with him,” I said, in some distress.  Now I had reason enough to think my views were valid.  If my parents, the brightest people I know, thought this Shepard person was an idiot, then I had the go-ahead to think the same.

            “Just keep reading,” my mother advised me, “and then tell us how you and your classmates feel about the book.”

            So I kept reading, and suddenly, and my entire life were thrown into sharp focus: I had this thing called privilege, and my own experiences were not universal.

Reflections of Self Within Class

            I heard so often from my parents that I was “a lucky privileged girl,” that I just filed it away in my mind as part of my identity and assumed everyone around me heard the same.  But not all kids hear those words, and often, those words do not describe them.  Only now am I able to understand that class is a very real barrier, and only now am I able to dissect how my background affects me today. 

            First, I want to look back at my public school.  It wasn’t the economic diversity that created the stereotypes and notions I had about the poor—it was the segregation.  The segregation bred mistrust.  It made me believe that there was an us and a them, and made me unsympathetic to my peers. 

            Second, the American meritocratic rhetoric I have been immersed in my entire life greatly contributed to my misconceptions.  If you tell a child often enough that “if you work hard you’ll succeed,” the child will believe it.  Not only that, the child will expect it—of everyone.  The reality is not so simple.  Class is not just a matter of how much money you make.  There are cultural barriers that continue to keep underprivileged children from our notions of success, and if you combine segregation with meritocratic rhetoric, you’ll produce generations of unsympathetic, unhelpful children.

            I continually find myself unsympathetic and unhelpful myself.  I hear about the minimum wage and I immediately want to turn off the radio.  I read a story about Walmart employees campaigning for $15 an hour, and I catch myself thinking, “well gee, can’t they just get a different darn job?” I see the markers of class all around me, and I automatically make assumptions. 

            Nevertheless, it is important that I continually seek out literature on the subject, and that I always attempt to complicate my thinking with regards to class.  I will never identify with what it is like to be raised in poverty, because my background will always blind me.  Nevertheless, I can and I will foster a sense of compassion and solidarity within myself. 

   

Bibliography

Tucker, Robert C., Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York:    Norton, 1978. Print.

Shepard, Adam. Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream. New York: Collins, 2008. Print.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan,     2001. Print.