The high cost of class-climbing

A dive into my psyche

Few topics make me more emotional than the politics of the educated class, as many readers have no doubt noticed. This is the most personal of what you’ve seen so far. I want to state at the outset that I’m not looking for pity but illustrating how and why I reached these conclusions. I’ve been working through the psychological injuries of rich kids for the last several years, and it’s far from over. As adults, those people are now telling me what to think and narrowing the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the name of justice. It often feels more like a conflict over manners than ideas about material reality.

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I must believe that a female president will be better than a male one and that racial identity determines morality. The rich girls who treated me as lesser because my parents weren’t wealthy and my clothes weren’t brand-name are the ones policing language and telling me I need to accept the New Gender Ideology on pain of being cast out of polite society. 

The superficial girls who have grown up to be vacuous women (who usually don’t read a lick of non-fiction) now control the social mores of bourgeois society and determine who gets to be part of the group. And their politics are about group cohesion more than ideas. Members must pledge loyalty to the correct beliefs about race and gender and must studiously ignore that they’re participating in a class project obscured by identity politics. The class project involves the denigration and exclusion of people without degrees (most people of color also don’t have degrees) from the spoils of white-collar jobs and the creation of an echo chamber. Peak woke hasn’t yet passed - as long as college-educated women believe these wrong ideas, things will not change. And they’ve made sure no one can question them on pain of defenestration.

If the regime of college-educated women is questioned, you are kicked out of social networks and dropped as a friend. Having female friends these days is contingent on keeping your dissenting opinions to yourself and never questioning the woman's authority at the top. Heaven forbid you create momentary discomfort and ask someone to defend their views. Debate is oppressive.

Fitting in with women means always deflecting responsibility for how you treat people to the ‘patriarchy’ and never apologizing or admitting you’re wrong. It is, in a word, toxic. It poisons the psyche and the body politic because women hold nearly all the cultural power in 2024. With economic self-determination comes an iron grip on popular culture through the tenets of internet feminism. Just ask Taylor Swift or Greta Gerwig.

Today, I am firmly ensconced in the top ten percent of income earners (distinct from wealth percentiles). I have made it. I have a master’s degree and am a tech consultant (the most PMC of jobs, and the irony is not lost on me). My parents don’t have degrees and teetered on the brink of poverty until I was 30. I scraped and clawed to get here, though I will not deny the role of luck in my success. But my hard work put me in the right place at the right time.

My parents are the types of Indians that the narrative of the diaspora overlooks because we are known as the wealthiest and most educated of all the minority groups. This ignores experiences that have everything to do with class and nothing with race. My race didn’t somehow help me get ahead (it hindered me), but affirmative action for women probably did help. I don’t want special treatment or favors because it delegitimizes my hard work.

My disdain for bourgeois politics stems from the high material and psychological cost of making it into this class and then trying and failing to fit in. I’ve given up on the latter. 

Race may affect individual interactions with prejudiced people, but it is systemic classism that prevents economic mobility. What appears to be systemic racism is better described in terms of its material impacts. The visibility of race and gender makes them an easy explanation for every disparity under the sun. Where people should see the effects of class, they instead see race as the causal factor, even though economic class accurately predicts life outcomes.

I reject the idea of systemic racism being the determinant of life outcomes. It does not take a lot of digging to see the class-based discrimination that results in what appear to be racial disparities in areas like housing, education, and healthcare. Even the New York Times has admitted that class and education level now affect mobility more than race. These disparities affect people of all races equally. I also reject this weird idea that non-college whites somehow can rely upon race-based privilege to mitigate effects of the class-discriminatory regime white-collar white elites have created. This regime harms people of all races without degrees. While they’re disdaining the working class as a whole, they forget that most people of color that they purport to care about don’t have degrees, either.

Elementary school: nascent class consciousness

I grew up in the Hare Krishna community, and my parents are initiated members. From 1995 to 1999, my parent’s grocery store and restaurant were doing well enough for them to send my sister and me to private school (and this was the only brief period in my life when my parents had disposable income). I spent fourth and fifth grade among the wealthiest kids in Gainesville, Florida. The daughter of an heir to the fortune of a significant industrial family also happened to be a classmate. Her father is white, and her mother is Bengali, and they were major benefactors of the Hare Krishna (ISKCON) organization. We were encouraged to be friends, and our parents became friends. We were close in the fourth grade, with frequent sleepovers at her house. 

Despite our families ostensibly being ‘friends,’ it was understood that we had a social power differential. This became apparent when her mother insulted my mother. As we were leaving their house after some festival, her mother ran out to stop us and give my mother a ‘birthday gift.’ She had not bothered to put it even in a plastic bag, and it was a set of pajamas of the type you see on perpetual sale in J.C. Penney. After our mothers stopped being friends, she and I only saw each other at school.

Despite being of the same small religious sect and from highly devout families, the class chasm between our parents meant I went to her house exclusively for sleepovers and understood that we were similar on the surface but entirely different because of our parents’ situation. Despite being middle class for that brief time, I was the poor kid among the children of the super-rich. That’s when I started to notice class above everything else; when you go to a friend’s stately home, you realize certain people are living on a different planet despite following the same religion and being of the same ‘race.’ 

There was a girl named Rachel who was frequently openly mean to me, and the teachers refused to do anything about it. I was the problem for being angered by her. I honestly don’t remember doing anything to provoke her because I was a quiet, bookish, loner kid who didn’t fit in and had no other friends. I was also an easy target for other girls because I was pretty ugly - I had a prominent wart on my face that my mother didn’t get frozen off for some reason, and I was hairy, as South Asians often are. My mother also refused to let me shave my legs because I guess that would attract boys, and I’d get myself pregnant.

Perhaps because I didn’t fit in with the rest of my peers, my best friend abandoned me in the fifth grade to become best friends with Rachel and join her group. Our mothers having fallen out didn’t help, but our friendship hadn’t been all that real. It should be noted that the class-based strife between two adult women led to the same between their girl children. I was a social loser with nothing to offer. This hurt deeply at the time, and I understood implicitly that class position had something, if not everything, to do with the difference in how the other girls treated me. This was an early lesson about how girls stratify themselves according to wealth and material possessions, which I still see as an adult. I spent the rest of fifth grade entirely alone without a single friend. I learned not to trust girls by the age of ten.

Middle and high school: effects of educational stratification

Because my parents bought a house in a good school district in 1998, I was zoned for a middle school of wealthy, mostly white kids. I was still prohibited from doing anything about my body hair or wearing tank tops. I did make a few girlfriends, who, of course, all came from wealthier families than mine. I went to sleepovers at their houses, and no one ever came to mine because I was embarrassed by our house. My father is also a slob, making the repair far worse than it should have been three years into living there.

I was part of a group of three other girls, but they mocked me a lot. My personality became even more awkward during this period, and I recognized on some level that they kept me around to make fun of me. It was still better than being completely alone. The popular girls were, of course, the richest. Once again, I understood that girls fall into hierarchies based on the brands they wear and the size of their houses. My parents, of course, couldn’t afford many clothes, forget brand names. This affected my social standing, and I probably take more pleasure in being able to buy most of what I want today because I couldn’t while growing up.

When we reached high school, the class chasm became even more apparent because the rich kids got driven or had cars while I had to take the bus at 5:30 am to our magnet school across town. During my freshman year, I ate lunch in the courtyard with a few girls, one of whom was a friend from my middle school group. I found out she hadn’t invited me to her birthday party but had asked everyone else we ate with. I stopped eating with them and sat alone under a tree, reading, or sometimes went to the biology teacher’s room during lunch. She had her room open to accommodate friendless misfits like me. This friend who excluded me told me once that I shouldn’t host a French club meeting at my house because “it’s kind of small.” 

There were four Indians in my grade, and we weren’t friends because our parents weren’t friends. And they weren’t friends because my parents don’t have degrees, while the majority of the handful of Indian families in Gainesville were white-collar professionals (mostly doctors) or academics. There was no mixing with people like my parents, and on the rare occasions we did mix, it was clear that they saw my parents as lesser due to their being small business owners. I was painfully aware early on that my parents’ situation would determine my social standing and ability to climb above their station. 

I share this about my lack of Indian friends to drive home that talking about people in terms of race, and national origin obscures the education-based stratification within those groups. People stick to their racial group, but within those, they stick to people in the same class position, for which education is the proxy. There is no mixing. This is why race-based analysis of political behavior leads to incorrect conclusions about what people value and vote for. Abstract concerns like ‘democracy’ and ‘climate change’ of the educated are not shared by those without degrees who are economically precarious.

College and the financial crisis: the false promise of credentialism

The International Baccalaureate program got me into a public Ivy with a full scholarship, and I got Pell Grants because of my family income. My story is one of education being the key to economic mobility, but all that happened is I got the piece of paper to qualify me at the bare minimum level for office jobs. I didn’t graduate with skills valued by the labor market because I have a master’s in history and an undergraduate degree in history and religion. I regretted it immediately after graduating in the early years of the financial crisis. I no longer do because it makes my life more profound and has given me a well-rounded set of skills to complement my technical abilities. At times it felt like I had fucked up the slight chance I had gotten to rise by majoring in the wrong field. But I wouldn’t have learned how to think had I majored in some STEM field. For all of academia’s faults, it still exposed me to a broader world than I could have otherwise accessed.

I bided my time in graduate school from 2009 to 2011 and still remember the day Lehman Brothers collapsed. I had misplaced faith in Obama for his commitment to helping the economically precarious people destroyed by the recession. He disappointed me deeply with his insistence on listening to the wealthiest in his administration.¹ The one saving grace for my family was that the homeowner's insurance policy had paid off our house because of a sinkhole we found in 2007. An astrologer in India had told my mom there was treasure buried under our home, and he was somehow correct. 

My mother also had a stroke in 2007 and was partially paralyzed for most of that year. We had no source of income after that; the grocery store and restaurant had closed three years prior so my mother could focus on real estate, which had better returns before everything collapsed. My story is also intimately tied to the volatility of the real estate market. Their primary income after the stroke was Social Security Disability, and thank heavens for that. We also were on food stamps earlier in my life, and I am eternally grateful for the little safety net we do have.

To top it off, my mother had kicked my father out temporarily because he was so difficult to live with. He came back after the stroke, and we were destitute. I was the only one in my family with a job ($10 an hour) at the campus computer lab. I gave them my Civic and drove their van so they could save money on gas. They worked as hourly employees in their 50s in a convenience store owned by Indians, as they were unqualified for office jobs—this fomented class even further as the difference between myself and my peers in college.

I started withdrawing from my friends because I had to take care of my whole family, my sister being fifteen then. Finally, I gave my parents $2000 to start another restaurant for Indian takeout from my meager wages and student loans. I maximized my loans to support them and myself, and my credit cards supplemented us in that bleak period. They had declared bankruptcy after my mother’s stroke because the bills couldn’t be paid, and their credit had been ruined once before already after a car accident in 2003. I do not know what we would have done had I not had access to credit. This debt hampered me right as I was entering the workforce.

They did not recover or have any savings until about 2018. When I married in 2016, my mother told me she barely had $100 in the bank before my wedding. Only now, in their seventies, do they have any significant savings enough to say they achieved the American Dream of doing better than their parents. They both came from generational poverty, so I’m proud of them for making it, even if it took most of their lives. I am exceedingly proud of myself, too, for establishing a stable career in a technical field. I am a success story; meritocracy enabled me to climb above my parents. Education eventually delivered the opportunities promised by the elite. But, I had to scrape and claw in a way my peers from middle-class and educated households did not, regardless of their race.² I had no network, and what I have today results from meticulous relationship building. I will not let go of this network because success is about who you know. Unfortunately, people from families without educated parents often think it’s about what you can do and usually don’t even know how to start building a network of successful people. 

To fit in with my social group as I climbed the ladder, I was required to signal the correct beliefs; we judge each other on beliefs more than possessions in this class. This means subscribing to an ideology presented as observable fact despite being a set of near-religious beliefs. My shorthand for this has been identity leftism, which I have to profess as interchangeable with liberalism when dealing with affluent liberals. It is, however, anything but liberal and is fundamentally intolerant. We who see ourselves as tolerant can never square the idea that we might be intolerant in our eagerness to punish people by stealing their livelihood. This costs the accuser nothing. And if you dissent from the ideology, you’re branded immoral. I suspended my critical thinking faculties in an earnest desire to fit in and finally be part of a group. I pushed uncomfortable questions down as they bubbled up. Eventually, the dam broke.

The final straw was the 2016 primary, during which Sanders supporters were smeared as racist white guys despite his coalition having plenty of women and people of color. But, painting his supporters as racist served the purpose of delegitimizing the movement; the charge of racism means being able to dismiss anything the speaker says. If you base legitimacy on the identities of the speaker, then you can push any bad idea on people by guilting them with a charge of racism. They couldn’t win the argument about class on the merits, so they went for the jugular. This wound has been one of the deepest.

I was once part of a network of people in politics, nonprofits, and media, basically professional Democrats. I was kicked out of this network because I couldn’t go along with the bankrupt ideological regime the women had pushed on the group, nor could I bow to the queen’s authority. She hated me, and the feeling was mutual. I kept trying to become a professional Democrat, so this network seemed important. None of my attempts succeeded, and thank heavens they didn’t. I’d be worse off in every way today, and my thoughts wouldn’t be mine. I was in a cult. 

There’s a straight line between the girls I described at the start of this essay and the adults I described above. They use the same means to enforce social hierarchies; their tool of choice is reputation destruction. Behind their obsession with race and gender, they hide the fact that they want to give nothing up to achieve justice, especially if it means a working-class white man getting ahead. 

They’ve created what they think is a moral community that wants to uplift the oppressed, but all they’re doing is creating sacred victims and saviors. Kamala Harris is both a holy victim and a savior of women from their guilt about their class position, which they have convinced themselves is about their being white. It’s why no one talks about money and why I am attacked when I point out that she is beholden to billionaires, just like Obama was.³ The first black attorney general, Eric Holder, was responsible for ensuring that not a single banker was held legally accountable for destroying the lives of millions of people.⁴ 

Being of an oppressed group does not make a person morally righteous or virtuous. If we want to uplift the downtrodden, we need to start by insisting on class-based remedies for all the disparities we’re attributing to race and gender. Professional-class women also need to wake up from their mass psychosis and stop imposing illogical ideas and emotional reasoning on the culture. That’s what depressed people do, and we now know liberal women are the most mentally ill group of all. Until these two things happen, I will continue to distrust my peers and their politics. I hope some of the above experiences illustrate why I won’t capitulate to the prevailing beliefs of college-educated liberals. We can agree to disagree.

1. For a detailed report on the early Obama years and his handling of the crisis, see Confidence Men by Ron Suskind.

2. I went to high school with several children of African immigrants from well-off families. This group benefits the most from affirmative action, though it is imagined that the beneficiaries are the descendants of enslaved black Americans. Elite admissions benefit almost exclusively the rich kids of any race.

3. Despite not winning a single primary vote, she was backed by the most billionaires in the field in 2020. This makes me eternally suspicious.

4. Eric Holder wrote the rule to justify not prosecuting bankers during the Clinton administration.