Consider Class Identity

Meaningful Work?

The hardest and most-fraught struggle of my life has been an economic one. It is often difficult to explain what this means this to people, for whom this was not the case. Unlike contemporary kids who go back to their parental home when they are having trouble being self-supporting, many of us don’t or didn’t have that option. By age twenty-two, because of deaths and remarriage, I no longer had a family to return to if I had nowhere else to go.  My family of origin was never wealthy to begin with. My parents, an insurance salesman who worked on commission and a secretary were not regarded as accomplished in this culture. And following our mother’s untimely death, my seventeen-year old sister and I took off for California in her car, to try to make a life for ourselves.

Yes, it was easier to make a living in those years, even in the Bay Area. Working part-time, paying rent and eating was possible then. But there were things I had to learn. To act obsequious and smile were two feats I found particularly difficult. I learned to swallow my pride when gays, lesbians or Jews were insulted, and this happened more often than I’d expected. Even though I was a chronic insomniac, I managed to get up early and go each day to a place where I was neither welcomed nor respected. You could call it prostitution. It was certainly soul-draining, humiliating and degrading. I did it for money, because it was necessary. I did it because I had no other options.

In lesbian activist groups in which I was a participant, friends would tell me how odd it was that I did such politically incorrect work. They said they could only perform a job if it was meaningful and fulfilling. I listened politely not bothering to explain that I didn’t have that luxury. Some of them didn’t procure work until their early thirties. Many never did get paying work and lived on trust funds while pursing art or politics. They put their energy into activities that had the potential of changing the world and looked down on folks like myself. I envied them. They were often very nice people who knew the right behavior for every situation. This knowledge of propriety was a totally new concept to me. I had trouble holding on to jobs, partly because I was too honest.

On three different jobs, all of which I was hoping to hold for a relatively long time, I was fired. It usually happened after I came out as lesbian. On one, after being outed in the SF Chronicle in a Sunday Gay Pride Parade, I was fired Monday, the very next day. Were these firings homophobic? Of course. But they were also class-related because of my poor social skills.

When I visited Cuba, two years ago, I met lots of very poor people. They had tons of issues due to poverty but fear of having no food and no place to live because of lack of money was not among them. Their rent and some basic food staples were given them by the government, but most make less than the equivalent of twenty dollars a month. Insufficient as it was, they had a safety net, unlike the potential free fall in a deep well that we have here in the USA.

I don’t need to worry and struggle anymore. In later life I learned my lesson. I went back to school, Because I could keep only union jobs, I looked for that protection and my work life as an older worker was easier. But my entire journey is part of my identity. When a political person who never experienced the anxiety and pressure of needing to earn their living, speaks to me as though our allotment of “privilege” is the same, I get extremely angry. If I bring up class issues in response, it is often dismissed as a sour grapes thing. “She can’t help her background,” might be said. Of course, she can’t change her circumstances, we are all born with some assets and liabilities.

But now, more than ever, white folks are acknowledging the way race has helped them move through the world. This is a change for the better. It is the same with class advantage. No-one is saying they hate you but our identities are not the same. Never make assumptions that your story is true for anyone else. Open your eyes to the many different routes we all must take to arrive at the same place. And like all members of a wide variety of groups, try to see people in all their identities, all their colors. Life is not just where you wind up. It is also an equation involving the distance traveled.

Beyond the Battles of Berkeley

In the midst of melee, meaning gets lost...

Brawling with the so-called "alt-right" has become fashionable in Berkeley. My city has become a magnet destination for white nationalist Trumpers itching to fight and anti-fascist demonstrators rising to the bait to take them on. We all wind up with a testosterone-infused mess that has nothing to do with actual issues. The powers that be even cancelled the Saturday farmers market to indulge this rumble. With Ann Coulter supposed to arrive for her cancelled speech this week, this pattern shows no sign of letting up any time soon.

Yes, the "alt-right," white nationalists are disgusting. As a woman, a queer and a Jew I haven't the slightest doubt as to which side I'm on. I have every intention of showing up for meaningful protest, just not a remake of the Sharks meet the Jets, (remember West Side Story?).

As a young dyke I was involved in groups such as Lesbian Schoolworkers, (who fought against the Brigg's initiative) and Lesbians Against Police Violence among others. We studied racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other isms. We also talked about socio-economic class and read Lenin and Marx, learned about dialectical materialism, which I never got quite right. Our anti-capitalist veiwpoint was based in a class analysis alongside identity discrimination. Perhaps if the leftist groups today had taken socio-economic class seriously in the first place, we wouldn't be stuck with this regime we have now.

The perspective of class has been lost completely, except perhaps in the dogmatic, highly regulated, left. In single issue groups, oppression is attributed to one factor whether it is race, gender presentation, ethnicity or immigration status. Perhaps, if we had organizations united around the genuine and multiple sins of capitalism. We could reach a place of unity.  Instead, groups focusing on separate issues are formed and led by the most bourgeois, entitled members of each identity.

The separation of urban and rural people is one of the main reasons for our situation today. Rural folks would have to accept the fact that we live in a heterogeneous, pluralistic society. The straight, white, Christian male is no longer the prototype American and hasn't been for quite a while. The nineteen fifties hold no magic for anyone outside of this limited narrative. And, as for our side, the side of history, punching a Nazi may be good for morale in the moment but it does not a movement make. Fighting is just another toxic ideology. It will take a purposeful, reasoned movement with a multi-issue program to initiate real change.

Lets create a more comprehensive analysis of what has gone wrong in our country, so we can figure out how to change it. We can start by integrating class analysis with identity politics and promote an understanding of a wide array peoples' situations in the under class that includes, but it not limited to, our understanding of all the isms that are dividing people today and placing Berkeley in the cross-hairs of civil war.

Class Comfort Level Persists

My father was a salesman who worked on commission only, my mother temped as a secretary throughout my childhood. My sister and I would spend every weekend at our immigrant grandparent’s apartment because parenting was not on the to-do list of either of my folks. In both environments, the kids I hung out with were from what we all considered “regular” families but now recognize to have been mostly from the socio-economic class that lies between the poor and the middle class.

My mother was always quite vocal about my father’s irresponsible financial behavior which consisted mainsly of going deeply into debt in order to project a middle-class image. She often called him Willie Loman, in reference to Arthur Miller’s character in “Death of a Salesman.” Both of them were Jewish and college-educated so, in some ways, they were atypical of the "white" working-class. And, in those days, Jews were not really considered white, anyway. 

In spite of my parents' educational achievements, they fell far short of the material prosperity held out by their socio-economic aspirations. None of us possessed the mannerisms of that desirable group. Kids in my school seemed to know instinctively that I was not one of them and treated me accordingly. Was I too outgoing? Too open? I couldn't figure it out. But the friends I made then were all from similar class backgrounds. We just had so much in common that I never considered befriending one of the “rich kids.” Like the weather it was just a given, a reality too obvious to be questioned or discussed.

At Ohio State University, I was introduced to a broader vision of the world. Now, if I so desired, I could be friends with students who wouldn’t have had anything to do with me before. And, sometimes, I chose to pursue these very people. It was to prove my worth, as though their privilege might rub off on me and allow me to rewrite my past. Sometimes making them like me was simply a way to extract a sort of revenge.

But as college years faded into real life, my path diverged sharply from that of the factory-owners’ daughters and the trust-fund babies. Economic struggle is not just theoretical when there is no family safety net waiting to catch you if you fall.

To this day, I find myself gravitating instinctively toward people from similar circumstances. Instead of diminishing, this tendency seems to be increase with age. I can’t put my finger on the exact cues of this shared oppression but, considering my automatic selection process, the indicators must be quite blatant and obvious to all.

Evidently, the people who can best put up with me, are those who have made their way without a lot of financial and emotional support. It has nothing to do with concious intention or some form of reverse snobbery. It just happens.

Class Consciousness and Pride

Mitt Romney's obnoxious plutocratic ramblings combined with the one year birthday of the Occupy Movement have got me ruminating about rising class consciousness in America, specifically my own. 

I was raised to believe that ours is a classless society and anyone at all can make it here with a little elbow grease and some sturdy bootstraps. My father was a salesman and my mother, a secretary. I knew that my family was deeply in debt because whenever they gave me a credit card to buy clothes, it would get repossessed by the cashier. 

Yes, like most Americans,  my family spent a lot of time worrying about money and how they would pay their bills. But we lived with most of the trappings of middle class society: a mortgaged house, financed cars, a refrigerator full of food and a large wardrobe of second-hand and bargain basement clothing. Looking back on it now, I see a lower middle class (upper working-class?) family that had bought into the American dream at the expense of their own personal peace of mind.

The upper middle class kids at school did not accept me or my group of friends but, with my rebellious nature, I perceived that as a badge of honor. It's only recently that I have begun to explore the feelings of inferiority that I've harbored and internalized. 

In personal terms, coming to terms with class and vowing to fight for equality for all is a positive thing. It is true that the early acquiring of awareness sometimes translates into resentment of those whose situation was cushier, more supportive, different. In any movement for liberation, a degree of hostility always plays a role in the early stages of consciousness.I experienced this both as an activist in the women's movement and the LGBT movement. Awakening is often born with pain. Later, realization dawns that feelings of inferiority do not indicate actual inferiority. Hopefully then it becomes possible to move on. 

The scars of our early lives follow us everywhere. Sometimes, when I'm depressed, I believe that part of me still lives in high school. The trick is to acknowledge those feelings when they arise, let them wash over me, and then to let them go. Or let them provide the impetus to do something even more productive like write about them.