Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education

Stephanie offers a thoughtful contemplation of how poverty is viewed in the United States. Late-stage capitalism offers little respite from the constant need to work, and one’s value is reduced to one’s production potential. Stephanie cites the stereotypes associated with welfare and loathes that she is lumped into the same category as people who are trying to freeload. When she seeks government assistance, she is forced to prove her “worth” and justify her choices. At the YMCA, the assistance offices, and in her child support hearings, she has to validate her career aspirations, career background, and justify how she spends her money:

I couldn’t afford to dream about [an MFA] unless I could somehow prove that it would result in a semi-decent job. This type of judgment, this question of if I was part of the ‘deserving poor,’ haunted me. Who I had to prove this to or who actually judged me for my choices was never clear, because it felt like everyone most of the time: from what I bought with food stamps to if I went out for coffee with a friend in the middle of the day. The paranoia that I would somehow get caught in a frivolous moment never left me. After several years on government assistance, my value as a member of society no longer seemed to be my education, but rather the low-wage work I would potentially do to make life easier in some way for a person whose family could afford to pay for them to go to college (47).

Stephanie encounters considerable prejudice when asking for assistance. She knows to bring a massive folder with her whenever she is attempting to secure aid of any kind because she never knows if she’ll have to justify her address, expenses, education, paycheck, or career prospects. Those who administer assistance seem to assume that everyone seeking assistance is looking to scam the government, and Stephanie seeks to separate herself from this assumption:

It was ridiculous to imagine that anyone would try to pull a fast one by spending hours at a government assistance office in the middle of the workday so they could possibly leave with a couple hundred bucks a month for food. But this was how I had spent hours and sometimes entire workdays of my life, convincing authorities that I wasn’t a criminal (46).

Prejudice functions as malevolent judgment that leads people to make assumptions about her that discourage them from wanting to help her.

In this text, privilege operates as something both explicit and implicit, allowing those who have it to transcend visible and invisible barriers. Privilege is a passport. Stephanie has an interesting relationship with privilege. She acknowledges that her race makes her poverty less visible: “I’m deeply aware they while our poverty put Emilia and me squarely in a marginalized group, our whiteness gave us camouflage” (70). She is not judged as much because she is white, and she believes that this helps her to ask for assistance.

However, one could argue that Stephanie benefits from more privilege than she acknowledges: “In high school, my parents helped me with building my resume and filling out applications for jobs. Dad even bought me a car… I knew that car had an invisible value” (41). She grew up in a middle-class house but expected her parents to support her financially after she turned 18.