What Class Are You Issac?
Erica Heilman’s incredible podcast Rumble Strip is a series of portraits of life in rural Vermont. Her most recent series involve her asking people what socioeconomic class they belong to. In her most recent episode, Erica asks 18 year old Isaac what class he belongs to. He expresses his feelings on coming from a lower class background incredibly well:
I would say that one key thing we overlook about class struggle is this social poverty. People of the lower class are deprived of these opportunities to express themselves because they don’t have time. I’m part of a government program, a trio program called Upward Bound. Its main purpose is to get first-generation, low-income high school students into college, and even though we have these programs, people don’t take advantage of them because they have other things they have to do. Most of the people in my senior year class they have to work, and they work because they’re poor, because their family’s poor, and they need money. Just because you’re you’re of a lower class or a higher class that you can still suffer in different ways, but I believe that opportunity is harder to come by when you’re in a lower class.