The class privilege meme
Thought I’d play too. From Amy (whose promised post about lesbianism, celibacy, asexuality, and coupleism I’m looking forward to), v, and cellycell whose post _Talkin’ ’bout the pay gap and antifeminism_ is the one I’ve linked to there and will quote from,
“The people who point out the pay gap doesn’t exist due to patriarchy, it exists due to womens own lack of being aggressive are often the same people who will say that domestic violence doesn’t affect women more then men, and that women are equally aggressive.
Either women are less aggressive (due to sexist societal training, in my opinion) and that accounts for the pay gap - or men and women in this society are equally aggressive. It doesn’t seem to me like it can go both ways.“
Nice point, I think. Made me go Hah!
Anyway, memeward-ho
From Random Acts of Observation.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: From What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. (If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.)
Bold all those that apply to you.
1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college - Can I semi-bold? Does Teachers Training College (not university) count? She went there for a while after highschool, then again for a while by distance learning when I was primary school age.
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor - If “any relative” includes aunts, uncles, cousins. (I’m from a ‘pleb’ branch of the family).
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home - I’m sure that at some point during my childhood the number would have come to exceed 500.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent - I think I was, until I could do it for myself at least.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 - Swimming, ’cause neither of my parents could, and some piano (which my mother could actually play quite well herself, along with guitar, before she got all out of practice and rusty, by her own description).
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like you are portrayed positively. - I think this has been true for me at some points in my life, in some ways, not so much other times, not now.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs -I didn’t go, still haven’t been to university (apart from a few months of distance learning once), and have only minimal odd bits of other tertiary learning besides. Didn’t even finish highschool, leaving with some few qual’s (as soon as I was old enough and had found a full-time job) 1.5 yrs before what would have been as far as I could go.
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp - A week long adventure/fun type camp once. Camp, as understood in the US is not really a thing down here.
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single family house - A three bedroom house was part of the otherwise not particularly well paid rural work my father did.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child - Only two kids in my family.
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in High School - Did have an old record player
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up - Only recall school trips.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family - I didn’t know the exact monetary cost… heating was by wood burning stove that could also be used for cooking or open fireplace (there was almost no central-type heating (or cooling) in homes here until the last decade or so), and we were to bundle up warm in the winter (no snow anywhere we lived) and most definitely keep unnecessary lights switched off, level of bathwater modest, that kind of thing.
Like v, I’m not sure how well this translates across international waters, even among ‘firstworld’ nations. I was brought up to speak, if not exactly quate naicely, certainly whitely NewZild English, though I didn’t always do so. Then at one time, as an adult, while living and working in a large city, found myself thinking on how elocution lessons (to take edge off the rural in me) might be to my advantage in that environment despite there not being much variation of accent in this country, by region (there’s a bit of a burr in the far South Island that wasn’t ever heard among tv presenters and such until the last few years).
I could ramble on, but that will do, I think.
Starfish
Hi Starfish! Yeah, I think teachers’ college counts, that’s what my mom went to too, though it definitely isn’t the same as a university degree.
Maybe v and others will come over here and we can start brainstorming some more items that are more applicable to more people. v mentioned dentistry, and I think an item about getting annual dental cleanings and checkups and even having “your own” dentist/doctor vs going to the ER when seriously sick/injured, is a big one. (And this should not be construed as support for the medical profession, or that I think regular visits are necessarily good things–I think they are things middle-class people consider normal and necessary for themselves and their kids, and which poor-er people forgo because they can’t afford them.)
I thought the item about the single-family home was a bit urban-skewed, because in rural areas in the US almost everyone lives in a single family home, whether they own it or not. Apartment living just isn’t that common in the area where I grew up, so living in a single-family home is not such a marker of middle-class-ness. Lots of poor people there live in really run-down single family homes that have been in the family for generations, and all that’s owed on them is property tax, so it’s cheaper than rent. A child having her own room I thought a better indicator of what they were trying to get at there; that requires fewer people living in the house, period, whether it’s a family with fewer children (sometimes indicative of middle- or upper-class families) or a lack of extended family members living in the home (again, often indicative of middle- or upper-class-ness in the US).
I also realize that the reason people like me aren’t treated well in the media isn’t really because of class, race, diction, education, or anything like that–it’s because of my size, and the way ideas about what’s an “appropriate appearance” damage fat women’s credibility and respect-ability.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting, thanks for playing!
Hi, Amy.
Overall I thought the questions in this skewed toward the comfort of those at the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum. I’ve seen other questionnaires in the same vein that ask if your family ever had the electricity, heat, phone etc turned off. I guess these sorts of things are often geared toward a particular audience so that they may contain assumptions that really aren’t that universal.
The doctor/dentist thing would would make most everyone here seem really privileged seeing as we still have nationalised, govt/tax payer funded healthcare. It’s been eroded some since the middle-late eighties, but most people will have a GP who is their nominated one. Children up to the age of six are supposed to be seen for free (though there have been some doctors charging a fee for that service when they shouldn’t). Then there’s a staggered co-payment for older children and adults (tiered again for “rich” or “poor” and seniors) that means coming up with anything from around $12-18 to maybe closer to $50.
Many common medicines attract only a $3 or $15(if you’re deemed rich) prescription fee.
Almost all schools have small dental clinics on site, and School Dental Nurses will see all children, including homeschooled children, once a year (or more if you have a prob). They do fillings and cleanings, but will refer on to a dentist for more major work. This applies up to the end of what is somewhat analogous of middle-school age. It’s free, still, technically up until highschool leaving (not sure how it is for tertiary students), though some dentists charge for some work on highschool age young people.
Adult dental gets a bit trickier, but if you’re on income support/welfare or are otherwise low income you can get up to $300/pa non-refundable which will cover an extraction or two, or a filling or three, maybe even a temporary crown, that sort of thing - emergency work only, no checkups. It’s also possible, if you’re low income to get a $1k-1.5k refundable loan to have more extensive work completed or for bottom end false teeth, if it comes to that.
Despite all this, which I’m sure sounds wonderful to folks who live in the US, there are numbers of people still not altogether well served. For an adult receiving Income Support (what we call welfare), whether or not they’re also in paid work, coming up with $25-$30 co-pay to see their GP is still too much, and many will forgo until they can’t any longer. Also paying back a thousand dollars for more major dental will is beyond the reach of many.
Alternative or complementary practitioners are not always covered, although some chiropractic, osteopathy, acupuncture might be sometimes, depending.
That’s the short, incomplete version anyway.
Single family houses are really common here still too. There’s not been a lot of apartment type living here until much more recently - many folks seeing that as some sort of abomination against humanity, especially for children to live without a yard to play in.
Holidays/vacations. Until we went “freemarket” in the eighties hardly anyone here did things like stay in hotels or fly to some other country. Camping out near beaches, whether in a motel, bach, caravan or tent was more common, if your family did go away somewhere - many didn’t, or only to visit with relatives maybe. Or ski-ing in the winter, maybe, though I’m pretty sure that was a luxury sort of thing.
Life here looks much more USian nowdays, but that’s only happened over the last couple of decades or so. The ’90’s were extraordinarily hard on a lot of people. That’s when the gap between rich and poor grew really, very noticeably wide. Prior to the ’80’s unions were strong for a long time and Britain still subsidised primary production here, so if anyone much was suffering back through the 50’s-70’s they were few and almost never white people, so no-one paid much attention. Another sorry indictment.
I don’t feel like I have a really good take on what would be more relevant questions. People who grew up in towns and cities here will likely have a whole different perspective on things than I do.
Perhaps related to perceptions, I wonder when did people in the US commonly have television? I think information technology makes a huge difference to our perceptions, to how much we might know about how others live. Otherwise life is much more insular without pictures of real life from all over the world beamed into your home each day. It was the 70’s here that tv began, and then only for a few hours a day, one channel, then only two channels for a long time. Children growing up now have three or so free channels available to them. Sky/pay tv didn’t come here ’til around 1990 and lots of people still don’t bother to or cannot afford to have pay tv. How much of that is so for the US?
Wow, yes, the health and dental benefits DO sound wonderful to me, though I’m sure you’re right that it’s still too much for some people. That’s true here too, for people who are on the various state plans for low income people, or on disability; the copays are still too expensive, or medications aren’t covered, or what have you.
I would say that TV here has been perhaps 20-30 years ahead of what you describe–your version of its availability in the 70s in A/NZ sounds like my mother’s description of it during her childhood in the 1940s. In the 70s, we had three major networks with (I think) 24-hour programming, and then the public TV channel that would end at midnight. Cable TV started coming into my area in my adolescence, in the 1980s, though I think it existed elsewhere earlier than that, and it’s all been downhill from there. :) I don’t really think of TV as a force for expanding minds, though of course sometimes it’s that; I think overall though it’s been a lot more damaging in the way that it normalizes whiteness, middle class-ness, heterosexuality/nuclear families, the sexualizing of everything, and violence. I think many lower-middle and middle class people in the US think of cable TV (or satellite TV, similarly) as a necessity–as a utility, the way they would think of electricity or water. It’s just another monthly bill that you can’t do without, that you go without other things for. I think it’s exorbitantly expensive ($40/month or more) and have only had it a couple of times, at roommates’ insistence. My mother was a teacher in a relatively poor and rural area and would talk about her students — 5 year olds, now — who all had their own TVs in their own rooms, AND cable. So each family member would be in their own room watching their own programs, separately. Seemed bizarre to me.
Thanks for all that info. Tv as far back as the ’40’s, eh?
“I think overall though it’s been a lot more damaging in the way that it normalizes whiteness, middle class-ness, heterosexuality/nuclear families, the sexualizing of everything, and violence.”
I agree with this. I’ve lived without tv altogether at times, other times I’ve had one or ready access to one. Coming back to it after a break, or a period of watching almost no tv was sometimes quite shocking, a jolt.
Particularly, the difference between say, the early ’90’s and the late 90’s, in terms of sexualisation especially was quite marked. Even looking at the ad’s being run during movies taped off of tv from one end of the 90’s to the other, the difference is jarring.
Thinking on, I’m aware of how my own het privilege, (while not effecting how I about felt about the the all-nuclear-all-the-time-families), meant that when gay men and/or lesbian women featured in documentary or magazine-style or fictional programming I just thought something like, Oh, hey, this is good. In other words, I did not notice absence, only relatively rare presence.
I’ve sat here trying to decide whether or not to comment on the tenor of GL (BTQ) local programming, which there’s not a lot of anyway, and have decided to go ahead. I particularly recall one item from maybe 6-7 yrs ago, where the partner of a featured lesbian artist identified herself clearly as a transwoman and spoke some about not claiming only womanhood, sans qualifier. Now, there seems lots more sex-pos, lipstickness et al.
While I don’t make a point of watching the available show(s) all the time, so that I could well be talking rather out of turn, I believe Prue Hyman made some reference to changes in the community (in among the essays of hers I linked to in another thread re economics) that suggest my perception is correct. Perhaps her comments were only in reference to a freemarket, libertarian style of politics overall, rather than what might be called sociopolitical changes? I’ll check on that sometime soon.