[Bonus] Classy

Lots of links on the slippery concept of economic class

Welcome to Wandering Grace. I will be sharing essays exploring the themes of place and (be)longing every other Thursday, and bonus snapshots from the road on alternating Sundays. Read more about the project here. See an archived list of essays in-order here.

Today, on the heels of my essay talking about the multiverses of land, privilege, and lineage in traveling from Bellweather into Sonoma County before returning to Oregon, I wanted to share some of the resources that have helped me reflect on and name economic class.

I’m actively working on the next essay about my 10-day break in Oregon in-between the northern California and southern California legs of my Healing Pilgrimage — it’s about the different ways we can run away from reality even when we are ostensibly sitting still.

Thank you for reading and sharing and engaging with this writing — and for supporting the work in whatever ways you can.

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One challenge of writing about my time in and out of Petaluma is how I’ve learned that it’s impolite to point out people’s wealth in ways that might make them uncomfortable. Another challenge is I don’t know where I sit in terms of class: I’ve woven in and out of different economic classes and have somehow retained the limiting mindsets of my working class upbringing while ALSO having taken on the limiting baggage of shame and guilt of middle class privilege (both of which obscure the real and atrocious inequity¹ between the wealthiest owning class and most of the rest of us.)

Class is weird! Class is so weird to talk about. And deliberately so. Self-reinforced by how much we don’t talk about it.

There are other essays to be wormed through and worked out about how class + coops + access to privilege and land and housing and (tech) wealth and (generational) wealth get very tangled up — especially in the Bay Area, and a not-insignificant factor in my own Oregon story. But today is just a resource guide of trailheads and rabbitholes about class that have been informing how I have gotten clearer in starting to name and talk about these intangible, uncomfortable things.

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Sacrificing Coordinates of Belonging for Coordinates of Colonial Power

If you engage with nothing else from this post!, please watch this instagram reel from Leah Manaema Avene (sharing open sourcery from herself and colleage Tiriki Onus) about self-sovereignty within constellated fields of belonging. I am obsessed.²

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A post shared by @co_cu1tur3

She draws fields of belongings wherein indigenous communities and people who are embedded in cultures can locate themselves by sharing about their relationship to their lands, and to their ancestors, and to their commitments and responsibilities, and by the stories from their bloodlines, and through naming requests and offerings and yearnings and griefs.

“A lot of us who lived under the delusion that being middle class or educated or having worked and assimilated really successfully would protect us, and nothing will protect us. The only thing we have is each other.

Unfortunately, intergenerationally, we are exposed to systems that reward us for sacrificing these coordinates of belonging and replacing them instead with coordinates of power, colonial power…I can flex my credentials and why I’m qualified, but it makes me really uncomfortable.

I’d rather tell you my bloodline is born in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and my ancestors before me traveled across that ocean to find land and that on my mother’s side we left Ireland many generations ago and haven’t quite found our way home to our belonging and I want to tell you that I grew up on [these] lands and I participated in erasure narratives of First Nations people in this southeast corner of Australia because that was what I was taught and most of my life I disrespected this land and disrespected these stories and participated in upholding the ongoing invasion and now as part of my healing I understand how important it is for me to reverse that and to refuse that and to participate in singing up the stories that will inevitably lead to the restoration of this land into the care of first peoples.

I’d rather locate myself that way because anyone moving towards that way is with me, and we are connected.”

There is something really real about the ways we sacrifice belonging as we ascend the ladders of the storied “American Dream” and take on some of the privileges afforded to middle, upper, owning class people.

Because class = culture. Moving class requires a form of assimilation.

In many of the money witch, woo woo money offerings I have engaged with (thank you to teachers such as Dez Davis, Meenadchi, Sophie Macklin), there is a theme — especially among young people of color (or people of the global majority) in America — of feeling like you are betraying your family or your people or your past if you start to make more money, if you transcend the class you grew up in. Part of these workshops is about freeing ourselves from the self-sabotaging and/or self-sacrificing habits and mindsets that keep us small in the face of possible resource and potential abundance.