Class, "Trash" and Passing in the Middle

Passing: (v) To be accepted as a member of a group by denying one's own ancestry or background. To serve as a barely acceptable substitute. Also: To gain passage despite obstacles: pass through difficult years. To move past in time; elapse: The days passed quickly.

When I was in high school, for the most part, people didn't know how poor I was. Sure, I "borrowed" 40 cents every day from David A. to buy a chocolate milk and a swiss roll for lunch (ugh!) but it wasn't because I had "forgotten" my lunch money-- it was because I had no money. I could have gotten free lunch, we were that poor, but there was this pride thing going on in my head where I refused to bring the forms home to my mom to fill out. It was stupid of me, but I was a kid. I dressed pretty well, but mostly it was because people tend to not notice outside their own worlds. I wore pretty much the same few outfits a lot. I was able to buy a few things because I worked as a cashier at K-Mart, or a busgirl at a local seafood restaurant, starting before I even was legally supposed to be working. Once, I got in trouble in band because I didn't have my band shirt-- other kids at first didn't, but called their parents to bring it to them. My mom and family couldn't bring mine to me because they were at work, and it wasn't the kind of workplace where you get a break. Other kids might have worked for a little "fun money" but most of my earnings went to support the family--paying the rent, the power bill, for some groceries. I did manage to squeeze a little now and then to buy myself a shirt or pair of pants. Basically, I "passed" as middle class so well that the people who should have known, say, my guidance counselors who could have told me I qualified for need-based grants and scholarships to go to college had no clue that I was dirt assed poor. So thanks to not looking poor, no one ever gave me a helping hand to get out of that poverty. (Thanks a lot guidance counselors-- what exactly was it that you did there, hmmm?)

Passing is usually used for color-- someone who is a light skinned black "passing" as white. It doesn't happen a whole lot nowadays; it was a lot more common during slavery, or during Jim Crow, since to pass as white gave a black person a lot more freedom. But it works for socio-economic class, too.

I was in a college class in my undgrad years and this professor, who taught 19th Century American Lit-- Walt Whitman, Thoreau-- was inspired one day by reading a book by Dorothy Allison called Skin. In it, Allison, who is a college professor and theorist of class studies now, who also wrote Bastard Out of Carolina (and she is no longer poor, so a "class rider" too) discusses (among other things) her upbringing. Apparently this was revolutionary to the watery-eyed prof wearing khaki Dockers and button down shirts, who got emotional over "Leaves of Grass" and Ginsberg poetry. He wanted to discuss this text as a way of, I guess, enlightening his clueless students. Here he'd had a revelation and it was important to pass it on. I was mostly with him, a little embarrassed by the title of the book and the brash, blond woman on the cover-- no one I knew ever bragged about being Trashy-- until he said "Cause let's face it, we're all middle class here"-- effectively wiping out my entire childhood of crappy low-rent slum houses, walls covered in mildew, ovens giving a shock every time you touch them cause they're not grounded properly, still rent barely paid for, the power turned off, picking up soda bottles to get the 5 cent deposit back and buy food with it. It was the first time I ever actually wanted to NOT pass, to claim my own history. My hand shot up and I argued with him. One other student in the class, this bohemian type who had a little soul patch and liked to carry a special cloth-bound hardcover of Walden around with him, also said later that he was not middle-class, but I don't really remember him arguing with the professor. He kept fairly silent-- I was the trashy one who got loud and argued. The professor hemmed and hawed-- "well" he said "getting a college education basically equalizes us to middle class." As if that was a good excuse for his thoughtless comment. And yes, I was no longer poor-- partly because I figured out about Pell Grants on my own, went to college for two years on them, and partly from marrying Andrew, but that's beside the point. You don't erase someone's entire history because you don't share it, and you assume you know them because of where they are NOW.

There is a school of theory in academia called "White Trash" studies (because they see the inherent racism in the phrase white trash, some people call it working class, but there really is a big distinction between the terms-- which you can learn if you study the history). The first time I ever really heard about it was at a conference in California in graduate school where this professor gave a speech called "Horatio Alger was a Lying SOB"-- about her own class change when she went from a working class family to a professorship-- the class jump may have happened, went part of the speech, but inside, she didn't really fit in with her peers in college (only something like 1% of college graduates come from this background) and still felt some affinity with what she grew up and some awkwardness, as well, with the family she had left behind. As I think all of us "class jumpers" do. I don't mean class-jumpers like the idea of "gold-diggers" who use sex & beauty to marry well. (And that was one of the reasons I was pissed at what Professor Clueless was saying because I felt like I was being called a gold digger, a little). But people who, through talent and hard work, shift themselves out of poverty and into a different socio-economic class. But they still sometimes feel a little out of place.

Hearing her speech was, for me, like that song "Killing Me Softly"-- as I heard her speak, it seemed like she was talking about my life and it actually made me want to cry, to run away, to jump up and yell out my similarities. My face was hot, my stomach in knots. The awkwardness I felt in academic circles because I grew up the way I did (homeless for a while, always being evicted, food stamps, poverty) and the awkwardness I now sometimes felt around the working class roots I had because things were so different now. Of course, there is a huge difference in "working class" in the South where there are no union jobs, no jobs at manufacturing plants. You're a single mother-- you're a waitress or bartender, living off of tips, no insurance, no breaks, no vacations, barely any days off. At that same conference, this weirdo freak guy was giving a speech at lunch where he talked of how wonderfully radical his art was in trying to help the maquiladoras in Mexico, but when I asked him a question about unions in the US for low-wage workers like waitresses, he said "So What?!" I really wanted to smack that guy. He was so self-righteous about how he was "helping those the U.S. system oppressed" but he had no clue about people in the U.S. who are, in some ways, worse off.

Anyway. It's still weird for me sometimes. I know where I come from, and sometimes I write stories about it. I also feel weird when someone mentions how "poor" they were in college cause they had to eat macaroni and cheese since they spent the money their parents sent them on a new Mac, or tickets to see Phish. I'm not mocking the tight times college students have, but they are often self-imposed, and if you've ever had "bank of mom and dad" bail you out, you weren't dirt-assed poor. Cause in my family, there was no bank of mom and dad. I always feel like these folks may have had tight times; I'm not arguing that. But did they ever go days without eating? (Not eating something a little less tasty than they'd like-- literally NO FOOD in the house?) I don't want to erase the rough times other people had. I don't assume that just because someone is sitting next to me now, they have always been able to afford the privilege of paying money to sit in a classroom.

All of those definitions of "passing" above sort of fit me. It's something that is always kind of with me, and it's weird because my kids will not (barring very bad things, knock on wood) go through such a life. So it's a little like being an immigrant-- our kids will not really share the first-hand knowledge of where we came from-- they will be stories mom or dad told but not real, kind of annoying that mom or dad still insists on harping about what was so long ago....

But sometimes I think about where I came from, and I really want to smack someone who assumes too much about our "shared" history cause of who I am now. When I first married Andrew, some chick who was a fellow "Officer's Wife" asked me "what sorority did you belong to?" and looked disturbed by me saying none (I couldn't afford it-- not that I'm against them).

I know. Wanting to smack her was really trashy of me. So be it.