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Survey Responses:
I grew up in a ethnic working class neighborhood. It was both a good and bad experience. My father was angry that he did not get an education. He quit school at the end of 8th grade to work. When he told his mother that he wanted to further his education, she told him that all he was good for was working in a factory. He never forgave her. He as much told me the same thing or at least that is what my mother told me. One of my aunts saud that every child you have is a millstone around your neck; in other words they cause the family to drown. I have never felt that I belong in this world. Both my parents felt insecure financially insecure. Their arguments always centered on money. When my dad was laid off, things got really tense. I feel that I can understand the some of the pain of the hurricane survivors. IMy ethnic background on the other hand has given me a heritage. Back when I was growing up, the people my parents hung around with were socialists. Today these ethnic folks are just like everyone else, i.e. caught up in consumerism. I am not. In fact, I hate shopping. My husband says this makes it difficult for us, but I believe it is related to my familial background where one never bought anything on credit and shopping was felt to be a waste of time. It was more important to be outside gardening or listening to birds.
I was working class but daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Repoublic, which has made my class experience even more coplex. Onthe one hand, we lived in poorer conditions than most working class whites we knew in New York, who looked down on us and were extremely racist. It was horrible to be called a spic at age 6. I felt that the racism of thse working class peole kept my father and mother and myself out of good union jobs. My parents worked in jobs with no benefits and no vacations or sick days. Working class white people seemed lazy to us and spoiled, as well as racists. I had a hard time understanding how they coudl be so complacent and why they didn't try harder in school like we did.
I grew up in upper middle class, but sometimes felt underpriveledged because many of my friends were far wealthier! the good things were I was given opportunities to travel to Isreal as a teenager, and attend a camping trip across the US, which included living with a Navaho family for 5 days and experiencing true poverty first hand. I was allowed excellent education and arts opportunities. The bad things were being "spoiled". Feeling like I could have whatever I needed. Never understanding the position of not being able to afford something. As an adult I do not have a good sense of handling money.
My paternal grandfather owned several weekly newspapers in Montana, and my maternal grandfather was co-owner of a large tractor factory in Iowa, then later owned an oil refinery in Montana. I was born in 1932, just at the time the Great Depression was striking full force, which decimated the fortunes of both families. My father ended up as a reporter on a small weekly newspaper, and we lived in half a duplex without central heating on an unpaved street in a tough little working-class town during my early growing-up years. My father worked 60 hours a week at half the pay he earlier had been earning on a daily newspaper, but his new job at least provided him some status in the town and some work satisfaction. Life was much more difficult for my university-graduate mother, who had grown up living in luxury in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house (now on the National Historic Registry of Houses), and her efforts to assert her former class status in the new setting brought her mostly rejection from the townspeople. Unfortunately, we three children (all boys)reaped some of the hostility she had generated, both on the playground and the classroom. I, as the eldest son, finally ended up identifying as much with the working-class population as I did with my parents' class, and in my teen years acted out by drinking beer and "making out" in the backseats of old cars with my new friends (many of whose houses lacked even indoor plumbing) and also turned against my parents' Republican views, as, for instance, when I argued for universal health insurance in a high-school debate class and regularly read the Communist "Daily Worker" subscribed to by the father of one of my friends. During World War II, my father became editor of the weekly newspaper. and my parents bought a "respectable" house in the better part of town and made friends with the doctors, lawyers and successful business people. While my mother failed to recapture all of her old status, she adapted to the little town finally and was accepted by the upper-middle class in the community. I remained a political progressive (and still do), because I clearly saw how life was for ordinary people in that town. My parents, however, never identified with the lower classes but, rather, bent all of their energies towards working to recapture at least part of their earlier class status. I ended up going to university (after three years as an enlisted man in the army), then worked for small daily newspapers and finally ended up (after a U.S. Senate internship with a liberal senator) on the editorial board of the Baltimore Sun, quite a prestigious paper then. My mother's comment at the time evidenced her continuing rejection of my political views. "Well, it used to be a good newspaper," she commented, reflecting on that newspaper's famous 1920s and 1930s social-Darwinist columnist H.L. Mencken, whom she admired. My mixed socialization 1) made it impossible for me ever to forget my working-class friends and their problems but 2) also gave me the intellectual skills to rise to a high level as a journalist. Ultimately, I lost the Baltimore Sun job in the 1980s when the paper moved rightwards during the Reagan Administration. Do I have regrets? Yes, I suppose so, but I also consider it to have been a blessing that my background gave me a questing mind and that my major concern today still is with the question of how to create a more fair, just, equitable and environmentally-sound human society. Currently, I am employed as a writer by a small weekly newspaper with a very progressive editorial policy.
I grew up in an environment with middle-class Jewish values, but a distinct lack of money. I was raised to know the importance of books, art, music--and to know how to find those things for free or very cheap. We never went hungry, but we didn't have much extra. It was two years before we even replaced a broken TV.
I grew up middle class and Jewish, but come from a mixed marriage: my mother's family were upper middle class shop owners who owned a small retail chain (10 stores) and my father's father was a truck driver and a proud member of the working class while his wife was a school teacher with a middle class background. When my parents divorced, we were a single mother family with support from grandma and a lot of fear about money. However, education was paramount and my private schooling kept me firmly in the middle class. With all of this, I suppose my primary relationship to class has been confusion, although just figuring out this much has helped a lot. Thanks for asking!
I grew up in an owning class family with a legacy of inherited wealth. My parents worked but they didnt have to. The benefits were ones that you might imagine: in depth education, travel, time and space to do art classes, ample shelter, food, clothing, good health care, and a sense that "my people" are recognized by the larger society. The downsides were isolation from poor and working class people except as employees, a fear of being ridiculed for being wealthy or seen as part of the enemy (I grew up in a liberal community). I grew up feeling like my privilege was a seperator between me and others. I also struggled with feeling that my problems were nothing compared to people with less financially, true on one hand but hard to live with as a child or young person.
I grew up poor. It's taken me years of being away from home to realize what was good about it. One thing is the interdependence of people in my community. None of my friends' families could always make it 100% on their own, so we turned to each other for help and support. One of the times my mom was evicted, she was an emotional wreck. The neighbors and my younger brother's friends turned out to help her pack up and move. Community was our safety net. What was bad about growing up poor was feeling insecure and unstable regarding basic needs like safe shelter, healthy food, heat, etc. and feeling like I could never talk about this with my friends at school because I just wanted to appear normal, and being poor was never portrayed as the norm.
Read earlier survey responses:
July 2005: What are your strongest memories connecting race and class?
June 2005: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal each ran their own series on class. What is your response to the recent press on class?
May 2005: The good, the bad, and the ugly of cross-class relating
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