I Am Not Alone

There is a line in the movie Shadowlands that has always stuck with me: "We read to know we are not alone."

Never have I felt the truth of that sentence more than while reading This Fine Place So Far From Home. Subtitled Voices of Academics From the Working Class, it is a 1995 collection of essays by academicians who all grew up in working class families. Working class poor, blue collar working class, working class.

Reading the authors' experiences and observations, I was able to recognize and acknowledge my own trajectory in ways I rarely have. Their words let me put my life sharply into perspective.

I am always the other.

I come from a working class family; my dad was a skilled machinist. On either side of my family tree is a long line of laborers back many, many generations. My siblings and I all graduated from high school; that was a first in my dad's immediate family and only one generation removed from my mother's (neither of her parents graduated from high school, although she and her siblings did).

There were not a lot of models in the family for further education. There was an uncle who completed an education degree on the GI Bill following World War II, another uncle who took some college classes through the same vehicle, and one cousin (out of 25 or 26) who went on to college and completed a degree.

And there was my older brother. He had an abysmal GPA as a high school student, but Dale had very high SAT scores and was a swimmer, so his coach worked hard to get him accepted into Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts college in Michigan. Dale didn't even complete his freshman year, dropping out a few weeks shy of the end of the year with failing grades. "The professors didn't know anything," he said. "They didn't have any real world experience." Looking back 47 years later and after reading This Fine Place, what I suspect sank my brother was the chasm between the working class kid he was and the middle class and professional upbringings of the other students and professors surrounding him. How did he begin to bridge the gap between our family life and discussing The Great Gatsby?

So enter me. I went off to the University of Chicago on a combination of scholarships and federal loans (which I signed for myself). I had a couple of hundred bucks in my wallet, thinking that would get me through the year. Who knew books were so expensive? I was totally at sea. A moment that still sticks with me? My roommate Katrina, who came from vastly different circumstances, had a long phone call every few weeks with her parents. (In those long ago pre-cell phone days, they had an agreed-upon system where she would call collect, they would "refuse" to accept the charges, then call her back directly at the pay phone in the dorm lobby.) I never talked to mine once on the phone; I received letters, often vituperative, from my mother. I doubt it crossed any of our minds to talk long-distance (think of the expense) ever.

After I went away to college, I did not live with my parents again until many, many years later. After I left for college, I did not receive financial assistance from my parents (until decades later, when I was too sick to work). That was just the expectation in our home: you were on your own.

Despite some rough spots, some of my own making, and some wrong turns, I eventually finished college and law school. But I never lost the sense of alienation and loneliness, both within my family and within academia. Having gone away to school, I was an outsider when I was back home; having come from the working class, I was an outsider at school.

I married up, that first time, but never fit quite into my in-laws' professional surroundings, a fact that I was constantly reminded of both in what was said and in what was not said. I married again, this time to an immigrant who grew up poor after coming to this country and resented that poverty. Now I am married to a man who grew up middle class.

I asked Warren, as I turned over this essay in my head, about his college years. He lived at home, he commuted to Ohio State, his parents and a music scholarship paid for his tuition. He worked summers, but not during the school year.

"What about clothes when you were in college?"

Warren reflected a moment. His parents, he said. "I was still part of the family."

"I was still part of the family." My parents did not buy me clothes or shoes after I went to college. It would have been the same had I gone to work after high school or into the military, as my two younger brothers did. That was part of being responsible for yourself after graduating from high school. Writers in This Fine Place made similar observations about their experiences. In many working class families, you are on your own once you hit adulthood.

I think of my own children, who grew up in a family just hanging onto the middle class by our fingernails. There was never quite enough money (huge quantities of it going into alcohol); we never quite managed to give Ben and Sam the financial support they really needed. They weren't deprived, but it could have been better. To a large extent, their trajectories mirrored mine: on their own once they went to college (Ben) or moved out (Sam). Ben, who went off to an expensive small liberal arts college (paid for, like his mother before him, with financial aid and school loans), once observed that, except for the students from 3rd world countries at Reed, he was the poorest student there. I don't doubt it. Sam, who has been self-supporting since turning 18, recently commented that he wished he had had a much better exposure to what traditional 4-year and community colleges had to offer before he made some of the educational choices he did. They are both making it, but they have had their own financial and class struggles along the way.

When I facilitate workshops on implicit bias, one of the group exercises we do is a social identity wheel. A social identity wheel is a way to explore how you see yourself. What markers (gender, race, religion, for example) are important to how you identify yourself? I always identity myself first as working class—before race, before gender, before education, before anything.

My friend Katrina (the same Katrina of above) discussed my explanation of the social identity wheel with her husband, who objected to my self-identifying as working class. I do not have her letter at hand (and with it being upstairs, it is for all intensive purposes out of reach), but I remember that among his objections were that I was bright and well-educated. When I co-facilitated an implicit bias workshop at court and shared my identity, I saw disbelief on the faces of some of my co-workers. They may have been thinking the same thing as Katrina's husband. April? Working class? But she's bright. And well-educated....

Yes, I am. And so is my son Sam, who is now a welder. The working class contains lots of us who fit that category.

I always identify as working class. Because that is what I am and that is what I will always be, no matter how far I come from my childhood.

And after reading This Fine Place, I know I am not alone.