Class Priviliege Meme
Dec. 31st, 2007 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylik(from a bunch of folks, including ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lumiere and gramina)
* Father went to college
He probably was the only one of his brothers (4 including him) who did. (He's been estranged from his brothers back in WI for years, so there's a lot I don't know about them.) His father was a factory worked and labour union organizer.
* Father finished college
With a PhD in physiology
* Mother went to college
I suspect all of her siblings (6 including her) did.
* Mother finished college
BA in history. Later part of a MS in microbio, a teaching credential... maybe working on an MEd?
* Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
Father is an emeritus professor of Computer Science. Of course, I haven't been on speaking terms with him for more than half my life, and yet obviously having him for a father, and growing up around a university campus has had a huge (I'm thinking the positive) impact on my life.
* Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
This is complicated. Lower than some, but then some of my highschool teachers were from quite privileged backgrounds. I was also only in high school for a year. It was also a rather Marxist highschool, which means it was sometimes hard to tell, or hard to quantify.
* Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
* Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
When I was a kid, I tended to just pick up any random book that my parents had been reading, including a number of things that would generally have been considered quite age inappropriate. I'm really glad no one tried to stop me. I probably had more than 500 books in my room a lot of the time.
* Were read children's books by a parent
Both parents. Classics as well as picture books.
* Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
* Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
A bazillion. Piano, ballet, musical theatre, pottery, gymnastics, all kinds of team sports (that I mostly really didn't want to participate in), sewing, swimming (which I liked)... I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch.
* The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
Yes. Well, it depends on how much you mean "white, native speaker of american english" and how much you mean nerd girl, but even the later is doing okay.
* Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
No. Way no. I did open my own bank account a bit after moving out on my own when I was fifteen.
* Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
Yes, but. I went to a public university when academically I could have done much better. (Well, kind of. The U of WA is really darned good, really, but I went there because it was the closest place worth mentioning.) I worked the entire time I was in school, as my tuition was covered, but my living costs were not. Oh, and I spent several years not attending the university in my late teens when my father stopped baying support or tuition on me and I moved out on my own. Then I took him to court to win college support (which had been mandated by my parents divorce). And it continued to be a major issue, with him not paying when he was supposed to (and tuition was due) and that sort of thing. If you include my living expenses, even as cheaply as I was living... it was still probably a majority, but only barely. By the end, it wasn't a majority. (Tuition and such went up, support did not.)
* Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
* Went to a private high school
Yes. For one year. After I dropped out of college when I was thirteen.
* Went to summer camp
I loved summer camp. Only got to do this a few times, but it was great.
* Had a private tutor before you turned 18
I was a private tutor before I turned eighteen. Does that count?
* Family vacations involved staying at hotels
This one has the complication of time scale. When I was little, never. We went camping or on long bike trips (and camped at night). When I was older, there were more hotels... and I wasn't involved in most family vacations. My younger siblings largely grew up going to club med, I never did. (This isn't a complaint.) There was a pretty major change of class, certainly of financial status, that occurred in the family.
* Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
I wonder how much of this was the change in my family's money, and how much was a change in culture. When I was a kid much of my clothes, maybe (probably, the more I think about it) most, were hand me downs. A lot of the rest was ordered from the Sears catalogue. Now it seems like kids generally get more new clothing, even kids in families without much money. Clothing is cheaper, relatively... but in more than one sense. I would guess that *most* of my friends my age or older had a lot of hand me downs, and most of my younger friends had fewer or none. (Though this assumes less class diversity than is in fact the case.)
* Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
Actually, I didn't own a car until I was twenty-three and already had been at Microsoft for a bit, and didn't learn to drive until I was twenty-two. Couldn't have afforded a car before then anyway. (Certainly not the parking and insurance.)
* There was original art in your house when you were a child
Yes. Not anything particularly valuable, but original art.
* Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
Technically very briefly and by accident (I moved into what had been my dad's office, and the phone line still worked for a while even though it was supposed to have been turned off.) But not really.
* You and your family lived in a single family house
On Cap Hill even. Though they bought it while Seattle was very depressed, in 1976, for $22,500.
* Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
* You had your own room as a child
Always. Always the coldest room in the house, too ;-)
* Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
No, but that's almost more about privilege than lack of privilege. I took the SAT when I was twelve, on a lark. Didn't study for it, did well enough that I never bothered to take it again. I suppose if there had been some reason my family thought that I wouldn't do well on the SAT, later, they might have sent me to Kaplan or something, but that would have been considered surprising and distasteful. And I probably would have been tutored at home by both parents first (well, by the time I was old enough they were divorced, and I'd been admitted to college years before).
Last year, when I took the GREs, I was really busy getting my grad school applications and my first first-name paper together. So I didn't study at all -- I didn't even spend five minutes sitting down and reading about what to expect or anything. (And then I took it on a bunch of pain meds.) And I did well. My point is almost "of course I did well". Obviously there are historical reasons why I was not particularly concerned about this (I don't really think ability to well on standardized tests necessarily correlates well with anything practical, but hey, it's a talent). But I talked to my mom about it, and mentioned to her that I hadn't studied at all, and she said that she'd always believed that one really shouldn't study for these things, that indeed studying for them is kind of silly.
I think I hear in that an undertone of "studying for anything as trivial as the GRE is a sign of weakness, and our people don't do that". Which is a major undercurrent in my whole experience of education. I was expected to do well, though I wasn't required to pull top grades all the time. (As long as it wasn't a regular thing, if a class was boring or stupid, my parents, especially my father, were at least somewhat sympathetic.) But when it came to anything that mattered (maybe highschool grades would have matter, middle school grades... well, when my grades started to slump, I was sent off to college) I was expected to do well, and certainly by the time it became known that I was "gifted" I was expected to do brilliantly. At everything academic or artistic. And I wasn't supposed to look like I was breaking a sweat over it, because my parents didn't want to be thought to be pushy parents who forced their kids to be over-achievers. Of course, I was also castigated by my mother a lot for being a slacker who coasted by on being bright and was terminally disorganized and could never get my shit together to follow through on anything (like Leonardo da Vinci! -- yes, she really did say this. K loves this story, and having told it to him once he reminds me of it frequently. I may be crazy, but really, when you look at my background I am amazingly sane.)
To bring this back to class... The kind of privilege I came out of isn't necessarily one of money. Oh, money did come eventually, but most of my experience of my family was not one of much wealth. But even as crazy as my family was, it was intellectually a very rich environment, and I was encouraged not only to do well but to really explore my own talents and inclinations and find the things I did well in. (If my talents and inclinations had been less academic, this might have been more problematical. My sister's big terrible rebellion was not the running away, or the drugs -- some people have no room to criticize, and while that didn't stop them it kind of slowed them down -- or even early motherhood. It was not going to college.) I was started on programming when I was five. (I wonder sometimes if learning programming while still in the stage of development that facilitates language acquisition changes things...) I was exposed to art and literature, and encouraged to get a good classical education, and not let my years in college become essentially vocational training**. I was expected to handle myself gracefully in formal academic and business gatherings from a fairly young age. I spent a lot of time interacting with luminaries from any number of different cultures. It never occurred to me that anyone that mattered (say, not the kids at school) would look down on me for any reason. I can be dense this way -- it also just wasn't the kind of thing I thought about. But my experience of adults was generally that the more educated, the more distinguished and so on, the more they liked me. It was the more normal adults who had issues with me. Of *course* I was the social equal of anyone, at least as long as I carried myself well.
I don't know how to really convey all the expectations this background carried. Um, for instance, I grew up with a slight sense of condescension towards community colleges. I mean, they were *okay*, one supposes, for people who didn't have other options or who were perhaps not comfortable in a real university environment (it was understood that the smaller classes were better for some people, but it was also kind of a character flaw, if the sort of thing one prided oneself on pretending one didn't look down on.) If one took a community college class, it was for fun, and not anything to do with one's real education... unless you were in difficult financial circumstances.
Now look, I've taken CC classes, and I enjoyed them and value what I got from them. Though even now most of what I value isn't academic, it's about having interacted with all kinds of different people. (I'm thinking of the classes I took when I was in my mid to late teens and couldn't afford the university.) And come to think of it, I never transferred those credits over, in part because I didn't think of them as "real" credits. When my dad, in court, said that I would have done better to return to high school than take CC classes, I was indignant but as much as I denied it at the time, it also made sense to me. And there are still stupid things that lurk on the edges of my mind. K and I joked about how, with a certain upbringing, you reach a point in your life that you suddenly have a nigh unto overwhelming urge to swim upstream and get a PhD. And when I realized that he had taken some of his med school requirements at BCC, some part of me was shocked and kind of horrified. (And I still wonder, a little, if that's why he's still not really comfortable with O Chem. OTOH, I know some of the UW professors suck, and I was quite lucky.)
This is about me being a fuckhead.
* Had your own TV in your room in High School
Gods, no.
* Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Nope.
* Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Yes. Hawaii, once. Visiting family a couple of times. Oh, yeah, and to Connecticut and back when my dad was teaching at Yale.
* Went on a cruise with your family
No.
* Went on more than one cruise with your family
No. I think there was a bit of a sense that cruises were vulgar.
* Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
Yes. Constantly. I have so many memories of following my mother through modern art galleries in New York while I was sick to my stomach... But even when I was fairly young, like five, taking the kids to the Seattle Art Museum was considered a great outing for me and my friends***. (Though the museum of history and industry was our favourite. Not to mention the science centre, and the zoo, and the japanese gardens...)
* You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family
Yes, though the barn of a house I grew up in was rarely heated above 63 degrees.
Actually, this one I have mixed feelings about. I did learn a bit about investing from my uncle. But in most ways I was kept insulated from finances when I was a kid. I don't think this was entirely a kindness.
** In this I am, I suppose, particularly indebted to my father. There was never a sense that because I was good at math and science, I shouldn't be good at arts -- and in fact, while there was sometimes creepy pressure and such, my writing and my music (especially when I started writing my own) were valued by my family. I was told explicitly by my father that he loved his job, and that he was extremely lucky to be making his living doing something he loved, and he emphasized how much it would suck for me if I got myself into a career, no matter how prestigious or high paying, that I was not passionate about. (Remember, until I was well into puberty I was kind of my father's intellectual heir.) I was encouraged never to allow myself to become a mere technician, or get lazy about doing something because I was good at it and not do new and interesting things. I was told that if your work is really good, you should be able to present it simply and concisely and it's greatness would speak for itself. (His doctoral dissertation, I am told, was something like thirty-seven pages.) And y'know, I really think he was trying to give me the secret to happiness, as much as he had found it.
And the thing is, that's a major subset of the secret of happiness as much as I have found it. I had to figure a lot of it out for myself, of course.
*** By friends in this context I mostly mean Scott and Nels, who I sometimes call my foster brothers.
I think this is a good exercise in terms of getting a handle on some of the things that one has been given, whatever else one has earned for oneself. It's not, however, a very nuanced tool in terms of talking about class. Which is fine, but I'd really like to see more people talking about class, especially in the US, which is terribly classist, and yet partakes of a cultural myth that class mostly doesn't matter (at least not if you're white and were born here).
A lot of the overt class markers can be subverted. We mostly didn't have nice cars when I was growing up -- and at least as the family became more affluent, this was more about politics than money. To this day it's hard for me to sort out what things were affectation and what things were lack of money. I was raised to be proud of not spending money on inessentials like... well, anything in excess. You should have some nice clothes, but not a lot. Getting matching silverware was kind of a big deal. Spending money on books or anything educational was not. Conspicuous consumption was regarded with contempt.
Class doesn't have just once axis, and even to the extent you can simplify it to such, that axis is about a lot more than money. Oh, yeah, money is really, really important -- but if you have the right sort of cultural background, you're going to have a lot more access to money and training in what to do with it when you have it even if you don't get money from your family per se. And there are a lot of things that aren't about money at all.
lumiere and gramina)As well as responding here, please post links or acknowledgments to http://quakerclass.blogspot.com/2007/11/what-privilege-do-you-have.html
The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. The exercise developers ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright.
If you post this in your blog, please leave a comment on this post. To participate in this blog game, copy and paste the list into your blog, and bold the items that are true for you. If you don't have a blog, feel free to post your responses in the comments.
* Father went to college
He probably was the only one of his brothers (4 including him) who did. (He's been estranged from his brothers back in WI for years, so there's a lot I don't know about them.) His father was a factory worked and labour union organizer.
* Father finished college
With a PhD in physiology
* Mother went to college
I suspect all of her siblings (6 including her) did.
* Mother finished college
BA in history. Later part of a MS in microbio, a teaching credential... maybe working on an MEd?
* Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
Father is an emeritus professor of Computer Science. Of course, I haven't been on speaking terms with him for more than half my life, and yet obviously having him for a father, and growing up around a university campus has had a huge (I'm thinking the positive) impact on my life.
* Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
This is complicated. Lower than some, but then some of my highschool teachers were from quite privileged backgrounds. I was also only in high school for a year. It was also a rather Marxist highschool, which means it was sometimes hard to tell, or hard to quantify.
* Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
* Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
When I was a kid, I tended to just pick up any random book that my parents had been reading, including a number of things that would generally have been considered quite age inappropriate. I'm really glad no one tried to stop me. I probably had more than 500 books in my room a lot of the time.
* Were read children's books by a parent
Both parents. Classics as well as picture books.
* Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
* Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
A bazillion. Piano, ballet, musical theatre, pottery, gymnastics, all kinds of team sports (that I mostly really didn't want to participate in), sewing, swimming (which I liked)... I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch.
* The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
Yes. Well, it depends on how much you mean "white, native speaker of american english" and how much you mean nerd girl, but even the later is doing okay.
* Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
No. Way no. I did open my own bank account a bit after moving out on my own when I was fifteen.
* Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
Yes, but. I went to a public university when academically I could have done much better. (Well, kind of. The U of WA is really darned good, really, but I went there because it was the closest place worth mentioning.) I worked the entire time I was in school, as my tuition was covered, but my living costs were not. Oh, and I spent several years not attending the university in my late teens when my father stopped baying support or tuition on me and I moved out on my own. Then I took him to court to win college support (which had been mandated by my parents divorce). And it continued to be a major issue, with him not paying when he was supposed to (and tuition was due) and that sort of thing. If you include my living expenses, even as cheaply as I was living... it was still probably a majority, but only barely. By the end, it wasn't a majority. (Tuition and such went up, support did not.)
* Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
* Went to a private high school
Yes. For one year. After I dropped out of college when I was thirteen.
* Went to summer camp
I loved summer camp. Only got to do this a few times, but it was great.
* Had a private tutor before you turned 18
I was a private tutor before I turned eighteen. Does that count?
* Family vacations involved staying at hotels
This one has the complication of time scale. When I was little, never. We went camping or on long bike trips (and camped at night). When I was older, there were more hotels... and I wasn't involved in most family vacations. My younger siblings largely grew up going to club med, I never did. (This isn't a complaint.) There was a pretty major change of class, certainly of financial status, that occurred in the family.
* Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
I wonder how much of this was the change in my family's money, and how much was a change in culture. When I was a kid much of my clothes, maybe (probably, the more I think about it) most, were hand me downs. A lot of the rest was ordered from the Sears catalogue. Now it seems like kids generally get more new clothing, even kids in families without much money. Clothing is cheaper, relatively... but in more than one sense. I would guess that *most* of my friends my age or older had a lot of hand me downs, and most of my younger friends had fewer or none. (Though this assumes less class diversity than is in fact the case.)
* Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
Actually, I didn't own a car until I was twenty-three and already had been at Microsoft for a bit, and didn't learn to drive until I was twenty-two. Couldn't have afforded a car before then anyway. (Certainly not the parking and insurance.)
* There was original art in your house when you were a child
Yes. Not anything particularly valuable, but original art.
* Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
Technically very briefly and by accident (I moved into what had been my dad's office, and the phone line still worked for a while even though it was supposed to have been turned off.) But not really.
* You and your family lived in a single family house
On Cap Hill even. Though they bought it while Seattle was very depressed, in 1976, for $22,500.
* Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
* You had your own room as a child
Always. Always the coldest room in the house, too ;-)
* Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
No, but that's almost more about privilege than lack of privilege. I took the SAT when I was twelve, on a lark. Didn't study for it, did well enough that I never bothered to take it again. I suppose if there had been some reason my family thought that I wouldn't do well on the SAT, later, they might have sent me to Kaplan or something, but that would have been considered surprising and distasteful. And I probably would have been tutored at home by both parents first (well, by the time I was old enough they were divorced, and I'd been admitted to college years before).
Last year, when I took the GREs, I was really busy getting my grad school applications and my first first-name paper together. So I didn't study at all -- I didn't even spend five minutes sitting down and reading about what to expect or anything. (And then I took it on a bunch of pain meds.) And I did well. My point is almost "of course I did well". Obviously there are historical reasons why I was not particularly concerned about this (I don't really think ability to well on standardized tests necessarily correlates well with anything practical, but hey, it's a talent). But I talked to my mom about it, and mentioned to her that I hadn't studied at all, and she said that she'd always believed that one really shouldn't study for these things, that indeed studying for them is kind of silly.
I think I hear in that an undertone of "studying for anything as trivial as the GRE is a sign of weakness, and our people don't do that". Which is a major undercurrent in my whole experience of education. I was expected to do well, though I wasn't required to pull top grades all the time. (As long as it wasn't a regular thing, if a class was boring or stupid, my parents, especially my father, were at least somewhat sympathetic.) But when it came to anything that mattered (maybe highschool grades would have matter, middle school grades... well, when my grades started to slump, I was sent off to college) I was expected to do well, and certainly by the time it became known that I was "gifted" I was expected to do brilliantly. At everything academic or artistic. And I wasn't supposed to look like I was breaking a sweat over it, because my parents didn't want to be thought to be pushy parents who forced their kids to be over-achievers. Of course, I was also castigated by my mother a lot for being a slacker who coasted by on being bright and was terminally disorganized and could never get my shit together to follow through on anything (like Leonardo da Vinci! -- yes, she really did say this. K loves this story, and having told it to him once he reminds me of it frequently. I may be crazy, but really, when you look at my background I am amazingly sane.)
To bring this back to class... The kind of privilege I came out of isn't necessarily one of money. Oh, money did come eventually, but most of my experience of my family was not one of much wealth. But even as crazy as my family was, it was intellectually a very rich environment, and I was encouraged not only to do well but to really explore my own talents and inclinations and find the things I did well in. (If my talents and inclinations had been less academic, this might have been more problematical. My sister's big terrible rebellion was not the running away, or the drugs -- some people have no room to criticize, and while that didn't stop them it kind of slowed them down -- or even early motherhood. It was not going to college.) I was started on programming when I was five. (I wonder sometimes if learning programming while still in the stage of development that facilitates language acquisition changes things...) I was exposed to art and literature, and encouraged to get a good classical education, and not let my years in college become essentially vocational training**. I was expected to handle myself gracefully in formal academic and business gatherings from a fairly young age. I spent a lot of time interacting with luminaries from any number of different cultures. It never occurred to me that anyone that mattered (say, not the kids at school) would look down on me for any reason. I can be dense this way -- it also just wasn't the kind of thing I thought about. But my experience of adults was generally that the more educated, the more distinguished and so on, the more they liked me. It was the more normal adults who had issues with me. Of *course* I was the social equal of anyone, at least as long as I carried myself well.
I don't know how to really convey all the expectations this background carried. Um, for instance, I grew up with a slight sense of condescension towards community colleges. I mean, they were *okay*, one supposes, for people who didn't have other options or who were perhaps not comfortable in a real university environment (it was understood that the smaller classes were better for some people, but it was also kind of a character flaw, if the sort of thing one prided oneself on pretending one didn't look down on.) If one took a community college class, it was for fun, and not anything to do with one's real education... unless you were in difficult financial circumstances.
Now look, I've taken CC classes, and I enjoyed them and value what I got from them. Though even now most of what I value isn't academic, it's about having interacted with all kinds of different people. (I'm thinking of the classes I took when I was in my mid to late teens and couldn't afford the university.) And come to think of it, I never transferred those credits over, in part because I didn't think of them as "real" credits. When my dad, in court, said that I would have done better to return to high school than take CC classes, I was indignant but as much as I denied it at the time, it also made sense to me. And there are still stupid things that lurk on the edges of my mind. K and I joked about how, with a certain upbringing, you reach a point in your life that you suddenly have a nigh unto overwhelming urge to swim upstream and get a PhD. And when I realized that he had taken some of his med school requirements at BCC, some part of me was shocked and kind of horrified. (And I still wonder, a little, if that's why he's still not really comfortable with O Chem. OTOH, I know some of the UW professors suck, and I was quite lucky.)
This is about me being a fuckhead.
* Had your own TV in your room in High School
Gods, no.
* Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Nope.
* Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Yes. Hawaii, once. Visiting family a couple of times. Oh, yeah, and to Connecticut and back when my dad was teaching at Yale.
* Went on a cruise with your family
No.
* Went on more than one cruise with your family
No. I think there was a bit of a sense that cruises were vulgar.
* Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
Yes. Constantly. I have so many memories of following my mother through modern art galleries in New York while I was sick to my stomach... But even when I was fairly young, like five, taking the kids to the Seattle Art Museum was considered a great outing for me and my friends***. (Though the museum of history and industry was our favourite. Not to mention the science centre, and the zoo, and the japanese gardens...)
* You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family
Yes, though the barn of a house I grew up in was rarely heated above 63 degrees.
Actually, this one I have mixed feelings about. I did learn a bit about investing from my uncle. But in most ways I was kept insulated from finances when I was a kid. I don't think this was entirely a kindness.
** In this I am, I suppose, particularly indebted to my father. There was never a sense that because I was good at math and science, I shouldn't be good at arts -- and in fact, while there was sometimes creepy pressure and such, my writing and my music (especially when I started writing my own) were valued by my family. I was told explicitly by my father that he loved his job, and that he was extremely lucky to be making his living doing something he loved, and he emphasized how much it would suck for me if I got myself into a career, no matter how prestigious or high paying, that I was not passionate about. (Remember, until I was well into puberty I was kind of my father's intellectual heir.) I was encouraged never to allow myself to become a mere technician, or get lazy about doing something because I was good at it and not do new and interesting things. I was told that if your work is really good, you should be able to present it simply and concisely and it's greatness would speak for itself. (His doctoral dissertation, I am told, was something like thirty-seven pages.) And y'know, I really think he was trying to give me the secret to happiness, as much as he had found it.
And the thing is, that's a major subset of the secret of happiness as much as I have found it. I had to figure a lot of it out for myself, of course.
*** By friends in this context I mostly mean Scott and Nels, who I sometimes call my foster brothers.
I think this is a good exercise in terms of getting a handle on some of the things that one has been given, whatever else one has earned for oneself. It's not, however, a very nuanced tool in terms of talking about class. Which is fine, but I'd really like to see more people talking about class, especially in the US, which is terribly classist, and yet partakes of a cultural myth that class mostly doesn't matter (at least not if you're white and were born here).
A lot of the overt class markers can be subverted. We mostly didn't have nice cars when I was growing up -- and at least as the family became more affluent, this was more about politics than money. To this day it's hard for me to sort out what things were affectation and what things were lack of money. I was raised to be proud of not spending money on inessentials like... well, anything in excess. You should have some nice clothes, but not a lot. Getting matching silverware was kind of a big deal. Spending money on books or anything educational was not. Conspicuous consumption was regarded with contempt.
Class doesn't have just once axis, and even to the extent you can simplify it to such, that axis is about a lot more than money. Oh, yeah, money is really, really important -- but if you have the right sort of cultural background, you're going to have a lot more access to money and training in what to do with it when you have it even if you don't get money from your family per se. And there are a lot of things that aren't about money at all.
