Opinion | I rose from poverty, but left part of me behind - The Washington Post - 0 views
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If it were that easy to hop classes in this country, all you’d have to do is start packing
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the study acknowledged this is no easy feat in itself: in areas that are largely Black, or where Black and White residents are equally poor together, economic isolation made that jump all but impossible.
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if you’re lucky enough to simply be around “better,” you’ve got a fighting chance. That’s what happened to me. I grew up in a poor Appalachian town of 900 people, but then moved to a town of about 20,000 in Tennessee, where we lived in a trailer park with a handful of other families like ours, single mothers on welfare.
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That didn’t give me instant access to wealthier friends, but it was still a small-enough town that public school did.
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Nearly all my acquaintances were better off. This meant that by sheer virtue of seeing how other kids acted in school and going to their homes, I saw what middle class looked like — what “better” was.
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it was my friendship with one family that gave me a window into how I might attain it. Alison’s parents weren’t ostentatiously wealthy, but their lives held all the hallmarks of middle-class aspiration. Books, games and art projects were scattered around the family room; they read newspapers and magazines, and they discussed current events. They not only set a high bar for their children but also reinforced their children’s ability to meet it, daily. Good grades were a baseline. Extracurriculars were not optional. Success was treated as inevitable — not some lucky break, as it had been among my class of origin.
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acting “right” was the secret sauce, and that was heavily dependent on knowing what was considered acceptable and unacceptable even in normal conversations with other people. They didn’t burp the alphabet, like my sister could, or tell crass jokes, like I did. Money wasn’t discussed.
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Middle class meant napkins neatly folded in laps, pleases and thank yous unrolling sincerely and automatically.
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my mother certainly did. But working two jobs and the exhaustion of raising four girls alone made those conditions impossible to create to the degree this two-parent family could.
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Bringing up my con-man father whose name I didn’t even know, or the struggles of my less-educated kin? Not great table talk. Learning when not to talk was a big hurdle.
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You can still catch me eating bologna, and no study would ever convince me that growing up poor was a loss when I consider the resilience and gratitude it imparted.
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it didn’t take a good SAT score to notice what I was supposed to act like, dress like, talk like, and seem like to make those friends, to improve my lot. The sooner I accomplished that, the sooner I realized no one knew what class I grew up in — unless I told them.
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I have no doubt it was critical to succeeding, but it’s still not easy to admit to myself the extent to which I was willing to happily join in on that erasure all on my own. For all the study’s merits, that’s a cost it did not seem able to account for.