"Students who are low-income encounter classism in college".
Of course they do.
And in this study of low-income college students working to conceal their class backgrounds around higher status others at a large public university, the students were on their own to figure out how to respond.
Most of them simply tried to hide who they were.
The authors point out the consequences for these students: negative interactions, holding back from seeking help that would reveal a stigmatized identity, never fully integrating with the culture of college, internalizing classism as a personal deficit.
As with all forms of discrimination, the solution is to change the institution: To teach about class and classism, to integrate readings about classism in courses, to ensure that peers, faculty and staff are all challenged to face their own classist assumptions about students from low-income families.
Yet class isn't even mentioned in most campus diversity statements; faculty casually conceal their own class backgrounds in teaching and publications; programs for first-generation college students evade talk about class inequalities; there are very few co-curricular events, guest speakers, arts festivals, or even courses on social class inequalities in education. Even within affinity groups where they might form same-race friendships and learn advocacy around other identities, poor and working-class students navigate (on their own) the "hostile ignorance" of more privileged peers.
On too many campuses, low-income students just learn to avoid talking about their lives.
I'd love to learn of campuses where they are instead supported in understanding the circumstances of those lives shaped by structural inequalities. Do we have examples?
