Up from the Holler

I really enjoyed reading this weeks New York Times article about an Appalachian woman growing up in poverty and acquiring social mobility and not feeling comfortable in either world. I resonated with this story as I was the only one in my circle of friends to attend a four year university following high school graduation and one of three in my immediate and extended families to go to (and finish) college.

As a freshman, I remember visiting home and feeling as if I had stepped into a new world( and sometimes a time warp). While I was learning about WEber and Marx and deciding whether or not to take a class form Michelle Bachelet ( president of Chile) or study abroad in China the next semester, my friends were getting married and having children( not necessarily in that order). I felt so uncomfortable and out of place talking about my new experiences away at college that it became best that I did not. However when I came back to college, and we would discuss our old neighborhoods and lives, it became very clear to me that I was the only one who did not live in a house or had traveled independently as a right of passage after finishing high school. I felt just as Della Mae Justice felt; out of place.; an outsider in both worlds.

And now as I get ready to graduate I have learned more ways of my burgeoning middle class peers, but some remnants of my past still remain. I still face struggles when negotiating class differences that are complicated by racial ones. I have learned the ways of my white-educated middle class peers, but there is another world entirely that I am now apart of that is the black-educated middle class that has its own set of rules and cultural practices; three new worlds that I now occupy and must navigate.