re: #63 Anymouse

My maternal grandparents certainly were working class, as were my great-grandparents on their side. (Grandmother a nurse, a shopkeeper, and a schoolteacher in that order, grandfather an engineer for Ford and then a steelworker in Flint.) Great-grandparents were farmers.

My paternal grandparents fled the Nazis from Danzig, and were also working class in Massachusetts (my grandmother a homemaker along with her mother, my grandfather working for Uniroyal).

All my grandparents entered WW2 to fight against the Nazis and fascists; my paternal grandfather did not come home.

My parents were the first to go to college in my family (my mother in clinical psychology and my father in agricultural science). Since they were both in the US Navy, that qualifies in my mind as “working class” as well.

No college for me though. My sister went partly through veterinary school before the money ran out. We also were in the military, which to my mind qualifies as “working class” as well.

And yet, I can understand “identity politics,” as all politics boils down to that. As a male, I vote for candidates who support women’s issues, as I can identify with the women in my family. I vote for candidates that want to improve education, because I can relate to others with children (and the need for an educated populace to compete in the world). I can identify with minority equal rights, because if you can strip the rights from one group (or deny them), then you can strip the rights from any group.

Exactly,. Anyhow, would love to chat about this more but I gotta get ready for work. Glad you’re posting again AM. You bring alot of insight. Our families seem to have similar experiences. My mom and her brother were the first in their family to attend college too.