“We live in a classless society,” I’d been told as a kid in a white suburban school where most of my classmates were from comfortable middle-class families. I’d been told it so many times I regurgitated it myself, in a conversation with my Government teacher, Mr. D.
I loved hanging after class to talk to Mr. D. And I don’t remember what we had talked about up to that point, what brought me around to saying, “well, we live in a classless society, right?”
What I remember is Mr. D giving me this pitying look, and quickly stashing it away and asking me, “What does a person who works with his hands look like? When not dressed for work? How about a person who works in an office? You know, don’t you? Instantly?”
And I did. I could picture exactly what an office-worker would wear to the beach and how it was different from what my dad would wear.
Mr. D nodded as though I’d spoken. “You see, things like that — dress. That’s what makes class. Modes of speech. The music you listen to. Everyone in America is constantly aware of class, of what class a person is as soon as they see them, but we also are taught to pretend it isn’t there.”
That really stuck with me. It was like I’d put on the shades in “They Live” to see the hidden messages aliens had put in all the advertising. Class was all around me, and I had one.
I’d known, of course, that I was poor. I’d grown up with the constant frustration of not having what other kids had, of wanting shoes that fit and food every day. I knew intimately that not having food to eat didn’t stop me from also wanting a Barbie Dream House.
Somehow I always thought that made us “middle class”, because everyone was middle class, right? Everyone, after all, wanted a Barbie Dream House.
Because poor meant, like, homeless, right? And rich meant owning a private jet. We placed only the greatest outliers outside of the umbrella of “middle class” … but then was the term meaningful at all?
Well, yes. Delusions are meaningful, and useful.
Why was I told we were in an essentially classless society even as all the kids in torn jeans came from the small houses by the tracks, sat at the back of the class, and got more detentions, and all the kids from the subdivisions got to go to the gifted and talented programs, and got off with ‘stern talking to’ when they misbehaved? The class division was there, and stark, and clear to see. We had to be taught deliberately not to see it.
Because it’s sure hard to vote in your own self-interest when you aren’t aware what it is.
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