I came across two bizarre claims about me, one saying that I know nothing about being poor, one saying that I said things I never said on Compuserve or GEnie. I think these are simply the grumblings of middle class and upper class people who don’t like to think about their privilege.
While I believe that ideas are true no matter who offers them, I realize that some people think ideas can only be true if they’re presented by people who have experienced the things that they think are important.
So, my life in this country’s class system:
Shetterlys have been poor whites for longer than the USA has existed. I don’t know if we came as indentured servants and worked our way up somewhat over the generations; I do know that we were mostly small farmers up to my grandfather’s generation. By the US standards of the time, Dad was lower-class in his background and behavior.
But he clearly had his charm, because he married a druggist’s daughter. In small towns, the druggist is third or fourth in the wealth hierarchy, after the doctor and lawyer, and maybe the dentist. Mom’s mother didn’t approve of Dad; so far as I can tell, she always thought Mom married beneath her.
When Dad managed to get a few investors together in the late ’50s and start a roadside attraction in Florida, Dog Land, he had hopes of becoming rich. But he became involved in the civil rights struggle instead, and a freeway bypassed Dog Land, and eventually the business failed.
All through that time, until I was eleven, we lived in a two bedroom house. My younger brother and I shared a bed, and my sister had a bed of her own across the room. Our clothes usually came from Goodwill or the Salvation Army. I grew up mostly eating fried chicken, hamburgers, and canned vegetables. Frozen food like TV Dinners and pot pies were considered a treat. Our cars and TVs were always bought second-hand. I can’t remember anything other than school clothes that were bought new.
And for all that time, I considered myself middle class. We had black and white neighbors who were poor. Mom often found things to give to people who were much worse off than we were. I had no sense that Levy County was a poor county. All I knew was that black people were treated worse than white ones, and that was wrong.
I was four when we went to Florida. I may have learned about the idea of racism before I learned about the idea of race. Dad only had a high school education then, but he read voraciously, and he was a Kennedy Democrat. He explained that ignorant people saw the world in terms of race, and if I ever said “nigger” in his hearing, I would be spanked so thoroughly I wouldn’t sit down for a week.
The Gainesville Sun wrote an article calling Dad “The Only Liberal in Levy County.” As the eldest son of the only liberal, I was beaten and spat on by racists who called me a nigger-lover. I had some friends at school, but I was very aware that we were outsiders.
Dad was no pacifist; he taught me how to carry the shotgun to him in case the Ku Klux Klan came calling. We expected them; Dog Land could not get fire insurance because the word was out that the Klan would burn us down. I don’t know if Dad’s shotgun discouraged them, or if the Klan in Levy County was less of a threat than elsewhere. They never came.
At forty, Dad used the GI Bill to enter the University of Florida as a freshman. We lived in a blue collar neighborhood at the edge of town. It was a move up: we had a three bedroom house, so my brother and I only shared a room. After Dad and I enclosed the car port, there was a bedroom for each of the kids. We still ate and dressed as cheaply as we had at Dog Land. Mom supported us by working as a secretary at the university.
Then Mom’s father volunteered to pay for my education. Dad wanted me to go to Choate because John F. Kennedy had graduated from it. So, for two years, I learned how America’s ruling class lives. One of my best friends was was the daughter of the manager of the Waldorf-Astoria. Another lived on Park Avenue. Another lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. Their lives were the stuff of fiction to me, and I never quite understood the casual way they saw the luxuries that came to them.
After I was kicked out of Choate (the quick version is they thought I was dealing drugs, which I wasn’t), I graduated from Western High School, a public school in Washington, DC that was approximately 70% black. One weekend, I hitchhiked to Choate to visit old friends, and I met the first serious love of my life, a woman whose parents lived in the south of France. In college, we did a semester abroad, which included a visit to her home in Mougins, near Cannes.
To be continued?
I don’t know you, but was reading EC’s friends page.
Choate is an American school based on the Great English Public schools, I believe. A sort of American Eton or Winchester.
Ouch, that must have been tough. But it sounds as if folk were kind. The priviliged are often kind and nice: they can afford to be.
In Blighty the conventional shorthand would be scholarship boys or poor rellies. You would have been a poor relly. I know exactly how you feel. Especially the bit about being sacked for drugs, even if in my case they got the one of the right guys.
That’s Choate. It’s not quite up there with Exeter and Andover; if Dad had known more about the upper class, he would’ve wanted me to go to one of those schools instead of Choate. Choate is where Kennedy went after he’d been kicked out of the most elitist prep schools.
I also did my share of drugs; they were right to be suspicious of me. I didn’t deal, but friends of mine did. A small irony: I decided to go straight about two months before the end of the school year, but I had a lot of demerits, so I had to stay after the end of the year to be on a work crew. I went out drinking that night on the school grounds, got caught, and was told that because of their suspicions about me, they didn’t want me back.
Life just does things like that now and then.
Over all, folks were very kind. You’re right; the rich can be very good at kindness. It’s why I love more than a few of them. They’re just oblivious to the consequences of the system that provides them with their wealth–except for the few who make sure that system keeps going.
To be continued, I hope!
You had more experience at further distant points of the class spectrum than I did growing up. My father worked in a paperboard mill for 37 years, an operating engineer who helped keep the power plant running, which somehow seemed higher class than the mill workers who turned pulp into cardboard boxes for Kellogg’s and other companies. I suspect that’s because my mother had higher aspirations for the family. She’d grown up poor, with alcoholic parents. When she hit puberty, her parents put her in an institutional work home. Her grandparents rescued her from that, providing a home through her remaining high school years.
But those were just stories — my own experience was that there was always adequate food on the table, enough new clothes and shoes that I didn’t worry about wearing something out or outgrowing it, modest family vacations, and money enough for orchestra tickets and other cultural opportunities my mother lobbied for. There was never a lot of money, but there was money enough. The only time that came into question was one year when my father’s union went out on a long strike. After several weeks, Dad headed down to the Food Bank, “just to see what we’d get.” In those years, there weren’t food stamps, there were government commodities that they gave the needy. (Well, those who qualified.)
Years later, I asked him how much of that trip was to satisfy curiosity, and how much we actually needed the food. At the time, he presented it as the adventure only. In truth, it was half adventure, half need. The real butter was treat, but those powdered eggs sucked.
It wasn’t until all three kids had bachelor’s degrees (and two had their master’s) that it became family knowledge that Dad hadn’t graduated from high school.
I knew there were rich people, and poor people, and that we were closer to poor than rich, but there really wasn’t any direct exposure to the ruling class, even the ruling class of Battle Creek, Michigan.
There weren’t any blacks or other noticeable minorities in my schools or church. (Years later, I heard there had been one Jewish family with kids in my high school, but I certainly didn’t know it at the time.) There had been one black student when my older brother was in high school. Perhaps predictably, he was the senior class president and I seem to remember he ended up as Homecoming King, too.) My own experience with black kids was through Junior Theatre, a city-wide, privately-run drama program for kids in grades 5-9. Mostly, I was oblivious in that way that kids growing up in lily white neighborhoods can be.
When it came to the Civil Rights Movement, I was always in favor of everything it was trying to achieve. I didn’t understand how we could have possibly had the hundred years of institutionalized racism, surely the freedom won with the Civil War meant that was inherently and utterly wrong.
I grew up believing the words of our Declaration of Independence applied to all: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
(I’m still surprised and deeply pleased that the pursuit of Happiness is in there. And I’ve always read “men” as “people” in that context.)
I like to think that I’m reasonably aware of just how much the privileges I’ve experienced my entire life as a white female, and my adulthood with a credit score high enough to buy me considerable financial flexibility even during those times that my income did not support that. But I’m sure there’s much I’m still oblivious to at both ends of the class spectrum, and at many points in between.
Yii! I’d completely forgotten that we used to drink powdered milk. It was awful. Tang instead of OJ didn’t make me happy either, because we were in Florida and I loved orange juice.
Can’t remember if we ate powdered eggs, so I’m guessing we didn’t.
Thanks for the history! And I agree with you on both points regarding the Declaration.
I’d like to see it continued.
We had sort of a mixed position in the town where I grew up. On the one hand, people used to drop off old clothes on our front porch. (None of which fit anyone in the house, but I think they may have been meant for me.) On the other hand, the same people were “borrowing” money from my parents every Friday. I always figured the kids who lived in the trailer park were poor, the kid who had a walk-in closet bigger than my bedroom (which I shared with my brother) was rich, and we were just unrepentantly weird.
My parents drank powdered milk most of my life, but not from financial necessity (I think my mother gave it up after my father died, which fits other indications). Luckily they didn’t try to make *me* drink it or use it on cereal. I don’t know if they tried before I remember, and gave up, or if they thought a growing kid needed the fat.
I think part of the reason I loved school was that we could have all the real milk we wanted.
Oh, yes. We also didn’t get real American cheese. We got the knock-off American cheese. And, surprisingly, I could taste the difference.
you have OMG CLASS PRIVILEGE. it is also combined with the white privilege that allowed your ‘poor’ family to have the ability to marry upwards at all in the class hierarchy.
antiracists notice class privilege particularly when it is combined with white privilege, as in the examples of your life you’ve chosen to detail.
and it all starts with indentured servitude– still a class level above slavery.
it certainly puts all your complaining about class status in…interesting perspective.
Are you saying poor blacks never married middle class blacks in the 1950s? I can’t decide whether that’s racist or simply very ignorant.
If my mother’s parents had accepted my father, or if my father had accepted them, you would be right about my privileged youth. Instead, I drank powdered milk and ate generic cheese food because we couldn’t afford real milk or real American cheese.
But if you love class hierarchy, I don’t expect you to understand anything about the privileges of class.
Ditto the weird!
I lived in Edina MN until I was 9, which was a very segregated white upper class suburb here in Minneapolis MN. Dad was a Dr., Mom was a Nurse RN. Both had gone to college and private Catholic High Schools which made them “White Lace Irish” When I was 9 we moved to Northern MN to the town of Bemidji. (Notice my online handle?) and for those that don’t know I would call Bemidji a reservation town/ vacation community. There were Native kids in my school, but almost no black kids at all. I was certainly upper class to most of the kids in my school, and was class conscious for the first time in my life. I had new school clothes, and name brand jeans (Levi’s) and Nike shoes, both were requirements to be a cool kid in the late 70’s. People from Edina were called “Cake Eaters” in Bemidji, and for the first time I got beat up for being a rich kid. I made friends easily, and one of my best friends to this day was made in that Bemidji Grade School on my first day of class. His name is Lee Helgen and he is now a City Council member in St. Paul. He walked right up to me the first day as a new kid and said “Hi, I’m Lee and we are going to be best friends.” We were inseperable until we went away to different colleges. The Helgens didn’t have a lot of money, and my mother didn’t understand when I would wear my older brothers second hand clothes to school instead of my spiffy new clothes. My Dad finally had to explain to her that I did so to keep my friends from feeling badly about their handme downs. From that point on she bought me new clothes for church, but let me go to school in old beat up/patched jeans and worn out rock concert t-shirts gotten from older cousins or my siblings (I’m the youngest of four.) I went to a very elitist college at the insistence of my folks, but I hated it. Private Catholic College is no place for a gay kid trying to come out of the closet and the other people there were very intolerant of my Timber Town Leftist leanings and my anti-class attitude.
Ah, now Native American issues I could probably talk about. My mother’s older brother and younger sister both married into the same Ojibwa family. My uncle was a student at one of the last incarnations of the Indian Boarding Schools.
Funny thing, I was always more accepted in the Native community in my home town than the white. Dad delivered the kids of many Res folks and was held in pretty high regard for being a good Dr. to their community, so I was seen as family by many, or at least a part of their community. My best memories of that part of my life came from pow wows and beading circles, or fishing and ricing with families of friends I had made among the Ojibwa, it’s truly a fascinating culture to me.
We lived near an Ojibwe reservation in Ontario for a while. The Ojibwe that I knew were tribal (in the best way) and not at all racist (see the Cherokee, who may have simply learned the White Man’s Way too well).
I would like to take this moment to encourage you to continue!
:)
You had a TV AND a car?
We usually had no TV (I watched at the neighbors or not at all.) We had no car until I was about 10. Of course now I live in the suburbs and not the city (my young life’s dream) and we have to have 3 cars (not to mention 3 cell phones-of course we only have 1 TV-without cable and such).
Right now, I’m actually watching something worth it on TV. It’s called “Masters of Science Fiction” hosted by Stephen Hawking and today they are airing Heinlein’s story “Jerry Was a Man” (speaking of class). They also keep advertising a show called “Pushing Daisies” that has promise.
Oh, yeah. The TV may’ve been old, and it wasn’t a color set, but my only complaint was that we could only get two channels at Dog Land.
At both places in Florida, we lived pretty far from everything. Like all our neighbors, we had to have a vehicle that ran, even if it wasn’t much to behold.
wow, dude. you don’t even realise you’re a troll. there weren’t nearly enough middle class blacks in the 50s for your comparison to even be valid or ’sensical.
anyway, you’re a successful published writer in genre categories that aren’t exactly accepting of non-middleclass white imagined worlds. and that is love of class hierarchy that’s not contestable. although i wonder where on earth in my comment you got an idea that i ‘loved’ class hierarchy. i know it exists, and that it overlaps with white privilege to such a degree that you shouldn’t speak of class in america without mentioning race if you want to fairly and accurately assess the situation.
Seriously, read about middle class blacks in the 1950s.
Also, there’ve been important non-white characters in just about all of my books, including protagonists, so cut the accusations of literary racism. You’re just looking more ignorant.
It’s very easy to speak of class in America in places like northern Minnesota without mentioning race.
See, that is the problem with the American particulars - you will often sound like a rich person if you mention CAR (only rich persons have private cars), TV (again - such a luxury. AND then you mention that there was more than one channel as though TWO channels were not an incredible luxury. And I bet BOTH of those channels were in your native language also!), FRIED CHICKEN!!! (that IS a luxury).
BUT - there IS hope. Even if the particulars of American poor of my age may always sound off, I have had online conversations in English that have made me understand the reasons why being poor in USA has different particulars, but is same in general. I just have to learn to get over the knee jerk reaction I have to hearing CAR and POOR in same sentence (and I come from a privileged family - we had car and since 1970 a black and white TV that ran one channel for around 8 hours in a day. I did not get to eat fried chicken as often as I would have liked, though, so I feel jealous of your childhood).
Where are you from?
I’ve noticed that what the poor/middle class/rich have also varies a lot from area to area. Once I asked someone who was middle class if she had a swimming pool — she was shocked and said that she wasn’t rich. In AZ, there are pools in some *very* low income neighborhoods. In some big cities with actual decent public transportation, there are middle class people (some with families) who do not own cars. There are people who are on food stamps, but get cable tv. I’ve known artists who have thousands of dollars’ worth of artwork and supplies, but can’t afford shoes without holes. I’ve had people ask how I could afford (insert luxury) when I wasn’t able to afford (insert small necessity), without considering yard sale skills, that something could’ve been on clearance or a gift, or that some small items border on necessity (e.g. generic laundry detergent means there’s a good chance of itching all day and possible rash).
Most of us make assumptions about luxury vs. necessity based on personal priorities, where and how we grew up (including, but not limited to “class”), and perceived cost and value.
Estonia.
I once read a LJ of an 80-year old person from USA - and his experiences of life in nineteen thirties and - forties were more similar to my experiences in 1970-ties and 1980-ies than what people of my age describe.
I attempt to figure out what my personal knee-jerk items are and give myself time not to get aggressive in my assumptions mistakenly when interacting with people whose experience may be different (not that I am very successful in this, but I try).
Oh, I was *very* lucky! And I know that in much of the world, my neighbors who I thought were poor would have been considered rich.
I’m also glad there’s hope. Many of us are finally learning to notice those who are worse off than we are. Thanks for adding more perspective to the issue!
And to anyone reading this: visit anonuum’s LJ to see some great pics of Vietnam.