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6:58pm March 6, 2012

Why I don’t have a list of my areas of privilege and lack thereof on top of my tumblr.

I’ve long resisted putting up in my tumblr description, a concise list of identities and ways that I do and don’t have privilege.  I’ve done it in the past other places but it’s always felt wrong.  It feels like taking a complex set of wavy lines tangled together and then reducing them to a grid.  And that’s even in stating just one kind of privilege. 

I’ll take class as an example.  Sometimes I’ll say middle class because that’s how I grew up, sometimes I’ll say poor because that’s what I am (permanently, not voluntarily) now.  Sometimes I’ll say mixed class because I am both. But none of these even close to tell the whole story. 

I grew up first-generation middle class.  My parents were both from working class and poor families that had been working class and poor for as long as we have record.  Rural and small town, not urban.  This meant that there were cultural differences between me and the people in my neighborhood whose families had been middle class for generations, even when we had the same amount of money. 

There are also a lot of different types of middle class jobs, that make all these weird little distinctions in how middle class people treat each other. My father was an electronics technician doing both the work of a technician and that of an engineer. He had a two year degree despite being a better engineer than a lot of people with advanced degrees in engineering.  And the two year degree meant he was paid as a technician regardless of the work he did.  He said that his college taught him the building blocks of learning electronics, and he used those to teach himself engineering through practical experience outside of school.  

My mother, after a succession of jobs like waitressing, got a two-year degree and became a respiratory therapist.  She’d wanted to be a test pilot or an architect but those weren’t very open to women in her generation.  Like my father, she learned from practical experience until her intuition about people’s breathing, if not her technical knowledge, surpassed that of some nurses and doctors.  She saved people’s lives at times by overriding doctors’ judgements, even though she was only technically there to administer breathing treatments and the like. 

Where this put my parents in the basic job hierarchy of the middle class was complicated.  Their jobs were not as high ranking as a lot of weird corporate management type jobs of the upper middle class.  (I’m being vague because I honestly don’t know what such people do.)  This is because they were doing practical work for the most part, and working for others, instead of… whatever the hell those people do.  And they weren’t doctors or lawyers or anything. 

And yet their jobs – especially my dad’s – were definitely higher ranking than those of some other people in the middle class. I have a harder time describing this distinction.  It has something to do with the particular kind of skill involved. But I have no clue how to describe it so I’m giving up. 

Suffice to say that even within one class there are a bunch of shifting hierarchies and stuff. By the time I was born, my parents had landed pretty much in the middle of those.  With my father’s job being higher status than my mother’s.  (Although she often worked several jobs, if I recall correctly. She basically didn’t sleep.)

People often talk about class in terms of education. It’s definitely true that before my parents’ generation most of my relatives had only graduated from either high school or junior high if that. While my parents both went to two-year colleges.  My father went to technical school and my mother went to some kind of specific career program at a community college.  

My father, whose family were farmers, first tried to go somewhere else. He flunked out largely because of a speech they gave his first day there:  All about how going to college would make them better than other people. Better than my dad’s family. That so demoralized him that he couldn’t study or concentrate. 

What many middle-class and higher people don’t realize, though, is that there’s more than one way to be educated.  While having a college degree affords more privilege than other ways, I find it really insulting when I hear people’s stereotypes of people who only got to junior high or high school.

I have plenty of relatives who never made it out of junior high, never even made it all the way through it, yet were huge believers in education.  They read any books they could get their hands on, and found other ways of learning things. And that’s besides all the stuff you can’t get from reading, that’s highly valuable yet highly devalued. 

Now not all of my relatives did that. And there was nothing wrong with the ones who didn’t or couldn’t.  But when I hear all that stuff it just feels like they’re not even looking around at actual people who have a different background than theirs.  And I hate when people use the word uneducated as a code word for various moral failings, bigotry, or stupidity. 

With regard to education, that gets me into another weird thing about my class situation.  After I was severely bullied in school, my parents decided for some unknown reason that a private school would be better.  At the time it was a K-8 school but now they have expanded to both that and a prep school.  Unlike the other parents, my parents had to take out a lot of loans to send me there. So I went there, repeating fourth grade, and ended up in a school where practically everyone was rich.  The parents were at minimum doctors and lawyers, if not CEOs and that kind of thing. And everyone knew when you weren’t, even though people think uniforms prevent that. They don’t.  It was like the other kids could smell when you weren’t rich.  This didn’t help the bullying although I got educational opportunities there that weren’t in public school. 

And like my parents, I eventually went on to college. First a college for high school age students, where I barely hung on and then crashed hard at the end of the year. Then a community college in the same district my mom had gone to.  I tried university but never made it to class. 

It gets complicated though because of a few things. One, the education that I skipped over, I never made up for. I never got taught the things you get taught in grades 8, most of 9, and then 10, 11, and 12.  Most of my high school education was in special ed or skipped altogether.  And special ed is the only place I’ve ever graduated. 

The other complicating factor is how much I retained from school. The reality is that anything I managed to learn, I taught myself with the books and other stuff like that.  I couldn’t retain anything from the actual classes very long at all, if it penetrated my head to begin with.  I’d get good grades, or bad grades, or in between. But almost nothing actually stuck.  And this tendency only got worse after the sixth grade or so was over.  I don’t mean the way most people forget some things, either. I mean serious lack of retention of even the stuff I might need to use often.  The only things I retained are things I learned on my own. 

And that means while being middle class, and going to a school that was mostly for rich kids, gave me some amazing educational opportunities, the way my brain works and the way my education skipped around backwards and forwards all the time, means I didn’t get to take full advantage of these opportunities.  My parents got far more out of their educations than I did.  This doesn’t undo the class privilege I had over theirs, but it makes it far more complicated than even my weird educational history looks. 

But as for what I could learn on my own, money helped that. Having computers, even if they weren’t as good as the ones people I knew had, meant a lot. Especially in teaching myself communication and writing. I think my communication skills would have turned out much different without that. And we could afford for me to get tons of books, too.  And to do a lot of hands-on stuff as well. 

When most people talk about downward mobility, at least that I’ve seen online over the years, they seem to be talking about something that people choose. Because they think that being poor is somehow cool.  And so they bring themselves down to that income level, but they are always able to pop out of it and go back to the middle or upper classes if they run into any serious trouble.  Or they still have well-off parents who can help them with stuff if they choose to remain “poor”.  My experience has been quite different because of disability. 

When I was a kid I never had much clue what I wanted to do when I grew up. Or what I could do. As I got older, I became keenly aware that my intellectual skills were limited. Not in that I had a “limited intellect”, but that I had a limit to how long I could sustain intellectual effort.  Beyond that point I would lose cognitive abilities.  Some temporarily, others long term.  This is why I started having so many school problems. 

I also found that I was unable to direct my intellect easily.  I could not sit down and tell myself to do something, and then do it. Trying that led to all kinds of meltdowns and shutdowns. And screaming matches with my mother, who would say things like “I am so sick and tired of your mental blocks.”  As if I could will them away in order to complete my homework without bashing myself on the head and screaming. 

I was very relieved when my residential facility had a job training program. I had found things I could do.  And do for long periods. Even in 100-degree heat while on Thorazine and Clozaril.  They taught us how to fill out time cards and paid us minimum wage.  I painted fences, barns, and houses.  I cleaned outdoor things and hosed things down. I shoveled horse shit into a wheelbarrow and dumped it all the way across a field.  I took care of plants and animals.  (I ended up doing all of that because the other kids lacked enough human decency to care if the animals lived or died. They said this to me.)  

These were things I could actually do and I was so excited and proud.  I knew these kinds of jobs didn’t pay well, but I knew I couldn’t do anything else well enough.  And I’d spent so long thinking I could do nothing.  And I had the kind of messed up work ethic that said if you can’t do anything you’re bad. And I had thought I had no future. And here was a future. 

I was in another work program when I was in special ed. That one just confirmed that I couldn’t do even the kind of cognitive work that most people don’t consider all that cognition-intensive. They had me stocking shelves in a bookstore.  And I couldn’t. They required decisions of me that I couldn’t make.  It ended very badly.  Then they put me in a volunteer job caring for animals at a wildlife rescue and I completely thrived. 

And then my movement disorder progressed further. And I injured my back.  And after a really long illness, my physical stamina became permanently shot to hell.  And I learned that there was no way I could get a job. And in that way I ended up on SSI.  Permanently. I have far too many conditions any single one of which would prevent me from employment, for me to think I’ll ever have a “real job” again.  This differentiates me strongly from the voluntarily downwardly mobile. 

Even there, I’ve had certain forms of class privilege, though.  In a recent post I talked about Disabled Adult Child benefits.  Most people on those benefits end up on both that and SSI at once – their total income remaining the same. But my parents made enough money that I actually get somewhat more money than I did on SSI. I’m still poor, but I’m less poor.  (And I think this is completely unfair.)

My parents retained their middle class status for a little while, but it wasn’t long before they hit a wall too.  They’re retired now, and neither of them is capable of a job. Especially my mother, who has developed a condition quite similar to one of mine, at least in its effects. It messes with movement, her autonomic system, and stamina in a big and scary way. And she’s had a bunch of strokes. 

At this point they’re on Social Security benefits and exactly as poor as that sounds. And are in extreme debt from medical bills they’re not sure they’ll ever be able to pay off.  So that thing about having well-off parents who can help you out doesn’t apply either. 

Not that we all don’t have class privilege. Having been middle class even part of your life makes that inevitable. There are things easier for all of us because of that. And yet, having been middle class doesn’t remove the fact that we are poor now either. 

And as with the middle class, being poor has all kinds of levels and variations to it.  There are ways that I am better off than a lot of poor people. I have a subsidized apartment, and can usually afford food although it can get tight at the end of the month.  I have phone and Internet.  I have Medicare and Medicaid, which are both far from ideal and far from the worst possibility.  My income is in the upper range for a poor person.  And I’m USA-poor, not the same as other parts of the world. 

And yet, contrary to the belief of people who use the rest of the world to claim nobody here is poor, it’s more complicated than that. Poverty is often relative to the various resources in a culture.  I’m not good at explaining that, I know what I mean but I don’t know the words.  I lack the security I remember of the middle class, the financial resilience.  I experience classism on a regular basis.   I wasn’t kidding about the end of the month.  

People act like because I get my money from the government then they as taxpayers have the right to boss me around about what I do with it and whether I ought to have it at all.  They say I make no contribution to society. Call people like me parasites for wanting to be alive without a job.  Unfortunately things are set up so that it’s often poor people pitted against each other – the working poor versus the welfare poor.  (Although being white I get far from the worst crap about being on benefits.)

I’ve had to live outside before when my subsidized housing became uninhabitable due to illegal construction practices. It was us against the housing authority and the housing authority had the power. People here died.  I ended up in the emergency room several times.  It’s things like this that make it too simplistic to say that poor people in the USA aren’t actually poor.  If we weren’t actually poor we’d have been able to buy help fighting this.  But we didn’t and people died and others of us had our bodies damaged from breathing concrete and wallboard dust mixed with asbestos. 

And on the other hand we do really have things that poor people in other places lack. It’s really complicated. None of this is simple or easy to tease out. 

I could go on and get even more detailed but I won’t.  The purpose of all this is to explain why just picking a class, or even picking two classes, to describe oneself doesn’t do justice to all the intertwining complicated forces within and between the various classes.  And that’s without adding in all the other areas where privilege can exist. To even close to fully describe any person’s placement in these areas of life, could go on for the length of a book.  

So I am really uncomfortable just saying “white, lesbian, no gender, disabled, mixed class…” and on and on.  I’d far rather be precise and detailed about what they are and how they mix.  But that would take forever.

And it seems too easy to describe privilege itself in that way.  To say that in this area it absolutely exists and in that area it absolutely doesn’t exist.  It’s always complicated even in areas where it seems simple. Because there are always twists and turns and connections between things that make each person’s situation different. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.  

And things shift around a lot by time and situation – I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen two people in nominally the same category, whose day to day interactions reflected a constantly shifting set of power dynamics, where each would be on top or on the bottom sometimes, and all places in between, and the ties between them that pulled and shifted.  And that just within one category, it gets way more complicated than that when you look at all of them at once. 

And while I understand the shorthand that people end up having to use, it feels like it’s too artificially neatened to fit in with the real world.  Like if you list ten things that apply to someone then you’ll know all that’s necessary to figure out what’s going on.  And I just can’t bring myself to do that. It’s not that the things don’t apply, or that I think I’m special. It’s just that it’s really hard for me to see the world in that level of lack of detail. In a situation where the detail is important.