The birds are chirping, the grass is green, and the sun is rising on my first fall at Wellesley College! It feels both like I’ve been here forever and I just got here yesterday.
As you might remember from my first post, I arrived at Wellesley very undecided on what I wanted to major in. This hasn’t changed a whole lot, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t have a better idea of what direction I want to go in.
I try my best to attend all of the talks and lectures available to me as a Wellesley student, whether they’re offered by a student org or a professor or the college itself. In the past week alone I went to my professor’s book launch, tuned into the Nikole Hannah-Jones lecture on the 1619 Project, watched and discussed Hidden Figures with the Computer Science Club over Zoom, and attended a talk hosted by the Wellesley Leftist Student Union about solidarity economy. The classes I’m taking right now are both really interesting and very fun, but neither of them is really a subject I’d be interested in spending the rest of my time at Wellesley studying, much less the rest of my life. The lectures I attend over Zoom have been much more influential in helping me determine what direction I want to take my education in, and I’ve been really surprised by the things that draw me most.
Since coming to Wellesley, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of wealth and class. I’m from Iowa, which happens to be pretty widely regarded as having the lowest cost of living in the entire country, and Massachusetts- specifically the area of Massachusetts that Wellesley is located in- is the undisputed most expensive place to live in the United States. This has been a much bigger adjustment than I’d anticipated. Living in Iowa, I’ve never really met anyone who would qualify as upper class, although I have some cousins in the suburbs of Chicago that are pretty well off and I’ve never had too much of a problem navigating the wealth gap between us, so I figured it would be the same with anyone I met at Wellesley. Oh, how wrong I have been.
Every day I find that things I had assumed were a universal part of growing up- hand me down clothes, Hamburger Helper meals, the surprise treat of a name brand cereal every so often- are all completely foreign concepts to the people around me. This is really going to out me as oblivious, but I honestly didn’t know that there were people out there other than the Planter’s Peanut and the Monopoly Man who could afford to pay full price for a college education; nearly 60% of students at Wellesley are on financial aid, which feels much smaller in practice than it did in theory. The world here is just so completely different from the place I grew up; we consider Whole Foods the sort of Louis Vuitton of grocery shopping, we eat at McDonald’s a couple times a month and sit-down restaurants a few times a year, and we consider anything that costs over $50 an investment. Last week, I had to explain to my blockmate what it meant for meat to come in a tube rather than from a deli counter, and just as I thought we had gotten over that hurdle, we got stuck on what it meant for hamburger to be 85%; she didn’t understand what the other 15% percent was. There are a lot of things I’ve spent my entire life being aware of that she hadn’t had to take notice of before. Knowing what kind of milk our family drinks, the price of a box of crackers, the ways egg prices change: none of these were things she’d ever had to be aware of, because it didn’t matter in her family whether something was $3.25 or $4.50. They didn’t have to budget or change brands or buy meat that was a little less lean depending on the month. This was not a way of life that I thought really existed. I thought there were people who couldn’t eat, and then there were people who could eat but they still thought of places like McDonalds as a luxury, like the way my dad grew up, and then there were families like mine, who had what we needed and a little extra, who could afford to get a box of ice cream cones or takeout every couple of weeks, and then there was the section of upper middle class families who live in houses with finished basements and get an allowance every week, and then immediately following that was Jeff Bezos. Now that I know otherwise it seems a little ridiculous that I thought that way, but that was the world I knew; I had friends from middle class families and friends from working class families and I saw celebrities and CEOs and kids in movies living expensive lifestyles on the television; I never considered there were a couple extra very real layers that just didn’t exist in my community.
Now, you might be wondering: how does any of this tie into the lectures you’re attending or your future major?
On Wednesday last week, I logged onto Zoom to watch a talk with a former Wellesley professor about capitalism and the possibility of system change in the United States economy. The idea of class differences was rolling around in my mind- as it always seems to be these days- and I kept trying to summon a little bit of the anti-ethnocentric mindframe that my anthropology professor always encourages, to not think of one way of living as right and another as wrong, but I just couldn’t force myself to step outside the issue. I absolutely don’t think my blockmate is a terrible person for having grown up with fresher cheese and nicer chocolate than I did; that would be ridiculous, and incredibly unfair to her, because she didn’t have a choice in what family she was born into and how much extravagance they could afford. I don’t hold a general belief that rich people are horrible people or anything like that, but I cannot deny that there is something wrong to me about the way the upper class lives; I can’t just accept the fact that many Massachusetts families will drop the same amount my family of five spends on groceries every week to buy a brand name puffer vest, or that families like my blockmate’s can afford to have two multi million dollar houses while there are people all over the country living on the streets. There is absolutely no way for me to look at that situation and not feel like it’s wrong. That’s where the lecture comes in.
Dr. Julie Matthaei is a former professor in the department of Economics at Wellesley; she describes herself as a “Marxist-feminist-anti-racist-ecological economist, specializing in women, gender, feminism, and work, and involved in research about and promotion of the emerging solidarity economy”, and I don’t think I could even put into words how much things clicked for me while listening to her speak. I won’t try to rehash everything for you, because I don’t think I could do her justice at all. I will, however, give you my Very Important Takeaways, and I hope that you can get at least a little bit out of them.
- It all leads back to the economy
I will be completely honest with you; I normally don’t think about the economy at all. Most of the time I don’t feel like I even know what it is- is it the stock market, the Dow Jones, the price of eggs at the grocery store? Are the Dow Jones and the stock market the same thing? I’m completely clueless when it comes to the subject, and I’m just now realizing that this is something I really need to understand. To paraphrase Dr. Matthaei, all oppression leads back down to the economy. It doesn’t matter if we’ve elected a million Barack Obamas or nominated a thousand Clintons; as long as women and BIPOC are making less, are not given equal employment opportunities, are being discriminated against in the workplace, and are otherwise economically disadvantaged, they will continue to be oppressed. This leads me to my second realization.
2. The American Dream means anyone, not everyone
I’m sure you’ve all watched your fair share of real-life Cinderella story biography videos in school- the poor kid from the streets of Detroit or Chicago or the Bronx or maybe born in a shack in Kansas somehow makes all of the right moves and ends up a millionaire. The idea of the American Dream is that equal opportunity is available to any American, that a person from any background can rise through the ranks and earn power and wealth. Recently, there’s been a lot of discourse about whether or not the American Dream is the American Reality; in my opinion, this ideal holds true for our country. It’s definitely much easier for those born into wealth or racial or gender-based privilege to become successful- which we take in Western context to mean wealthy and powerful-, but it is true that anyone from anywhere could potentially reach those heights, and it does happen.
Justice is a very important ideal to me; it completely rules how I live my life. The American Dream is defended as a principle of justice, a way that those who work the hardest and do everything right can receive their rewards. I have many, many, many issues with this, but I won’t go into all of them right now. What I will say is this: the American Dream means that anyone can achieve success. It does not mean that everyone can.
To put this into perspective, I’m going to use what might seem like a bit of a silly metaphor, but bear with me: the American Dream and all capitalist economies operate on a principle similar to Gusteau’s motto from Ratatouille, “Anyone can cook”.
Under capitalism, it is possible for greatness to come from anywhere; it is possible for a little boy who grew up without a roof over his head to raise his children on lobster dinners and caviar in a mansion, just like it’s possible for Remy, an actual rat from the sewer, to be one of the greatest culinary geniuses in all of Paris. It can absolutely happen; any person could possess the capabilities to take a tech startup to a Fortune 500 company or make a perfect ratatouille. The important thing is that the saying is anyone; it is not everyone. Yes, a girl from the middle of nowhere whose family is too poor to own a television could absolutely become the CEO of Disney someday, but not every poor girl from the middle of nowhere can do that. A rat may be able to cook, but that doesn’t mean that every rat can cook, or even that every human can cook. It means that a successful person can come from anywhere, that your circumstances do not determine your life path. On the surface, it is a pretty inspiring message, but what Dr. Matthaei pointed out was this: in order for there to be people at the top, there have to be people at the bottom.
For every homeless little boy who grows up to be a CEO, there are thousands that will never escape their situation; many of them won’t even have the opportunity to grow up. For every Black man who becomes president, there are millions being passed on for the job or the promotion or the lease because of the color of their skin. For every rat that learns how to cook, there are hundreds of millions of people who cannot afford to eat. When our system is running effectively, all of our successes come at the expense of millions of others. I don’t think there’s any justice in this kind of dream.
3. I can do something about this
There is a part of me that feels like this post doesn’t fit; like this is a little too political or opinionated to send out on the blog. I shouldn’t be telling you about how horrible capitalism is, I should be talking about Wellesley! I think that’s it, though; there are definitely schools out there where sharing my feelings about the United States economy would in no way be a way of properly reflecting on my college experience so far, but Wellesley is not one of them.
In May of 1970, there was a nearly empty commencement ceremony at Wellesley College; most students had boycotted their own college graduation in favor of protesting the Vietnam War. There was no speech from the class valedictorian, because she was sitting in a jail cell after being arrested at a protest. There is no way to separate the political from the Wellesley College experience; it’s just a part of who we are. The radical thinking I’ve been exposed to from other Wellesley students is undoubtedly one of the most influential parts of my experience so far; I’m learning just as much from listening to my peers as I am from listening to my professors, and that’s something that is incredibly ingrained in the Wellesley experience. I’m learning to question everything in a more productive way, and to think and learn for myself rather than just blindly assuming the adults know better than I do. I’m learning to have a say- and really I’ve never had any difficulties forming an opinion on anything- and also to listen to all points of view and to really educate myself about the things that I feel passionate about, to find out what I really do believe is right. I’m learning things about the world and about myself, not all of which I necessarily like, but I’m learning to accept some things and figuring out how to fix others. The economic questions fall under the category of things I’d like to fix.
The Purple Class of 1970 at their 45th reunion!
Much like every other person who was ever a kid, I’ve always wanted to save the world. I want to spend my life helping people, to fight the good fight and do the good work and make the world a better place. Unfortunately, looking for careers with these ideals in mind can be a little bit difficult, and what’s even more difficult is finding an actual, concrete way of reaching these lofty aspirations. Sitting in that economics lecture listening to Dr. Matthaei speak is the closest thing I’ve ever felt to finding that way to change the world. Economists like Dr. Matthaei can point to where oppression is rooted in our system, and they don’t just pull them out; they plant a new garden, one where every flower can grow to be as high as a sunflower. I think I might want to do that, too.
Like any college student, I go through six new major ideas a week, and I have no idea if this will just be another one of the subjects I latch onto one day and move on from the next, but either way it’s a part of my journey, and it’s a very exciting part that I wanted you all to be involved in. Maybe next week I’ll have a new major idea to tell you all about, or maybe I’ll still be on this one; who knows! The best thing about college is the ability to explore and be exposed to new ideas.
Sending you joy,
A