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3:54am July 6, 2013

➸ BBC - The Ouch! Blog: Is it hard to work out which class you belong to if you're disabled?

clatterbane:

And very relevant to a couple of earlier posts.

Shame this even matters.


I had a really weird discussion with a friend about class.

I wondered out loud how different our social circles were.

She said “About the same – y'know, upper middle class intellectual circles.”

I tried to pick my jaw off the floor.

I’m disabled, unemployable, and poor and live in low income housing with other disabled and elderly poor people. My only social contact is with other developmentally disabled poor and working class people.

She is paid to think about how to prevent a hyperintelligent computer from taking over the world. A computer that doesn’t exist and probably will never exist. Most of her social contact is with others thinking about the same thing. (She truly believes strongly in this work, that it’s the biggest threat humanity faces. I don’t.)

I kind of gaped at her and tried to explain the difference. At which point she redefined upper middle class as anyone who’s heard of environmentalism.

Which kind of… as far as I know she’s only ever been upper middle class, living among intellectuals, and wouldn’t have noticed how off the wall that sounds.

My class background is complicated. My parents both come from families that have always been poor and working class. When they started our family, they slowly rose from working class to what a friend of mine calls upper working class – jobs where you’re still doing work for a boss (electronics technician, respiratory therapist), but the money is middle class type money, but without middle class financial security. I went to school with kids much richer than us. But due to that lack of financial security, my parents are now dirt poor and will never have much more money than they do now. Which means that I can’t get out of poverty through my parents the way some disabled people technically could.

I tend to call myself mixed class in background, poor currently and for the entire foreseeable future.

I kept trying to pick my jaw off the floor, and babbled something to my friend about all my social contact being with other DD poor people.

Her response – “DD poor people who’ve heard of environmentalism?"  There was an irritable edge to her voice I couldn’t understand.

At which point I was so confused and hurt and angry that I don’t even remember what more I babbled at her. Every part of my brain was screaming WTF, but my words weren’t in line with my ability to understand things.

I wanted to tell her that poor people are the people hands down most affected by environmental problems. And that we organize about it all over the world. And that just because upper middle class lifestyle environmentalism hasn’t heard of us, doesn’t mean we don’t exist.

I wanted to tell her that it’s impossible for us not to have heard of upper middle class lifestyle environmentalists when they are constantly being paraded in front of us on TV and elsewhere for being better than us because they can afford "green” products.

I wanted to tell her that it’s impossible for us not to have heard of them when they are constantly blaming working-class and poor people for having to take jobs that harm the environment, and pitting us against them in that way.

I wanted to tell her what my mom indignantly mentioned later – that nobody in the world is too poor to think about environmental issues.

I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t up to her to define who was poor and who was upper middle class using such strange criteria. 

And so much more.

But all I could do was sit there and babble nonsense. As it felt like the gulf between us was only growing wider.

And like I was falling away beneath her. Looking up at her through one way glass. Seeing her clearly. While she could look down towards me and only see her own reflection.

I had felt a gulf between our lives already, or I wouldn’t have asked about the difference in our social circles.  But after the conversation was over, I felt like it had become so wide I couldn’t even fathom it anymore.