Karl Marx. Photo from web.
In recent years, there has been a growing discourse in the United States about social class and inequality. The Occupy Wall Street movement has made phrases like “the 99%” fashionable, and we are finally talking about how much money it takes to run for president and whether wealth is really the best qualifier for leadership. Jazmine Hughes’ editorial “Connecticut College, broken down into numbers” at the beginning of the semester about diversity and tuition reminded me of a question that has been on my mind since my sophomore year here: why aren’t we talking about class?
As any sociology major will tell you, numerous factors make up a person’s social location and that the big three are race, gender and class. I remember one year the campus community received little cards in our mailboxes asking, “What does race mean at Conn?” And sometime later another one that read, “What does gender mean at Conn?”
I waited patiently for the card that would read, “What does class mean at Conn?” But we were too afraid to ask.
To be fair, I would dare say there isn’t a person here who hasn’t at least thought about what class means at Conn. Our extremely high tuition seems to give us a simultaneous sense of entitlement and a feeling of shame.
We’ve all heard someone say “I pay fifty-something grand to be here, so I should be allowed to…” but most of us have probably also done a private face-palm as we see another article listing Conn as one of the most expensive schools in the country. (By the way, we’ve also been listed as one of the friendliest schools in the country).
When it comes down to a serious or personal conversation, however, class makes people very uncomfortable. For the most part, we don’t talk about class at Conn, and I argue that perhaps we should start to.
When I hear people say “I pay fifty thousand dollars to be here,” my usual response is “I don’t.” My family pays very little out of pocket for me to attend this school, due to the generous financial aid I’ve been awarded by the government, the college and a few outside scholarships. I couldn’t be here without that help, and I remind myself often how lucky I am to be graduating from this beautiful liberal arts college in May.
Of course, a little less than half of us are on some amount financial aid, leaving a little over half of us paying the full tuition to be here. This fact is less immediately visible than race and gender, but it still counts as diversity.
The point is, when I arrived here, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in August of 2008, I was prepared to come across people who were different from me in many ways, but I found myself facing a different kind of culture shock that I (perhaps naively) had not anticipated. I noticed it slowly at first—when my friends looked up their beautiful houses on Google Earth, for example, and I suddenly felt strange about the two-family house where I live on the second floor with my mom and my younger sister. In one class I took, several people mentioned the women who came to clean their houses once a week—a service I had ignorantly never considered as a real possibility except when I pictured celebrities and mansions. Little experiences like these slowly made me aware that my family had significantly less money than many of the families of my peers at Conn.
This fact does not bother me in the slightest. In fact, I rarely even think about it anymore. I am deeply grateful for my upbringing and the things that I have, and class was something I had never really thought about before my arrival at Connecticut College. I had never encountered people who lived such different lives than mine and those of the people immediately surrounding me in Keene, New Hampshire.
Suddenly I was unsure of where my voice came in and I was unaccustomed to being the one with a perennially different perspective due in part to my different socioeconomic background. (I later embraced this.)
One afternoon in Harris I brought the subject up and was surprised to find that it made my slightly more well-off friends uneasy. I began to understand that many of us have grown up in relatively economically homogenous areas – the questions I was asking were new to us all. Part of the reason we can get away with not talking about class is because it is largely invisible. I can “pass” easily as a girl from the suburbs. But another thing that distinguishes discussions of class from those about race and gender is the idea that our class is within our control.
Unfortunately, we seem to hold conflicting and equally damaging ideas about what class means in this country. On one hand, the American Dream dictates that everyone who has money deserves it and has earned it, and anyone who doesn’t has been unable to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. A different narrative may be equally prevalent: that wealthy people must be snobs and poor people must be working-class heroes. Neither is categorically or usually true, and leaves conscientious citizens like us feeling guilty and confused. We are afraid to reveal our socioeconomic backgrounds for fear of what it says about us and how it will make others feel. Let us also remember that since most of us at Connecticut College still depend financially on our parents, our class isn’t even really ours yet, but entirely inherited.
My point is this: our socioeconomic class differences don’t mean anything inherent about who we are or who we will become, despite these narratives which dictate that they must a part of our personal identity. Most of us are well aware that a great deal of our learning here takes place outside of the classroom. Especially in a setting where education is a great equalizer, we have little to fear from a discussion about class except that our own conceptions about it might be challenged. We do, I’d argue, have much to gain from such a conversation. Not only can we learn, as always, from the diverse population at Connecticut College, but we can also begin to understand how a force, which has massive implications in our country and in our growing global society, impacts our own personal lives. I believe this understanding is vital to being effective and fully educated graduates.
Note: After I wrote this article, I saw a sign for an event called “Classism 101” put on by the Diversity Peer Educators. I was unable to attend, but this event began to address the issue of class. A promising beginning, I’d say. •
