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2:38pm June 5, 2012

And all the categories get shifted around again…

Pretty often I’m in a situation where I feel like things are one way, but end up talking about them another way. Because I’m so sure that they couldn’t possibly be what they seem to be. And in this case, because I’m afraid of being taken the wrong way. And then someone comes along and tells me things are how they seem, I just didn’t know it or was afraid to think about it that way. And then everything rearranges in a way that makes sense.

In this case I’m talking about class. This is going to be pretty US-specific because I know these things work differently in other parts of the world.

I wrote something really long trying to describe my family’s class position. Which is we’d always been poor or working class and then for a brief period of time when my brothers and I were growing up, we jumped up to the middle class and now my parents and I are poor. But I never felt middle class even when we were. It felt more like something I didn’t really have a name for. So I mostly call myself mixed class or because it’s several things and confusing.

And then a working-class friend of mine tells me the reason I never felt middle class was because I wasn’t. That my immediate family was more like a segment of the working class that temporarily gained a lot of privilege during a short period in US history. But that, in terms of the way the power dynamics work, we were still working class, just sort of “upper working class” that has some overlap in money (but not in other kinds of power) with the middle class.

She then told me that a lot of the people I call rich were actually middle class. And that you can determine a lot of these things by a combination of who has what kind of power, and what happens, how fast, and in what manner, if they stop working. So now there’s a lot of categories doing a lot of sliding around in my head. They make a lot more sense this way.

She told me that a lot of these distinctions have gotten blurred on purpose, to keep workers feeling separated from each other, even competing with or resenting each other, and unaware that they could unite in any sort of common cause. She said people like my family certainly had a kind of privilege that not all working class people have, and that can’t be ignored, but it’s not the right kind to make us truly middle class.

She said even the distinctions of upper and lower within a certain class, while useful to show differences in privilege and circumstances, are often less good than they look. Because they can become barriers to understanding and acting on what interests your class has in common. (We still used them throughout a lot of the conversation for clarity.)

So she’s definitely pushing for me to see myself as working class. Not to deny the kind of privilege I grew up with, but to get to the heart of basic common circumstances. I’m completely nervous about it and she knows that. It’s not that I think I’m better than other people. Hell no. She’s telling me what my instincts have told me all along. The problem is that people have an image in their heads about what working class means. And I’ve already gotten in so much trouble online for basic vocabulary differences. So I know some people will jump all over it the minute I say something. But then they jump all over me no matter what I say.

But the thing about how she described things. Is that it made sense in a way class-related terms have never made sense to me. The usual ways people divide up class in the USA has no solid meaning under it. It’s just fuzzy overlays, nothing hard and real beneath. The way my friend says it I can see the similarities between my grandfather the mill worker, and my father the technician. And the difference in the type of work they do, and the kind of power they do and don’t have, between them and doctors or lawyers or solid middle management types. And so forth. Despite all categories being iffy in the end. And for me the test of whether I will use a category or not, is whether it puts similar things or people together, and keeps different things or people apart. And her categories work really well that way.

I know they’re not just her categories either. I’ve heard similar things before. I just never knew how they applied to me. But she’s utterly adamant that my apparent membership in the middle class is an illusion created during a weird blip in US history when parts of the working class gained temporary privilege. And given that it fits everything I’ve been noticing all along, I believe her. It’s just really weird to get used to all of the categories I had learned, being skewed and unreal. So now it’s [upper] working class/poor instead of middle class/poor? Weird.