Reading, discussing, & challenging class(ism)

Bastille Day!

I was sailing along through the reading (lots of charts, basic elements, check check check) until I got to the last essay on Class and the Politics of Living Simply. Partly because the author starts with an old-time religion view (in the best possible sense) which is foreign to me. The historic period he* is talking about is exactly my period of reference, the 60s and 70s abandonment of traditional christian teaching on charity in favor of "new age" spiritual mores that the writer shows have been co-opted toward greed and narcissism.

(This is where I should have an introductory post to sketch more of where I come from on these issues, cause I don't know most of you except from brief WisCon meetings. Instead I'll just work it in a bit.)

Right where I had to stop and come back later was in the discussion of shame. How being poor or losing class standing is a matter of personal failing in our society, more and more over the last decades. This is not necessarily a new thing: I've read history of folks like mine from Oklahoma during the Depression, and one of the things that made working-class men like my granddad most close-mouthed was that they had to shoulder their own failure, in a mythological America where anyone could succeed if they applied themselves. So this sense of personal failure assigned to the poor has been a long time in the works. Shaming the poor for their misfortune goes back centuries (like in Monty Python, "you'll like the poor -- dreadful people"). But the people writing the histories have not much taken a christian attitude toward it. As soon as poor people give it any thought, the systemic nature of the failure is plain enough, that it is not personal but a world made wrong, where they? we? have got the shitty end of the stick.

This internalization of failure is something I am struggling with in my own family and my own self. My parents are all teachers, professionals, and I slid back on that ladder of achievement to clerical work, like my grandma, even though I have the college diploma. I understand a lot of the systemic reasons for my position, but I still feel the shame of personalized failure.

I didn't let the threat of that stick send me back to a job I didn't like after my maternity leave, to spend all my wages on day care, but I stayed home to raise my kid, with the traditional support of a salaried spouse. But I came from a class background that made it quite a surprise to me when I started to hear (over years) from other working-class women that they envied me the ability to stay home, instead of having to go out to work. Women getting into the workplace was the big push in Second Wave feminism (my mom wrote the book!) but then professional women kind of forgot about the moms and working class women who didn't have careers but just jobs. My husband has reassured me over and over that my value is not measured by my income, or lack thereof. I've satisfied those professional class inner demons by studying arts and literature -- to the extent that for some years I have filed my (self-employment) Schedule C, and can see the dreadful position of artists and writers in our society, who can hardly earn a living without a day job, or (like me) support of a patron (spouse).

So that's a piece of my mind that came loose with this reading. I especially liked the kind of mission statement at the end of the last author's selection:

It is the task of those who hold greater privilege to create practical strategies, some of which become clearer when we allow ourselves to fully empathize, to give as we would want to be given to.

[*is this author bell hooks?]