Luck of the Draw…
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on June 21, 2023.
Human beings love certainty. They like things to make sense. So they tell themselves stories that arrange the things they think they know into a narrative that makes them feel good, and then they share that story and other people validate it and perhaps adopt it as making sense of what they think they know. And on it goes.
One of the central stories we tell ourselves, in the Western world at least, is about class. We position ourselves somewhere along an economic spectrum that also implies a lot about character. To be middle class, even if we’re not quite certain about what that is, is good. To be lower class or upper class is a bit suspect: too little of whatever it is that makes money on the one hand and a bit too much on the other. Kinda like Goldilocks’s bed, middle class is just right.
Deborah Dundas’s just-published book On Class explores how it would change us if we talked more honestly about what class is and how it works in our culture. She skewers us on our own class hypocrisy so evident during Covid, when we banged pans at 7:30 to show our appreciation for the under-paid minions who risked their lives to protect ours, but looked the other way when their danger pay ended before the danger did. When the un-truth of ‘we’re all in this together’ became embarrassingly evident as the rich became much richer and the poor became temporarily almost middle class and the dispossessed died. When the hypothesis of a shared society splintered into a thousand points of dissonance, a dehumanizing street fight for dominance, for control, for certainty.
If we did dare to talk honestly about class, I think we would embrace the certainty that the single most influential factor in determining what class you are and will be is what family you are born into. Not just the genes (as adoption shows us) but everything that makes a family what it is: where it lives, its geopolitical world, its values, its access to resources, its capabilities, its composition, its relationship with its history. You have zero influence about what family you are born into. It’s luck of the draw.
If we talked honestly about class, we would acknowledge that we’re referring not just to wealth or the appearance of wealth but to associated behaviours – behaving in a ‘classy’ way being the good middle way, not unmannered (lower class) or snooty (upper class). It’s not so much what we have, but more how we behave about what we have.
Which gets us to a consideration of privilege. The question isn’t whether or not you have privilege, because simply being alive is a privilege, for starters. It’s how much you have relative to the other in a given situation, and how you acknowledge and use that advantage. (Or are abused by ignorance or disadvantage – it works both ways.)
Deborah Dundas was born poor – single mother, on welfare, thrift shop clothes -- but is now book editor of the Toronto Star, an influential position that puts her into the economic middle class. Her job entails making decisions that will impact the lives of probably-struggling writers – to review their books, or not – and rubbing elbows with the affluent at philanthropic and cultural events. She doth bestride the class world like a Colossus, on one hand/foot bestowing profile that can launch or extend a career, on the other hand/foot wondering if her half-price little black dress will pass as good-enough at $1000/plate dinners.
The burden of privilege is to figure out what the right thing to do is in a world where privilege is as relative as the weather. (And, like living with weather, learn from your mistakes.) Dundas explores the specifics of this conundrum in her book, and that encourages readers to do likewise.
I have lived my entire life as a woman in a patriarchal world where, as Charlotte Whitten said ‘Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good.’ (and added, as saucily as women of her age living in patriarchy learned to do, ‘Luckily, this is not difficult.’) I’m reaching an age where women tend to become invisible: ageism. Those are the short end of the privilege stick. I was born to a functional farm family that valued education: that’s the long end of the privilege stick. I came into the world with good (as far as I know) genes, breathed clean (sometimes stinky) air, ate organic food before that was a construct, drank raw milk; to this I attribute my current good health and energy. I can’t take credit for having those advantages: they are primarily luck of the draw.
I interpret that good luck to mean that I must use my education, reasonably good mental health, physical health and energy for the greater good. I dunno if that’s the right rule for everybody, but it’s a rule I share with Dundas and it’ll do until we find a better one.
