Stay Solid!: A Radical Handbook for Youth by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

2. Class is about inherited capital: social, economic, and cultural. It’s not entirely about cash.

This is a tricky thing. The socio-economic class a person is born into seems to magically mold and define their future regardless of how much money is in their pocket at any given time. Research shows that most people stay in the income group they start life in. There is much less class mobility than we think. “Classes do not consist of individuals differentially achieving on the basis of ability, but of individuals inheriting the advantages and disadvantages of their parents before them” (Dennis Forcese, The Canadian Class Structure).

Even though I grew up on welfare, that level of poverty wasn’t really my socio-economic class. My grandparents were working/lower middle class and owned a house. So when I was 11, my previous life of bouncing around many different schools, houses and cities came to an end when my grandmother sold the family home and bought two cheaper houses. My mom, brother, and I moved into our own house and my mom went back to work as a secretary, so our lifestyle changed a lot. Our economic situation stabilized and was closer to what my mom’s class was growing up.

As a young adult, I raised my daughter while living on student loans and welfare. The year after finishing college and before finding full-time work, we lived primarily on white bread and fried bologna sandwiches (which were cheap, comforting, and satisfying) and I felt terribly defeated and depressed. But, we also had a stable roof over our heads and I eventually got a good union job. Because of my college degree (achieved through students loans I am still paying off) and stable housing situation I could move out of the entry-level retail jobs I started out in, and move into a job with a living wage. So, even though I have been cash-poor for most of my life and carried with me the first-hand lessons of welfare-style poverty, I have still managed to maintain a working/lower middle class lifestyle—largely due to the property my grandparents passed down... and my white skin.

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