Rich people don't know that poor people can be smart

I’m going to get a little personal on the substack here, but I think it’s necessary. My feelings and thoughts on this topic are especially informed by my experience, and my experience is sort of unique. So first off, here’s a bit of background.

I grew up very privileged. Both of my parents come from a lot of privilege. Both sides of the extended family are what we would call “high achieving”—advanced university degrees, upwardly mobile, leaders in their field, international travel in the summer, intact marriages with 2.5 children and a boutique dog, the whole bit. My hometown is a university town, but not just any university town; it’s the home of a giant, prestigious research powerhouse that has ballooned in size and acclaim during my lifetime. The kind of rich people I have experience with are of what Barbara Ehrenreich would call the “professional-managerial class”, or PMC. I expected that I would (and was expected to) join the ranks of the overeducated PMC, that I would have a job with healthcare and a 401k by the time I was 25, or 30 at the very latest (if I decided to go to get a DMin or a PhD, which was on the docket). However, despite my family’s second home, fridge overflowing with food, and 2 cars in the garage, all was not well, not at all. Because of all the layers of bad stuff that happened at home and elsewhere, I got really sick. I failed classes all through middle and high school, spent a lot of time in hospitals, and was generally non-functional for about a decade. At one point in there I somehow managed to wind up at a stodgy music college—then I dropped out. Because of my family’s wealth, I never wound up homeless or without food, but I also definitely never got a 401k. And I also never got overeducated. I never even got a bachelor’s. (Here I think it’s orienting to note that neither do most Americans.) I’ve done wage labor to sustain myself for my whole working life. I don’t pretend to be under the same economic conditions as people who come from generations of low-wage earners, nor the same social conditions: I can still pass as rich and educated; I know which fork to use, and the names of all the people on NPR. But I’m downwardly mobile, that’s for damn sure. I made about $18k in 2022. My life is not full of occasions where I would need to know which fork to use.

Rich people aren’t born thinking they’re smarter than poor people, but the training starts early. I know this from experience. For the first few years of my life, we lived in the X-urbs west of town, so I was enrolled in the rural school district instead of the cosmopolitan one. A lot of kids I knew talked differently than my family did, differently than the families at the cooperative hippie preschool I’d gone to in the city. I came home from kindergarten saying things like “I seen my friends” and “I done my work.” I don’t have a distinct memory of getting corrected on these by my parents, but I do remember the visceral feeling they instilled in me that the word “ain’t” was as taboo as the word “frickin’”. And I remember being told clearly on multiple occasions not to drop my g’s because people would think I was stupid. When I was 12, I got a (highly illegal) job in a kitchen in a rural town. I asked my manager where she had gone to college, because that was the kind of question I knew to ask adults. She looked at with an expression I had never seen before and told me shortly, “I never went to college.” I vaguely assumed that that was because she was too dumb to get in, because that was how things worked. This assumption was bolstered by the fact that she said things like “I ain’t seen the boss around in a while”, which, I had been taught, was the kind of thing that dumb people say.

I have worked mostly with people who say things like “ain’t” for my whole adult life. Some of them really are dumb. But a greater number of them are smart. And I don’t mean “smart” like “working class smart”, a concept I have actually heard discussed by highly university-accredited people I know, wherein working people have special kinds of intelligence that come from working with their hands.¹ I mean actually smart, like the kind of smart you need to be to read Kirkegaard or do calculus. A few people I have worked with in kitchens thought much more flexibly and clearly than most legacy grad students I know. And—get this—those extremely smart people sometimes said things like “ain’t”.

Throughout my life I’ve had plenty of smart friends who grew up poor, but many of them have been middle-class-passing: they went to university, they worked office jobs, and they wouldn’t split infinitives in front of me, let alone drop their g’s. They read Chaucer and watched auteur filmmakers I had never heard of. They pursued careers. I believed they were smart. For many years, I believed they were smart because they proved it to me by following middle class scripts, by demonstrating their intelligence according to the narrow terms my rich-trained brain was able to comprehend. I still believe those people are smart, but now I would believe they were smart even if they said “ain’t” in my presence, if they dared to do something poor-coded like smoke a Newport, even if they didn’t pursue a career.

Because I’m twentysomething, I like to go to bars and parties and stuff to meet new people. I live in a town where almost everyone else my age is a grad student. I’m not. I’m a cook in a brunch place. Before that, I was a nanny. Before that, I worked on a farm. Before that, I worked in cafés. (The list goes in in a similar vein.) At parties, a common opener is, “What program are you in?” I frequently have the experience of watching people’s eyes glaze over when I tell them I am not in a program, and what I do for work instead. People quickly run out of follow-up questions, and often outright lose interest. Which is allowed. But it is really noticeable. I’m sympathetic to the would-be friends I meet at grad student parties who dismiss me out of hand, though. If my life had gone according to script, if the training had stuck, I would dismiss current-me. If I’m being honest with myself, I probably wouldn’t accept that smart ain’t-sayers were actually smart if I hadn’t been shut out of elite life myself, if I hadn’t been forced to hold my ability to work with ideas and low-wage labor as equally true parts of my experience.

I want to make it clear that I’m not saying the solution is to make PMC academic spaces more accessible to ain’t-sayers.² What I actually think is that rich people don’t deserve to frame them(our?)selves as having a monopoly on intelligence, because they (we?) don’t. As my buddy Phil often says, “intelligence isn’t rare.” I am really coming to believe, though, that a lot of what the PMC takes to be “intelligence” is soft skills, mostly just upper-class carriage and motifs. It’s MLA format, it’s knowing how to sound insightful but not dickish at an office cocktail party. I really, really don’t think it’s a terrribly worthwhile end to teach ain’t-sayers these things, or anyone else. I think it’s much more worthwhile for rich people to give a shit what poor people have to say, whether or not those poor people look and sound poor, whether or not they want to get a four-year degree. I think rich people—ESPECIALLY academics—could really benefit from the understanding that a person can both work construction AND understand abstract algebra, can say “ain’t” while they learn Attic Greek. An understanding like that would help keep the overeducated from becoming condescending assholes to the rest of us. And that could help us on our way to being curious about each other across class differences. And (not to be too idealistic about it) that’s what we need if we are to have any chance at a better future. Of course, people much smarter than me have been working on this project for seemingly as long as there have been rich people and poor people, and unfortunately, this is how far we have come. I hope we can go farther. Probably I would have a better time at parties.

1. I’m not sure where this idea comes from, so I can’t cite it or contend with it directly. If I’m being generous, I expect that in its original form it names something real: if you work with your hands instead of concepts, those are the skills that you will hone. And I definitely agree with that; I would pay to see an insurance agent try to work the dish pit at Sunday brunch, for example. But the way I’ve heard this idea deployed sounds a lot more like “So you see, poor people have their own special intelligence, which is not like our intelligence, but it’s actually not as useless as you would think.”

2. Of course a good education should be accessible to anyone who wants one, but not everyone should have to want one, and a comfortable life should be an option without one. And I actually think a robust life of the mind is completely distinct from a formal education, but more on that some other time.