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Sparkle (5)
The concept of passing privilege is one I’ve seen talked about a lot in both discussions of race and of gender. It means, most simply, that you pass for something you are not considered to actually BE when it comes to mainstream society. That means a person can pass as white – and receive the privilege that entails. That means a person can pass as cis-gendered – and receive the privilege that goes along with being cis-gendered (at least to a point). Passing seems, in these examples, a dangerous proposition – because if a person ever fails to pass, other people who have made a lot of (uninvited or invited) assumptions feel betrayed and, all too often, turn to violence.
Because passing can be so fraught, I hate to borrow the term for my own purposes here in discussing class (and I’ll get around to fat as well – this is going to be a series); yet it seems the most apt at the moment.
When people look at me (and my extensive wardrobe) I’m pretty easily pegged as solidly middle class. I wear a really good dress made of middle-class acceptability, middle-of-the-road class identity. I work an office job in an urban area. I travel for work and recreation. I own a computer and a smart phone. My income puts me in this bracket, as do my actions, my education, my interests, and my expectations for what I should be able to accomplish.
But sometimes I think I am only passing as middle class.
One thing you have to understand is that my mother’s family and my father’s family come from two very different places. My father’s family is very country club. They have a restrained sense of being well-off about them – they live and travel internationally on a frequent basis. My dad went to boarding school in Switzerland for a while. My mom, though: my dad met my mom when she was still in high school. He was in the small north Florida town, attending a community college with a special program not available all over, and the two of them started dating.
Family rumor is that my grandparents weren’t too exicted about the relationship – which led to my mom dropping out of high school the last semester of her senior year to marry my father. She’s never gotten a GED or otherwise continued her formal education. My dad finished his two-year degree and, for a very long time, was the only person on either side of the family to have gone to college.
My dad’s family is full of wonderful people. But they are kind of restrained and we’ve never been what I would call close. When I think of family, I think of them, absolutely. But mostly I think of my mother’s family.
My mother’s family is a sprawling working-class clan. No matter what, because they have their pride, they would never identify themselves as poor; that doesn’t change the reality that some of them are poor. They all believe in bootstraps and making a better life for their children, but that’s been difficult to realize in any sort of meaningful way for most of them. I don’t say this as a passing of judgment: they are my family and they are a part of me and I am a part of them. But it’s reality. The fences between class identities keep getting higher all the time.
Sometimes I think the reason I love Faulkner is because his people feel like my people – they all feel like family all the time.
My mother’s family is my primary influence when I think of the way things are and the way family IS. But my father’s family has never been without influence. Not only did marrying my father temporarily pull my mother out of a small-town semi-rural area, it guaranteed at least a window into some other worlds for me. I attended a private school for kindergarten and first grade. I received a near-endless supply of books. I had relatives (especially my great-grandma Mimi) who believed in the power of the written word even if they didn’t practice it themselves – and they passed that on to me through constant encouragement but also through letter writing. I went to golf tournements and dinners and company events – I was quite the little adult in some ways. Most of that came from my father’s family in one form or another. They taught me how to act, how to speak, how to walk, how to sit, all
