Ana's Story - Class

Ana’s Story, Part IV: Class & Status

In my life, money and class and status are all intimately linked but somehow not always overlapping. Class in particular has been this somewhat elusive, abstract concept based on a set of unshared values and histories all relating to how we spend or don’t spend money, how we display it, and how we then use the power (i.e. privilege) we have once we’ve gained access to the spaces where decisions about money in the large scale are made.

So in one sense, a lack of money on my father’s side of the family helped generate several mythologies about how we were to go about living our lives. It also implied that everything my father worked for had to be maintained and elevated – particularly the status of our family. Therefore, money has often been an important and essential part of the formula as to how we would maintain our status, but given my parents’ social values, a secondary part as well. Therefore, the message always was to work hard, no matter what, to avoid going hungry. Because that was always a possibility (in my fathers’ mind at least).

A history of land and slave ownership on my mother’s side helped generate mythologies about how we relate to other people in our lives. It also implied that without a doubt, anything we may have lost was through no fault of our own, but rather through the fault of a great-great relative who was not responsible with his money. In other words, we as descendents of the great land/slave owner are entitled to all sorts of status and monies, we are the masters’ table.

I believe I may not naturally have an internal conflict on this topic if I were not from a culturally-racially-nationally and class-based mixed family. Perhaps, I would have settled very easily into always working hard (which I do anyway) to avoid going hungry (which, interestingly enough is a strong motivating factor). Or perhaps, I would have settled into life as an unconscious upper-middle-class person who doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about (such as most of my mother’s family has done, as a way of modeling for all of us what it means to be white and middle class/upper class in America). But, regardless of what WOULD have happened had I not been mixed, I’d like to focus on what it actually has meant in my life as a mixed-race-black-queer-butch-Latina-Jewish activist and writer.

When I think about class, I think more about status than about money and this is because what I’ve learned is that my class experience is not defined so much by the material items that carry monetary value and would somehow give me “net worth”, but by the access created through the sum total of my status-based experience. The fact that I even use this language is a sign, a marker of my class. And it is the fact that my language, my clothes, my movements, the way I walk into a room has all been shaped by the access created by my status that leads me to define class in this way.

Because of having a white mother, I was taught white middle class normative values in the larger world. This has been useful. But when it comes to enacting those values in a black body, the implications have often been unanticipated. Secondly, because of my parents’ hard work, and their choices, I went to an elite private college (Harvard); I grew up in the world as a “UN Brat” – traveling with my parents all over the world, going to elite international elementary schools, and with a person in my home that took care of my every need until the ripe age of 14 (and it was not my mother or grandmother). I speak four languages fluently and I have run through three passports in the last 12 years, i.e. I participate in the global tourist economy, whether I go somewhere as a “traveler” or not.

My own income based class standing, as a sum total of both who I am and how I am perceived in the world, is very different from the class standing my parents hoped to lead me to participate in. This has both to do with my choices (and the sense that I have a choice), as well as with the ways in which my sexuality has influenced my sense of self in the world, and my sense of what’s right or possible.

As an organizer, my education has meant that I bring resources to the work, resources such as language, writing skills (that are useful with other college-educated people in power) and an ability to interact with white, wealthy people. But, my lived experience as a butch black lesbian has meant that my friendships and personal life are composed of queer people of color and the children of working class folk (and the overlap is grand). Somehow, it has been in these circles that I have found the other people who work so as not to go hungry, but who were also taught to believe in choice and entitlement and therefore experience a range of conflicts similar to my own.

Getting Deeper....
Because my father does not come from a moneyed family in the Dominican Republic, we belong to the intellectual middle-class whose existence is tied into the universities, community-based organizations and politics of the country. But this standing is very tenuous, again, because we don’t have extended family wealth; my coming out as a lesbian in this context is one thing that contributes to this tenuousness, specifically because I will not be marrying into another family, and therefore, will not participate in securing the economic stepping-stones to continued wealth within Dominican society.

Simultaneously, the fact of my mother’s whiteness, Americanness, made me different from my Dominican cousins and my extended family and also secured my participation in international intellectual circles. My norms were different and there were subtle ways in which I was treated differently by our family members. This included which piece of meat I got at lunchtime – the higher up on the privilege scale, the better the piece of meat.

My mother is an American with deep European roots in the United States that are directly tied up into the master side of the slavery system. Because her family historically partook in the process of defining American-ness AND whiteness, she knew what markers to teach us to enable us to function as “white” children in the US. And her particular brand of whiteness is much embedded in American upper middle class Christian values (my mother’s family is not currently ruling class) that are nuanced with histories of plantations and western expansion. This history was very much challenged by our (my brothers’ and my) experiences as people of color. Because we know “white” norms, we’ve been able to function in the social, political and economic systems here in the U.S., but because we are people of color, participating in this system has meant putting ourselves directly in the line of fire of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism and elitism.

Add to this our particular experiences as international children, and it’s a very volatile combination indeed. The fact of my having grown in a country not my own already makes me suspect as a valid member of any community or society. Most people do not welcome strangers/foreigners into their midst. And so I grew up finding my community with other people who grew up as I did. And even though neither of my parents was a diplomat (my mother was an ESL teacher and my father worked in the UN Secretariat), it was the children of diplomats, wealthy American businessmen and missionaries with whom I ended up going to school. As an adult this disconnect has impacted my social circles, my work and my choices: if I am not part of any community by the simple fact of not having a geographic base from which to relate, then how do I do community work?

So, I must say that it is not so much the dynamics around socio-economic status in my family that has impacted me as much as the real history of my mother’s family, the poverty of my father’s family and the status of my immediate family that has developed as a result of the choices my parents made. My understandings of class are very much grounded in knowing that my family perceives my lesbianism as a threat to what “little” my parents have gained - because their wealth is mostly non-material, and that the same lesbianism as a person of color means that my alliances have developed and been intimately connected to that of my peers: working class and poor queers of color who have one too many bills to pay, and who by the shared experience of oppression, question our value and worth in a society where money = status = humanity.