There was an editorial in the DI the other day about the assumptions that are made about people's financial backgrounds.
Last semester I had a row with one of my Spanish classes about this. We were discussing the portrayal of the States in Latin American media, specifically the stereotypes about the "American Dream" and how this is consistently portrayed as the norm in mainstream media in Latin America. Our TA asked the class if we agreed that this image was accurate.
And the said yes. Every single one of them.
As one might expect, I just about exploded. Seriously, it is actually possible that people are totally unaware? Long story short: I ranted, they started looking a bit scared, I lost the ability to speak properly and switched to a combination of Spanish, my weird bastardized French, and the handful of Hebrew curses I know.
I should put in a little disclaimer here. These were all white kids who were (mostly) from the Chicago suburbs. I'm not suggesting that all white kids from the 'burbs grew up in bubbles with a massive sense of entitlement and an unawareness about how the world works for the have-nots. [There are a lot of kids from middle-class families who have part-time jobs on campus and who spend their summers working, etc. But the point is that ultimately they don't have to, and statistically these are often things like internships that are specifically taken as resume boosters, not as survival tools.] I am, however, saying that this particular bunch of white kids from the 'burbs grew up in bubbles with a massive sense of entitlement and an unawareness about how the world works for the have-nots. Technically, I too am a mostly white (part Latina) kid from the Chicago suburbs. But only because I was born there, because that where my grandparents live, and they only live there because they bought the house in the early 1970s when the neighborhood was really different. When I was little, I lived with my mother and various stepfathers on army bases and assorted other crappy places. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, not as bad as some kids I knew had it, but suffice to say that there were days we didn't eat.
I was one of the ones who got lucky. When I turned 13, I left my parents and moved in with my grandparents. This meant that I had the chance to attend a fantastic high school, which is funded by the property taxes of the parents of the rich white kids who have never been out of the suburbs except to go on vacation to some resort in Hawaii or Cozumel. They have never had a reason to contemplate where their next meal is coming from, and part of me envies them that. The other part wants to drag them down to the projects and point out that this is how people actually live.
...Well I feel better now.
--C.
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