AMY ROSE: How did your class background affect your ability to pursue the career and education you wanted? In my case, the privilege of going to school in a major city for a vastly reduced cost due to financial aid/scholarships was instrumental to my being able to make a living doing what I do.

ANAHEED: My class background is 100 percent responsible for every job I’ve ever had. Potential employers assume the best even when I am totally fucking up in job interviews. They never question my credentials because I went to good schools, and they “like” me because I know how to talk to such people, because I am comfortable with them, because of my privilege.

STEPHANIE: I definitely am where I am because of my class background. My parents encouraged me to be a writer even if that meant borrowing money from them, which I didn’t like doing and have worked to avoid as much as I can, but I’ve always had a safety net, and I’m very aware that it would have been a lot harder for me personally to have any of the professional and creative success I’ve had without that net.

CHANEL: I’d seen my mom and sisters work hard for what they wanted, even if it took them a long time to get it. So even though I didn’t have the ultimate privileges (e.g., getting tutored for SATs), I made do with what I had — the public library, after hours at school, so I could get into a good college so I could build a good career (though now I’m like LOL is “a career” even a real thing anymore?). I had to apply for financial aid/scholarships/loans because without it, I would not have been able to go to college. Like, absolutely not. Then came internships, which were such a bitch because of the whole unpaid thing! If I couldn’t stay at my sister’s place in Jersey while I’m interning, I wouldn’t have been able to say yes to these unpaid (or very-low-paying) positions, almost all of which, I have to admit, helped me shape my current hustle. Anyway, most of the other interns at all my jobs came from well-to-do families, because unless you’re holding down a paying job in addition to the internship, you have to rich to be able to afford not to be paid for that long. Some of my fellow interns would buy takeout lunches every single day of every single week. I was like, “Wow, how do you pay rent?!”

JENNY: Yes, so true in re: internships! To do an unpaid internship in New York City, you need to have a couple thousand bucks at your disposal, so it weeds out the vast majority people from step one. I always felt like the rise of the internship industrial complex (heehee) was another way to make sure talented poor folks don’t get a chance to get their foot in the door, because even if you work your ass off and are talented as hell, you are like 100 connections behind if you can’t afford to spend your summers working for no money.

GABBY: INTERNSHIP CULTURE IS SO REAL AND SO DESTRUCTIVE. My sister let me live on her futon (ugh) last summer for reduced rent, just so I could do a (paid) internship. I’m freaking out about where I’m going to live this summer, because I need to save money and find some sort of internship that will help me build up my “experience.”


AMY ROSE: How did race inform (a) the financial realities of your class, (b) your perception of your class, and/or (c) the class-based ways others treat or treated you? Coming from a white family, I quite obviously had tons of privilege even when we were at our poorest. My mom recently said something to me about how she felt like it was necessary to “dress black” when she was applying for welfare/aid, and it made me really upset. I love her a ton, and she stays admirably open to and receptive of discussions about race, class, and culture, but my family sometimes conflates race and class in a way that makes me so angry. TOTAL HONESTY, Y’ALL. I KNOW THIS KIND OF THING IS RAGE-INDUCING AND HARD TO TALK ABOUT, but it’s so necessary.

SUZY: It’s not just limited to white people! Many members of my family have adopted racist rhetoric in the hopes of better assimilating into white American culture. The idea that rich people have what they have only because they worked hard for it—the “bootstraps” mentality—does not work for everyone. Many CEOs have what they have because they had a team of low-income workers to support their businesses. And many businesses are set up so that none of those workers ever move up, no matter how hard they work.

JULIANNE: My mom’s personal class shame was also tied up with the racism she experienced when she was young. She often acted like she was ashamed to be Mexican. She was never racist against other races or other Mexicans, but she definitely hid her culture and did not speak Spanish at home with me. Being poor and being Mexican were one and the same to her, because basically every Mexican immigrant that she grew up with in Wyoming was poor and treated like garbaggio.

JENNY: There’s been a long history of pitting Asian folks against black folks with the myth of Asians as “model minorities,” and I know that there have been a few studies that have shown Asians in the U.S. to be the most likely to hold racist views, particularly against African-Americans. When I first got to the U.S., my parents took me to Harlem and said, “These are the poorest of the poor,” and then we drove back to our single-family home that we shared with three other families. My dad literally came to America with a broken broomstick in his suitcase—because he thought he would never be able to find one in America—and $50 that his sponsor back in Shanghai gave him that was stolen from him by a shitty customs official at JFK, so he had to borrow $20 from his academic advisor at NYU to get through the next two weeks. That said, he was still coming to the U.S. as a grad student which, of course, affords one many opportunities down the road that someone who did not go to college will never have.

CHANEL: I had a weird mix of experiences with race and class growing up. On one hand, as a black girl, there were definitely some assumptions of how I was raised and that I was probably low-income. I remember that this white kid in one of my classes laughed at me because I was reading Candy (that book about heroin addiction) and he said of course I would read something like that, since most black people are lowdown drug addicts. My mother didn’t really raise me to see characteristics based on race, even though she had it rouggghhh growing up in the ’60s (there was a “slave day” at her high school and she participated in a sit-in because of it, because she’s a badass). On the other hand, I often got flak that because I was in band and wrote for the literary magazine and stuff like that, I wasn’t “black enough” or part of “the black community.” Even my own family mocked the way I talked because it was “proper” and I came off as “affluent” (which is like, get the fuck outta here). So I guess you could say I didn’t really have a class to fit into, since people were giving me different definitions of my own life/actions/background/race, LOL.


AMY ROSE: What preconceptions did you have of people in other classes growing up? I had/have an ingrained prejudice against people who grow up wealthy that I am trying to work past. Like all prejudices, this one is based more on my own insecurity about money, class, and my worthiness/abilities than on anything real, and I often catch myself trying to invalidate the achievements of people who grew up with privilege (“Yeah, of course you’re an editor at the Paris Review, YOUR PARENTS STILL PAY FOR YOUR APARTMENT PROBABLY” or “If I grew up with what you did, I’d have SO MUCH MORE to show for it”). It would be a lot easier to get over my unfair attitude if it didn’t contain at least a little bit of truth: I mean, growing up privileged does make it easier to get into a good college and get jobs and stuff. But (a) everyone’s life, experience, and pain are valid, even if I don’t immediately relate to them; and anyway, my unfair attitude benefits no one, least of all me. Do any of you grapple with these kinds of feelings?

JULIANNE: Amy Rose, I had the exact same feeling as you for a long time, and while I still get pangs of it, as I’ve grown older I feel it less—maybe because by the time people are my age, most of them aren’t really supported by their parents anymore and have had to experience the shock of doing it on their own.

SUZY: I still don’t think I can shake it. Maybe I’ll chill out eventually, but…I’m not there yet. I think living in New York has exacerbated it.

PIXIE: I grew up in a working-class factory town that was next to a rich town. I remember one time I was shopping with my mom in the rich town and a clerk at a store there gave my mom a hard time when she wrote a check, because of our address. And that ONE clerk pretty much set my mind as to how “rich people” treat others. But you can’t hold people’s background’s against them. I remember watching Tiny Furniture and being like, What is the point of this? I am so pissed! But after I thought about it, I was like, Whelp, I don’t relate to this at all, but I appreciate a view inside a world that I don’t live in, because it makes me understand it a tiny bit more. So I dunno. People can be sheltered in millions of ways.

CHANEL: I admit I also have a little prejudice against wealthy people, which actually didn’t come about until college. I just saw how rich people at my school walked around so entitled, as if their money did everything for them, and the way they treated “the less fortunate” was something that I just didn’t like to see (especially in Greek life—that’s why I avoided fraternities and sororities). But my senior year, I became really good friends with this girl who is a great deal wealthier than I am (family-wise), and she showed me that rich people are also humans, and some do work hard for what they have, etc. (We’re still friends today.)

KRISTA: I def have serious class-rage issues. For instance, a close friend of mine who was raised wealthy but doesn’t seem to understand what that means turned to me a few weeks ago and was like, “What is it like to have to pay off all those loans each month? How can you save up or invest?” I tore her a new one. I have a new rule: No dating entitled people. I just cannot with people who have never worked a service job, never had to work at all, or never known what it is like to be down to $4 in your bank account with payday still six days away.

MARIE: I’m still completely judgmental of people who grew up without ever having to worry about money. There is this invisible but palpable separation between us. I don’t know if I will ever be able to completely shake it. No matter how much I connect with and adore a person like that, in the back of my mind I’m like, YOU AIN’T NEVER BEEN BROKE!

GABBY: I’ve always seen rich people as VILLIANS because of television, because growing up I didn’t really know any rich people.

PIXIE: I thought all rich people were evil or ridiculous because of John Hughes movies (except for the ONE good person amongst the rich, of course). And fictional ’80s rich people, are, of course, my favorite ridiculous villains of all time.