Hm

[sciatrix]

So I asked Metafilter about class and socioeconomic status yesterday. Not theoretically, either: I was pretty direct about where I was coming from and openly curious about other people and their thoughts.

(I'm honestly kind of surprised the thread went up immediately without workshopping from mods; I'm not bothered by it either, just startled.)

And... predictably, people are really uncomfortable! I totally understand that--I'm uncomfortable having written it out, frankly--but I'm kind of impressed at the number of people who jump to "this thread is a doxxing honeypot" or "this thread is an exercise in making us all feel bad!" Not really surprised, but impressed.

I mean. I didn't bring that here. That's you, buddy. I'm trying to be careful to signal both "I come from an incredibly privileged class background that just got more so after I left" and "I am currently struggling in SES but I have a way forward not everyone does." I'm actually more vulnerable feeling about the first one, which is why I took care to bring it. Economic inequality and class privilege exist. It's not a personal insult to talk about where I stand and invite others to do the same.

(At the same time I totally understand why that makes people feel vulnerable and why people might feel uncomfortable both that they feel like they're being pressured to contribute--I tried not to do that but you know how that goes--and like the conversation itself is something of a threat.)

In some ways I think internalized classism is harder to deal with because it is so complicated, and you get the same privilege fragility as you get on any axis except it's coupled with more defensive "I'm not REALLY privileged because--" thought because it's complex and there aren't discrete categories that any given person obviously belongs to. And also everyone quietly hides their advantages.

I'm not really bothered by the defensiveness, but I'm thinking about it. I spend a fair bit of time sitting with my own class based discomfort, often because T has heard something fall out of my mouth and explained why it was a real real "wow your class background is obvious" moment; our backgrounds are really different and mine is a lot more divorced from many of our friends' realities.

So. I don't know. I'm sitting thoughtfully right now and putting my thoughts here rather than there. I'm not feeling much in the way of personal emotion, just intellectual interest. But I had thoughts, and I figured this was probably the place to have them without distorting the entire conversation around me.

Comments

[cbrachyrhynchos]

For the record, I was not at all worried about your intentions. It's other people who were participating in that thread that I'm not willing to discuss my family economics around, given what's going on elsewhere on the site.

[sciatrix]

Oh, noted! And I'm not--like, I don't blame anyone for not being willing to put that information out there, that's completely understandable for a whole bunch of reasons. So is the sentiment of "oh god this idea is terrible," tbh. It's more the repeated sentiment of "this is a discussion that will only make us all feel bad" and even more "this discussion is intended to make us all feel bad" that I'm sitting and going "hm" at. Does that make sense?

[siderea]

It's more the repeated sentiment of "this is a discussion that will only make us all feel bad" and even more "this discussion is intended to make us all feel bad" that I'm sitting and going "hm" at.

Class-blindness is no more a virtue than color-blindness. Insisting that discussing class and personal income inequality will be divisive is like insisting discussing race or sex or sexual orientation or culture will be divisive.

If one can only tolerate the presence of people different from oneself when one is permitted to pretend they don't exist, then maybe one isn't really tolerating those differences, eh?

[sciatrix]

Riiiiight, and it's like an extra special complicated difficulty-dealing-with-privilege because a) it's complicated and b) one's actual status is often not clear even to oneself in part because c) people tend to pretend that differences don't exist, so people don't... have a lot of practice sitting with that. In some ways, class is like--take all the general problems with privilege fragility and blow them up two or threefold.

I say this as someone who routinely gets checked on class assumptions, ofc, and someone who has also experienced the special brainfuckery of people who own a multimillion-dollar house and a beach house and routinely go on expensive vacations insisting angrily and with some fear that they are merely middle class and "about average."

We don't talk about this shit! It's hard! And that lets us all tell each other we're really all the same. Which means that people in certain places who don't have, say, regular parental infusions of money think it's their fault and not an unfair system. It makes me mad.

[siderea]

Sure, and adding to the difficulty is the pretty naked demonstrations of class-based hostility most of us have witnesses in our lives.

I mean, every time one hears someone go on a rant about, "I saw a woman buying steak with an EBT card, how dare she", it reminds one that there's this very venomous, very open, policing of one's class performance. It's okay to be poor, just so long as nothing you have is Too Nice, because then you are a Bad Poor, stealing from others. It's okay to be rich, just so long as you are folksy and/or ostentatiously generous, because otherwise one is a Snob. It's okay to be middle class, just so long as you aren't into anything Pretentious.

One of the reasons people are afraid of being open about their resources is becase of, well, exactly the phenomenon demonstrated in that MF thread: other people might decide you have too much. If you say, "I only make $x" someone might come along and say, "You make $x?!? I would kill to make $x! I make half that!" They might decide that you are unworthy of sympathy. They might decide to make some sort of example of you.

We can take money out of it and the problem is still there. I was having a convo with the professor who was basically my unofficial advisor in grad school, and while I respected the hell out of the guy for many reasons, he said to me that once I started working with poor people, I would find it difficult to go treat upper middle and upper class people, because poor people have real problems. And he launched into a whole story about how he once took as a client for couples counseling an upper middle class couple, and he wound up just yelling at them that they were making a mountain out of a mole hill, because they didn't have any real problems, and that caused them to resolve their conflict and not need any more treatment. Yeah, apparently in his reality, sexual assault, child abuse, cancer, schizophrenia, drunk driving accidents, and drug over doses don't happen to rich people. :|

I'm always reminded by these discussions of an incident on a local news blog, which reported on the salaries of top MBTA (subway/mass transit) employees. Commentors got all outraged that a third-shift track welder was making about $300k. I'm pretty sure that they're all okay with stockbrokers and CEOs and movie stars and NFL players making that kind of money or far more. But for a welder to earn that...! That, clearly, is not because this is a highly skilled craftsman on whose work other people's lives will literally depend, who is working in the middle of the damned night and this is what the market for that sort of labor requires, but because this is a profligate waste of our tax dollars. :|

This is the social world we live in. One in which if you let other people know what you earn, they will unleash their venomous opinions on you of whether you are perhaps making too much for a whatever it is they think you are, or whether you're not performing the class attributed you by your income.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I don't think the idea is terrible. I think the idea is terrible on metafilter, and I wasn't particularly surprised to see someone pontificate about education debt and bad life choices in the first few hours. And I have better things to do with my weekend.

[sciatrix]

Totally fair.