How Their Silence Diminishes Us

Dear [REDACTED],

I’ve started this letter too many times. A few weeks ago, we stood at opposite ends of a small apartment. I’m new to being part of gatherings like this, so I watched warily from the sidelines of the pong game. Your opponent messed up, and you stood a little taller and spoke a little louder: “What the fuck is wrong with you, man? What is this, a state school?” Nobody reacted to that. Nobody reacted later when you made a joke about scholarship kids. Nobody reacted again when word spread of you scrolling through our current student website to laugh at where people went for undergrad. Nobody said a thing.

Have you ever been hungry? There are different ways to starve. When the fridge is empty and your mom won’t fill it because she won’t be a “welfare abuser”—that’s starving. That’s when you learn there such a thing as being too poor. Maybe that’s the first time I felt class shame, when it was better to be hungry than to need help. I felt that way again standing across from you. Maybe I could have walked it off if the feeling stayed there, in that room, but it didn’t. I heard you in the silence of my friends, my colleagues. I heard you when I called my mom later that week to talk about my thesis, and she told me she didn’t understand why I kept working so hard. She says I’ve already proved myself. She says I came from nothing and made myself something.

I’m something because I did well enough in high school, better in community college, and really good in undergrad. I read as if the books could fill my empty stomach, and I learned how to assimilate myself into an educated middle-class. I stopped wearing flannels and camouflage, and I only mentioned my hometown as the punchline for a joke. I wanted to be someone important, not just a kid from the middle of nowhere, not nothing.

There’s a secret whispered throughout the hidden curriculum, and it’s that you must pick a side. So I burnt down my own history. As Matthew Ferrence says, people like me have a choice: we either “embody the stereotype” of the rural working class or “abdicate” our roots.  What else was I supposed to do? Now, I sometimes wonder if I chose wrong.

Maybe you won’t believe me. Maybe, to you, I’m still nothing. You apparently don’t find it relevant that we’ve landed at the same prestigious university and study in the same program. It surprises me that it was actually here, at this place I wasn’t sure I belonged, where you seem to be certain that I don’t, that I learned about working-class studies. It was the first time I identified the crossroads where I exist. Alfred Lubrano describes it as being “two people.” Sandra Dahlberg calls it a “dual existence.” Renny Christopher listens to Bruce Springsteen and wonders, if we are born to run, where do we run to? Christopher points out that “when Jefferson wrote ‘All men are created equal,’ it was not my ancestors he had in mind. And I can never get very far from that fact” (my emphasis). Look these people up. Lubrano is an award-winning journalist. Dahlberg is a professor.  Christopher is a Vice-Chancellor. Whatever you hope to be one day, they’ve already done it.

Another scholar in this field, Allison L. Hurst writes that, even if most of us no longer believe in meritocracy (a key part of the American Dream), we still act as if it’s true. This isn’t on purpose. Even when we’re starving, we can get full on the hope that hard work will pull us into something better—even when it still leaves us hungry. Even when we know better. I thought I’d feel like I obtained the Dream once I got my associate degree. Then I thought it would come when I got my bachelor’s, and now the hope has been kicked down to my master’s. And with that degree in sight, I’ve started imagining the inevitable happiness I will feel upon earning my PhD. Success is always in the future. It’s always the thing I am reaching towards. And the further I move in that direction, the more I feel myself moving away from where I came from.

Working-class academics don’t just battle the class ceiling. As you move up, so does the floor. The ceiling does not move. You earn enough degrees until you’re smushed like a specimen under a microscope. You feel exposed, scrutinized, but you can also see in both directions—and you find that you’re not welcome to move either way. Maybe that’s what Lubrano means by limbo. That’s where I have been. It’s where I was when your terrible voice came booming in — flattened between two panes that I can’t help but feel responsible for. But then I reflect on what was not in my control.

If I could bottle up a smell for you, it would be this: mac and cheese burning on the stove, as one child cooks for another, combined with the grease on my mother when she comes home long after dark. I was the parent to my younger brother after our dad passed. Mom had to work twice as much as before, and we couldn’t afford to hire help or send us to any after-school care.  Things would have been so different for all of us if we had half the privilege you do, and we wouldn’t have taken it for granted.

Do you hear me, [REDACTED]? What did you do after school? I raised a kid. I grieved and cooked and worked and read and wrote and studied. I have been laying bricks with my bare hands for 24 years; I built the entire path I walked to get here. I didn’t deserve to hear you talk like I didn’t exist, like all the people like me didn’t exist—or if we did, we didn’t matter. I didn’t deserve to hear silence from my friends. That moment made me sad, but I’m working to turn that sadness into anger. I want to use anger like fuel, like the gasoline that stained my mom’s hands after a day working at the garage.

But even with that fuel, with these degrees, with this letter, you will still exist. So many people like you will. I can’t always be mad. The thing that scares me most after all my work is how quickly the words of some privileged jerk can erase me. You spoke me out of existence, and everyone else allowed it to happen. My colleagues let it happen. And I can never get very far from that fact.

Rin Baker

Rin Baker is a first-generation graduate student with degrees in English and Educational Studies. Her work focuses on working-class experiences in U.S. higher education, with emphasis on students with rural backgrounds.