The announcement of the UPDirectory has prompted a number of comments about a category not included among its underrepresented groups: philosophers who grew up in poverty. One theme in many of these comments is a sense of isolation and difference that comes from having that kind of background. The point of this post is just to open up a space for philosophers to discuss this issue, their experiences, suggestions, and so on, related to being a philosopher from a background of low socio-economic status.
Philosophers from Poverty
About time, thanks Justin. But why “from poverty”? It’s unclear what that means, and many people from traditional blue collar backgrounds won’t feel that they came from poverty, and yet I’m sure they feel underrepresented. Is the word “class” such a taboo? How about socio-economic disadvantage?
Another difficulty with this is that many working class people hide their origins after they gain a foothold in the middle class.
I feel afraid to tell people in my program about my background and don’t know why. I feel like everyone around me is wealthy or has a safety net. I feel stupid for deciding to go into philosophy without a safety net and when people talk about why you shouldn’t go into a philosophy phd expecting a job I feel like they are talking about how stupid I am. I feel my advisors would look down on me if they knew about my background. I feel that the work I put into my education would be dismissed as typical of my class if people knew about my background. I think about leaving philosophy often on the basis of feeling out of place and worries about being inferior in some little defined sense.
I say all of this just to add one bit of evidence suggesting that there should be resources for people coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I don’t know what form those resources could take. I think a good first step though would be for some established philosophers from such backgrounds to let us know they exist. If I knew of one senior philosopher who came from such a background, I think I would feel much better day to day..
Really happy that this issue is getting on someone’s radar. I’m a first-generation college student from a blue collar background. Most of my education took place at public schools, so I never really “felt” my status. Now as a faculty member at a small elite private school, I feel it all the time. In philosophy, we’re not exactly hip to this issue. Working knowledge of Scotch, classical music, and chess was not part of my upbringing, but think how often these things are either used as examples in philosophy papers or dropped in casual conversation. You get really good at faking it after awhile. Many private colleges now have programs that are targeted at students who are from lower-class backgrounds, but no structural support exists like this for faculty. Just having a group and knowing you’re not alone helps so much.
I’m not a senior philosopher, but I was in your position not long ago! It’s hard for people to self-identify because you do fear that people will look down on you. Unfortunately, that goes for senior people too.
Let this be a call to senior philosophers: if you identify as first-generation or working class, please say so! You don’t know what a difference it makes to us.
Thanks for posting this, Justin.
As someone who grew up in poverty I do feel isolated in “the academy”. Having grown up in a rough project in Massachusetts and on welfare until my teen years I can say that the road to the PhD has been tough. I think the isolation comes from conversations that colleagues have about their lives and the lack of relating experiences I have with them. I couldn’t help but feel like I was “out of my league” by the unknown words that were being used and the way some of my peers would hide behind their polished vocabulary to cut up my arguments and make me feel stupid. Couple that with dressing different and using slang far too often it becomes difficult to feel like one of the group. The principle of charity didn’t apply to me as often as it did to others because of my presentation (loud and “ghetto”) and my lack of well articulated GRE words. Luckily, I had some great mentors at my M.A. institution and they guided me successfully through the transition.
Growing up around children from families that did not have any college education (I’m also the first from my family to attend college let alone pursue a PhD) brings many challenges that folks often do not (and cannot) see. Besides the financial issues that should be obvious there are sociological issues that might be worse. In high-school I surrounded myself with friends that shared similar lives, it’s what we tend to do at that age. Many of us did not attend college, it’s not what our parents did and wasn’t something we strived for while in school. Class was a way to meet people and socialize, it wasn’t taken seriously and this puts those of us that have that mind set at an early age at a disadvanatge when it comes time to decide what we will do with our lives. A majority of my core friends got into drugs and ended up dead or in jail. The topics we discussed growing up surrounded sports and stature, not academic or philosophical in the slightest (not usually anyway unless we were discussing PEDS in sports). So, walking into a philosophy department was very intimidating for me. Even now that I have had some success in the field I deal with imposter syndrome, as if I do not belong. I’m not sure that will ever go away and I believe that I feel that way at least in part because of my background. Having had to work while an undergrad it took 8 years to finish. It could have taken less time but when one is brought up without money it’s hard not to spend it once you start making it. So being the older one in my cohort also brought with it some further insecurities. Not to mention that I needed to save money to make a move to graduate school, folks from low economic backgrounds rarely move from the city they are in, let alone the state or the country to go to school for something that is likely to end without good financial employment. The academic life seems like a fairy tail, not something someone like me should consider. This is the thought process that needs to be overcome in order to embark on this academic journey. Overcoming these entrenched beliefs seems to get harder once entering the academy. When folks do not share similar interests and often poke fun at things you use to be into yourself it becomes isolating. I say these things in the hopes that others thinking about entering the field coming from a similar background won’t feel alone. It’s embarrassing to discuss these sorts of things but I think it’s important. The perspective of a poverty-stricken individual is important for our discipline and I’d be shocked if this group was represented well in the discipline.
It’s also worth mentioning how hard it is for someone from a low socioeconomic background to “persevere” in the job market. (This isn’t to say it’s not hard for others, I’m just sharing how it’s hard for lower socio-economic folks in different ways) I’m now in my 30’s and have 2 children, how long should I hold on before giving up? I hit the market softly this year (25 apps so far) given that my dept has secured some work for me next year and I need to complete the diss, but given that a top tier program was not in the cards for me (at least in part) BECAUSE of the struggles I had early in life the market is that much worse. I don’t know how I will afford the move when I leave here to accept a job or to change careers. This is tangential but maybe others from similar backgrounds can share their experiences on how they dealt with the job market coming from a lower-economic class.
Anyway, thanks again for opening up a thread to discuss this. Our discipline is about exchanging ideas. If all the ideas are coming form the same race or class that seems to be a skewed view of the world. We should try our best as a discipline to engage professionally with people from all walks of life, even if some of us drop our R’s, wear sweat pants, and listen to rap music.
Thanks for sharing! I always feel like folks are looking down and many times they probably are not. It’s not easy to be ashamed of your background…
Anon Grad:
You’re not stupid – the world (and our discipline) is screwed up. I’m in a bit of a bit of a weird sort-of-yes, sort-of-no relationship to this category. My parents’ story could be told as a round about version of the American dream, in that they both came from poverty to achieve a certain measure of success and financial security. As a result, I do have a safety net – without which I would have given up on my academic dreams years ago.
But, despite having a family that highly values education in general and my academic accomplishments in particular, I also have internalized many of the same values which make me embarrassed to need such a safety net.
If academic philosophy is to be anything other than a playground for the rich, it is imperative that it provide sane career paths for people like you.
I don’t promise that I can help, or that I can relate to all of your struggles. But if you’d like a sympathetic set of eyes to correspond with, you can find my contact information on my website.
I’m not sure if I grew up in poverty. I grew up poor. Lots of children, very little money. We relied on the generosity of others for our necessities and our splurges. My feet are misshapen from wearing the wrong size shoes for too many years. I was financially responsible for myself at 16, and I put myself through college by working three jobs. My parent’s income was never above the poverty line. We were poor, but our lives were rich. We made our own music, baked our own bread, borrowed books from the library, and put on our own plays. I grew up totally unaware of status markers, and I still don’t get most cultural references.
Academia is a weird world to me. It is full of status markers, but I often am too ignorant to even be impressed by them. I used to be embarrassed by my educational background and feel that it was a fluke that I made it this far. I don’t feel that way anymore. I am at the same university as students from wealthy backgrounds with Ivy educations. They had money and guidance that paved the way for them to end up here. I had none of that. Yet here I am. And because of my background, I can live comfortably on a graduate student stipend.
It used to bother me that I had so little in common with other academics. I disliked being condescendingly told that my upbringing was charming, or quaint. I disliked casual conversations where we talked about our families or childhood and my experience was a glaring aberration that made salient the class distinctions among us. It’s a real mood killer. But as I’ve become more confident that I have a place in academia, I’ve become more confident that my background does not illegitimate my status as a philosopher. And once I bonded with another philosopher who also grew up on government cheese. See, there are more of us than you think!
Here are two resources people should consult when thinking about privilege:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person_b_5269255.html
http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/12/the-privileged-oppressed/
Yes socioeconomic features really matter viz. privilege, but they’re not all that matter.
Yes, Rachel, but judging from the recent campaigns for inclusivity in academic philosophy you’d think that socio-economic status is the least important form of disadvantage in the profession, which is plainly absurd. I’d say it’s the most important one, followed closely by race. (Hello, actual intersectionality, nice to see you here).
That’s a very open question, though. I don’t think that class is the most important (though I don’t think it’s the least important). The problem I see is when people, and it really tends to be straight white dudes, raise class as a way to shut down discussion of other axes of privilege. So let’s be sure we’re not doing that here. Class doesn’t share a lot of important features with gender, race, and sexual orientation (John Scalzi discusses some of his reasons for thinking this in his series of popular posts).
Or we could not make this another unproductive edition of the oppression olympics and just listen to the stories of people like ‘Anon Grad’ and ‘poor but not unhappy’ on their own terms.
Fair enough, nobody should shut down discussions of privilege. There’s also another angle to this though: which types of disadvantage are the ones that the profession is finally beginning to address? The ones that can affect upper middle class people. Many people are frustrated by this. Straight white *working class* dudes especially so, because they’re well aware that this is a zero-sum game.
Rachel–I don’t see anyone doing this here. I agree that it happens. But I’ve much more often, in the philosophy world, seen discussions of class silenced by the raising of other issues than the other way around. No one is policing e.g. the “what it’s like to be a woman in philosophy” blog, or the feminist philosophers blog, and ensuring that they aren’t allowed to talk about gender stuff without talking about class stuff. How about you just lay off the one public forum that has so far been opened for people who want to talk about class stuff, at the least until there is some evidence that people are using it for political purposes you disagree with? And thanks, Justin, for opening this discussion. I will post something in it soon.
ER: Many of the things I’m involved with are working from a perspective of gender, race, sexual orientation, *and* class (from an intersectional perspective). So I don’t know how that counts as only issues that affect upper middle class people. Which initiatives are you thinking of?
It seems to me that immediately comparing issues of socioeconomic status to issues of race and gender does a lot more to “shut down” discussions of privilege than listening to the stories of those who have been impacted.
I tick several boxes in the UP directory – I am not white, I am female, my native language is not English and I currently work as a postdoc in an English-speaking country. I also grew up in a working-class background (I wouldn’t say poor, because I used to live in a country where the social safety net *was* (before several rounds of austerity measures) so good that very few people slipped through the mazes. Still, my father was a bricklayer/handyman and my mom a stay-at-home mom so we always struggled to get to the end of the month.
At first, coming from a working-class background was quite the culture shock. The whole thing about pedigrees (in grad schools) and ranks (in journals etc) I still do not get. Most of my fellow students/postdocs came from richer backgrounds; many even had academic parents. But gradually as I advanced through grad school and my multiple postdoc positions, the socio-economic background became less important. I learned to eat with the correct table manners at restaurants (having only been in fastfood restaurants before!) and to talk the way the middle class does, on middle class topics. I winced as I spent half a monthly postdoc salary to buy a nice interview outfit but I did it anyway even though it felt so frivolous to spend all that money on clothes I almost never wear. I still feel reflexively often that I think like a poor person, but I feel that humble beginnings make for a resilient attitude that is helpful later on, especially in the harshness of the job market. I kept on going in years of uncertain employment because I have seen my father go in and out of work, who persevered to make sure we were all clothed and fed.
There are many forms of privilege and disprivilege and this is not the venue to compare them – I think it’s useful to have a thread on working class/poor background. But I can say one thing. I can hide my working class background (and I usually do) in a way that I am unable to hide that I’m female and not-white, or speak with an accent.
Rachel, I don’t know what initiatives you are involved in. I wasn’t talking about you specifically. But if you asked any philosopher what are the most high profile diversity campaigns I doubt that many would mention class. My guess is that gender would be a distant first on that list.
I have a mixed background. I remember strangers leaving toys at our house when I was young, I was for a time on the free lunch program at school, and I worked almost every summer in graduate school (waiting tables, retail, etc.). On the other hand, my parents are both highly educated, well-travelled people and I have had a decent education, so people often assume that I come from a wealthier background, which I am sure has made it easier for me to be welcomed into certain circles. So while I am aware of the ways that lack of money can prevent access, I have had an easier time relative to others from the same economic status.
I know that Patricia Churchland talks about growing up with very little money and the effect that had on later choices: “‘We didn’t have an indoor toilet until I was seven. We had a two-holer, and people actually did sit in the loo together. I know it seems hilarious now.’ When Pat was a teen-ager, she worked in a fruit-packing plant. Neither of her parents was formally educated past the sixth grade”: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/12/two-heads .
Linda Martin Alcoff talks about her working life in some low-paying jobs here: http://www.alcoff.com/content/emphis.html .
Derek Parfit was a “scholarship boy” at Eton: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/reason-and-romance-the-worlds-most-cerebral-marriage .
I am sure that there are others, but these are the first philosophers who came to mind.
One thing no one has mentioned is that if you come from a working class background it’s much harder to get into an elite grad school. This is a common working class story: You start off studying at SW Nowhere State Univ. (cuz you’re working class), and suddenly you get really into school and especially philosophy, and do extremely well at it. You decide to pursue a PhD. The chances of this person getting into an elite grad program, compared with someone of the same natural ability coming out of an elite undergrad program, are lower, to put it mildly. This is true for many reasons. As a result, talented working class philosophers don’t have the pedigree. I think this is all pretty obvious.
There are a couple of lessons. First, in response to Anonymous Postdoc, yes I agree with everything you say. One thing that can’t be learned away though is your pedigree. There it is, the first line on you CV, and it’s preventing you from getting a job. On the other hand, being a woman or a racial minority is a Diversity Hire — it can help. (Just to be clear, I’m not saying such hires are unimportant. On the contrary, I support current efforts to hire more women and minorities.) Second and more importantly, all this shows a way to combat our discipline’s bias against people with a working class background. Count pedigree less, and actual accomplishments (publications, teaching accomplishments, . . . ) more. I can’t think of another way to combat it, since I don’t see being from a working class background as enabling you to count as a diversity hire any time soon. It’s not a box you can tick, and it’s something about you that’s invisible to the world.
Also, it should be mentioned that there is a difference between “working class” and “poverty”, though, that distinction is shrinking each and every year. Having grown up in the 80’s there seemed to be a stark difference between middle class and poverty. But, given that we are discussing folks that grew up long ago (well, you see the point).
Also to comment 17 (anonymous) : The ease in which one can blend in gets significantly more tricky and difficult depending how low you are on the chain. Not to mention the time and effort that it takes to change the way you speak and when you speak. That’s effort (and added stress) that folks higher on the economic latter do not have to deal with. That rarely goes away and leaves one exhausted!
Very good points, anon. I seem to recall some stats on Schwitzgebel’s blog: about half of the students at elite grad programmes come from elite undergrad programmes. I would add that people from non English-speaking countries interested in analytic philosophy are in a similar situation to the working class people you mention, at least in one respect: they usually have no-name BAs.
I would appreciate it if we could separate the categories of those who grew up in poverty and those who grew up in blue-collar households. Though there is a lot of overlap in these groups, they are not identical. And each kind of background brings its own challenges. My worry is that, in conflating these, we will cause members of one group to feel overshadowed by members of the other, and their unique difficulties will not be heard.
Thank you to people for posting. It’s really good to see those links and hear from other people dealing with this.
I think that there is a problem of authenticity in these cases too. Class is something you can hide. You can act in ways different from your background and maybe in the process you can even change your self conception. But should you? And does philosophy require you to if you want a future in the profession? I see a lot of people talking about learning how to pass off as having a different background than you do, and I feel the pressure to do so and usually try to. I can’t help feeling though that doing so is betraying the people with whom I most identify. Or tacitly acknowledging that its more desirable to be a person of one class than a person of another class..
Hi Anon: true – I don’t have a pedigree. I don’t know how hard it would have been to try to get into an elite programme. I never tried, because the idea of elite undergrad and grad programmes wasn’t foremost in my mind (I had other concerns such as proximity to family), and getting any PhD at all was already such a huge step. I agree the emphasis on pedigree harms people of lower socio-economic status, and there is no way they can signal this in their applications (“Look, I might be from University Nowhere, but honestly, I had no idea pedigree was that important and I just wanted to get a PhD).
I think that there are a lot of us in this boat. Unfortunately, so many people draw the problematic inference that one would only not go to a ‘top’ program because one couldn’t get in.
@ Derek Bowman: the “oppression olympics” make a lot of prudential sense, given that academia is a zero-sum game, as pointed out above. The group that can muster more support has a lot to gain. The recently launched “market boost for women” program is a prime example of this.
I have experienced this, but only with one foot in the grave, so to speak. I am second generation college and lived for a time in childhood truly poor, though by the time I left for college, my family was solidly middle class. Nonetheless, my grandparents are rural working class with all that accompanies it: hunting, low church evangelicalism, traditional gender norms, etc. These people are positively despised by most academics that I’ve encountered, and one is frequently invited to join in condemnation of them, albeit usually indirectly (condemn them via condemning gun-owners, for instance). Personally, I’d rather not spit on my family, and I’ve had to learn to grit my teeth.
I propose that instead of “straight white dudes,” we should refer to such men as “straight white men.” I am not quite sure what a “dude” is, but its use seems intentionally (and unnecessarily) pejorative. Unless RM is okay referring to straight white women as “straight white chicks.”
Forgive me if this point has been made in response to Rachel above, but it strikes me that “straight white dudes” raising the question of class vis-a-vis other markers of exclusion is a problem only if class is not, in fact, the most basic and fundamental context within which exclusion should be addressed. I happen to think it is, and I am a white dude (though I wouldn’t characterize myself as ‘straight,’ not that I think it matters really). You can’t object to me that I am distracting you from discussing other contexts of exclusion without arguing why they are important to consider on their own and apart from class analysis. I frankly don’t give a shit if class politics means less discussion of identity politics, because I think that identity politics is nothing more than a badge that privileged liberals like to wear on their sweater. It has no actual purchase in a country in which less than one percent of the population owns more than fifty percent of the stocks, and where the oligarchs can’t decide whether they are more excited at the prospect of a Clinton or Bush presidency.
A valuable post and some moving comments — thanks.
Claiming that Derek Parfit is working class because he was a ‘scholarship student’ at Eaton is ridiculous and suggests a lack of any real understanding of class and privilege in the British context. Both his parents were doctors and he was bought up and spent pretty much his whole life in Oxford. And attended the most elite school in the UK. It is just plain false that he was in any way working class. And the suggestion that he is show a lack of real understanding of class and class based prejudiced in the UK.
Fair enough. But I didn’t say he was working class. I didn’t know just what his status was, which is why I provided quotes and links. At the time I had looked into the scholarships at Eton and found references that made me think scholarships were only given to those of low economic status, and so I thought it was relevant. I think I have a decent understanding of class and class-based prejudice in the U.K. I am half British and that side of my family split over a class issue (a marriage that was “beneath” one part of the family). When I was at St Andrews I became pretty familiar with class. I hardly think my comment above deserved the claim that I lack understanding of this issue. Does your misspelling of Eton deserve the claim that you lack a real understanding of issues in the U.K.? No. It is a small mistake and it is hard to know what you might know or not know from it.
The intentional or unintentional misreading of my comments–and their discursive purpose–is amazing. Nowhere did I engage in oppression olympics. Nowhere did I say that ‘white dudes’ can’t raise class issues. Also ‘dudes’ has a specific extension (‘dudebro’). Men =/= dudes.
This is a terrific thread and an important issue to raise, so thank you all who have contributed your personal stories. Getting some more comprehensive data about the percentage of first generation college students who end up philosophers would be an important first step in thinking about how the nature of class privilege in academic philosophy. It would be useful to know, for example, if the discipline of philosophy had a lower percentage of first generation college students who end up being majors/ graduate students/faculty than other humanistic disciplines as is the case with people of color and with women. It would also be useful to know the race, ethnicity and gender composition of those philosophers who come from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
Rachel, I am not sure whether you think that I in particular misrepresented your comments. I do not think I did. But it’s important to be clear that there is a fundamental disagreement here. You do not think that class is the most important framework for addressing problems of discrimination and exclusion. I do. That means that we are not going to agree about what the most important issues to address in the profession are, and that even if we agree that an issue needs addressing, we will likely disagree about means. Because I am (some sort of) Marxist, I have no problem affirming that this is the case. My great frustration with leftists of your stripe is that they always end up being especially enlightened and self-consciously moral liberals. Identity politics is basically liberal politics. But I am opposed to liberal politics. So I *would* try to change our collective focus away from certain evils and toward others. I am only speaking for myself here, obviously. And I don’t mean to be unnecessarily confrontational, but it is important for me to be clear that our politics are incompatible. I think you’re wrong about the fundamentals, and you think I am wrong about the fundamentals. There’s no getting around that. (Sorry for the thread hijack. This will be my last comment.)
I’m a senior philosopher at a relatively minor institution, but one thing has stuck with me for the entirety of my career–I feel really lucky to have had the privilege of teaching philosophy and occasionally making the minor contribution to its scholarship.
I come from lower-class white Southern stock. (I know well that one major factor of any upward mobility potential I had was that I was Caucasian, especially in the South, though that ultimately was watered down a bit by my parents’ move when I was 10 to California and good and heavily integrated public schools. Still, being white and male is not inconsequential to explaining where I am today.) My parents never went to high school, but managed to go from tenant farming to working in a casket factory in Tennessee to co-owning a dry-cleaners in California. They worked themselves up from poverty to the middle class, but the lucky move to California (they lost their jobs making caskets) was the biggest boon to my life. I got a solid education in California that I could never have gotten in the horribly underfunded schools in the rural South. Luck (and added luck due to privilege) is nearly everything in retrospective assessments of relative success.
Later after college and becoming enchanted with philosophy I applied to grad schools and even was admitted to some Leiterific ones. But financial realities left me one option after my folks moved back to Tennessee: claim domicile status based on them and attending UT Knoxville. Which I did and earned my PhD, using food stamps (legal then) and the occasional plasma donation to supplement my horrible TA salary. But I loved UT and got a great education there.
No regrets and no real sense I was disadvantaged. The truth is I simply got lucky over and over again to pull myself into a solid middle-class life as a Full Professor at a good if not prominent state school in the University of Wisconsin System. I have never been ashamed of where I came from, and never tried to hide it, or extol it for that matter–it is as they say what it is. But the defining moment of my life in terms of background was when, after earning an MA and well into my PhD, my mom asked one day, “Alan, what is philosophy?” as she stumbled over pronouncing the term. The fact that she supported me even when she had no idea what I was doing brought me to tears that day, and pretty nearly does even today thinking about it.
I looked at a page at Eton’s website, and it appears that they reserve the term “scholarship” for merit and “bursary” for need. So I now have reason to think that Derek Parfit should not have been included in the list above. Mea Culpa. In Parfit’s place perhaps you will allow Albert Camus, who said of his early years: “I lived in destitution but also in a kind of sensual delight ” (http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ca-Ch/Camus-Albert.html#ixzz3MJGEBKUh). I tried to find someone more contemporary, but was unsuccessful. I hope to see more comments like Alan’s!
Re: “I agree the emphasis on pedigree harms people of lower socio-economic status, and there is no way they can signal this in their applications (“Look, I might be from University Nowhere, but honestly, I had no idea pedigree was that important and I just wanted to get a PhD).” I’m on a search committee this year, and a few recommendation letters for candidates from non-highly-prestigious schools have said something like ‘This student is as good as students from [insert highly prestigious grad programs here], but she/he did not realize the importance of pedigree when applying to grad schools, and wanted to stay close to family.’ So even if the student cannot say it, their recommenders can (and might want to).
Except that the great weight attached to references is precisely one the factors compounding the importance of pedigree. How likely is it that someone without pedigree will have influential letter-writers?
I have been thinking over the past couple hours about whether to write a post and, if so, what to write. I rarely talk about my poverty and I’ve never done so on a public forum. When I do talk about it, I usually say some things to situate my past poverty. We lived with assistance from the usual public programs (section 8, food stamps, AFDC/TANF, NSLP) along with various private charitable programs. The house we lived in most of the time I was growing up was heated by a single coil space heater. We almost never had a phone, we often had no hot water, and sometimes we had no refrigerator.
Although I grew up very poor, I had some social and even some economic advantages. I am a white male, the oldest child in my family (at least among those that I grew up with), and I lived in a state that had relatively generous public assistance (though far from adequate). I started my higher education at a community college in my hometown. And I received enough money in state and federal grants throughout my undergraduate education that I didn’t have to work very much and I ended up owing just a little money through the federal subsidized loan program. My fellowship and TAship in graduate school gave me more money than I had ever had before. So, I did not feel like grad school was an economic hardship.
Nevertheless, my most commonly recurring thoughts are about my past poverty and my family’s current continuing poverty. I think about these or related issues every single week. When I was in grad school I felt distant from my family and their struggles. I continue to feel guilty about the fact that I left my family to go to school and I feel guilty about the fact that they are still struggling whereas I am living fairly comfortably. I feel out of place in my current environment. It’s hard for me to relate to other people when, for example, they talk about their experiences in childhood or young adulthood or when they reminisce about experiences that are common for people who did not grow up poor. And I feel an odd combination of shame and pride over my background. Shame because in our society it is treated as shameful to be poor and pride because my poverty has played such a strong role in forming who I am and what I value.
My socioeconomic background is complicated–the short version is that I grew up in a working class family (cab driver and nanny) in a crime-ridden urban neighborhood, but my family is now solidly middle class. My mother went to college while I was growing up. My father never finished high school. I also was very privileged in ways my peers were not–but I won’t get into details. Despite that relative privilege, I have struggled hugely with many of the things mentioned here. Though I am now in an elite department, I took a long circuitous route here. I worked 40 hours a week while getting my undergrad degree at a very non-elite institution and raising a young child. It took me a long time to conceptualize grad school as an option (same with college), and then I ended up transferring. Despite now being pedigreed, I know that this is largely a matter of luck and agree that we ought to think long and hard about the correlation between pedigree and socioeconomic status.
But the thing that I find the hardest in philosophy is just a lack of anyone who can relate to my experiences and life story. It is really isolating. And lonely. Even my closest friends in philosophy seem to think that I have had some crazy unusual life when I tell them about my experiences–they just don’t get that certain things are normal for lots of us. I’ve had three friends murdered in the past three years, countless people I know are in prison or dead. I have witnessed multiple shootings. I had to physically fight my way through middle school and high school. It is really hard to be in a situation where no one can understand these kinds of things (and where they are usually either joked about or coldly used as thought experiments in the classroom) but to also feel completely disconnected from one’s roots (my friends from home can no more understand what I am doing with my life and why than philosophers can understand where I come from, and my family is not much better in this respect). I still feel like a drifter who has disassociated from my past but who can’t find any sort of place in my present.
I also think that we really cannot overestimate how much class privilege influences people’s judgments about intelligence, capabilities, etc. I feel like my whole life is just watching rich kids get rewarded for knowing how to talk right and having gone to private schools their whole lives, over and over again. I think this is the thing to really focus on, and I think it intersects with gender and race issues.
Finally, I just want to emphasize a point already made here: philosophers are classist jerks. They think it is perfectly acceptable to make sweeping generalizations about things like: gun ownership when they have never seen a gun, eating fast food when they have no idea what it is like to be poor or working class, being from a rural and poor area, they have “white trash” dress up parties, they expect us to spend masses of money on food and drinks at places we feel incredibly uncomfortable in. Every time I go to a conference I hear at least one person casually insult my oldest friends or my family via sweeping and ignorant generalizations. My fellow graduate students and the faculty in my department do it too.
To be clear, my ‘oppression olympics’ remark was initially a response to ER @10, but the spirit of that comment applies to anyone attempting to adjudicate the relative importance of class relative to other sources and dimensions of disadvantage in this thread. That’s not the point of any of the experiences people are posting here. If “an on” @27 wants to see my response to the “Market Boost” program, they’re welcome to look at the DailyNous comment thread on that topic.
Rachel, go reread Justin C’s comment above. There’s no meaningful concept of “privilege” on which his story isn’t an account of lack of privilege.
A lot of people I know are completely savvy towards most URM issues, and may even see themselves as budding activists, but in conversation they have no issue whatsoever casually dropping derogatory remarks about homeless people as a whole, sometimes just to express how lazy they might have felt that day or to talk about some outfit. These sorts of things really enforce my implicit worry that people really do have a theory of class and that they would see me or my work differently if they knew about my background. This is also part of the reason why I think that established activists in philosophy need to do more to address socio economic background. Because there are lots of people plugged into the right channels to make them more aware of many forms of privilege, but the channels aren’t making them any more aware of class.
I don’t think that wanting some kind of resources for people with low socio economic backgrounds needs to ask for the support that other issues have.. I think it would be great if there were just a spot for it in the Updirectory so that people who struggle with these things could talk about it with others in philosophy and if in general people in phil programs could hold back from saying explicitly classist things..
I won’t take this bait. I will only say that you’re misunderstanding what ‘privilege’ refers to.
Rachel–could you say more about why Justin C’s story isn’t an account of lack of privilege? It really seems like it is to me. Perhaps you are using the term in a technical sense, and I am not claiming that there is ‘no meaningful concept’ there. But for some of us the term is inseparable from class politics. And I think it is very commonly used as attached to class as well. So it seems really wrong to me to suggest that those of us familiar with that (common) use are misunderstanding how the term refers.
Just adding another story. I am the first in my extended family to earn a bachelors degree and a PhD. My father was out of work on disability (from many tours in Vietnam and then city police force injuries), and my mother worked night shifts on the janitorial staff at a local college so that I could get their employee tuition discount. I myself had no fewer than two jobs throughout my undergraduate career, and some years I would sleep in my car between classes and work shifts (including an overnight job at a hotel).
My first year in grad school, I received a $14.4k fellowship–that was the first year I didn’t have a job since high school, and also the first year my income exceeded the combined income from my parents. I lived frugally throughout grad school, teaching summer classes when I became eligible. I did not learn about wines, liquors, etc because I did not purchase them or attend tasting parties. To this day I confuse colored white wines with reds.
No one ever made me feel excluded because of my background, but then I imagine very few knew my background-attributing behaviors instead to a certain kind of Nerdiness.
I lucked into a tenure track job right out of my PhD, earned tenure a couple years ago. But I still feel odd, especially when people talk about their vacations, or when we decide upon restaurants for visiting speakers. (I rarely vacation with my family, and instead pay off loans or help people struggling in my biological family; and I don’t feel comfortable ordering food that costs more than $10/plate or so at a restaurant.) There are other differences too-e.g., choosing to live in a lower-income neighborhood both for my own comfort and because a rising tide lifts boats. But this post is long enough and my toddler is getting restless 🙂
Thanks for the thread, and thanks to others for sharing their stories.
I posted two links at the beginning of this thread. *please* read them for the answer you’re looking for. A poor straight man still has forms of privilege in terms of white privilege, straight privilege, and male privilege. One can lack some forms of privilege while still having others. It’s not an all-or-nothing concept where one is “privileged” overall or not. Thinking of it in these latter terms is inaccurate and quite misleading. And to return to the point: we always have to be mindful of intersectional forms of oppression and privilege (or lack thereof). Class/socioeconomic privilege is just one of many axes of identity and privilege. But given an intersectional perspective, one cannot ignore that axis. But that also means we can’t ignore the others. My comments in this thread were merely making the latter point: yes class matters quite a lot, but let’s not use that discussion to lose sight of the other axes of oppression.
@ Anonymous Thank you for saying this. We, in which I include me, who have a great deal of class privilege really need to reflect on our conduct and how it is insidiously integrated with “professional norms”:
“Finally, I just want to emphasize a point already made here: philosophers are classist jerks. They think it is perfectly acceptable to make sweeping generalizations about things like: gun ownership when they have never seen a gun, eating fast food when they have no idea what it is like to be poor or working class, being from a rural and poor area, they have “white trash” dress up parties, they expect us to spend masses of money on food and drinks at places we feel incredibly uncomfortable in. Every time I go to a conference I hear at least one person casually insult my oldest friends or my family via sweeping and ignorant generalizations. My fellow graduate students and the faculty in my department do it too.”
Maybe we can be more specific with how we use the word privilege. For instance I was thinking that there are lots of kinds of privilege, like white, male, class, etc and that when someone said “privilege” they generally meant a specific kind. I assumed intersectionality just meant that you can have some kinds while lacking other kinds, and that there can be complicated relationships between the kinds.
So when Aeon said that Justin C. lacked privilege I thought he was saying that he lacked a specific kind of privilege, and that the thrust of his claim was that there exists a kind of privilege (class privilege or something like that) that the person in question lacks. As someone who worries about class and who doesn’t see it addressed often in philosophy, I thought that whether class privilege was a type of privilege at all was in question. Then when you replied I was worried that you were saying that it definitionally wasn’t a type of privilege, and thus it isn’t the kind of thing that there should be resources for. To be fair, you had said that it was a kind of privilege before, so I was sort of confused by your statement in general.
If Aeon is interpreted as saying that someone lacking class privilege lacks privilege of any kind though, then that would be clearly wrong. And if people are saying that lacking a specific kind of privilege means lacking privilege of any kind, then your contributions are very urgent.
All of that just to say, thanks for explaining that! I was confused about what you and other people were disagreeing with before and think I understand now.