Beyond Selidor

So, I've been thinking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. I've been reading up on it (We Are the 99 Percent is a good place to start) and thinking and thinking. In many ways, the Australian experience is the same as the American one. You don't mention class. Apparently, we are a 'classless society'. Words like 'egalitarian' get flung about. It's as if by avoiding discussing class, we can pretend it's not there. But it's there.

I am upper middle class. I know this because of things like the jobs my parents had, the overseas trips we took for holidays, the piano lessons and gymnastics classes and maths tutoring, the fact that when something was wrong, my mother would be making outraged telephone calls to the school, because you would never find sliced bread or supermarket own-brand products or ready-meals or junk food as snacks in our house, that my mother has never eaten at McDonald's or Pizza Hut or Hungry Jack's or KFC in her life, because those things were DISGUSTING, because we went to art school and music school in the summer holidays, because we were told not to speak 'with a rising inflection', to hold our pencils correctly 'because otherwise people will think you have been poorly-educated and you won't get a job'. And because we noticed when these things weren't present in our friend's houses or upbringings, and we knew that you weren't meant to mention it. You averted your eyes.

I also know that my mother was the first person in her family to go to university, that her parents clawed their way out of the working class with their fingernails, and that their status was precarious, that my mother was embarrassed when people visited her house because it had bare floorboards instead of carpet, and it was her awareness of things like this, little markers of difference, that was responsible for her losing her faith at the age of sixteen. I'm certain we're not the one percent, but I'm not sure if we are the 99 percent.

I say all this as a preamble to the real purpose of this post, which is to link to this utterly beautiful piece of writing by the indescribably wonderful Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown. She writes of her experiences of class and privilege in the United States, her unease with the '99 percent' label, and comes to this conclusion:

The more I write, the more I know this: “Objectivity” is nowhere to be found on this Earth. Everything you are, as a writer or an activist — every place you come from, everything you’ve learned — is called upon, every time you set forth to speak or to change the world. The less we know what we carry, the more it undermines everything we do. And to write from one’s own experience, to construct a biography, is to understand where one connects with the world. This is specifically a biography of class. But I see gender, in this history, very clearly; I see heterosexuality, and I see race, and I see disability; I see location in time and space, and don’t believe any of these things are fundamentally separate from the ways money and culture (and culture is money, of course, always was; “taste” has never been an absolute good, never divorced from the reality of production and consumers) construct our lives in the world.

If you read one thing about Occupy Wall Street, read this.