Emily On Privilege

Here is where I'm coming from.

Kate and I are away for the weekend. (This is relevant, I swear.) When we told people we were headed out of town Friday night, after a late meeting, and they asked us where, it's Kate answered. She named the beach town where we are, and says simply, "Em's folks have a place down there."

I can't say it. I can't say it because it's an admission of something I've never felt. If called upon to account for the free vacation time we spend here, I am a snippy answer: My dad inhereted half a single-wide trailer when his mother died. And, if I really feel like it, I can tell you about the family dramas involved, about the times when my folks have really considered giving the place up because of the monthly payments. Anything. I will tell you anything, to avoid being thought of as a person whose family has a summer house.

I've written some about my personal class history on my other blog: the post is here, and it's a little scattered but I rather like it. In any case, let's have it be enough that I grew up relatively-deprived for where I'm from, one of the only kids I encountered regularly who did not come from easy money. Beyond the general money-tightness, my folks went pretty broke in my teenage years, because I had cancer and we had shitty insurance. So I grew up with a bitterly-honed sense of class resentment, nurtured on merely the difference between being upper-middle-class and being lower-middle-class.

Kate's experience of class was different than mine; I'll let her tell you about it. But class was a problem for us as we started dating, not for any practical reason, but because it was a psychological barrier for me. I didn't like that she knew how to be around money. I didn't like that she knew what brand all her clothes were. I didn't like that she had a car, had a trust fund, had a private school history, had a father who served on something called a gentlemen's auxillary and that neither of her parents appeared to have worked a day in ten years. I couldn't handle it. I've learned how to, now, but it's a skill I resent. I resent privilege. I don't think I'll ever forget how.

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Here is the first thing about the privilege meme. It is not about what your class status is now; it is about what class status you inherited. Most Americans harbor this notion that you can simply change classes and become someone else, by earning a degree or getting a job or winning the lottery. But you can't. Class is something you inherit, something that comes to you from your parents, and something you give to your children. (This is why I thought it was so powerful when when Bridgett did this meme for herself and her daughter; class can be changed, class can be inherited, class can be passed on all at once.) I think this is why the meme has appeared so frequently in the parenting-and-babies blog circles: we look at our children and we think of what we are giving them. I think about the kids I want to have: how I want to raise them in New York or somewhere similar, so they never think that only white faces are normal and that English is the only language in the world; how I want to teach them about art and music and bad television and good television and cheap boardwalk food and what it tastes like to grow your own dinner. I want them to understand the difference between needing and wanting, to understand about not being able to get everything they want and sometimes not even everything they need, because this is life. This is reality. These are the things I want to teach my kids about money and about class and about privilege: that we are human, that humanity transcends, and that the trappings of creature comfort can be traps, or they can be pleasures. I don't want my kids to have my resentment, and given the material situation Kate and I can predict ourselves being in over the next bit, they probably won't have it; we won't be rich, but we'll be able to keep ourselves together, and they'll be New Yorkers, after all. But I do want them to be aware. I want them to understand what class means, to understand where that resentment comes from. (I wonder if anyone's translated Nietzsche into third-grade-reading-level yet.) I want to give my kids my awareness, without my anxiety. That's why this matters to me.

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There's another thing I thought about a lot looking over the privilege meme--besides the fact that my internal social scientist could mount an intense and complex refutation of most elements of it. (The cell phone thing? I didn't have one in high school in 1996-2000. My brother, who is a senior now, does have one. What does that mean? Why heating bills and not grocery bills? It was groceries that caused consternation in my house.) But looking over it, there are two different kids of class status being communicated in it. One of them is ownership-status: what does one have? What can one give one's kids? The other is knowledge-status: what sort of information can you convey to other people and your children about yourself. Ownership-status is all the things about summer camp, computers, cars. Those are things we can give, or not give; one can have the money to give one's kids their own computers, but decide not to do it. But knowledge-status is different: it's about giving your kids the assuredness to feel that they are capable of being full and complete members of the world. The actual money involved in reading children's books to your kids, in taking them to museums, or in presenting them with media images that reflect their own images positively. These are the gifts my parents gave me that I respect the most: the books, the museums, the encouragement. Those are gifts that not everyone feels entitled to give to their children; maybe they don't know they're there, maybe they don't know what they can mean, maybe they know but they don't have the time or the energy. And that's where class privilege kills people; that's where it takes away their power. I don't want to give my kids material things that build them up above those around them; it's against my religion, in a very literal way. But I do want to tell them they're worth listening to, worth talking to, worth spending time with. Class is not just about money, not just about what one has; it's about whether one feels entitled to exist. Everyone should feel entitled to exist. That's all I'm saying.