Raised Poor and Working Class, Currently Middle Class
I participated in a Raised Poor and Working Class, Currently Middle Class, Workshop. It was led by Dorothy Marcy [the Regional Reference Person for Memphis, Tennessee, USA; and Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Mississippi, USA; and the Area Reference Person for Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA]. About forty-five Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)* people attended. It was an important workshop for me as a raised-poor woman of African descent. Dorothy was a good example of how powerful, inspiring, and connected a Black leader can be. She led with humor, determination, and decisiveness. [*The peoples of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and those descended from them, and Indigenous people, are over eighty percent of the global population. These people also occupy most of the global land mass. Using the term “Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)” for these people acknowledges their majority status in the world and interrupts how the dominant (U.S. and European) culture assigns them a minority status. Many Global Majority and Indigenous people living in dominant-culture countries have been assimilated into the dominant culture—by force, in order to survive, in seeking a better life for themselves and their families, or in pursuing the economic, political, or other inclusion of their communities. Calling these people “Global Majority and Indigenous” contradicts the assimilation.]
When I was a young girl, my family sent me from the Caribbean to the European continent to get a middle-class life. I lived in a white Dutch middle-class environment in the Netherlands and adapted to the white middle-class way of life.
In my Co-Counseling sessions, I reach out to that girl and discharge feeling bad about myself. I can now remember that I am a powerful person—and intelligent, good, and creative. I am in charge of my life as a Black woman who is currently living a middle-class life.
As a child I witnessed how hard those around me worked to survive. They tried to give their children a better life than they had had. They did everything possible so we would have enough food, and enough money for school and schoolbooks. That took all their attention; there was little attention for my siblings and me.
They wanted us to have a better life than they had had, to have more opportunities, to escape the poverty. A middle-class life would supposedly “save” us from poverty and give us more prestige and status as GMI people. We would be confronted less often with our internalized oppression. Initially we believed that, but it turned out to be [resulted in being] a big lie!
Dorothy asked us to share what we remembered about our upbringings as poor working-class people. Here are some of the comments:
- We could be loud.
- We were not afraid to fight.
- We didn’t pretend to be someone else.
- We shared the bathroom with several people at the same time.
- We did things together and had fun.
- Many of us had a nickname.
- We sometimes acted out internalized oppression at each other—for example, by criticizing each other’s clothes.
We need to do the following:
- Reclaim our brilliant minds
- Have our voices
- Write
- Cooperate
- Be allies for each other
- Build a sustainable society based on human needs instead of greed
- Organize our lives around liberation, not around security, comfort, and greed
- Discharge about anything we love about capitalism, what we would hate to lose if capitalism ended, and how the collapse of capitalism is hurting us
- Be RC leaders, do the work together and back [support] each other
- Speak out about the climate crisis—our people know how to solve problems
- Not wait until we discharge enough—decide, act, discharge!
- Not waste time on “not being smart enough”
In Co-Counseling sessions, we can ask ourselves why we chose to live middle-class lives.
Arnhem, the Netherlands
(Present Time 207, April 2022)