NYT Ch. 14 Angela Whitiker's Climb

This article talks about a woman named Angela Whitiker, who got herself out of the poverty and made it into the middle class. Whitiker dropped out of high school and was a mother of many children, all of whom she had to raise. She was living in an extreme poverty that she had to rely on food stamps and live in places where she and her children would always have to worry about getting shot by gangsters. At one point, she became determined to lead a new life and started to study nursing at a community college. However, it did not last long as men who were with her eventually left the family and it was up to her oldest son, Nicholas, and her to support the family. She quitted her study and worked whatever she could do to manage her family's daily life.

Then Whitiker met her current husband, Allen, who was very supportive not only of her nursing study but also of her children's education. They soon started to live together and her life was slowly changing. With Allen's support, she was able to get a degree in nursing and her children also started to have a normal life like other kids that she had always dreamt about. She became a nurse and pulled her family to a middle class. Her children, with the exception of Nicholas and Willie, is now walking the path of other middle class children, graduating from high school and planning to attend a four-year college.

Her story is a very good example that illustrates the process of social mobility. Her story not only shows how one could bring oneself up the social ladder but also presents probelms and concerns that come with it as well. Just like the story of Justice, who became a lawyer from a memebr of poor family, Whitiker mentions that sometimes, she feels excluded from the middle class members as she feels that she lacks the social and cultural capitals that other "born into the middle class" members possess. Furthermore, throughout the story, she shows how she fits into the middle class in income wise, while still becoming conscious of looking like a middle class member. Her consciousness illustrates the importance of capitals that Bourdieu discusses in his essay; like he says, it seems that income is not the only measure of one's class, but rather we have to take into account capitals that shape one's taste and disposition as those are the elements that ultimately define one's lifestyle and social position in the society among other individuals.