Having been at Carleton for a while, the first thought that strikes me about wealth is our lack of awareness of how wealthy our student body actually is. We never talk about it; and whenever it crops up tangentially in conversation, the general feeling is that we are a middle-class, perhaps upper-middle-class set of people. That is incredibly far from the truth; approximately 50% of our students come from the top 10% of the income distribution, and the reverse is approximately true as well; 10% of our students come from the bottom 50%. This is incredibly skewed!
And it shows in our behavior, too. The casual way we treat incidental expenses, for instance. Textbooks. Going out for dinner. Lab-snacks. Alcohol (let's not kid ourselves, we spend more on alcohol than the other things combined). It also shows in the shabby way we treat public spaces; vandalism, breaking windows, making a mess that the custodians have to clean...the list goes on.
What's the point of saying all this? Feeling guilty is not a useful thing, but acknowledging privilege certainly is. The first step to changing inequities is to acknowledge them, and to acknowledge where each of us stands with respect to the class power hierarchy. And once we've done that, maybe we can stop asking people why they have stressful campus jobs, why they don't want to host a party, don't want to go out to dinner, and so forth. We can be more respecbul of the things that we collectively pay for. And we can make Carleton a generally friendlier place for people from a lower-income background.
- Anonymous
And it shows in our behavior, too. The casual way we treat incidental expenses, for instance. Textbooks. Going out for dinner. Lab-snacks. Alcohol (let's not kid ourselves, we spend more on alcohol than the other things combined). It also shows in the shabby way we treat public spaces; vandalism, breaking windows, making a mess that the custodians have to clean...the list goes on.
What's the point of saying all this? Feeling guilty is not a useful thing, but acknowledging privilege certainly is. The first step to changing inequities is to acknowledge them, and to acknowledge where each of us stands with respect to the class power hierarchy. And once we've done that, maybe we can stop asking people why they have stressful campus jobs, why they don't want to host a party, don't want to go out to dinner, and so forth. We can be more respecbul of the things that we collectively pay for. And we can make Carleton a generally friendlier place for people from a lower-income background.
- Anonymous