When teaching about multiculturalism, instructors often ask members of oppressed groups to offer one or two examples of statements they never want to hear again about their social group. Growing up in what some call, “the White underclass,” (Hartigan, 1997), I have accumulated a substantial list of poverty stereotypes that I would love to ban. However, opinions about poor people, unlike those spoken about other groups, are considered a matter of political belief--and derogatory comments are merely seen as free speech. The radio and television airwaves are presently dominated by rhetoric against poor people, but such talk goes largely unchallenged. The taboos against speaking about American classism are difficult to overcome. There is little language to discuss what classism is, and many do not know how it is institutionalized in our schools, churches, government, workplaces, and attitudes.
Lott (2002) defines classism as discriminatory institutional and interpersonal responses to poor people and poverty by those who are not poor. Like racism or sexism, classism is based on devaluation, exclusion, stereotyping, and prejudice, with the target being poor people (p. 100). Individuals from middle and upper class backgrounds have power, defined here as “access to resources paired with the ability to set social rules” (Lott, 2002, p.101). Like racism, where White people by virtue of their ethnic features, have access to resources and the ability to define social structures, classism confers social and economic advantages to people with resources.
In this thesis, I attempt to provide examples of classism while also discussing the personal cost to individuals and society when classism goes unacknowledged and unchallenged. I will also explore how the structure of higher education plays a role in perpetuating classism, as well as social and economic inequality.
A Personal History of Harm by Classism
I come from the White underclass, estimated to include just fewer than 2 million people, mostly children, in the United States. Various scholars have defined us differently, but some features of the White underclass are: 1) concentrated neighborhood poverty, 2) high rates of family dissolution or single parenthood, and 3) long-term use of welfare (Murray, 1986). I have been a foster child, something that occurs for only about a half a million children a year. I have also been homeless—twice. Conservative policy makers like Charles Murray, a man with an established history of romantizing poverty (see his 1988 essay, “What’s so bad about being poor?”), sounded the alarm in the mid-1990s that the white underclass was a looming threat.
My hometown neighborhood was identified in U.S. News and World Report as the 7th largest white ghetto (Whitman & Friedman, 1994). Relative to others in the lowest income quartile, our family, with an annual income totaling approximately 30-50% of the poverty line, was considerably poorer than most. It is difficult to understand the poverty line without a reference and even more difficult to summarize the economics of a family over the span of many years. So the best way to explain our family income is to say that throughout most of my childhood, my two parents and their six children on average lived on approximately $5000-8000 per year or $400-$650 per month (in 2004 dollars). Paying rent usually took 75% of the cash our family had, leaving about $12.50 per person per month for all other expenses aside from housing. We had no assets whatsoever, but rather carried a constant rolling debt with creditors who gauged poor people with usurious interest rates.
Seven percent of people in the lowest income quartile in the United States get a Bachelor’s degree by the age of 24 (Mortensen, 2001). Statistics on the number of Ph.D.s given to people from the lowest quartile are not readily available, but poor people are scarce among professors (Oldfield & Conant, 2001). Needless to say, a tiny percentage of people from my background are university educators.
Getting an Education
No one suspected I was heading for doctoral studies during my childhood. My first and second grade teachers from a small town in Iowa identified me as “slow,” because of irregular gaps that appeared in my early basic skills education. My early schooling had been quite chaotic, so despite participating in Head Start, I was still behind. Economics had led my parents to move more than 100 miles in pursuit of jobs—not once, but three times—in the late 1970s, during my kindergarten and first grade years. These teachers who labeled me as slow also expressed disapproval of the way my parents were raising me. At one point we were all ashamed when they figured out that an ear infection had caused some hearing loss because my parents had not been able to afford medical care for me. Their disdain was made obvious in their verbal comments about the threadbare nature of my clothing, my disheveled appearance, or other types of derogatory remarks they made on my report cards.
My third grade teacher reversed my prior intellectual assessment and labeled me as, “talented and gifted,” which opened new doors to me in terms of classroom and educational experience. Through this program, I learned a few skills on an Apple computer during a time when most elementary students were not introduced to computers at all. During 4th and 5th grade, I escaped from the stressors of school and work—yes, work—by reading constantly: in the bathtub, on the way to school, in the sliver of light under the door after bedtime. Beginning when I was age 8, I had a job each morning at 5 AM delivering Des Moines Register papers to half of our small town. I worked outside the home consistently in some form of employment from that age onward.
Many of my elementary school teachers made negative assumptions about my low-income parents including the belief that they were “druggies.” Their opinions became apparent during my 5th grade year when the State of Iowa conducted a child neglect investigation after they found our farmhouse was 38 degrees Fahrenheit. My teachers went on record to share their guesses as to the sources of my parents’ lack of resources, and substance abuse topped their list of stereotypes about what led to our poverty. In reality, neither of my parents ever touched a drug or drank alcohol. The difference between the assessment provided in the 35+ pages of the child neglect report and the reality of our family life is so striking that one immediately sees why child welfare agencies have such degraded reputations.
Instead of being “potheads”, both of my parents suffered from major mental illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) where their symptoms were expressed as zealous pursuit of religious enlightenment. This actual situation of an exceedingly religious milieu was never described in the child neglect report or noted by the investigator. When I look back at this report, and think about the social services employee who failed to even come close to accurately evaluating our family, I wonder about the extent to which his classism was to blame. He saw poverty and assumed substance abuse. He built a case around a myth.
In any event, my youth was characterized by interactions with strict religious sects and conservative Christians rather than any sort of hippie drug culture. I was the child never allowed to watch TV, participate in Halloween, or play with even mildly rebellious children. My mother had to be convinced by repeated displays of desperate pleading to allow me to attend school. She preferred the idea of home schooling where she could maintain the Godliness of our learning environment. She would hate to hear this, but that type of Godly atmosphere had its significant drawbacks including terrifying her small children whenever there was added talk of demons and Satan. Still, we were a very close family with strong bonds of love built on a foundation of Biblical teaching.
Based on the interventions for poverty and unemployment selected by the State in 1981, my family life changed entirely. Their choices included 1) placing my siblings and myself in foster care to protect us, 2) securing public housing for our family to relocate to an urban area, and 3) finding my father a minimum wage job in the same blighted urban area. The State selected these interventions based on established social policy, and social policy is determined largely by the values of the people. Rather than offering a temporary cash payment to my parents in the form of welfare, the State was only willing to address our poverty by splitting up our family and paying foster families over $1200 per month (in 1981 dollars) for the care of the children. We never would receive such monetary support for keeping our family united.
Assumptions about sinfulness, poverty, the Puritan work ethic, and other American traditions had led to miserly social policy that left almost nothing of a safety net during a period of high unemployment in the early 1980s. During that same time period, the invisible nature of mental illness in the national consciousness, and the lack of services to families affected by it, meant that the root of our poverty was never actually addressed. There were no mental health policies to assist parents with major mental illnesses in parenting or securing income for their families. I would later learn during graduate school that President Reagan’s policy changes directly led to reductions in the types of interventions available to the State of Iowa at that time. Realizing that my family was split apart by poor social policy, I was drawn to studying policy analysis from that point on.
Prior to the government’s intervention, my life was dominated by family activities such as tending the three gardens on our farmland—because they were our sole source of food—involvement in family Bible study, and performing family community service such as cleaning up litter in public parks as a substitution for monetary tithing. My parents could not afford to tithe, but they wanted us to do our part. Perhaps the best evidence for the strength of my parents’ love and attention comes from the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills administered yearly to youth across the country. Each year, 5 of 6 Megivern children received letters from the superintendent of schools congratulating us for scoring in the top 3% in the country.
After the Government “Helped”
By and large, before the government stepped in to help with our poverty, I was a healthy, developmentally appropriate child with a high sense of security despite long-term familial bouts with unemployment. After the government’s 1981 intervention, my parents’ ability to function deteriorated and became inconsistent. The stability they had always provided, even within the confines of poverty and mental illness, was now dissolved. Both parents became paranoid, fearful of the State and its power to take away their children, fearful of the economy that could leave them unemployed for such long bouts, and finally, fearful that God had abandoned them. The structure that had previously characterized our lives was replaced with an unpredictable schedule and limited parental interaction. I babysat for my siblings while my parents worked different shifts at minimum wage jobs. Bringing together the full family unit was never again easily done. My youngest sibling, representing 1 out of 6 Megivern children, was born into this post-intervention environment, and he never scored above the 35th percentile on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.
A particularly dark memory from the period around my 12th birthday haunts me and helps to maintain my deep fear of the Police. My parents were working a great deal, and I was babysitting on a constant basis. My ten-year-old brother David was being beaten in another part of our public housing units by a small group of boys. I left my younger siblings with my next oldest brother and went to try and rescue David. Shortly thereafter the police arrived, and in sorting out who did what, a malicious officer—who liberally utilized social class slurs—filed a child neglect report on me. After all, I had left my siblings in the care of an 8 year old. The State found me guilty of child neglect when I was 12 years old without listening to my story and without providing me with any representation. In retrospect, the knowledge that a middle or upper class child would never have been treated in this manner deeply angers me; more so, because I was made to feel ashamed about a situation that should instead be a source of shame to society.
To this day, I keep and archive several inches of documentation on the involvement of child welfare and social services in our family. Some of the assessments they made were so ludicrous, they deserve to be scrutinized by the government as a means for improving services. For example, the documents following an inpatient psychiatric evaluation of my brother Daniel when he was 14 years old include predictions that he would “only become a future master criminal.” Currently, he is a law-abiding electrician for Quaker Oats in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. To be poor and distressed meant being labeled dysfunctional in a menacing manner even when demonstrating behaviors that would be considered normative in any child under severe stress. Poor children are not like other children, almost as if they are bad seed.
As a highly parentified child after my father and mother divorced, I was controlling the finances for my family by the time I was 14 years old, and I knew that we were in dire circumstances. In 1987, when I was 16, my mother attempted suicide. To prevent the State from learning that we were unsupervised, I quietly called on extended family for help and missed school to care for the preschoolers. Luckily, the social programs that were effective for me—such as a government educational program called Upward Bound—had staff members that never treated me using “professionalism.” They took midnight phone calls for help, provided personal assistance well beyond the end of the program, and intervened even when policy tied their hands.
One of the ways that middle and upper class people exercise their authority and “help” without really helping is through codes of “professionalism.” The professional person dresses in a business uniform, keeps small talk superficial, and never politicizes their personal experience or that of their clients. Among many poor people, “professionalism” is actually a simile for upper class. Keeping low-income children with a history of adversity and trauma, “at arm’s length,” is easily a contributing factor to the ongoing distance between helping professionals and the poor. A professional assists or studies poor people “at a distance.” A professional does not really care about you, but is paid to intervene in your life.
Upward Bound was not a social services intervention in the traditional sense. It was a holistic setting where youth could grow and heal. Among poor people who have gone through the Upward Bound program, there is wide agreement that this type of educational and supportive intervention would truly start to help children rise from poverty through education, but it is available to less than 10% of poor youth.
Going to College to Escape Poverty
My duties in helping my mother to raise my younger siblings were so unambiguous to me that I nearly did not attend college. I enrolled at Luther College, a Lutheran liberal arts school in Decorah, Iowa, because of, Project Upward Bound. I also ended up making it through college with the help of this federally funded antipoverty program.
During my first year of college in 1989, my interest in learning about how poverty affected identity and mental health led me to research psychological databases using the keywords poverty, inequality, and identity. In particular, I wanted to learn how to feel less marginalized among other college students, and somehow less bitter about their significant unacknowledged privileges of safety, security, free time, and childhood. There were no articles, book chapters, or edited volumes on the topic. Repeated literature searches each year since then have resulted in a smattering of articles from across many academic disciplines. As an 18-yr old, I remember thinking that the percentage of poor people in America must be low, or else someone would have thought to write about poverty from the psychological perspective. What I did not realize was that one in five American children is poor, but talking about social class and poverty is largely forbidden in America, unless you were complaining about how high taxes had become due to welfare queens.
One of the most damaging socioeconomic experiences was attending school with privileged students—who appeared more intelligent, educated, and superior because they had more access to resources— talk as though they had worked hard to get where they were. I worked 30+ hours a week off campus and 10 hours a week on campus throughout college (1989-1992) with the exception of a semester where I was privileged to study in Germany due to the generous donations of the college. My work shifts were difficult, because I ended up typing all of my papers on a typewriter between the hours of midnight and 6 am. I had no choice but to use a typewriter in the computer age, because the campus computer lab closed before I got off work. Worse than the disconnection from others socially was the feeling of resentment over my decaying health and mental health as a price of extreme adversity while I watched wealthy sorority and fraternity youth vomit hundreds of dollars a week in alcohol on Thursday-Saturday festivities. Well, I did not just watch, but rather I served them.
Studying poor people
I went to graduate school to study how poverty affects individual development. I soon realized that poverty research is done in a very specific manner that I felt objectified those from poverty communities. In addition, the focus was not on the people, unless it is about their pathology. Typically, the focus of poverty research is on large social trends or specific African American communities.
I was a child of the 1980s, turning 30 in the 21st century. The poverty we experienced was eclipsed by the glaring wealth, excess, and widening inequality of that era. We are not represented in the media, in research, in the literature, or in the minds of the American people. Only about 1.7% of white children is extremely poor for greater than 10 years, but that means there are approximately 2 million of us, rivaling rates of schizophrenia in the American population (about which there are multiple journals, let alone articles). Where are we represented in scholarly investigation?
It has felt as though if I would suffocate if I could not find my voice, a voice for poor people, including those of us who are white, in the sanitized academic environment. I began writing about poverty and classism in a short piece called “The Poverty Experts” in a student journal, Social Work Perspectives, where I told about the lack of acceptance of poor people evident in poverty research. I almost dropped out of graduate school, feeling very isolated and different. Most of the researchers are middle class and they would feel uncomfortable around poor people. They were always a bit nervous with me. This amuses me, because I am fairly good at not being too stereotypically underclass in my behavior. Plus, I am widely regarded by poor people as warm, friendly, and easy to be around.
Crawling Across the Ph.D. Finish Line
Throughout most of graduate school, I raised my two adolescent siblings: taking out high educational loans, charging food to credit cards, and working as a teacher’s assistant, research assistant, and a gas station attendant to support our small nontraditional family. My adolescent sister had two suicide attempts and two psychiatric hospitalizations while my youngest brother dropped out of high school despite many interventions I attempted. They were both more highly affected by the trauma of foster care and its aftermath on our family unit, perhaps because they were small children when the most chaotic experiences occurred. My next oldest brother David committed suicide in 1997 by hooking a vacuum hose to his car exhaust and winding it back into the car. He had attempted college, but returned after a semester significantly depressed. Our whole family knows he died because of his socioeconomic life experiences and classism.
I completed my dissertation with a herniated disk in my back that can be traced to the paper route I had from age 8-12. The heavy bag of papers was always slung to my right side, pulling my back out of place. The price is paid so much later; I did not know how my work would hurt me as I aged. I still have chronic cold hands and feet from the frostbite I sustained during the winter months of paper delivery. None of these life experiences is particularly extraordinary until you compare my life with that of my classmates in college and graduate school. Others in their early 30s could not fathom the kinds of experiences children have in “the Other America.” Hopefully, the strain of my socioeconomic ascent becomes easier to contemplate for privileged individuals when they can take an insider’s perspective on psychological and emotional reactions of poor people to encountering others taking a blind eye to their own advantaged background.
Immediately after defending my dissertation in June 2001, I began my postdoctoral training in a condition of coping fatigue. I was drained from dealing with years of chronically high stress, but I needed to complete my dissertation and meet the demands of a research center, so there was little time to recuperate. Unfortunately, the effects of poverty do not take a holiday just because I was solidly middle class as a doctoral research professional.
During my postdoctoral years, my father began a two-year saga with an open head wound that still has not healed in 2004. There is a website with pictures for those interested:
Consequences of Lack of Health Insurance
They have taken skin grafts from his thigh to try and heal him, but it has been too late. Years without health insurance meant that his severe and untreated diabetes created a chronic distressing health situation. It was painful to me when he was unable to travel to my wedding in 2003, because of a health problem that may not have occurred had he had access to health care earlier in life. I have an endocrine disorder related to diabetes, and I had hoped to focus on this aspect of my health through concentrating on my physical fitness during my postdoctoral training, but instead I needed to take additional time to recuperate from back surgery. At least, I could finally afford to have my back fixed, because I had health coverage.
I cringe to realize I still pay the price for growing up poor through suffering current psychological burdens that affect my productivity and competitiveness. I am a middle-class professional, but I cannot afford to help him or others in my family. Low-income students do not educate their way out of poverty, but rather they buy their way out of poverty by taking out high educational debt to earn access to the American labor market through credentials. It is not supposed to matter to me that other children are simply given these advantages. The helplessness I feel in trying to help my father financially is deeply detrimental to my well-being.
Higher education replicates inequality
I was privileged to barely gain access to my current academic position because I came from the University of Michigan, the top graduate school for social work in the country. Once you have access to privileges like the stellar education provided at a top school, other doors open for you. The best school leads to the best jobs. Few people would recognize what a coup my presence in an elite university really is. The assumption that merit rises to the top is easy to apply after the fact, but it falls down under close scrutiny. With my mediocre Graduate Record Examination scores (Note: The GRE is known to be class-biased), my informal writing style, and naïve understanding of academia, I was not immediately accepted to graduate school. Approximately one month later than most students are notified of acceptance, I received my acceptance letter. Another person, a brighter star, the school had accepted turned down the offer, and the University of Michigan gave me “the waitlist” break. I did not realize how lucky I was at the time.
Later when I would become involved in admissions decisions for both masters and doctoral level graduate studies, I witnessed how gender, ethnicity, and disability status were given some consideration in admissions decisions, but socioeconomic status or social class only served as a liability when assessing the quality of an applicant. The applicants from lower classes were like me: they tended to write more informally; they attended less prestigious universities or colleges; and their scores were lower on standardized admissions tests. Sometimes reviewers would mention social class sympathetically, but overall the impact of social status on the perceived quality of an application was negative. The reviewers did not appreciate that they held any bias whatsoever. Yet, the applicants to receive the most disdain based on poorly written (i.e., colloquial) statements and weak credentials were easily identifiable as working or poverty class. These applicants had no idea how unrefined they appeared next to their more privileged counterparts from elite families and schools. This is how what some call merit is identified by others like myself as privilege. This type of dynamic also helps explain why lower class individuals are rarely academics (Oldfield & Conant, 2001).
Privilege
I am very fortunate and privileged to be a new faculty member in a nationally recognized school of social work. However, it has been while working in elite social work education that I have come to settle on a single sentiment I never want to hear again from students about poverty or welfare or social class. I never again want to hear privileged students who are learning about societal oppression suggest that such a curriculum is oppressive to them. It sickens me, and deepens the psychological wounds that poverty and class oppression have inflicted. These naïve young people—never having dedicated time to critically thinking about social stratification or inequality—have inherited resources and a stock portfolio, but sincerely believe that they have a better understanding of how to help poor people than poor people themselves.
The learning that “privileged” students protest as being oppressive to them actually focuses on critiquing the structural foundations of inequality. It does not contain personal assaults on them or their socioeconomic group, but some privileged students find ways to take critiques of laissez-faire capitalism as a private attack. They have no concept of what it looks like to see professors truly teach in oppressive ways. For example, when I was a student in political science and economics courses in college, I was bombarded with personally degrading poverty stereotypes in my required readings and in the comments of my classmates. As a case in point, I was forced to read Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, as though he were truly a scholar. This was harmful to my already overtaxed emotional well-being, and nearly led me to withdraw from college.
My academic experiences left me feeling alienated, because I was dealing with the great unspoken foe of classism, and few people could understand the nature of the climate that pained me. I was not in the best position to combat classism or to prevent internalizing the negative beliefs of others, because I had very little social support among the middle class college students. I was fatigued from a lifetime of enormous economic stress. I sat in classes learning about the alleged beneficial nature of social services while bearing the overwhelming weight of the knowledge that the “State” can be desperately misguided. I sat in my classes terrorized still from a young age by the realization that freedom and democracy are not evenly applied in America. I have feared the Police since I was ten years old when they took us from our parents and then later when they stigmatized me as a child neglecter.
Compared to my deeply oppressive undergraduate education as a social work major, our current social work curriculum is not laden with stereotypes, but rather focuses on statistics demonstrating the consequences of social and economic inequalities in society. The privileged students hear only the structural theories of poverty and discrimination, but they personalize the critique and turn learning about oppression into a burden.
As I struggle to gain my footing as a new academic, I see little awareness in my academic peer group that an infinitesimal few of us may never have a chance to save for retirement or buy a single stock. Furthermore, we deal with stressors our peers cannot imagine. For example, my youngest brother turned 19 in 2003, and desperate for income, enlisted in the Army in the middle of the Iraqi conflict. While my fellow academics were condemning the war on principle, I was personally frightened that the boy I had helped to raise was headed for a war zone, because he lacked the education and skills for other employment options. Problems such as these remain unresolved.
It appears that people I interact with in academia are comfortable with the assumption that lower class academics have the same chance as others to succeed. They do not know the whole story. They do not know how the road is made ever more difficult with emotionally draining exposure to privileged young adults. I stand before these students, worn down from years of coping with chronic poverty, laden with heavy debt from borrowing my way out of poverty, and I endure their vehement defense of simplistic social policy offered to counter my “liberally-biased” view. But, we never talk about classism.
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Our first Christmas vacation morning was ruined by this alleged business. As it turns out, this dealership is not about Toyota, it is a center for right-wing propoganda.
