Joe,
I only discovered you this past week, thanks to my friend, and yours, Arvin Hill. I really love your thinking, and writing, but I need to add my two cents. I am one of those po' folks who attend college, and I am also appalled at the ignorance that so many so-called elitists spew. They even think they are so much smarter because of their money. They are too stupid to realize that money is completely different from brains, poor suckers. To make it worse, sometimes it is just imagined money since many are financially stretched so thin in their attempts to look moneyed that they only have macaroni and cheese to eat at home. And it's not even real cheese.
Fortunately, they have plastic so that they can eat out at a different restaurant every night. Somehow that is more worthy than a healthy home cooked meal. They have constructed a "high class" and "low class" and of course they feel they are among the high class. These ignorant concepts have been discussed in passing in many of my classes, just as a given. Meanwhile, I'm just thinking this isn't goddamn India with the layers of the different castes of people.
In reality, so many of them are like my mother, running from a poverty stricken past, trying to hide the truth of picking cotton as a child, just so they could have a bowl of beans to eat at night. I suspect many of them have excluded the poorer, uneducated segments of their family from weddings and other family events, just like my mother did when my sister married into a wealthy family, and my mother excluded her own son, my brother, because he has a lazy eye, and speaks kind of countrified. Drinks too much too. Her parents weren't good enough either, way too country, and they drive an old car, God forbid, how shameful it is. Always more concerned with what OTHER people might think.
For all those who have experienced poverty, and maybe suffer from self-esteem issues from their background and upbringing, regardless of race, color, or mutthood, I have to "holler" STOP! We are not frauds, or trash, but instead are the real people, who are GEMS, and possibly more aware in our ignorance than the true frauds who are so righteous in their belief that they are somehow better than poor people. You see, these frauds are in a large part composed of previously poor people who are too scared to admit that they, or their family, were ever poor, or uneducated. We need to stand up proudly and stop being so damned scared that someone will realize we are not like them, stop being wannabees, and we just might find out that we are not as alone in those classes as we believe. In fact, we may learn that we are surrounded by others just like us, secret mutts, who just happen to be wrapped up in posing. As for me, I'll take a love shack and a bowl of beans over a stone cold mansion and macaroni and cheese any day.
Peace,
Jeani
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Jeani:
You certainly have a grasp of how the self-loathing of the working poor gets passed down from generation to generation.
College is a real eye opener isn't it? I hope you don't feel too lonely among those people. Even though one is completely surrounded by mediocrity in today's colleges, we nevertheless get out of it what we put into it.
Go gittum gurl!
My warmest regards and respect,
Joe
