When can you talk about one until you must acknowledge the other?

Which one is more uncomfortable to discuss? 

Class

 The influence of class on my way of being has been passively and actively there. I didn’t realize what class I came from until I went to college and came across the other extreme way of living as a human in America. In the book Race and Technology by Ruha Benjamin, she mentions how racial identity can influence the class you come from and go into. 

As an example, she points out the influence your name can have on the jobs you get. Although there have been diplomatic and legislative attempts at the “diversification “of the workplace since the 60s-70s, not much has changed.

The attempts to allow various racial identities have been publicized and verbalized, but they remain words, not actions. (This is where I would bring up statistics showing the disparity of multi-racial representation in high-earning jobs in America, but they are all over the internet, and I don’t feel I need to back that claim up rn.)

How is it that the number of PHDs and tenure track positions to BIPOC has not increased even though the desire for education has been there? Even if career opportunities in high-earning jobs are open, they don’t tend to be the most hospitable workspaces for BIPOC. I will return to this thought with more research and in-depth discussion; I just felt I needed to start expressing it in the written word.

Digital identities

For me, in grade school, free lunches were something to be proud of and grateful for; for others, it was a source of shame and disgust. Free school lunches generally meant that your parents did not meet a certain amount of income per household, and therefore it qualified you to receive free breakfast and lunches from the public school district. Lunch money isn’t a very significant amount for some people. But for others, it means being able to budget out fewer meals for your kids and guaranteeing food in their system before and during school. I have been fortunate enough to have two parents working hard to ensure we had food in our bodies every day. The money they did not spend on school meals allowed them to spend on other expenses such as rent, utilities, car maintenance, health bills, etc. 

This scenario relates to class because of the public display of the financial status displayed by being on the federal government’s National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Since grade school, we were categorized as free-lunch kids, paying lunch kids, and kids who brought lunches from home. The cafeteria space was where multiple grades and learning levels encountered one another in a social setting. It was my introduction to how financial status defines and categorizes your eating and lifestyle in America. This article goes more in depth on the background and process behind the School Lunch Program.

Along with our name and school ID image on the cashier’s screen was our account balance or another economic signifier. Something as simple as that daily experience started to shape our first independent interactions with class in a public setting, with it the shame or pride of money. 

“Ruha’s book challenges us to question how the technologies we are sold impact questions of power, ethics, equity, and sociality. It points out the illusion of progress and neutrality through coded inequity.” 

Dr. Ruha Benjamin