Americans like talking about class even less than they like talking about race. We are deeply uncomfortable with where we place ourselves and, invariably, try to wedge ourselves in the middle. According to CBC seventy percent of us identify as middle class but only fifty percent of us actually are. That’s based on income. But class is more than how much you make. It’s where you come from and where you feel capable of going. It’s expectations.
Melanie: This is not available for kids of color. This is something that only privileged or the elite can have.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/550/transcript
Raquel: These kids are free. This is what freedom looks like. We must not deserve to be free.
Joffe-Walt, C. (2015, March 3). 550: Three Miles. This American Life.
When Melanie and Raquel, two students from the South Bronx, first laid eyes on the private school Fieldstone a mere three miles away, these were their thoughts. Melanie and Raquel were part of the thirty percent of Americans that do not see themselves as middle class. They saw themselves as working class or as poor. When they saw Fieldstone, they saw barriers or hurdles. They saw kids no more deserving than themselves who were living in a world that they only saw on television or read about in books. For both seeing through the looking glass affected the course of their lives.
When Melanie saw Fieldstone, she “felt like a ratchet ass girl from the hood.” As though she “didn’t belong there” and had “no business in this building”. Raquel thought, “I am really lucky to be seeing this.” The story does not go very deeply into the backgrounds of these two girls. We never find out about their families and learn little about their friends. We don’t even find out much about how Raquel is perceived as school. All of those things matter. They matter a lot. In today’s America, the single best predictor of our success is the success of our parents before us.
In Classy I wrote about how I wouldn’t buy my teen a Mercedes. I still wouldn’t. But now I understand the reasoning behind buying your teen a Mercedes. It’s the same reasoning that makes people take out loans for the Ivy League when they could pay cash for the BYU. Branding matters. Understanding that, and understanding what the brands mean, is integral to being able to see yourself in another class. The thing is, class is a part of our make-up but it’s also dressing. Like that Mercedes.