Read This: How Thick Is Your Bubble (Kate Harding)

I'm always really happy to see Kate Harding writing again, though it took me a minute before I realized I'm not the target audience. Class is rarely talked about in the feminist and social justice blogosphere, and like most liberal spaces, classism is misunderstood, accepted, and even encouraged. An honest discussion about class issues is a welcome sight. In the post there are links to quiz to see how thick your bubble is (meaning how removed are you from working-class America), and Kate added a few of her own queries.

How Thick Is Your Bubble:

"I am one of the people [author Charles Murray of the book Coming Apart: The State of White America] speaks about—born, raised, and lucky to have remained upper-middle-class, with zero lived experience of poverty, rural America, or hand-roughening work. I’ve eaten at an Applebee’s recently only because my sister has kids and lives in the suburbs; I’ve walked a factory floor only because my dad was the boss; I score no points for living in an economically and educationally mixed neighborhood because I am one of the white gentrifiers. I’m friends with a few people who were raised in evangelical Christian families and communities, but they’re all atheists now. (Wait! I was just reminded that one is now a Reform Jew.) I lettered in yearbook, and the only uniform I’ve ever worn was a teal polyester skirt suit required by the bank where I worked for six weeks in 1993, before I quit in tears and admitted to my wealthy, supportive parents that yes, fine, I wanted to go back to college. I have a master’s degree, a professional husband, no kids, and a sense of entitlement a mile wide."

I took Murray's quiz, and as someone who grew up working-class and still identifies as such, I have no bubble -- at least not an obvious one, and not in the way Murray defines it. Most of my neighbors did not have college degrees, my parents did not hold managerial positions (my mom moved up into one after years of hard work), and we lived pretty close to the poverty line -- something I didn't really become aware of until I was in my teens. I watched a metric ton of junk tv and ate fast food most days. Despite that, and like how Harding describes her life now, my upbringing was atypical.  My neighborhood was ethnically diverse. My dad was sort of a hippie who let my friends call him Lou. Neither of my parents could be called religious. (Dad's agnostic; mom's vaguely spiritual. The most religion I got ever from either was when my mom taught me to read Tarot cards and how to do someone's astrological chart.) We didn't have a car, but I went to a private school. I lived a block away from a good library and a short bus ride from an art museum. By the time I was in college, I knew someone who was dying from AIDS. I lived -- and still live -- in the American Midwest, but feel divorced from middle-America.

But I answered "yes" to most of Kate's questions, too, missing only a handful: I've never been to a gay wedding -- gay marriage is still illegal in my state, and there haven't been any newsworthy acts of violence at the public school in my neighborhood, at least none that I know of. There are a few things I could add to it, like "have you or your family ever lived a year without health insurance?" a big issue for working-class families. I think it's also fair to note that one can live among poverty, and not be directly affected by it. Another bubble.