I have been in so many conversations with other first-gen academics about what it means to be critically upwardly mobile. I have taught poor and working-class students about the complicated psycho-social processes of becoming educated into access to worlds closed off to your families. I have challenged my students to read poems and view films created by artists raised in poor/working class families who now peer at middle-class worlds with both critique and longing.
Because upward mobility is not just about being rewarded for good grades with a good job and then all is well.
So many of us have been left on our own to figure out what it means to live now among more powerful others. We may now visit beautiful places and taste delicious things and learn about art and music and books never displayed at chain bookstores. And we're unclear if all of this means that we are simply now enjoying beautiful things or if we are selling out to belong. So much of privileged class culture is sustained by the the powerful flaunting what others cannot have. It gets complicated to enjoy things that you understand are often deployed as markers of status and exclusion.
One evening when I was in graduate school, I listened so closely when a group I had joined at a party (one of my first parties when almost everyone was a highly educated professional) started telling travel stories because I longed to travel and to experience what these people took for granted. Yet it didn't take long to realize that the stories were becoming competitive. Some of these people were no longer only speaking about the joys of travel but were instead performing having more and more unique experiences of such moments than the others. The joy of travel was indistinguishable from the satisfaction of winning status games. At a party.
At this moment in graduate school when I was constantly weighing questions of what it would mean to be educated as a core social identity, that group was yet another reminder that the world of privilege would often mean being drawn into social contests of privilege and deference.
And still, I longed for travel. And now I love travel. And I try to be very conscious of how I tell my travel stories.
This week, Jason Herbert, a scholar that I follow on Bluesky wrote an essay that took me by surprise. I didn't know his background, but there he is, describing some of these very tensions. As a working-class child, fishing was about a family tradition of providing food for the table from the meaty stock in local lakes and rivers. As an adult child of the working-class, he understood fly-fishing as a leisure hobby of the wealthy.
And then he came to enjoy fly fishing.
Given his sense that fly fishing is a marker of elite status, his account of navigating the markers of "worthy" at a convention of fly fishers is funny and fascinating.
And he's pleasantly surprised to be accepted.
And in the end, he writes of his evolving understanding of the questions of elitism/enjoyment/ethics, at least in terms of fly fishing.
So like other things linked to class and stature, I think my reluctance to accept fly fishing as I thing I can do might ultimately be linked to the inherited trauma passed down through generations of poor people struggling to get by. There is almost a fear to accept not being in that position anymore and maybe some sort of anger about losing that edge. And I don’t like that. It makes me rush to judge. It makes me hesitant to try things. It makes me miss out on life. And folks, there’s enough stuff preventing us from doing what we’d like. We shouldn’t be ruling ourselves out of anything.
I believe that these are life-long questions of "who we now are" as the upwardly mobile, the "class straddlers" described in much the literature on first-gen students.
And I wish for every first-gen student from poor and working-class backgrounds to have ample space and support for these conversations while they're in college as their own judgments of family begin to shift, when they're practicing the first steps of inclusion among more privileged peers and faculty, when they're trying to make sense of what's expected of them in the new social worlds they're entering. I want every first-gen student to begin to make critical, reflective, informed decisions about the version of middle-class that they'll become.
I want colleges to teach more about recognizing and critiquing the status markers being thrown down in competitive travel stories and to tell our own stories of complicated [and often late] access to beautiful places.
As Herbert said, we shouldn't rule ourselves out of anything. And we should be learning that we deserve access new and beautiful things.
