2018 was undoubtedly the year of wellness. With #fitspo trending on social media at every turn, Generation Z supposedly drinking less than any age group before them, and trending health fads showing no sign of abating, it’s clear that society’s obsession with how we eat, exercise, and care for our bodies is going nowhere. But although Instagram would have us believing that we’re all ditching vodka sodas and a kebab for kale smoothies, the statistics tell a very different story.

A recent UK study suggests that alcohol related deaths among women are at their highest rate since records began, while an estimated 300,000 deaths in the U.S. per year are currently obesity related. Growing swatches of fitness enthusiasts may be hashtagging their morning yoga session and staking out their nearest #foodporn vegan joint, but it is clear that for all the talk of wellness, we are in a health epidemic that shows little sign of slowing.

For many this paradox may be puzzling. As our society continues to prioritize health and self-care, why are so many falling behind? Exercise and eating well is increasingly accessible, with videos and advice from experienced personal trainers and nutritionists only ever a click away—we no longer need to stake out a small fortune for the service. But although wellness may be trending it remains deeply exclusive, its Lululemon clad roots embedded in the class structures that still dominate modern society.

It is clear that for all the talk of wellness, we are in a health epidemic that shows little sign of slowing.
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An expensive gym membership and a fridge stuffed with hummus may seem second nature for some, but millions of others have grown-up leading a very different lifestyle. For entire communities, gym class may have been more likely to have been the dreaded repetitiveness of weekly laps of the playing field instead of a range of activities with proper coaching and inter-school competition. School lunches may well have been beige in color, and a celebratory meal out was more likely burgers and fries at a local diner than a posh nosh with plenty of protein and greenery arranged elaborately on a child size plate.

As much as we may cringe and delight in equal measure at Overheard in Whole Foods you can bet your bottom dollar that little Tarquin, asking his mom for fettuccine rather than farfalle for his lunch, will grow up knowing his avocado from his artichokes. Our attitudes towards wellness are ingrained in us from a young age and these deeply entrenched outlooks are not easily overturned.

Privilege defines how we approach our health well into adulthood. Although the archetype of the yummy mummy squeezing in a pilates class before picking the kids up from school may be a faintly uncomfortable gender stereotype for some, for others it speaks an untenable truth of inequality. Those who can afford childcare or to give up their jobs to care for their children are more likely to have the time and money to exercise, to prepare nutritious meals, and to educate themselves on health. With unaffordable childcare options comes vast disparities between the haves and have-nots that disproportionately affects women.

The parent working fifty hours a week just to cover nursery costs may have to prioritize their child’s health at the expense of their own. Mothers unable to afford childcare altogether who are forced to give up work may have to prioritize putting food on the table full stop, without having the luxury of ensuring that this covers their kids’ five a day.   

Beyond parenthood, the seeming ignorance of the wellness set can also be infuriating. Influencers sunnily declaring that their home workouts are something “anyone can fit into their day!” are preaching to an extremely privileged subgroup. The fact is that multitudes of women don’t have the time, space, or social environment to roll out a yoga mat in their living room and cram in some burpees.

Likewise, bloggers who blithely assert that anyone can give up gluten ignore that to do so requires access to a half decent selection of gluten-free products at their local store, the time and energy to research alternatives, and the cash to cater for this dietary preference (not to mention no other dietary restrictions that might make going gluten-free even more difficult).

Embracing a plant-based lifestyle in a nutritious manner requires a level of food education that not everyone has been fortunate enough to have, and enough food security for your primary concern to not be that your family is getting enough calories to live, period. Giving up drinking requires being part of a social circle that fits with a booze-free lifestyle. Practicing yoga safely requires a membership fee that not everyone can afford, and is often an environment that alienates anyone who isn’t white and already skinny. “Wellness” is for people who are already doing well.

Statistically the links between social class and health are undeniable and terrifying. Residents of affluent counties in the U.S. can expect to live up to twenty years longer than their poorer counterparts, with variables such as quality of healthcare, smoking, drinking, and physical inactivity cited as major contributory factors to soaring mortality. Fitness bloggers declaring that shaping up and switching their nutrition plan changed their life are perpetuating a message that fundamentally fails to correlate with reality.

It suggests that something as simple as what we put into our bodies defines our quality of life. It fails to account for the numerous other factors—social and economic—that are far more significant determinants of how well we live and which ultimately defines the food and exercise we are able to afford to enjoy.  The conversation around wellness seems to too often sidestep the things that actually make us well—affordable healthcare, access to nutritious food, and available sexual health care amongst many others.

Wellness is for people who are already doing well.
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Suggesting that the wellness culture is the new normal lifestyle places onus on the underprivileged to eat and exercise better. In reality this is far from feasible, a seismic gulf in opportunities, education, and healthcare options holding back thousands of people from emulating a lifestyle we are urged to aspire towards. Can we really preach self-care when, as a society, we are failing to care for the thousands left behind by a flawed and deeply exclusive system?

As the gap between rich and poor becomes ever deeper our conversations around the wellness culture need to be reframed to understand it as a privilege. Instead of declaring that young people are giving up alcohol, signing up to gyms, and embracing clean eating we need to be honest about the specific subset that this lifestyle caters for, and look to who is getting left behind.

In the summer of 2016, I took a position as an organizer with the Clinton campaign in Iowa. I’d grown up just across the northwest border of Iowa in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and drove down from my father’s house on a Tuesday in July for training in Ames, Iowa. Prior to spending three and a half months canvassing for candidates up and down the ballot in Iowa, I’d only really been to Steve King’s district in Northwest Iowa or to my cousins’ former home along the Mississippi in Burlington, on the far east side of the state. The entire middle area was unknown to me, but I was assigned Marion and Mahaska Counties, two areas with a solid Democratic base outnumbered by Republicans and gerrymandered in 2010 to eliminate a previous democratic state house district.

I leaned heavily on the established party structure in both counties—a structure that was still feeling raw after the failed election of 2014. I learned the geographies of my counties, and learned which county officials were friendly and which ones would need someone not directly from the campaign to drop off voter registrations so the registrations from our Hispanic voters wouldn’t face challenges to their requests.

And I knocked on doors. Every day, I was out in the streets, driving from town to town, leaving pamphlets, answering voter questions, encouraging people to early vote and sign up for absentee ballots. I spent most of my days in towns of less than 2,000 people. In one particularly memorable incident, I was in a small town that had one major intersection consisting of a four way stop. I had to use the bathroom, so I pulled over to the only gas station in town and walked in. Every person in the store looked up at me as if to say, “I don’t recognize you.”

I was definitely in rural America.

“Rural America” has become many politicians’ favorite euphemism when talking about who needs courting in upcoming elections. Sen. Bernie Sanders recently called on coalitions to understand the pain and suffering many in rural (aka white, non-liberal) America feel, as a failure to do so resulted in Trump’s win. The Economist says Democrats abandoned “kitchen table issues,” leaving these voters feeling alienated and anxious. And Sen. Claire McCaskill blamed Democrats’ refusal to compromise on core issues on their failure to “gain enough trust with rural Americans.” They’re not prejudiced, just disillusioned with the Democrats’ inability to understand the issues that face them.

But I found a great universe of Democrats there. Many of the local volunteers were people from marginalized positions in society—queer people, Latinx people, many lifelong Democrats dedicated to bringing about change in their hometowns. I trained these volunteers on discussions from the campaign, discussed the policies of the candidates on the ballot, and talked about what was good for rural Iowa. I went to bat for my rural counties with the data people in Des Moines, insisting that some of the tactics passed down from Brooklyn wouldn’t work in rural Iowa—I couldn’t make thousands of unique phone calls in a week because I simply didn’t have enough active Democrats to call different ones each day. My counties combined were 55,000 people, one third of which were under 18. The counties are 97% white, mostly rural, and mostly Republican. In Mahaska county in 2016, only about 10,000 people voted in total.

Many of the local volunteers were people from marginalized positions in society—queer people, Latinx people, many lifelong Democrats dedicated to bringing about change in their hometowns.
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So needless to say, I got to know my rural voters. And consistently, I encountered white male members of rural communities who insisted that, despite being registered Democrats, despite having voted for Democrats in the past, they would not be voting for Clinton in 2016—because she’s a woman, because she’s a baby killer, because they bought into narratives about Benghazi.

The only time one of my voters brought up disillusionment over a Democratic failure to reach the white working class, the person was an upper middle class professor in a largely well-off college town.

Otherwise, my interactions with the rural white working class followed along a certain narrative. Older white men expressed concern about voting for women. One voter I spoke to the week before the election told me he’d already gone to the courthouse to vote early—for Trump—because “I can’t stand that female.” Another who spoke with me for 20 minutes outside his barn on his farm told me all about his disabled daughter being on social security, and yet he was worried about the Mexicans at the border, coming in and living off the government dime. When I pointed out that his own daughter is living off Democratic social safety net programs, he shrugged his shoulders and said “She needs it. Others don’t.”

I encountered white male members of rural communities who insisted...they would not be voting for Clinton in 2016—because she’s a woman, because she’s a baby killer, because they bought into narratives about Benghazi.
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I don’t say all this to relitigate 2016. That election is over and done with. But rather, I say all this to divorce “Rural America” from rural whites, and to point out that the ongoing narratives from liberals about what concerns the rural whites and the white working class is not “economic anxiety.” Like liberals in cities, white Dems out in rural areas are concerned about social issues—but many, in those areas, tend toward conservative. I was asked repeatedly about abortion, about immigration, about gay rights, about Black Lives Matter. The vast majority of my canvassers were queer people or people of color, working hard to change their hometowns by being an active presence in them. And they recognized, cogently, that their own liberation was bound up in the issues of their neighbors, which led them to reach out their hand and knock on those doors.

Many members of what might be called the Sanders wing of the party harbor a lot of bitterness over 2016, continuing to emphasize narratives of economic anxiety. But, in my own experience, economic anxiety, while relevant to people’s lives, wasn’t the driving issue that brought them to the polls. They care about their community, and the social issues that impact it—they care deeply about identity, especially if they’re an old white man who feels like his community is being threatened by minorities. Pursuing these voters would mean sacrificing the progressive social politics that make us the party of diversity, the party of queer people, of people of color, of women—the party of civil rights heroes. To win white rural America would mean giving up what makes us progressives, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to do that.

As a devoted William Morris fan, it’s been a delight — in part — to see Morris & Co prints brought to high streets across the world by H&M and rendered instafamous. Morris’ beautifully stylized depictions of nature are almost ubiquitous now.

These mediaeval-inspired designs were originally produced for Victorian wallpapers and home textiles, and their imposing yet delicate grandeur established Morris as one of the 19th century’s most famous textile designers. Now the popularity of this clothing collaboration has launched his work into the international spotlight. But just what tradition is being celebrated by H&M marketing his work as iconically British? Just what are we losing when we strip an artist’s work of its political context?

In addition to being a poet and designer, Morris was also a revolutionary and friend of Marx and Engels. He was an idealist who argued that craftwork and cooperation would make wage labour obsolete and, far from being simply the “iconic [nineteenth Century] British wallpaper and fabrics brand” which H&M proffers, Morris’s company was run on collective principles and managed by his daughter May at a time when women were rarely afforded such power.

Capitalism has done to William Morris what it always does best to political creatives: de-politicized his legacy for profit. Admittedly his household designs have long been mass-produced and on sale in museums and homeware shops. But at least the mugs, coasters and tea towels were affordable symbols of affinity with Morris. They were often marketed within the confines of the designs’ history and therefore, by and large, did not so fully erase his politics.

Just what are we losing when we strip an artist’s work of its political context?
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H&M presents his maximalist, repeated homages to the natural world as emblems of British tradition and nostalgia, when in fact Morris used mediaeval aesthetics not to celebrate Britain, but rather as a protest in advocating pre-industrial values. The press, however, has followed H&M’s marketing wash, instead of looking to Morris’s actual political legacy.

Vogue termed it “another British heritage brand”; The Guardian, too, echoed the “heritage” language.

How does capitalism’s own tradition of depoliticization play out when consumers are clothed in imagery taken out of context but also place, having originally been created to celebrate home?

H&M is curating a selective history which conjures nostalgia for a Victorian era of Empire. They launched their Morris and Co collaboration with a campaign video boasting a grainy, faux ’70s aesthetic.

Skinny white women prance through what looks like the Scottish Highlands, a brook and a cottage to their backs. They wear silk scarves, maxi dresses, pussy bow tops: demure looks paired with classic jumpers and jeans. Then, in a move which reinforced the capitalistic juggernaut that is H&M’s marketing, the company then gathered influencers for “paid partnerships” at the Morris-decorated mansion Standen House.

This manipulation fits within fashion’s long history with the commodification of radical craft and the history of Morris prints is simply a case study of how mainstream consumerism subsumes radical aesthetics.

Two previous uses of Morris designs for clothing aimed to pay tribute to his anti-establishment politics by linking them to subcultural styles.

The first was in the ’60s when autodidact designer Mary Quant — inspired by Mod fashion and the sexual revolution — made a mini-skirt suit in Morris’ “Marigold” print. The second instance occurred in 2017 when fashion house Loewe released a capsule collection approaching Morris through punk style. 

However, both fell into the consumer culture trap where radical social movements were transformed into fashionable commodities for companies to profit from.

The aesthetics of subcultures — like punk for example, which communicates a rejection of the status quo and an alternative belonging — also resided within the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement (of which Morris was a leader) in their distancing from Victorian production and values.

When aesthetics designed to be imbued with a certain meaning are donned as decontextualized fashion statements, those meanings are signaled without an actual affinity for movement, without a desire to belong or perpetuate the aesthetics’ accompanying ideals. This transformation — problematic in itself — is the process of reincorporation which leads to meanings being written over at best and bastardized or erased at worst.

William Morris’ creations were inspired by his belief in ordinary people’s value and rights
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Looking at the H&M collection, we can see nods to this lineage of aesthetic spin-offs, although they don’t directly mention the homage.

Their ’60s-esque mini dress uses the same print as Quant’s mini-skirt suit and their “Pimpernel” trouser suit recalls George Harrison in a “Golden Lily”-patterned blazer or John Lennon in “Chrysanthemum.” 

Morris’ politics inspired some subcultural affinity in the 20th Century but the sartorial trickle-down of these styles is mere commodification.

The anti-establishment message has disappeared when a mainstream brand like H&M calls him “iconic.” yet simultaneously ignores the radical politics he stood for. Indeed, when the company talks about “tradition,” they don’t even mean this tradition of subversive reuse. Instead, they invoke an abstract, white, and classist British status quo of countryside leisure.

Returning to the bigger picture of how fashion commodifies art, the connection between Morris’ radicalism and subcultural fashions like mods and punks is fitting — but not for the reasons the fashion houses intended.

Dick Hebdige, scholar of subcultural style, coined a term for the way capitalism seizes subversive aesthetics and turns them into a “fashion,” therefore making them apolitical, mainstream and profitable: “reincorporation.”

In his book Subcultures: the Meaning of Style he argues that youth movements develop their own style which puts across their criticisms of the existing order. The mainstream culture, however, incorporates their subversions within its own pre-existing world-view. In this way, the deviant meaning is lost. This sort of commodification happened to the styles of teddy boys, mods and rockers, hippies, skinheads, punks, etc., but it also happens today when far older styles with a political message are brought into vogue.

William Morris’s natural imagery — inspired by mediaeval styles because it sought to evade capitalism — now adorns the high street as season-appropriate florals.

Paying attention to the intended meanings behind art and design is important, especially when corporate fashion aims to depoliticize and commodify those visions’ intentions. Fashion is political, and the imagery it recycles, especially so.

William Morris’ creations were inspired by his belief in ordinary people’s value and rights; his words still appear on trade union banners today. Dismantling the homogenizing consumerism of fashion means celebrating the hidden radical histories erased by corporations, whether those be the politics of class, race, gender or sexuality.

So when you next see someone in that instafamous H&M x Morris & Co. maxi dress, they are — arguably — an inadvertent, living homage to a Victorian anti-Capitalist aesthetic and to those who sought revolutionary in the ’60s and ’70s.

There’s a thin line between buying pleasing patterns and communicating affinity of ideals, but if we celebrate and talk about these hidden histories we foster a critical eye and a celebration of the subversive role fashion should be allowed — and continue —to play.

“Sexual violence isn’t about sex; it’s about power.” This phrase has been repeated again and again and again and has recently resurfaced in conversations, public and private, throughout rape culture’s arguable year of reckoning.

This statement is at once a reassurance and a protest: the aim of sexual violence (including harassment and assault) is not the act of sex itself, but the power one asserts through the act. But the more we pass this phrase around, the more we establish a false binary wherein there is such a thing as sex untouched by power dynamics, a “pure” sex that is safe from the threat of power.

What’s insidious about this phrase is that it assumes we have stable and agreed upon definitions of fraught terms like “sex” and “power.” The phrase ushers us past the physicality of sex and violence all together in favor of an abstraction.

Power remains diffuse in this formulation, only showing its “true colors” in the faces of the bad people who abuse it and the institutions (the fast food industry, Hollywood, academia, the District Attorney’s office…) that enable it. The conventional wisdom demurs: sexual mores may change, but the quest for power is forever and there will always be bad people. That’s just the way it is.

Admittedly, the phrase can be employed in good faith—to say rape is “about power” is to make the necessary claim that institutional power facilitates and perpetuates abuse. Those with power—even and especially those who make their dime critiquing power—will close ranks to protect their hierarchical kin. But we don’t need to avoid talking about sex if we want to understand power. Instead, we can ask how power is part of sexual asymmetries and the demands of intimacy.

Sex disappears in this binary. The framework implies an unrigorous sex-positivity wherein sex is inherently good, as opposed to power, which is inherently abusive or predatory, the corrupting agent that ruins an otherwise consensual sexual experience.

The conventional wisdom demurs: sexual mores may change, but the quest for power is forever and there will always be bad people.
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As Charlotte Shane points out in her evaluation of recent publications and films on rape culture, consent is only a binding agreement insofar as the power differential between participants is even-keeled.

“Properly introduce consent to a potential date rapist, and you’ll be rewarded with a sexually law-abiding citizen,” explains Shane about this logic. The consent framework and the sex/power line go hand and hand, both concealing the need to think about sex at all, let alone ask when sex is ever unburdened by power differentials.

As if straight sex is ever free from the curse of its coercive history. As if queer sex can ever be enjoyed without the knowledge that someone wants to, and perhaps could, punish you for it. Making room to think about sex, as Shane acknowledges, means “admitting that the capacity for rape is determined by man-made conditions rather than some inborn evil.”

Sex isn’t necessarily the chaotic good to power’s lawful evil at all. In fact, Emily Yoffe argues in her essay, “Understanding Harvey,” that when we assume sexual violence is only a question of power, we refuse to look at darkness in sexual desire. That is, abusers don’t do it merely because they can get away with it, but rather, because they have a particular desire that power gives them the ability to fulfill. Power is the means by which that desire can be satisfied. If abuse is not about sex, then desire drops out of the equation, and the exercise of power is the only thing to be reproved.

As if straight sex is ever free from the curse of its coercive history. As if queer sex can ever be enjoyed without the knowledge that someone wants to, and perhaps could, punish you for it.
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But even in Yoffe’s more careful examination of the sex/power framework, she still works from the premise that power only ever belongs to those who abuse it, not to those who are victimized by it. Too often, this assumption is behind the sex/power framework.  

To say “it’s not about sex, it’s about power,” is to fetishize power and proffer it as the abusive kind of power that only exists when it is stolen, and therefore only ever belongs to the few.

A variation of “it’s not about sex” can be found in two articles from the early days of #metoo: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s essay, “The Problem Isn’t Sex, It’s Work” and Rebecca Traister’s similarly titled, if qualified, essay, “This moment isn’t (just) about sex. It’s about work.”

Sarah Leonard has also employed the phrase “The fact is that sexual harassment is more about power than sex” to argue that, under capitalism, sexual harassment is inevitable, given the imbalance of power between boss and worker.

Examining sex and power in terms of work is an excellent way of getting at what we mean when we say “power,” even though it still sounds an awful lot like “it’s not personal, it’s business,” and even if we’re still not saying “class.”

In the workplace, sexual harassment is a specific form of exploitation because what it does to the body cannot be collected for profit; there is only the abuser’s pleasure in cruelty.

Sexual violence targets the most vulnerable across lines of race, class, gender, immigration status, ability, and age, as well as workers in particular conditions of precarity, such as undocumented workers, those in the gig economy, and sex workers. It is a means of claiming ownership of the worker’s body beyond what they can produce as labor.

Our body is our first and most visceral relationship, even more immediate than anything else the boss steals (like time or wages). Sexual violence in the workplace, too, is a kind of theft. Work steals so much of our body from us: our posture, our eyesight, sometimes our fingers or limbs. But unions have yet to win tickers in the workplace that count “X days without unwanted touching” or worker’s compensation for therapy necessitated by incessant humiliation.

Sexual violence in the workplace is a violation which proves that the worker’s body is not only exploitable in every way, but also that workers do not have the right to consent to any of the conditions in which they work. To say that this reckoning is “about work” does not give us a framework to understand sex’s particular relation to power and labor. That is, it doesn’t account for the specificity of sexual violence, what makes it, as Law and Order reminds us, “especially heinous.”

Reluctance to talk about sex when we talk about sexual violence also makes it easier to leave sex workers out of the story of workplace harassment. Sex workers have a 45-75% risk of physical violence, contrary to ill-informed claims that sex workers can’t experience rape or that rape is merely “theft of services”.

Our body is our first and most visceral relationship, even more immediate than anything else the boss steals (like time or wages).
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In this collective moment of reckoning, something like solidarity has been shaping up: a rally for International Whore’s Day against SESTA/FOSTA, the quickly organized week of protests against Kavanaugh, a hexing, and more to come. There is power in solidarity. But the binary nature of the sex/power framework doesn’t allow for a definition of power which encompasses the ability of the victimized to fight back and demand transformative justice.

Between people, power is the ability to make change or to stop change through work over time. It is also the ability to either obfuscate or clarify the forces that enact it. The danger of the “it’s about work” phrase is that it has the ability to distract our attention from sex and the structures with which it may be difficult to personally identify with.

If we admit that sexual violence is about sex, that sex is always entangled with power that enables and perpetuates abuse, there might also be less hand-wringing over cases that trouble our perceptions of who commits sexual violence: a Holocaust survivor who made startlingly accurate films about psychosexual horror, say, or a queer, allegedly feminist professor.

For those who have been exploited and hurt—what is their power? Is it a comfort to be told that a physical act of violation was actually about power? Will it heal bodily injury, or prevent those with PTSD from dissociating during consensual sex? Will it return our time? There are so many explanations for why people engage in bad behavior. How many of them are satisfying? Who really wants, as Yoffe proposes, to “understand” Harvey?

What if instead of—yet again—examining the psyche of damaged men (that Yoffe begins with the nineteenth-century Austrian psychologist Kraft-Ebbing suggests that this fascination was not born in “our” era of prestige television and true crime podcasts), we spoke to the vulnerable ones about their own darkness?

What if we were to consider to their relationship to power?

There is a reason why we encounter this framework in thinkpieces but rarely in testimony. In the stories I’ve heard and read and told and wrote since the early days of #metoo, we observe our own bodies as though floating above, find bruises that change color but never fade; we trace and retrace our footsteps and still don’t know how we ended up face down.

Sometimes, talking about it feels compulsive, as we detail our trauma to anyone who will listen, like the Ancient Mariner interrupting a straight wedding or the vengeful ghost of It Happened To Me. Other times, the hurt is compartmentalized, the dazzling feats we accomplish make it unclear if we push ourselves in spite of our hurt or because of it.

For those who have been exploited and hurt—what is their power?
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And yet, not every incident of sexual violence has the effect of trauma. Sometimes, the offense is mundane, a waste of time, as Melissa Gira Grant has written. “Our conflict is not over sex,” she stresses, “or with men in particular or in general, but over power.” I agree that sexual violence is a theft of power, but our conflict over who possesses power does extend into the sexual.

Sexual violence is very much about sex—it is a particular way of hurting someone where they will stay hurt, since their wounds are discouraged from being publicly bandaged.

Acknowledging that it is about sex allows us to treat our wounds and to tell stories of healing, as #metoo founder Tarana Burke urges us to do. It allows us to admit that even if it wasn’t personal to them it was personal to us, and most of all, it allows us to feel like we can move forward without relying on individualistic conceptions of strength and empowerment.

The phrase obscures the uncomfortable truth that “sex” and “power” are not incommensurate terms. By ignoring this truth, we make it harder to create a world in which sex doesn’t hurt and power isn’t exploitative. Instead, power can be the means by which we refuse, or by which we work together to negotiate what we want.

The tragedy of Grenfell Tower has awakened the London community, in the most violent way, to the negative impacts of gentrification and “regeneration” projects on social inequality. The fire of June 14 that consumed almost 80% of the social housing tower block should have been a self-contained incident within that 1970s brutalist structure. Instead, the flames turned into a fireball, thanks to the newly fitted cladding placed on the building to “beautify” its appearance for those who looked at it from luxury apartments nearby.

Regeneration plans were set in motion for the Silchester Estate and Lancaster Estate of Latimer Road, to be torn down in the beginning of September 2018. It was the fire at Grenfell that stopped those plans from happening — for now. The severity of this event has left a physical and emotional mark on the community of North Kensington — and many residents have been dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and flashbacks of that terrible day.

In Brutal Presence is an ongoing documentary project I started in 2016 that focuses on certain realities surrounding social housing in London, and the impacts of gentrification and “revitalization” to urban communities through the borough of North Kensington. The neighboring council estates and tower blocks of Grenfell have all shared the same history and are all part of the same story. They have witnessed the changes to their neighborhoods over the years through the process of gentrification and are increasingly concerned about the impacts this will have on their future.

These photos and resident quotes—collected between June 14, 2017 and the present—help shed light on what’s happening in the area.

Vasiliki Stavrou of Bramley House, 35 years resident of North Kensington, W10

“Bramley House, where I have lived for 35 years, was significantly impacted during the fire of June 14. There was burning debris landing on and around the building like rain, and access to Bramley House was restricted by the police for safety reasons. Further concerns were raised about the stability of the tower, which was likely to fall directly onto us.

Some residents were taken into emergency accommodation, while the majority of us were left behind […] forgotten.

Witnessing the fire has caused emotional trauma in the community, which has had severe consequences on both our physical and mental health. We have been directly affected by the events that took place, as well as the response of central government in the days immediately following the fire. We face the future with uncertainty, and no one knows what the long-term effects might be.

There was a time when a question was raised whether it was reasonable to have social housing side-by-side with the private houses. I think most people felt that we shouldn’t live separately; otherwise we’re going to create ghettos. In North Kensington, you will find one long street where one side is social housing — and across the road  are private Victorian houses. We have always had a good mixture of both.

But then the question about the future of North Kensington and its residents became a concern, once the council started trying to implement a long process of regeneration schemes to the area.

People worried a lot about these regeneration schemes. We personally didn’t agree to them, but unfortunately, in all three different plans our building — Bramley House — was included as part of the Silchester Estate. They would have used every single inch of the estate possible. […] Many people decided to move out. Of course, their lives were very much disrupted.”

Lynda of Silchester Road, 38 years resident of North Kensington

“That cladding they put on Grenfell to make it look more glamorous, that’s all they put it on for — because what good is it to anyone? It’s not good, is it? Thank God they didn’t put it on the others.

We had letters come through that said the council was going to pull down the other estates — but since Grenfell happened, it’s all backfired. That’s why they didn’t want to spend any money doing work on them.

They gave us all the plans and they put them through the letterbox, telling us what they were going to do in the area. They wanted to do it up like a little village, build little houses, make it all nice and that.

And where were we supposed to go? Out in Mongolia, I suppose! They don’t care, do they? As long as they get what they want. And now, they’ve had to put it off. They’ve got no money because of Grenfell. It’s all gotten away.

I’ve paid into the system all of my life. Unless you own it [your flat], you’ll never get anything out of it.”

Tarek Gotti of Henry Dickens Court W11, 26 years resident of North Kensington

“When I think about being offered a flat on the 24th floor of Grenfell Tower, before the fire, and how the council claimed they didn’t know I was disabled and mentally ill — I realize now what could have happened to me had I gone through with it by force. Because it was forced — they said ‘take it or leave it’ when I was looking for housing.

I lost a lot of friends in the fire. I lost a total of 13 friends, including one family member. My kids lost most of their friends from the nurseries, and from the primary and secondary schools next door.

The council was never there for us; we told them about these buildings. We saw they had lots of major work that needed to be done. We told them about this cladding, ‘What is it? Is it necessary? […]’ And we know it was done because of the rich gym and the rich school next door. You can’t put an ugly building next to two rich, fabulous buildings.

As a resident, I feel I’ve been failed. The Government has failed me in every way. They see us as third class citizens, and then ignore us.

It shouldn’t have taken Grenfell to happen for every ward, or every country, or every community to come together. It should have been happening from before Grenfell. Grenfell wouldn’t have happened if they had listened before about what the community wanted.”

Teresa Griffin of Bramley House W10, 28 years resident of North Kensington

“The night of Grenfell, I really wish I’d stayed in bed and not seen anything. I really wished and prayed to God that I hadn’t heard (my daughter Amelia), and I’d just stayed in bed.

Bramley House would’ve been in the prize line for it (Grenfell), had the building fallen. There are people living here that should’ve been evacuated. The council didn’t value our lives enough to do that.

When we got a letter from the council about three years ago, talking about refurbishments and ‘upping’ the area, and knocking down these flats in order to get the area looking ‘nice’ — I just couldn’t believe it. They wanted to knock it all down and build new homes.

We had the choice that if we wanted to come back [after the refurbishment], we could come back, but we wouldn’t be able to afford the rent and they knew that. When the council says, ‘You haven’t got an option, we’re knocking them down and that’s that,’ they can do it; it’s called a compulsory purchase.

I went to a couple of these meetings where they’d show us the plans for Notting Hill. It would knock us out in every way. Every working class person would be put out of the field — people who have been here a lifetime.

It was class cleansing. […] They were going to put us out and we had no choice in it — nothing — we didn’t have a say in it. They were doing it and that was that. A lot of people had sleepless nights because of it.”

Elizabeth Stravoravdis of Kensal House W10, 26 years resident of North Kensington

“Before the fire, you would walk down and see Grenfell — with its panels — and it looked absolutely smashing! Then you saw the gym — this massive structure — with its beautiful architecture, and the academy looking like Lego Land […] but none of it was functional; it was all done for the money. It’s like having a suit sewn to look pretty but it’s not actually sewn properly; you wear it once and it falls apart.

We aren’t short of talented architects or talented designers, or knowledge in structure. And yet, we can’t build or renovate a simple building and make it stand or not burn. How? Why? The answer is the money.

What we want is some common sense, a few more mums running the world.

Mums care about the future generations. They don’t just care about their pockets and what’s in their fridge today, or what’s in their bank account today. They’re thinking about what they’re going to leave behind.

Since the fire, I have seen survivors more than survive. I have seen them become warriors. These are the people who are still in temporary housing, who are still in hotels. I’ve seen the bereaved become conquerors. Because this is not normal to be crushed to such a point, where you turn into Hercules.

Despite knowing how powerless we are and not funded, we are still carrying on for our children and our grandchildren. I like to think that even if they succeed in doing their social cleansing in this area, our children and grandchildren would’ve seen a heroism in us. I hope we’ve given our young people and our children a good example of what a decent human being does, and what a decent human being is.”

Singh Minder of Goodrich Court W10, 50 years resident of North Kensington

“The media has always stirred things. Do you think they’re really worried about what’s happened here (at Grenfell)? They’re not going to solve anything. They’re here to discuss it. They’ll discuss about how Syria has been bombed, Russia and America…so that people can ring up and offer their opinions. It’s a ‘whisk in the water’. Nothing is produced except bubbles.

Here at Goodrich Court, we’ve heard about the Housing Trust, which runs the estate, but they’re like gods — invisible. I said to myself ‘It’s easier to say a prayer to God, but it’s very hard to contact these people.’ I don’t know where they are.”

Joseph Alfred of Hurstway Walk Lancaster Estate W10, 40 years resident of North Kensington

“The local authority and central government showed very little interest in this half of the borough. To this present day, when compared to the south, the north is at a disadvantage in all aspects — like employment, crime, investment, and education.

My concern about the future of North Kensington and its residents pre-Grenfell fire, is that the council proposed the regeneration project that would demolish the houses surrounding Grenfell tower. My fear is that it will be disastrous if that occurs; a break up of a close-knit community, relocating residents to far-away places, and then having to adapt to a new environment.

I’ve lost a friend in the fire, and there were some people living around here that I knew. They’ve moved now. Some friends moved because they were more affected than me by Grenfell. Once they move, friends are lost.”

Noreen King of Trellick Tower W10, 30 years resident of North Kensington

“Whatever effort they (the council) makes, it will never be enough.

People still need to be housed. And no, we can’t all afford what you (the council) have. We are at the bottom. But being at the bottom doesn’t mean we can’t be happy.

And no, we’re not going to Manchester, we’re not going to Nottingham — because that’s what one council officer tried to make me do. I said, ‘Get lost. Born and raised in London, and you want to send me somewhere? Why?’

My hope would be for the government and those that have the power to make decisions, to just look after those that are below your pay grade. Put enough housing out there for those who have got their children that need to move on, and can’t move on, or become independent.

Stop segregating our communities. Stop clumping people in as a majority and making others feel uncomfortable in their own skin, or in their own area. Stop spending your money in the wrong places. Fix your country.”

Judith Blakeman of W10, 29 years resident of North Kensington 

“I lived in Ladbroke Grove from ’71, and then I moved here next door to Lancaster West in ’89. The area was very diverse then, but it was very rundown. It didn’t have the gentrification it’s got now. All the houses back then were falling apart. That’s when the council built the Lancaster West Estate. It was a slum clearance program.

[…] Towards the mid-1990s, they started improving the area and getting planning permission for all sorts of lavish developments of luxury flats.

Soon, council residents were told — before the Grenfell fire — that basically “this land is now very high value, and you’ve enjoyed living on it for long enough, but if you can’t afford to stay here then you’ll have to move. We (the council) will redevelop it and regenerate it, and only those of you with completely secure tenancies will get the opportunity to come back.”

It was social cleansing. The original proposal for this area was far vaster. […] That would’ve gone ahead had Grenfell Tower not happened.

I want justice for Grenfell. I mean, it’s a slogan, but I want justice for Grenfell. Really nice people just died, they were burned to death for no reason, and it couldn’t have happened anywhere else. There were too many different things that all came together, and nobody listened to them.

The very, very small children, both those who escaped and those who were evacuated — they’re going to tell their grandchildren about this. That’s going to be three generations after us.”

 

I am 7, and I’m aware that my existence is a financial burden on my mother. She would never say it, of course, but I recognize the lines that spread across her forehead when I need to buy gifts for parties, when I need money for school bake sales, when I need food for lunches.

As I grow up, I see the bigger picture: Having children isn’t only expensive when it comes to the cash you hand them. I can sense my mother’s breath quickening when she swipes her card to buy my school uniform. I watch her try to figure out how to cover our medical expenses. When my teachers hand out letters about school fees, mine invariably has the word “OVERDUE” stamped on the front.

In many ways, I had a good childhood. Our income bracket and lack of assets meant that we were considered a low-income household, but we were never homeless. My family is a group of genuinely wonderful people, and I felt safe and supported in my own home. And of course, I benefited greatly from white privilege, which means a lot in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Poor People Deserve To Taste Something Other Than Shame
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But we didn’t have class privilege, and our financial situation was always dire. I cried myself to sleep on many occasions because of our financial burdens; I had nightmares about bills covering every floor in our house. I was stressed about our financial situation, and even more stressed because I had no way to make it better.

I’ve been thinking about my childhood a lot recently, especially since the concept of “adulting” is so prevalent on social media nowadays. According toMerriam-Webster (because yes, the word is that widespread):

“to adult is to behave like an adult, to do the things that adults regularly have to do. This includes things like having a job and living independently, sure, but also such mundanities as taking clothes to the dry cleaners (and remembering to pick them up), making and keeping dental appointments, getting your car registered, doing yardwork.”

The word permeates our everyday conversations, and the concept is often touched on in popular memes. “My favorite childhood memory is not paying bills,” states an often-shared meme. #AdultingInFiveWords, a hashtag that trended a while ago, was often used to point out the financial responsibilities of adulting. For many people, adulting is associated with stressful financial burdens because their childhood, by contrast, didn’t involve shouldering those burdens.

For me — and for many people who grew up in working-class and poor environments — the opposite is true. My worst childhood memory is not paying bills. Because I couldn’t work, I felt that I was unable to contribute to the family that worked so hard to raise and protect me.

For many of my peers, financial strain is a part of adulting. For those of us who weren’t as privileged, it’s been a fact of life since birth.

In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, anthropologists Allison James and Alan Prout wrote, “the immaturity of children is biological fact, but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture.” Anthropologists before and after them have argued that childhood is socially constructed and influenced largely by culture.

There is no universal experience of childhood. And yet, many international groups — such as UNICEF and the World Health Organization — have attempted to treat childhood as a universal experience. Because those groups were — and arguably still are — very Westernized, a lot of their policies erase the experiences of children in non-Western, marginalized situations. As scholar Sharon Stephens argued in her intro to Children and the Politics of Culture, “affluent groups in Western society confronted a chasm between their idealized concepts of childhood and the realities of many children’s lives, both in the Third World and in the heart of First World urban centers.”

Stephens and many other anthropologists point out that policies like the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of the Child are problematic, because they fail to take into account that we all experience childhood differently. For example, the Declaration implies that the biological parents of children are usually the best caregivers, and that biological relationships between children and parents are more natural and important than other familial relationships. This is a heteronormative assumption that sidelines queer people, multi-generational households, and non-traditional families.

The ideas we have about what children should and shouldn’t do are often based on the childhood experiences of the most privileged people in our society. Children should be protected. Children should be sheltered. Children shouldn’t have to work. As well-intended as these notions are, these expectations don’t match up to the realities of poor and otherwise marginalized children.

These laws and policies prevent children from working because, supposedly, we want to protect them from exploitation. But who protects children from poverty? Poor children find themselves at a painful crossroads, simultaneously experiencing the difficulties of poverty, and unable to do anything about it. It’s an immeasurably taxing situation to be in, and one that can’t be easily fixed.

Who protects children from poverty?
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Adults are privileged over children. We have more political, financial, and social power than our child counterparts. Of course, when we become adults, we’re expected to have certain responsibilities — responsibilities that can be burdensome, especially for poor and disabled people. These responsibilities are often what we discuss when we speak about “adulting.”

Many of our discussions around adulting center on dealing with bureaucracy, dealing with the medical-industrial complex, navigating governmental structures, taking care of ourselves, sorting out our finances, and doing domestic work. A lot of these activities aren’t easy for everyone. We know that banks, medical institutions, colleges, and government departments are seldom friendly and accessible spaces for trans, queer, disabled, poor, and otherwise marginalized people.

Sometimes, our discussions around adulting involve addressing that inaccessibility. In that sense, these conversations can be insightful. Our anxiety and frustration at broken and unfair systems must be discussed. But we also have to remember that adults aren’t the only people hurt by these systems.

I Grew Up Too Poor To Smile
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If a system is hard for an adult to navigate, imagine how difficult it would be for a lone child to navigate, especially if they didn’t have any adults supporting them. This isn’t only limited to poor children, but children facing emotional trauma too. I often complain about adulting when I have to make an appointment to see a doctor, but truthfully, I first took myself to a clinic when I was 12. I had just been sexually assaulted and I found out I was pregnant. I was afraid to tell anyone, so there I was, “adulting” alone. My situation was horrific, but far from unique. We often don’t want to admit that children are put in these positions because it’s painful to imagine — but we need to acknowledge that this is a reality, or we erase marginalized children altogether.

In some ways, these discussions remind us that adulthood and childhood are social constructs. There is no magic age where you stop feeling anxious whenever you make a doctor’s appointment, and there’s no expiration date on impostor syndrome. Many of us feel like confused children in adult bodies with adult responsibilities, and this is because we don’t automatically stop feeling like children as soon as we’re legally considered adults.

But on the other hand, our discussions about adulting shouldn’t presume that we’ve all had the same experience of childhood: one where we seldom deal with bureaucracy, where we weren’t faced with the financial burden of bills, where we’re protected.

Becoming an adult has brought me a great deal of joy and frustration. I find myself having to grow up, work, make major life decisions, take on responsibilities. But when I look at the struggles I face, I realize many aren’t exclusive to adults. When I complain about adulting, I’m not wishing for my childhood, but for one that was sheltered, stable, and peaceful.

In sharing our frustrations with the world, we should remember that many of our younger counterparts are facing the same challenges with less privilege. Adulting is difficult, but for the marginalized, childing is, too.

Conspicuous Consumption Is Over — It’s All About Intangibles Now

The troubling new way America’s top 1% reproduce their privilege ensures the middle class never has a shot to catch up.

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By Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

I n 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen observed that silver spoons and corsets were markers of elite social position. In Veblen’s now famous treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class, he coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ to denote the way that material objects were paraded as indicators of social position and status. More than 100 years later, conspicuous consumption is still part of the contemporary capitalist landscape, and yet today, luxury goods are significantly more accessible than in Veblen’s time.

This deluge of accessible luxury is a function of the mass-production economy of the 20th century, the outsourcing of production to China, and the cultivation of emerging markets where labour and materials are cheap. At the same time, we’ve seen the arrival of a middle-class consumer market that demands more material goods at cheaper price points.

However, the democratization of consumer goods has made them far less useful as a means of displaying status. In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags. They both lease SUVs, take airplanes, and go on cruises. On the surface, the ostensible consumer objects favored by these two groups no longer reside in two completely different universes.

Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars, the rich have taken to using much more tacit signifiers of their social position.

Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars, the rich have taken to using much more tacit signifiers of their social position. Yes, oligarchs and the superrich still show off their wealth with yachts and Bentleys and gated mansions. But the dramatic changes in elite spending are driven by a well-to-do, educated elite, or what I call the ‘aspirational class’. This new elite cements its status through prizing knowledge and building cultural capital, not to mention the spending habits that go with it — preferring to spend on services, education and human-capital investments over purely material goods. These new status behaviors are what I call ‘inconspicuous consumption’. None of the consumer choices that the term covers are inherently obvious or ostensibly material but they are, without question, exclusionary.

The rise of the aspirational class and its consumer habits is perhaps most salient in the United States. The U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey data reveals that, since 2007, the country’s top 1% (people earning upwards of $300,000 per year) are spending significantly less on material goods, while middle-income groups (earning approximately $70,000 per year) are spending the same, and their trend is upward. Eschewing an overt materialism, the rich are investing significantly more in education, retirement and health — all of which are immaterial, yet cost many times more than any handbag a middle-income consumer might buy. The top 1% now devote the greatest share of their expenditures to inconspicuous consumption, with education forming a significant portion of this spend (accounting for almost 6% of top 1% household expenditures, compared with just over 1% of middle-income spending). In fact, top 1% spending on education has increased 3.5 times since 1996, while middle-income spending on education has remained flat over the same time period.

Eschewing an overt materialism, the rich are investing significantly more in education, retirement and health — all of which are immaterial, yet cost many times more than any handbag a middle-income consumer might buy.

The vast chasm between middle-income and top 1% spending on education in the U.S. is particularly concerning because, unlike material goods, education has become more and more expensive in recent decades. Thus, there is a greater need to devote financial resources to education to be able to afford it at all. According to Consumer Expenditure Survey data from 2003–2013, the price of college tuition increased 80%, while the cost of women’s apparel increased by just 6% over the same period. Middle-class lack of investment in education doesn’t suggest a lack of prioritizing as much as it reveals that, for those in the 40th-60th quintiles, education is so cost-prohibitive it’s almost not worth trying to save for.

While much inconspicuous consumption is extremely expensive, it shows itself through less expensive but equally pronounced signaling — from reading The Economist to buying pasture-raised eggs. Inconspicuous consumption in other words, has become a shorthand through which the new elite signal their cultural capital to one another.

In lockstep with the invoice for private preschool comes the knowledge that one should pack the lunchbox with quinoa crackers and organic fruit.

In lockstep with the invoice for private preschool comes the knowledge that one should pack the lunchbox with quinoa crackers and organic fruit. One might think these culinary practices are a commonplace example of modern-day motherhood, but one only needs to step outside the upper-middle-class bubbles of the coastal cities of the U.S. to observe very different lunch-bag norms, consisting of processed snacks and practically no fruit. Similarly, while time in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City might make one think that every American mother breastfeeds her child for a year, national statistics report that only 27% of mothers fulfill this American Academy of Pediatrics goal (in Alabama, that figure hovers at 11%).

Knowing these seemingly inexpensive social norms is itself a rite of passage into today’s aspirational class. And that rite is far from costless: The Economist subscription might set one back only $100, but the awareness to subscribe and be seen with it tucked in one’s bag is likely the iterative result of spending time in elite social milieus and expensive educational institutions that prize this publication and discuss its contents.

Donald Trump Is A Rich Man’s Idea Of A Rich Man

Perhaps most importantly, the new investment in inconspicuous consumption reproduces privilege in a way that previous conspicuous consumption could not. Knowing which New Yorker articles to reference or what small talk to engage in at the local farmers’ market enables and displays the acquisition of cultural capital, thereby providing entry into social networks that, in turn, help to pave the way to elite jobs, key social and professional contacts, and private schools. In short, inconspicuous consumption confers social mobility.

More profoundly, investment in education, healthcare and retirement has a notable impact on consumers’ quality of life, and also on the future life chances of the next generation. Today’s inconspicuous consumption is a far more pernicious form of status spending than the conspicuous consumption of Veblen’s time. Inconspicuous consumption — whether breastfeeding or education — is a means to a better quality of life and improved social mobility for one’s own children, whereas conspicuous consumption is merely an end in itself — simply ostentation. For today’s aspirational class, inconspicuous consumption choices secure and preserve social status, even if they do not necessarily display it.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

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The idea that Trump’s gaudy excess is what poor people imagine of wealth is dangerously classist.

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“Donald Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man.” The phrase has become popular enough to be a cliche, circulating through much of the vast stores of critical media surrounding our 45th president. It pops up everywhere, from this 2015 Economist article, to an interview with Fran Leibowitz, to a Michelle Goldberg column on Slate, to this recent viral tweet by James F. Hanning II; clearly it’s an aphorism with legs. In the phrase of one stand-up comedian, Trump is specifically “what a hobo imagines a rich man to be.” Sometimes the idea is expressed in something more than nugget-of-wisdom form and explodes into an entire article, as it did in this scathing review of the Trump Grill in Vanity Fair, which tries to find Trump’s entire political philosophy in his gaudy aesthetic.

Yet each time this phrase rode past on the telegraph wires of my Twitter feed, I felt something wrong about it, marrow-deep.

This notion, supposedly a response to Trump’s vulgar displays of wealth, is extraordinarily dangerous. Whatever value it may have as a way to needle the staggeringly vainglorious billionaire, it loses in its extreme classism. Really think about it for more than a moment before you hit retweet: What are you saying about the poor when you take that sentiment at face value? What are you ignoring about Trump himself?

Trump isn’t a poor person’s idea of a rich man. He’s a rich man’s idea of a rich man. Specifically, his own.

So much of this “poor man’s idea of a rich man” sentiment trades on the idea that there’s something especially classless about Trump’s demeanour and lifestyle, which is undeniably true. But phrased this way, it leaves another idea unspoken: that the problem is less his wealth than how he displays it, and that there is an unproblematically noble way to be rich that is only spoiled by stupidly gauche poor people with their foolish notions of how to use money. In her interview on the subject, Fran Leibowitz said, “All that stuff he shows you in his house — the gold faucets — if you won the lottery, that’s what you’d buy.”

Trump isn’t a poor person’s idea of a rich man. He’s a rich man’s idea of a rich man. Specifically, his own.

Presumably Mitt Romney is the “right” kind of rich person, one who doesn’t buy gold faucets but adroitly robs people of their pensions instead?

Trump was born into and sustained by extreme privilege that gilded his life with one expensive unearned second chance after another. The idea of wealth he represents is unapologetically his own. There can be no doubt that he has associated his very name with a gold-plated concept of wealth. Amidst the smouldering wreckage of his many failed businesses and deals, one success stands out above them all: branding. Trumpian wealth is garish in its excess; even the gold is gold-plated. It’s offensive in its superfluousness and self-aggrandizement. Every unneeded flourish is a dictatorial tribute to his own vanity. But again, that is Trump’s own vision of his own privilege, inspired by nothing but his ego.

To give into the “poor man’s idea of a rich one” jibe is to participate in the pathetic internecine battles of the super-elite. It’s an insult from aristocratic “old money” meant to lacerate the self-esteem of “new money” and little else. When we repeat it, we’re merely waving foam fingers for Team Romney in the great dressage battle of billionaires. We say nothing meaningful, certainly nothing that could rise to the level of resistance. But we do advance a notion about the poor and working class of this country as uncultured and stupid, or as a people whose culture is only worth mockery and derision for being declasse. For many liberals and quite a few conservatives, too easily entranced by the polite exercise of power, style can matter more than substance.

Trumpian wealth is garish in its excess; even the gold is gold-plated.

This was always the problem with so much early opposition to Trump, especially on the political center and right: They objected to Trump’s boorishness rather than his politics per se. It was easy to fixate on all of the ways in which he was gauche and vulgar rather than how his cruelty stemmed from an honest expression of fascistic politics. Instead of scoffing at how Trump is a “poor man’s idea of a rich one,” these people should be asking “would a rich man’s idea of a rich man really be an improvement?” For those who truly are wealthy, or at least upper middle class, such a searching question might be unsettling for how it implicates them.

After all, one need only look at the Rococo period or the Palace of Versailles to know that extravagance to the point of obscenity has long been an aesthetic parlour game of the already wealthy, including those aristocrats who pooh-pooh the nouveau riche so much. Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan belong to the same hideous world.

But what actually is a poor person’s idea of a rich one? At least part of the currency of this anti-Trump jibe rests on the idea that it correctly recognizes Trump’s garishness as part of his appeal to underprivileged people. They’re impressed by the gold faucets and fancy-sounding Trump Grill(e) food, and it must make them like and trust him more as a successful man who knows what he’s about, yes?

Let me give my own, admittedly anecdotal, perspective on the matter.

I grew up in the Bronx, the daughter of a garbage man and a stay-at-home mom from a large Puerto Rican family where “success” meant landing a civil service job with benefits; there are a lot of postal workers in my extended family, and they’re the lucky ones.

What did “rich” mean to me as a kid? I think of what I saw in the media back then, growing up in the ’80s and ’90s. “Rich” was the Home Alone kid’s family. They had a house with stairs in it! He had the Smithsonian chemistry set I always wanted for Christmas but dad said he couldn’t afford! They get to fly on airplanes and American Airlines sent a van to pick them up at their house! In truth, they were a comfortably middle class family, but they looked rich to my eyes.

Poor People Deserve To Taste Something Other Than Shame

“Rich” was having a chimney Santa Claus could come down. It was having a refrigerator that made its own ice cubes. It was having a car that didn’t have 20-year-old cigarette stains on the backseat. It meant not learning what “repossession” was when I was in fifth grade. It was eating at a restaurant that wasn’t McDonald’s. “Rich” was Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in Dangerous Minds, or my white history teacher having a house in Rockland County. Frankly, “rich” often meant “white” in my neighborhood.

“Rich” meant not having to worry. Yes, it meant having a swimming pool and fancy crap, naturally. But to us all rich people looked frivolous with how they spent their money; middle class people did too. A second car? That came with power windows? Oh my stars. And why buy a Mercedes when a Toyota would do nicely? Everything looked like gravy, especially when all the benevolent rich guys on TV showed off — from Thomas Crown, who stole paintings because he was bored, to Richie Rich, who bought baseball fields for him and his friends to play in. Wealth looked like what it is under capitalism: unlimited excess, doing things because you can.

By pretending that only describes Trump, we let countless wealthy people off the hook — all of whom have, use, and buy plenty that is pure excess and frivolity. Just because it’s aesthetically pleasing in its minimalism, or brushed aluminium rather than gold-plated, doesn’t mean it’s a nobly ethical use of filthy lucre.

I freely admit my circumstances weren’t as dire as some. I belonged to what sociologist Loic Wacquant memorably called “the working class aristocracy.” My father’s job gave us health insurance, after all. For others in my family, being “rich” meant being able to go to the dentist. But really, this all makes the point: We didn’t dream of gold faucets, we dreamed of being free from want, something that was once thought of as a democratic right.

The sneering of some upper class liberals, therefore, misses the point entirely, and makes a real politics of resistance harder to realize. We cannot effectively organize if we fixate on Trump’s style in lieu of his policies, and contrary to the assertions of many a commentator, his tastelessness offers little insight into those politics.

This isn’t new, of course. In Canada we got a preview of Trump’s childish demagoguery in the person of the late Rob Ford, filthy-rich former mayor of Toronto. Local columnist Heather Mallick, a leftist who delights in her acerbic wit, turned it on, of all things, the suburban Ford family’s glassware.

In recounting a televized interview with Rob Ford’s mother and sister, Mallick asked her readers such probing questions as: “Why are there drink glasses sitting open on the sideboard next to the decanter? They get dusty unless they’re used daily. Are they? Why is the living room full of silvery spiky things that match Diane [Ford]’s jewelry?” She went on to observe, “It’s like one of those reality shows, I said to my viewing companion, and then realized that reality shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Hoarders are real and so are the Fords.” For those keeping score at home, what socio-economic class do the subjects of those reality shows belong to?

The entire column was devoid of any substance beyond sneering at the Fords’ bad taste; she even said that their wealth meant that they should’ve “bettered themselves morally and intellectually,” as though human history gives us the slightest reason to associate those things. As though the engines of capitalism can do anything other than deform morals with their perverse incentives and fell logics.

But therein lies the germ of the idea and all its horrors: the belief that more money should make you a good person. The entire, unbearable weight of our history, oozing as it does with the blood of crimes beyond counting, should put paid to this idea. It lies at the root of such inhumane drivel as Jason Chaffetz’ assertion that the poor should stop buying iPhones if they want health insurance — poverty is seen as a moral defect, wealth as a moral virtue.

Yet this idea persists, even left of center. If liberals are serious about resisting Trump, as I believe many are, then that means disabusing themselves of the comfortable received notions that enable and excuse men like him, even if they occasionally flatter our own meager successes. Trump has always been a despicable bigot and serial sexual harasser. If the “classy” rich people around him had done more than simply sneer, he might not be president today. The problem with Trump isn’t his overlong polyester neckties; it’s that he’s a fascist.

The problem with Trump isn’t his overlong polyester neckties; it’s that he’s a fascist.

What’s more, the flattering idea that only a poor yokel could be impressed by Trump is simply false. Trump’s heartland isn’t coal country, it’s in the middle class suburbs of Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Trump’s branding as a “self-made businessman who will be the CEO of America” didn’t just take in steelworkers, it took in plenty of accountants, lawyers, and executives as well, for reasons that have much more to do with his racist demagoguery than the impressiveness of his gold-plated whatevers.

Getting rid of Trump is a beginning, not an end. We will have to accept that capitalism’s production of Trump is a feature, not a bug. If we fail to acknowledge that, we are doomed to be ruled by all the other Trumps sprinkled throughout this monstrous socio-economic system. But hey, at least they might not leave their tumblers upturned by the decanter, right?

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/on-privilege-guilt-my-fraught-path-from-foster-care-to-luxury-high-rise-6d000d5fecc7/ Fri, 05 Feb 2016 02:13:01 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1727 Read more]]> Without remembering, I’m just another career-oriented White girl who wants a gym in her building. And I hate that girl.

“I want to make sure we have good light for the plants,” I tell my boyfriend of nearly four years. “So there should be big windows.”

I make a mental note of the granite bar in the open kitchen, the dishwasher, the circular basin bathroom sink, the rooftop deck with the living wall, and the shiny people at the juice bar — the juice bar — in the lobby.

I’m looking for my first real (read: not sharing with roommates) apartment, and when I’m not careful, I forget who I am and where I come from. This is dangerous. Without remembering, I’m just another career-oriented White girl who wants a gym in her building. And I hate that girl.

When we see the bedroom — which is technically a home office in New York City, per its lack of windows — we wonder how the darkness will affect our sleep cycles. But in the back of my mind I’m reminded of my teenage bedroom in the port of Newark, New Jersey, where one night my best friend and I tried to hair-spray the cockroaches away, only to make matters worse.

I slept in the center of my room on a mattress on the floor, as did my younger brother. I would sleep with the window open in the summer, while friends slept in cool, three-story homes on the better side of town. Our dinner was funded by food stamps; we washed the plates immediately lest the roaches come. The memories are of my little brother’s bedroom.

This room was the saddest of all. It didn’t have a window, and it was always dark, always filled with the sound of him playing by himself, a static television. I think now of the little pale boy, alone after school, sitting on his broken bed on the floor. How he didn’t know of the lack. How my mother took the living room couch as her bedroom. And the television with the aluminum foil.

Without remembering, I’m just another career-oriented White girl who wants a gym in her building. And I hate that girl.
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But we did have long white curtains, and if I closed my eyes just slightly, they seemed beautiful. Like the balcony apartments on Riverside Drive where writers in movies always lived.

When I finally signed our lease, I felt guilty. Guilt that I left behind those days of poverty and had all that I do now: my own sauna, the cobblestone square and its French wine bars outside, the option to have things I want. Mostly, I was mourning the loss of the 14-year-old girl who never wanted anything but to write and to be happy. Who wanted her mother to have another work shirt, a dinner that didn’t come from the bodega. That 14-year-old shaped me. But here I have the 30-year-old with the fancy job and the gone-into-debt credentials. I can never let her shape me.

When I told my partner this, he said, “That’s fucked. You worked yourself to death for this this. You work more than anyone I know. You put yourself through six years of university. You sacrificed everything, and we’re still paying more than we probably should be. We’re pushing our limits.”

What we’re paying is three-and-a-half times the amount that my mother — after she got custody of us again — paid to live in a small house in the rural hills that had enough bedrooms for everyone. Put that into perspective.

It takes a certain level of privilege to even get to a place where I can pay my rent as a writer and editor. As I look out at the financial district from the seventh floor, I take measurements for the window seat and think about how my partner could be right.

I went into extreme debt, worked countless jobs and had no parental help, no safety net — nothing but my own resiliency. All I wanted was stability, and so my work-hard strategy has been advantageous.

Those In Poverty: You Aren’t Responsible For Making Your Family Comfortable
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Weirdly, all of this makes me less inclined to invite my mother over to my new fancy apartment, as if now I’ve changed, am entitled to these luxuries, as if I’ve forgotten about being chased by the pretty girls after school because I wore brandless sneakers. I don’t want my mother to think I’m other now. I have not forgotten where I’m from, I tell her, but good god, I don’t want to wax all Jenny from the Block here.

My mother wants me to have everything and has never, ever implied anything else besides sheer exultation. But her just-don’t-be-like-me only makes me feel guiltier. I think of her in her tiny New Jersey apartment. I think of how hard she works for less-than-enough.

My path from rags to more-than-enough has been strange, punctuated by privileged variables.

When I was 16, we ended up in foster care. My mother couldn’t afford to care for us because of an addiction to hard drugs and bad men, and so we were sent away. First we lived with family, then we lived with people we didn’t know; my brother and I were separated.

This is, ironically, how life got better.

My boyfriend at the time didn’t want me lost in the system, and so his family, a couple of New York City artists, rifled generously through their rolodex. They knew of an older couple in New Jersey who owned their own esteemed theater company. They’d taken in foster kids before, and so I moved in with them one sunny day. I still remember the fancy rotary phone in my new bedroom sitting painting-like on the white oak desk at the window.

The couple were quirky, intellectual, fiscally Republican, and they lived in an affluent town, Westfield, where the high school was jokingly referred to as Westfield University.

There, I could take an English class about existential literature, so I was 17 reading Camus. I would think about how I am an agent of personal responsibility. And then I’d walk back to my upper-middle-class foster parents’ house. A big blue house. Furniture no one sat on. Constant vocal technique practice. (Think Running With Scissors, Broadway-style.)

And me, the dirty foster kid, putting on my airs, staying tucked away.

Actually, I blossomed. Their rigid expectations meant I would go to class, and I would pass the class. They got me a job at the local newspaper. They taught me about cuisine and art. They decorated with Degas. And so, I had my experience with privilege, and because of that (and my own desire to not recreate my mother’s life), I got into college and later, into graduate school.

If I didn’t have all of that, I wonder if I would have had what I have now. I might have failed all of my classes in a depressive anger, suffering from separation anxiety and PTSD. Even though my dream was to write and edit, I would likely be the person wishing fucking hard for it, not the person negotiating for more money because I can.

But in this disparate new life, I feel my past-self is more real. Going from foster care to a luxury high rise is not lost on me. I can’t enjoy the steam room without thinking too hard, because normalizing privilege is dangerous to community and to the nation. Maybe I’m a poor girl at heart? Maybe the answer is to take what I have and share it with others, helping other women empower themselves to do better, be better, and take care of themselves.

And whether or not I want to admit it, my body is part of the privileged class, even if my heart isn’t. It’s tough to swallow, tough to convey, and I’m always checking myself and remembering myself.