More class explorations

I think that there is a difference between being working class and being poor/low-income, or being working class and being non-tertiary educated.

As far as I am concerned, and I'll admit I'm trying to figure this out as I write this out, all middle class people (who work for a living) are working class, though not all working class people are middle class...


The distinction between these two classes would be related to two major factors:

1. The extent to which one is consciously identified with (one's own working) class struggle... 

Middle class (identity) would tend to be highly invested in the managing of amicable relations between labour and capitalist owning classes (or about aspiring to the comforts that such managerialism rewards/affords), while working class identity seems more squarely to be about identification with the possible dignity of working itself, and of being a worker.

Working class struggle, therefore, is not necessarily about the desire to cease to have to work, but about the desire to recuperate work from capitalist goals and ends.

2. The extent to which one aspires to higher/upper class status 

In this sense, one can be both working class and middle class. I can be identified with the possible dignity of work (working class), and can choose to recuperate this dignity through various machinations (conscious working class struggle), while simultaneously medicating away the humiliations of work within a capitalist society by identification with (and acquisition of) the middling trappings of wealth, comfort and cultural capital (middle class). The latter, far from being "not working class", is actually a quintessential expression of the sometimes "inevitable" cultural results of working class labour under global capitalism... 

...

For example, for those of us raised by working class parents in more middle class conditions, who move into the attainment of quintessentially professional middle class tertiary education, or into middle class professions (e.g. medicine/law/public health/etc.), we are culturally wedded to as well as culturally disconnected from the working class roots which may have propelled this movement, even as this professional attainment has been about access to more privileged and powerful work.

i.e.

"My working class parents worked so hard [under capitalist oppression] so that I would not have to suffer like they did; so I/they/we became middle class [more comfortable under global capitalism]"

To me, the indignity of work has less to do with the fact That We Work, and more to do with the lack of control over the ends to which all our work is dedicated, as well as the under-compensation and under-recognition of this labour for the purposes of sustaining our day to day material existence. Too many workers are disempowered from negotiating the terms and conditions of their/our labour.

In this sense, then, many so-called middle class professions are of the same cloth as more quintessentially working class professions, except that the forms of workers' angst that arise will differ, as may the struggles and strategies for enfranchisement.

The aforementioned factors combined (i.e. lack of self-directed control over the ends of our work, under-compensation and under-recognition of labour)... Along with a more classically Marxist-industrial society view of the lack of workers' collective ownership over the means of production, these to me, as someone who is expediently identified with both my middle class upbringing as well as with being a worker in a worker-majority world under capitalism, are some of where the major humiliations of working (class) people lie, broadly speaking.

Middle Class Organisers in Low-Income Communities

"Often the paid organizers in low-income communities come from professional middle-class backgrounds. I worked as a community organizer for many years, and the class dynamics can be tricky. Nearly everything I know about poverty and urban politics, I learned from members of groups I staffed. I loved the relationships I built with people on their stoops and around their kitchen tables.

Seeing people move from less to more powerful was exhilarating. Here's one story. I was trying to persuade tenants at an apartment complex to come to a City Council hearing. Knocking on doors, I asked one woman, Donna, to come, she said no, I pleaded. Finally she said she would attend but she absolutely wouldn't say a word, because she was terrified of public speaking. She sat at the hearing listening to testimony, until a tenant leader mentioned the lack of sidewalks between their apartment complex and the shopping area. At that point Donna leapt up, saying, "Ooh! I have something to say about that road!" She took the mic and told a hair-raising story about how a car came within an inch of hitting her child while she was pushing a stroller and trying to get 3 kids down to the bus stop. The City Council voted on the spot to appropriate money for a sidewalk — something that wasn't even on their docket of proposals. Last time I visited that city, I walked that sidewalk, grinning the whole way.

And of the five tenant groups I organized, three now own and run their own apartment complexes as permanently affordable housing, so I feel I made a real difference.

But it's a tricky relationship with many pitfalls, the relationship of middle-class organizer to working-class community.

I've encountered groups that were basically fronts for one staff person, usually a leftist white man. The low-income members were basically his mouthpieces. All their speeches were written by him, using their legitimacy as low-income people to spread his ideas. In the power balance between the staff's expertise and the members' knowledge of the community, those groups were way off balance.

Grassroots members get crucial information funneled through the organizer, information they need to make decisions. The staff can convey their biases either consciously or unconsciously in how the information is presented. I remember presenting choices to tenant groups about models of tenant buy-outs — decisions that would make all the difference in the future of their homes — and trying not to let my own opinions show. If I had concrete information about why one option would be better for them, that seemed fair to share, but if it was just my own preference, I tried not to betray it. No doubt I didn't always succeed, as my doubts and enthusiasm crept into my tone of voice"

- Betsy Leondar-Wright,
Program Director, Class Action

Class Matters

An excellent website I'm starting to read...:
Class Matters --> http://www.classmatters.org/

Diaspora

My parents, my brother, and I moved to Singapore when I was about six. It was my first immigrant experience. According to my parents, for a while after we moved into our new place, I kept asking when we would go home. An image that stays with me somehow is looking out the window of our fifth floor flat, watching my father walk across the carpark to get in the car to go to work.

In Singapore, my parents would today be called “foreign talent” (I’m not sure if the term was as in wide circulation in the 80s when we migrated), or perhaps “expats” (though that term to me always had connotations of whiteness). They were firmly in the professional class of lawyers, doctors, academics. In fact, many Malaysians moved to Singapore to find work, and that number has grown over the years. In 1990, Malaysians made up 3.7% of the population of Singapore. In 2010, that number was 9.7%.

The terms “foreign talent” and “expatriate” have a certain glamor about them, suggesting a successful, exotic, highly intelligent and/or capable person whose presence in a country is at the very least exciting. A “foreign talent”’s presence could inspire happiness or even gratitude in an imagined native born citizen, who benefits from the expertise and cultural goods that such a visitor brings. As this rather optimistic headline on a letters page of AsiaOne reads, "Majority say foreign talent is the way to go."

Of course, the deliberate use of these terms is in fact calculated to officially foreclose the possibility of (to render unthinkable, uncivilized) the very real resentment of actual citizens who perceive themselves displaced, put upon, or invaded. For those unfortunates who are marked as “migrants” there is little attempt to even mask this xenophobia.

It’s also worth noting that there are other immigrants in Singapore who are not generally referred to as “foreign talent,” but are rather “unskilled workers” or “migrant workers.” They are differently stigmatized (as prone to criminality and a source of disposable labor). However, just having the label of "foreign talent" does not protect one from being the target of "local" resentment or hatred.

After the Olympics this year, the issue of “foreign talent” was in the news in Singapore, and not always in a good way. At the Summer Olympics, Feng Tianwei, who was born in China and became a Singaporean citizen in 2008, won a Bronze medal in the women’s singles table tennis. She is Singapore’s first Olympic individual medalist in 52 years, and the only Olympic individual medalist since Singapore’s independence from Malaysia in 1965. (As a side note, Singapore’s first and only other individual Olympic medalist, Tan Howe Liang, who won the Silver for lightweight weightlifting at the 1960 games in Rome, was also a Chinese immigrant).

Feng’s win, perhaps predictably, triggered an outpouring of vocal ambivalence from Singaporeans on the internet. The Financial Times' brief survey of how the public debate over immigration has been playing out recently in Singapore is revealing:

Comments on social media sites were quick to point out that Ms Feng was born in mainland China and did not get Singapore citizenship until 2008. Meanwhile, 77 per cent of respondents in an online poll conducted by Yahoo Singapore said they were “not proud” of a “foreign import” winning an Olympic medal.

“Honestly, I cannot bring myself to feel proud for a foreigner to win a medal for us, although they carry our Singapore flag,” one person wrote on Yahoo’s Facebook page.

Xenophobia is an almost inevitable (some might say deliberate) product of a highly nationalistic government. In the U.S., there happen to be two slightly different parties that trade power espousing somewhat different flavors of what is essentially the same nationalist ideology, which is echoed by corporations and their media outlets. In Singapore, there is one ruling party that has been in power for quite a while, and that builds nationalism into school curricula and public media.

Never mind that, like the U.S., the majority ethnic/racial group in Singapore (Chinese) is itself descended from migrants, many of whom actually came to Singapore or Malaysia in living memory, and are relatively new immigrants to the region. Now that they (we!) are there, it’s time to turn around and keep someone else out. It seems to me that xenophobia is the dark shadow of any diaspora people who have attempted to make themselves a new home, and to cement their belonging-ness with the blunt tool of nation-building.

Currently, Israel is in the news because it has commenced a bombing campaign in Gaza, with the justification given being that Hamas launched a rocket into Israel. As with almost any new incident involving Israel’s ongoing project of militarized nationalism, it feels almost impossible to talk about competently without years of study of the history of the region. However, I think it is safe to say that there is some sympathetic resonance (in addition to the obvious political connection) between Israel’s attempt to suppress a native population, with the U.S.’s own long history of the suppression of and genocide against Native Americans by a government historically most committed to the advancement of white elites, whose ancestors left Europe, whether to escape religious persecution or to better amass wealth, and who consider North America to be home.

There is an almost unbearable tension in the hearts of a diaspora people between acknowledging their immigrant past and embracing their new home. Even when the immigration has not happened in one’s lifetime, this tension persists. Attempts to resolve it by jettisoning or minimizing the immigrant history and identity lead to xenophobia and genocide in a pathological and ultimately futile attempt to externalize what is in fact an internal battle by seeking to destroy or harm “outsiders” (despite being outsiders ourselves), or seeking to destroy those who were already here (whose existence is a constant reminder of our own foreign-ness).

While Asian Americans often criticize the (white) hegemonic view of them (us?) as “perpetual foreigners,” I wonder too if it might be wise to hold on to some of this identity as “foreign,” to not blend into (white) America the way that the Italians and Irish did, in order to not replicate the xenophobia and genocidal impulses connected to a (white) American identity.

Especially as a middle-class immigrant who gets along pretty well in predominantly white settings (whatever my actual comfort level), there is a strong temptation to believe that other stereotype, that Asians are the “model minority” and are virtually white. It’s a comforting idea, that maybe this phenomenon of (white) Americans treating or regarding me as “not belonging” here might one day come to an end. However, if the price of avoiding being the target of others’ xenophobia is to become xenophobic oneself, or to endorse genocide, then I think that price is not worth paying. Ultimately, all immigrants and their descendants must walk the harder path, but one that I think ultimately preserves our integrity and humanity, that of grappling with and healing our own woundedness, and re-learning the meaning of “home.”

Growing up Middle Class in Singapore - Part 2

Work/Merit

I received various messages about the purpose and nature of work when I was growing up. One important idea was that work could, and should, be meaningful. It could be challenging, interesting, and, importantly, make a difference in the world. "When you grow up, you need to make a mark," my father would say to me, as a way of motivating me to study harder, or to try to get into a "top" school.

Which brings me to a second set of messages about work - that personal responsibility mattered, meritocracy prevailed and that this was a good thing. I learned that if somehow you failed to get meaningful work, that it was your own fault for not trying hard enough. This fit well with the idea that the world should (and did) reward merit, and punished mediocrity, and that this system was a good one. Along with that was the idea that merit could be measured relatively objectively, and was separate from "politics," as in office politics, which both my parents, to my recollection, spoke of in disparaging terms.

My parents did acknowledge that some people did not have the same opportunities as others to succeed under the existing system, but the solution was to give them those opportunities while maintaining the meritocracy. In other words, to make the system more meritocratic, and minimize what I think they thought of as accidents of birth. Both my parents had gone to college in the U.S. on scholarships, and my father, especially, was very grateful for having had the opportunity to do so.

As a child raised for most of my life in the middle class, I was told that I had every opportunity, and that, if I failed to take advantage, and to make something of myself, I had nobody but myself to blame if I ended up... someplace bad. It was never said explicitly in our nuclear household - I think both my parents were too liberal to repeat the cliched Singaporean/Malaysian warning that if I didn't work hard, I would end up a roadsweeper - but I think that this unspoken (unspeakable?) fear was of ending up in poverty or working a "mindless" job, or both - to become somebody to pity and/or despise.

I internalized this message strongly. At the age of about nine or ten, a partner at my father's law firm who was visiting from the U.S. asked me what I thought of affirmative action, and explained (inaccurately, and certainly incompletely) that it was a system of giving preference to candidates for colleges based on race. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to trumpet my meritocratic ideals, and emphatically denounced such a system. This drew some delighted laughter from the visitor. I don't know what his intention was in asking such a question of a child, and I don't know what impact my answer had on my parents, both of whom had attended college in the U.S. as Asian people in the 70s and may have themselves benefited from race-based affirmative action, whether they knew it or not. If they objected to my answer, they held their tongues.

I also learned how to wield these ideas as weapons. Once, upset at my father for lecturing me about some bad grade or other, I threw the idea of meaningful work being the reward for industriousness back in his face. "What change in the world does your job accomplish?" I spat, "you're just a lawyer who helps companies make a lot of money!" In essence, I was questioning his credentials - who are you to tell me how to live my life, when you have a job that doesn't measure up?

Both my parents were professionals with prestigious advanced degrees. My mother was a professor of science, having received her higher education in the U.S. and the UK. Most of her career was at the National University of Singapore. My father got his education also in the U.S. and UK, taught in a University for a while, then returned to University in the UK for a law degree, and became a lawyer. He worked for most of his career with a large firm.

I idolized my parents for their intelligence and hard work. In the universe of possible meaningful future careers, academic and lawyer were pretty much at the top of my list. They still are today.

Rarely did my parents talk about how difficult it was to make their way through college as foreign students who had been raised working class and poor. I think that doing so would have threatened both the idea that the world was at least relatively meritocratic, and that there were neutral standards of merit out there. However, there are a few memories that stand out from my childhood as a clue to how hard it was for my parents.

My mother once told me how hard it was for her to leave home. It was strange to her to think of there being a "good" school so far away. She did not know how to decide which schools were good or not. Once she had been accepted to the school of her choice, her mother, my Amah, objected strenuously to her leaving - from her point of view, she was losing her daughter, and for what? My Ah Kong, my mother's father, however, was a teacher, and supported my mother's desire to get a good education. My mother ended up going to that school and now, as an alum, helps to recruit and interview young women in Singapore and Malaysia for her alma mater.

My father would sometimes allude to the racism of white people, specifically certain partners in his law firm (this was before he made partner himself), and professors in the US and UK. "They think they're smarter than me just because they're white," he said. He told me he had to work much harder, and be much smarter, than his white counterparts, just to prove he belonged, and deserved to be there. Even after he made partner, he told me, some white partners in the firm would treat him with condescension and hostility, especially refusing to credit him for his ideas for directions the firm should take.

As I reflect on work now, I want to hold on to the idea that work can be meaningful, but let go of the idea that there is a hierarchy of work, that only certain people (hardworking, smart people) deserve to do meaningful work, and that anyone who works at a job they dislike does so because they didn't try hard enough or weren't smart enough to do anything else. It is very difficult to let go of this idea, however. Not only was I raised with it, but it is constantly reinforced now. It's an easy thing to fall back on too, when my ego is shaken by the daily indignities of living in this society - I may have it bad, but at least I'm smart enough to not be working at that guy's job.

It is important, as a mainly raised middle-class child, that I did still get some glimpses of my parents' insights and experiences from being raised poor and working-class, even if they came with a heady chaser of meritocratic ideology. I think that I would also like to talk with them more about their experiences becoming middle-class, especially to see if they feel like they have lost something in the process. I know that I feel a sense of loss having left Singapore to come to the U.S., in order to go to a "good" school, and then "make it" in a major center of capitalist power.

Growing up Middle Class in Singapore (Part One?)

A note: Right now I am on a project of thinking about class more. As part of that project, I am hoping to reflect and write about how it was to grow up middle class, and what it is like now to be a middle-class professional. I think that part of what perpetuates the invisibility of class, and thus a lack of public discussion of how we can end class structures and oppression, particularly in the United States and Singapore, is the reluctance or inability of middle-class people to talk honestly about our experience of class, and to acknowledge the ways we both benefit from and are oppressed because of the class structure.

There is a lot of fear, shame, and guilt associated with encountering class difference and thinking about class. This is not unique to middle-class people, but I think that the way it manifests for the middle-classes is in silence and/or a superior distancing attitude from people they consider to be of a lower class background, and from poor people. I hope to unlearn and undo these rigid patterns of thought in myself by openly talking about class and its role in my life without denigrating the intelligence, goodness, and value of working-class or poor people, or of other middle-class people.

Auntie



When I was six, my family moved to Singapore, and hired a live-in maid. Her name was Belan, and she was from the Phillipines.

Because it would have been near unthinkable for a child to call an adult just by their given name, my brother and I were told to call Belan "Auntie." However, unlike other Aunties in our life, my brother and I did not append her name to this title, so she was just an unadorned "auntie," not "Auntie Belan." This was the same way we would address older women that we barely knew or with whom we had a merely commercial relationship ("Auntie, soya bean how much?"). Thus was she marked out as always a stranger to us, even though she lived in our home.

Auntie had a small bedroom with a very small window. The room barely fit her bed, a small plastic dresser, and, as I recall, a chair. I believe she also kept some laundry supplies in her room. I would often see her ironing and folding our clothes in her room. Unlike my brother and my bedroom and my parents' bedroom, Auntie's bedroom door opened into the laundry and trash area connected to the kitchen, rather than into the living room. It was distinctly the "back" of the house. Of all these details I cannot be too sure - the various apartments we lived in blur together, as do the various work lives of the four different live-in maids we had over the course of our childhood.

Auntie did almost all of the work of maintaining the household, including all of the cleaning, cooking, laundry, and some of the grocery shopping. When we ate, my nuclear family would eat first. Auntie, having cooked the food, would set it out on our dining table, and would usually retreat to her room while we ate. When we were finished eating, Auntie would clear the table, and then prepare a plate for herself to eat in her room or standing in the kitchen. She then put away the leftover food, and cleaned all the dishes.

Auntie took on a caretaker role for me and my brother for the hours between when we got home from school and when my parents returned from work. This was not a happy role for her or for us. She rarely seemed pleased to see us when we arrived home and, similarly, we were rarely pleased or delighted to see her. Our relationship was arms-length, cold. When I saw other children being physically affectionate with their families' Filipina live-in maids, I felt a kind of shocked dismay each time. It seemed unnatural to me, and a little unsavory, like hugging someone you had just met on the bus.

Auntie had one day off a week - Sunday. On that day, my mother or father would sometimes cook lunch for the family - usually a noodle dish. I think my mother would then clean up, or perhaps rinse the dishes and leave them for Auntie to clean fully and put away. I do not remember my father helping with the cleaning. Although I now see preparing food for one's family and friends as an expression of care and love, I also realize that for most of my childhood, there was at most only one day a week that one of my parents prepared food for us without a financial transaction taking place.

Auntie was a working class young woman living in a house with two early-middle-age professionals (my parents). A native Tagalog speaker in a country dominated by English and Chinese speakers. A Catholic living among atheists. A single woman with no children, she was suddenly faced with caring for a six and a three year old. I don't know how much she got paid, but I can't imagine she was raking it in, since her salary just came off the top of whatever my parents earned, with the agency that placed her with us taking a cut. It was not a great setup, and she sometimes expressed her anger at her situation by telling me stories of Filipina maids who had gone off the deep end and gone on murder sprees, killing their employers, their employers' children, and even other Filipina maids (this was the kind of story that the Singaporean media loved), the implication being that if we did not behave ourselves, she might snap in a similar way.

To us children, Auntie was a person with no backstory, and little context outside of the work she did. We never met her friends, her family. Unlike everyone else in our lives, she seemed un-tethered, completely outside the network of kinship and acquaintance about which we were often kept updated as a way of signalling social connection (Are you still in touch with so-and-so? Did you hear his wife just got out of hospital? Her sister just moved to Penang, down the street from such-and-such you know. Her nephew is friends with your cousin etc. etc.). Even now, as far as I know, I have no way of finding out what has happened to her. She lived with us for four years, and, once her employment with us was over, she was out of our lives.

I'll probably write more about this and other memories of growing up middle class in Singapore in subsequent posts.