A Question of Class

My most recent read was a series from The New York Times entitled Class Matters. This series was published in the paper in 2004 in an effort to address the myth that class is no longer an issue in America. It seems the people generally think that upward mobility has reached a point where the social class into which one is born has very little affect on one's ability to achieve "the American Dream." The Times series set out to prove, more or less, that this is not the case. Despite the fact that most newspapers, this one included, are written at an 8th-grade reading level, they still managed to accomplish their task in a way that held my attention.

Each entry in this series aimed to address a particular issue affected by social class, primarily by recounting anecdotes from members of several different classes. One of the most compelling is an examination of three people from three different classes who each suffered a heart attack. Janny Scott shows that the class to which one belongs impacts medical care received, chances of long-term health, and quality of follow-up care. The upper-class man in the story suffered his heart attack in the streets of midtown Manhattan and was immediately taken to a top-quality hospital with an excellent cardiac center (Manhattan is lousy with these). The hospital was licensed to perform the procedure the man needed and performed it as soon as he arrived. It was easy for him to miss work to attend follow-up appointments, and he had no trouble understanding his doctor's instructions. His personal wealth kept his wife from having to work, so she scheduled doctor's appointments for him, fixed healthy meals, and reminded him to exercise. All of this was vastly different from the experience of the lower-class immigrant woman also profiled in the piece. She did not have health insurance and therefore put off calling an ambulance. She was taken to a hospital in Brooklyn that did not have the ability to perform necessary procedures, requiring her transfer to a Manhattan hospital later. It was hard for her to miss work for follow-up appointments, and her limited English made it difficult for her to understand the lifestyle changes she needed to make. Even those she did understand didn't happen because everyone around her smoked and had unhealthy eating habits. Her risk for another attack is significant.

This piece very powerfully showed the limitations and opportunities that class provides. Other pieces pointed out the lack of material differences between the classes these days: everyone seems to have a cell phone, regardless of income or education. But it's a false belief that this means class barriers are coming down. There are still too many advantages to having a college education, a job with regular hours, salary, and benefits, and a family and community that supports good choices.

The final piece in the series told the story of Angela Whitiker, a rare example of someone who managed to eschew her upbringing and move up to the middle class. Whitiker did this after giving birth to five children with four different men. While trying to support these children, she went back to school and earned her nursing degree. Her first two children lived mostly in poverty and did not reap the benefits of their mother's life change. Both of them went on to have children of their own while still teenagers, and both also did jail time for drug possession. Whitiker's younger children, however, are graduating from high school and so far have not given their mother any grandchildren. By the time they were old enough to get into trouble, their mother was married to a middle-class man who helped pay expenses while she was in school, and together their incomes afforded the younger children security and opportunity their older brothers never had. The Whitiker family is as good an example as any of how deeply class matters. The older Whitiker children will likely always struggle to overcome their impoverished childhood, while the younger ones have a fair shot at education, career, and traditional family. The saddest part of the story is that Angela Whitiker is an exception to the rule. Most women in her situation are never able to make the necessary changes that would give their children a better life.

When I began reading the introduction to this book, I was more than a little surprised to read the following: "Peter Kilborn, a Washington-based business reporter, set out to study what seemed to be a growing geographical isolation by class: subdivisions segregated not by race, religion, or ethnic origin but by increments of income. He pored over census data for places where the incomes were conspicuously stratified, and settled on Alpharetta, Georgia." Well. That is the town my parents live in and the very one I in which I spent my high school years. And as I read the chapter Kilborn wrote on Alpharetta and the trends it represents, I understood in a new way how unique my childhood was.

We moved to Alpharetta when I was 14, in the summer between my eighth and ninth grade years. It was the sixth time my family had relocated in my lifetime, but this time I was a teenager, and this time we were moving from Highlands Ranch, Colorado, the closest thing I'd had to a hometown in my life, so it was a bit more of an upheaval. Most of the friends I made in high school were also from other places; it seemed pretty common for people to come to Alpharetta from somewhere else for a job. Kilborn refers to these people as "relos," a term I had never heard but that certainly applies. These people are "the shock troops of companies that continually expand across the country and abroad, [and] they move every few years, from ST. Louis to Seattle to Singapore, one satellite suburb to another, hopscotching across islands far from the working class and the urban poor." That describes my growing-up years to a T. And I didn't think it was that out of the ordinary until I went off to college and encountered "townies" for the first time. Especially at UGA, where many of the people I met had never ventured any farther than Athens, Georgia, which was maybe twenty minutes from the town in which they were raised. There, they were surrounded by uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents, and everyone lived a stone's throw from everyone else. This was exceedingly strange to me, having occasionally lived in the same state as non-immediate family members, but never having lived near all of them.

Of course, now I live in New York, central city for transplants. Maybe 5% of the people I know were born in the tri-state area, and maybe 1% were raised in the 5 boroughs. No one here thinks you're weird for moving around, leaving home, living far away from your parents sometimes for no reason at all. In many ways I think my "relo" life as a kid made it possible for me to move to New York. I'm a person who likes comfort and clear boundaries and familiarity, and I know that if I'd lived in Colorado all through high school, I would have gone to college there, and I never would have left. My roots are there and it would have taken something pretty major to make me leave those behind. But since I spent high school and college in Georgia, for which I felt very little affection, it was easy to leave when I graduated. It was as good a time as any to make a big move, and though I don't think I realized it at the time, I understand now that that is the only time I will ever make such a move. Taking risks is too hard for me, and making big changes even harder. That was kind of my one shot to do something crazy, and I'm thankful every day that I did it. Living in New York is so wonderful and so hard it can't be put into words, and if I'd headed straight back to Colorado as I was tempted, I would never have had this experience. Now, there are only two circumstances in which I see myself moving again. One, New York will run its course for me (this could easily happen once I finish school, because if I can't find a good job I need to move somewhere I can afford rent and student loans) and I will head back to Denver to make my life for good. Two, I will meet someone I decide to spend the rest of my life with and then my choices will be dictated by what's best for us and any family that's in our future. The only way I see myself ever having the guts to move somewhere other than Colorado is if it's with someone else.

All of this does come back around to class. I now have a much deeper understanding of the class I lived in growing up, and beyond that I understand that my situation was actually kind of rare. Neither of my parents had college degrees when I was born, and we lived in a trailer in Kearney, Nebraska at first. Now my dad has a master's degree and all of his kids, so far anyway, have entered college immediately upon finishing high school. In some ways, we have moved up a class or two. My hope for my own kids is that they will have opportunities but that none of those opportunities will feel like entitlements. I'm not sure that's entirely possible; especially in middle-class America, it seems impossible for parents not to give their kids rather more than they need. I have a lot of ambivalence about class divisions still, and what should be done to overcome them. This book didn't solve any of those problems for me, but it opened my eyes to some realities I hadn't seen before, and made me more grateful for the advantages I've had.