Jacob Malone
When I look back at my college career, I always come back to my introductory weeks as a first year. It was a terrifying time of anxiety between new classes, strange people and an alien party scene. I was completely out of my element. But, of everything I was anxious about, one thing always sticks out: the simple question, “So what do your parents do?” I’ll never know how every conversation or ice breaker came to the topic, but I remember always talking with people about the careers their parents had built. The common answers were things like lawyers, doctors, therapists, professors, engineers, and a few working class careers like mechanics or small business owners. I always remembered hearing a string of happy, healthy parents behind every new first year I met, yet I was anxious. In the end, the question would come to me, and I’d have to say, “My mom is chronically unemployed and I don’t have a father.” I always felt added tension as people attempted to respond. Some responded with sympathy, some with pity, and others failed to find a response. The conversation just died at that point. By admitting that knowledge, which is still true today, and watching the reactions that followed, an apparent fact was reinforced: I didn’t fit in because of my socioeconomic background.
My experiences with poverty have been real and life changing. I’ve moved around a lot from relatives to kind neighbors, I’ve lost my home on many occasions, I’ve gone without clean clothes and adequate food, and, in winter months like now, I’ve had little or no heat. But it seems like this campus is mostly ignorant to these troubles. From my experience with sociology and anthropology classes, I have seen professors teach about poverty like it is worlds away and I’ve witnessed students battle with the simple concepts that some people are born with an economic disadvantage and that the system holds many people back. We discussed what food stamps were and talked about shelters like intangible myths from a lost culture, and everyday it became apparent that most students had never had an experience with poverty beyond the television screen. This display of socioeconomic ignorance is disheartening. We are supposed to be a group of “diverse” people, yet we forget that diversity may also refer to the money in our pockets (or lack thereof) or the place in society we were given.
Let me ask a few questions. What are survival economies, and are they all legal? What does a full-time employee make on minimum wage, and how does that compare to regular expenses? What programs exist to help people in crisis? Some questions may be closer to home: What is the process to becoming an independent student on campus and what does that mean? How does break (which tends to start early in the day on Friday) affect families who work for hourly wages? How does our school’s rich reputation affect students from low-income backgrounds and assumptions made about our students? These are voiceless questions on our campus. We have groups that speak up about racial, ethnic, sexual, LGBT and religious diversity and rights, yet I have not seen an event around socioeconomic class and its struggles. We forget or avoid these important questions and others every day. Maybe I’m missing those discussions, or maybe they are hiding under the radar, but it is my opinion that this college, and the student body, fails to take these issues seriously. We push poverty aside and focus on other topics we deem more important, and everyday students may feel more discouraged in our community.
Every day since I started attending classes at the College of Wooster, I’ve felt different. I knew that my experiences did not match many other students on this campus, but I’ve never known how to talk about it. I’m asking that the campus reflect on personal and collective goals, think about our actions towards social justice and bring a new topic into the folds of our social change on campus. I’ve waited four years to bring class issues to this college, and I don’t want another student to spend four years feeling isolated or forgotten anymore.