It’s Saturday night. I’m at a Brown Divest Coal party, in line for a unisex bathroom, where two girls divide five perfect lines of cocaine. AmEx Card. Platinum.
I’m thinking about last March, when Susan Patton wrote a letter to the Daily Princetonian, urging women to find husbands before graduation. She claimed they would not find men of the same caliber upon leaving Princeton. She used phrases like “intellectual equal” and “educated.” What she meant was far simpler: After leaving Princeton, these women would not find husbands in the same class.
We don’t talk about class in America because we don’t all agree it exists. Instead, we use shorthand: “income inequality” and “poverty.” We don’t talk about class at Brown because it brings up images of a game — a fading one — sometimes called the American Dream. It’s hard to admit that we’ve already won.
These are the facts: According to a Herald poll in 2012, at least half of us don’t receive a single dollar of financial aid. At least half of us pay full tuition — presently $60,460, when combined with room and board and indirect costs. This is more than the median U.S. household makes in a year.
Some thought socioeconomic diversity would increase after the 2003 transition to need-blind admission. However, according to Michael Goldberger, dean of admission from 1995 to 2005, the University’s socioeconomic diversity has barely changed since 2003.
“Things are very slow and subtle the way they move in places like this,” he told The Herald in 2012.
Class expression isn’t like race or gender. It’s not as easy to see. The differences appear when we thoughtlessly talk about unpaid internships or spring break flights to the Caribbean. When somebody buys drinks for seven people and says, “It’s on me,” or takes a leave of absence to volunteer in East Asia, documented by high-concept Instagram photos. Nonprofit, Common Good, Artist: Are these future careers or different names for class privilege?
“It’s not like people are walking around in sneakers,” as Katharine Grimes ’14 told The Herald in 2012.
Step back for a moment. Think about your friends — you know who their parents are. You know the names of their siblings, their sexual orientations, their genders. You know where they grew up. But do you know how much money they have? Does this question make you uncomfortable?
We like to imagine that inside the Van Wickle Gates lies a classless community. When I first stepped on campus, though, the distance between the haves and have-nots appeared wider than Cara Delevingne’s thigh gap. During Fashion Week.
Class segregation is a two-step process after the initial craziness of move-in weekend. First, lower-income students are shocked by garish displays of wealth. They feel displaced. They learn to perform. Resentment ensues. Second, upper-class students sense this resentment. They also learn to perform: Remember that first Family Weekend, when you saw a Prada-clad mother linking arms with a girl in a thrift store sweatshirt, so overwashed it had holes?
Other times, upper-class students decide they don’t want to change their lifestyles. So they channel off. It’s just too much guilt.
Last year, when Lorde’s song “Royals” went viral, we were thrilled to sing about “post code envy” and fantasies of ball gowns. But when the song played at certain program house parties — charging $350 dues so members can drink the very Grey Goose the song cries out against — I couldn’t help but think that the real fantasy was the lower-class lifestyle itself.
As a first-year, I visited Harvard — where 70 percent of students receive financial aid — and was asked if it were true: Was Brown really a place of guitar circles and vague protests, where people who called themselves “artists” spent summers working as unpaid interns, living in wildly eclectic, helplessly cool apartments?
Of course I was offended. But I don’t deny that Brown’s more-organic-than-thou culture can be stifling, especially when coupled with extreme wealth. Does a pay-your-way volunteer position in Ghana really trump a retail position at Macy’s?
This is not to say we are ignorant of class struggle. Most Brown students understand extreme poverty pretty well. We study it in anthropology classes, field studies and backpacking trips. What most of us don’t understand is how the rest of America lives — what it’s like to work a job after a long day of school, not to be able to afford restaurant food, to stay in Providence when the flight home is too expensive.
We can’t all possibly be middle-class. So we find solidarity in social justice. At times we dabble in the politics of victimhood because it lessens the guilt. We all want a rags-to-riches story, to say that when we reached our dreams they were covered in claw marks. But at Brown, sometimes our rags — made from 100 percent recycled materials, for every one purchased a new one goes to a child in need — are wholly fictional.
What disturbs me more than the occasional flaunting is the blatant lying about wealth. We’ve reached a tipping point. We can all admit we’re tired of students pretending they were escaping from inner cities instead of complaining to SAT tutors in suburban McMansions.
So we talk about race. We debate gender. We explore different aspects of sexual orientation, but never touch upon our biggest normative segregator.
The time has come to abandon class-blind lenses and acknowledge that we come from vastly different backgrounds. Class is sticky, because it intersects with most minority groups. That’s all the more reason to talk about it.
Back to the party. Someone brings up the environmental devastation caused by the drug war, and the room goes silent. Two girls argue and one boy shakes his head. Someone says the drug war isn’t relevant anymore; the real problem is prescription drugs. Someone offers me an Adderall. A glass breaks. We agree to sweep it up tomorrow. It’s too late to say, “I shouldn’t have.”
I say goodbye to a few students I watched protest in the Occupy College Hill movement my first year. They are tired, they haven’t been sleeping. Tonight, they rally for change. Tomorrow, they prepare for banking interviews on Wall Street.
Cara Dorris ’15 can be reached at cara_dorris@brown.edu.
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