Skipping the Nasty Parts
I grew up learning how to skip over the nasty parts. My friends didn’t need to know that Mom was doing her absolute best, sharing paychecks between Walmart and Dollar Tree to feed us both something tasty and inventive each night. It wasn’t that I was hiding a part of myself intentionally, being poor, but these kids… they just wouldn’t get it. No matter how much deconditioning you allow yourself, no matter how accepting you promise these people are, it’s still difficult to admit your family is struggling. The concept of poverty in modern society is such a complex, nuanced, and villainized fact that it becomes not just a facet of one’s life but a cruel designation that affects one’s entire social position. In this way, bell hooks’ experiences of alienation due to poverty outlined in her work Seeking and Managing Culture: Representing the Poor are accurate, but I would go a step further and state that the communities found in spite of these alienations are incredibly important.
The human condition has judgment stored inside — whether we like it or not, humans categorize almost everything we see upon first instinct. Alone, this isn’t an issue — it only becomes an issue when such judgments are saturated in a society where these differences are deemed important. Humanity has a history of subjugating based on differences, and the more historical ‘meat’ a difference has backing it, the more isolating it can be to be designated into this category. bell hooks speaks of the historical relevance of class differences in Seeking and Managing Culture: Representing the Poor, particularly in modern society, noting poor people’s villainization in contemporary American television. She says poor families on the silver screen always “have a healthy measure of self-contempt”. This self-contempt infers an inherent insufficiency in being poor — a notion that is not at all unfamiliar. And in a world surrounded by screens, what is displayed on television influences culture more than anything else.
Despite society pushing an association between poorness and inadequacy, an ever-increasing majority of society falls under the exact stipulations the zeitgeist considers as ‘poor’. This, ironically, leads to lower class individuals rarely classifying themselves as being poor, despite living in conditions everybody would consider as poverty on paper. I distinctly remember always easily assuming I was middle-class as a child, despite lacking things as simple as housing or food security. But… there must be people worse off, right? I’m surely better off than them. This mindset of there always being an invisible somebody worse off to compare oneself to, that somehow we are always different from the rest, is a common one — anything to not be considered poor. hooks comments on this many times, elaborating by speaking on many poor people’s desire to escape the stigmas created by the media superficially, even going as far to purposefully try not to understand the struggles of the very impoverished communities they reside in. hooks discusses her personal experience as a professor watching poor black women be unable to relate to the poor black women in the novels she was teaching. Despite many of them being easily classifiable as ‘poor’, only one woman in the class self-identified as such. As hooks perfectly states, one’s “self esteem is linked to not being seen as poor”.
Being designated as ‘poor’ by society has both external and internal consequences — along with the constant psychological battle society gives you, you also have to deal with the structural implications of being marked as poor. Beyond the fiscal financial limitations that come with being poor — the lack of economic mobility, being coerced into taking dangerous or degrading job or housing offers out of necessity, the inability to afford small emergencies — bell hooks describes being poor as a social condition. According to hooks, being poor is being considered “shiftless, dishonest, and untrustworthy” in many academic and social settings. Because of this, poor individuals tend to be discouraged from taking ambitious and difficult opportunities in the workforce or during education, unintentionally perpetuating the stigma that poor people are lazy and don’t want work. This negative feedback cycle continues on forever, and despite opportunities and general wealth increasing in most countries, as hooks says, “low self-esteem makes it impossible for this younger generation [of poor people] to move forward”. In fact, it is more difficult for poor people to seek out new life-changing opportunities in modern society than it was many years ago. And as wealth continues to consolidate into the upper crust of society, the gap widens farther and material conditions worsen for an ever-growing population of people.
Poorness as a concept is not a single-dimensioned issue. Being poor in a capitalist society deems you in the lowest echelons of the ugly, sacrificial machine. But being poor in a capitalist society that has suffered (and continues to suffer) from racism, sexism, elitism, ableism, and general xenophobia garners a much more complex definition of poor. Being a person of color in America, for instance, regardless of wealth, can garner you similar if not worse forms of othering than the designation of ‘poor’ previously discussed. bell hooks speaks on this briefly, comparing the assumptions of shiftiness based on race to similar assumptions based on class. Because of this, powerful connections can be made betwixt oppressed groups as they share collective trauma. hooks talks about finding solace in the working women of Stanford University while she attended school there. In a place drenched with such overwhelming displays of wealth, it is not a far stretch to understand that hooks created much more genuine connections with the women who cleaned the dorms: “They, more than other folks at Stanford, knew where I was coming from”. According to hooks, being black at Stanford and being working class at Stanford were not too dissimilar, especially considering the large majority of students there were a part of the dominating cultural communities.
I have found out a similar truth in my own experiences — people who have been subjugated in their own ways tend to relate better to my struggles, even if the origins of their oppression arrive from extremely different backgrounds. The feelings of alienation, shame, immobility, and low self-esteem all outlined in Seeking and Managing Culture: Representing the Poor seem to be an almost universal experience across all members of an ‘outgroup’. Although modern society may be trying to subjugate us, we can at least join together in quality relationships.
