#class discourse

Ive grown up poor. I had no one in my corner at all, ever. I was failed by the healthcare, mental health, and family care system over and over. I was bullied severely. And yet, I never called anyone slurs. And yet, I never went right wing out of 'self defense'. It's a fucking weak argument to say that his environment shaped him and he had no further common sense to be a better person?

I work with people who have been in and out of prison multiple times. Many of them have not only committed crimes, but have also struggled with serious drug addictions, particularly heroin. The vast majority come from deeply devastated environments, shaped by poverty, institutional neglect, structural violence, and complete emotional abandonment, situations so extreme that most of your moral judgments would crumble if you spent five minutes face to face with them. I’m talking about people who started using heroin at 13 or 14. People who had no support networks, no resources, no guidance, no actual options outside of what their environment imposed on them. People who formed emotional bonds and loyalties in violent, abusive contexts simply because that was the only form of connection or care they had access to.

And you’re telling me —someone who sees, every single day, how material conditions weigh on people’s bodies and lives— that I should focus on the exceptional cases? The ones who did make it out? The ones who didn’t “turn bad”? You really expect me to ignore systemic realities and center moralistic exceptions, as if virtue were some innate, individual quality instead of something profoundly shaped by class position, access to education, mental health care, and safe environments?

Sorry, but that’s pure neoliberal thinking. That’s exactly the kind of discourse that blames the poor for their own poverty. It’s the same meritocratic narrative that says, “If I could do it, anyone can,” as if everyone starts from the same place, as if growing up in hell doesn’t shape the way people make choices. It’s a fallacy, and it’s deeply classist. And yes, you can be poor and classist, just like you can be oppressed and still reproduce oppressive narratives. That’s because the system teaches you to hate yourself, to compete, to cling to figures of power even when they destroy you. This is not about justifying everything, it’s about understanding things through a material lens.

The issue isn’t whether there are poor people who don’t use slurs or who don’t turn to the right, of course there are, just like there are rich people who don’t either. The issue is demanding moral superiority from the oppressed in order to make them worthy of empathy or analysis, while refusing to apply any structural understanding to their behavior. That’s a double standard. If you only use individual morality as your framework, then you’re reproducing the same logic of punishment that puts poor people in prison while letting rich criminals walk free.

I once went grocery shopping with a classmate who was taking the course because everyone ~else~ in her family had at least a Master’s so she felt she ought to as well.  We were staying at her family’s ~summer cottage~ and I wanted to bake a cake. I went through and selected ingredients like I normally do; she looked in my cart and said, “Why did you get the crappy chocolate?” and took half the items out of it to replace them with higher-quality versions. I’d automatically picked out the least expensive items.

She didn’t mean anything by it, but that memory still makes me burn with feelings of shame and inadequacy.