Classism

1. Describe an experience where you were privileged or advantaged due to your class/socio-economic status.

         I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but I can’t really come up with an idea. I haven’t really found any instances where I was privileged because of my socio-economic status. I know that one time my family had to use the Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program (WIC) when I was younger. I do not know if this would be considered a privilege because my family was a low-income one, but it allowed my family to buy food.

2. Describe an experience where you were oppressed or disadvantaged due to your class/socio-economic status.

         One time during the summer my family and I were driving around Rhode Island. We went to Providence for the day, but as we don’t know the area very well we couldn’t really find a good restaurant. We passed by a couple of them, but they were very fancy ones. We didn’t try to go in since we didn’t think we could afford the food. Plus, we weren’t dressed in any nice clothes and we noticed that everyone going inside the restaurant were wearing formal clothes.

3. Write about an experience where you witnessed an incident of classism (remark, behavior, attitude) and your reaction to it.

         When I was in high school we had some other students from a neighboring town, but this town had a very bad reputation for being a poor one. I know that a lot of students talked about how “ghetto” these students were or how trashy the town was. Even other students from that town would talk about how trashy it was or how the people were ghetto. I would usually join in as well even though I had friends from the town, and I knew not everyone was like that.