White Men Rule

[amandabeech]

168. I'm from a working/lower class background. I received my A.B. from a "Public Ivy."

I walked into the Ivy professional school that had deigned to accept me for my first day of classes wearing flair leg men's jeans, some sort of tee shirt and a short shag haircut.

I found myself surrounded by a sea of pink oxford shirts, chinos and various types of slip on shoes without socks. The girls sometimes wore chino skirts or a skirt made of 4-square-inch swatches of madras put together like the top of the quilt. I think that LL Bean still offers these. And pink oxford button downs.

Right down the street was the J. Press men's clothing store that makes Brooks Brothers and Paul Stewart look like they came off French and Italian runways, respectively.

I'm from Michigan, and my favorite uncle worked on the line in G.M.'s Fisher Body plant in Grand Rapids, MI, and I tried to convince my friends that the death of manufacturing in the U.S. would destroy us as a country. I even mentioned WWII as a time when people learned the value of each other across social lines. A member of a MAJOR U.S. Democratic family attended at the time, and I knew the guy a little--he earned his way in, took his studies seriously and was a decent guy. But his reaction to me after one of my mini-speeches was to laugh a bit, say that I was cute and start calling me "the little populist," which spread like flies over the non-chemical fertilizer at my Grandmother's dairy farm.

Needless to say, I haven't made it in my career, although part of it has been the necessity to return to Michigan to help aging relatives, but part of it has been my own dumb mistakes, the first of which was marching off to Ivy league grad school.

Class does matter. It is possible, with help, to purchase camouflage clothing, particularly if you have a friend to say "yea or nay". Nonetheless, a lower, working or lower class person is painfully obvious to everyone else.