Percolating in a chaotic brain of late is a lot of thought about poverty in Aotearoa and classism.
We in New Zealand REEEEEEAAAALLLLY like to pretend that class isn't a thing - a throwback to our colonial origin myth. A nation founded by pioneers locked out of the landed classes in mother England arriving not afraid of hard work and wielding naught but their grit and metaphorical number 8 wire.
Aside from the fact that this collective psyche completely ignores the thriving society that existed here before Europeans arrived *ahem*, I can assure you that class most certainly does exist here.
What bought this on was this somewhat off-topic piece about accusations of appropriation of class in music from the frontman to (excellent band) Sleaford Mods.
I grew up in a DPB family and am constantly bemused or upset by the attitudes of many people towards "poverty". Taking on an attitude similar in the zeal of missionaries and assuming that poor people are lacking and need saving and speaking for. Similarly, assuming that poor people are lacking but that this is a flaw in their character and any outcomes deserved. Or perhaps the one that annoys me the most where people glorify or fetishise poverty without lived experience with it (living in a dive student flat while studying for your six figure career doesn't count) and yeah, kinda appropriate it.
Also near the top at the moment is the perpetual discussion around the cost of raising children, especially at this time of year with many finding school costs compounding upon the unpaid bills from Christmas and summer. If you can't afford to pay for x, y, z don't have children rings clangingly in my ears.
Don't have children. A throwaway remark uttered by those who are utterly out of touch with the silent majority of New Zealand families. Leaving aside how ridiculous suggesting that parents somehow travel back in time more than a decade and counsel themselves not to have that child (although the if you can't afford it/anti-abortion Venn diagram is often very overlapped I must point out), or that situations change in the space of many years, honestly sir/madame fuck you. Don't have children? You mean kindly sterilise yourself because you don't deserve the right to breed right?
If this feels like I'm taking it a bit personally it's because actually I think it is personal. I was that child. There are a lot of that child. Some of them don't make it far enough in life to put voice to their own fuck you. How dare you invalidate our very existence. I deserve to live as do all of us that happen to have parents wondering how they can pull multiple hundreds of dollars out of their arses for uniforms. Retrospectively shaming us for our mere existence is beyond pointless.
Think that this online comment section is rhetorical? Again, I'm here to tell you that it's not. In today's post I'm going to be tell you about the time I almost single-handedly wrote my school's yearbook. A triumph in my burgeoning dream career as a writer. Well actually that's pretty much the whole story, I wrote pretty much the whole yearbook. I also chose photos, I formatted, I approached advertisers, I organised artwork and pieces from other writers. I kicked butt. The yearbook committee was just me and my English teacher. I was so proud.
Our school (Inglewood High class of 2004, named and shamed you absolute arseholes) had a policy that if your parents hadn't paid the (voluntary) school fees then you couldn't have a yearbook. Side note: they also had a policy that such students who left without qualifications couldn't get their testimonials - the things that would usually be used to attest to character to get a job or into tertiary education - but I'll leave the ramifications of that mind-blowing fact to fester in your minds. The yearbook policy included a work-around and students were allowed to purchase a copy of the yearbook for $20, something I'd done every other year.
So there I was, newly 18 years old, clutching a $20 note I'd stressed the importance of having to my mum for weeks, bypassing the line of upstanding fee-paying parent possessing students waiting for yearbooks, and sneaking to the school reception to buy a copy of this book I was so proud of.
Standing there talking to my small country school receptionist, who I knew and was friendly with, I was informed that I could not, in fact, buy a yearbook this year. I pleaded and probably cried, brandishing my $20 note like it was a shield that could hide my shame. The answer was still no. The message explicit. No matter how hard I worked, how much talent I had, I was still a piece of shit. I dared exist in a family that couldn't pay the (again voluntary) school fees.
Somehow I must have walked past the throngs of happy classmates signing each other's books and found myself in the class of the wonderful English teacher in charge of the yearbook still clutching a sweaty crumpled $20 note. She, outraged, gave me what I realise now must have been her personal copy. I returned to the atrium but all of my friends were gone. My school days were over and it felt like all I had to show for it was an unsigned yearbook that made me feel dirty, burning with shame every time I looked at it.
I went off to uni. I didn't really write again seriously for a looooooong time. I did my best to blend in. Surrounded by people from different, more affluent backgrounds in an expensive city I slogged away for years before it all came crumbling down and I returned home.
My mental health took a dive. In subtle, often unexplainable ways it was apparent to me again and again that I didn't belong and it felt like everyone could see through the disguise. For people with a landing pad a blip in mental health is just that, for those without it can be a death spiral.
Many years later, going through my things, it struck me how little I had from certain hard times in my life, and that I only had four yearbooks. The book I'd put together was missing. I panicked but pushed it aside sure it would turn up. Subsequent deep organisational sessions years later still and the book never turned up. Eventually the memory came crashing down on me as an avalanche.
I burnt it. At one point I was so low I had gone outside and I had burnt everything that made me happy or proud. I burnt everything that made me feel shame. I burnt a lot of stuff. The yearbook had been the first and only book I burnt. Every time I had looked at it all I could see was that blank section at the back. The section where my peers would have told me that I belong. Instead I had 2 bare pages that were a not at all subtle statement that I wouldn't ever belong.
When I finally remembered this my avalanche wasn't remorse or regret that I burnt these things. Instead I felt buried by the shame of the day I got the book all over again. Then an anger was alit in me. How dare a school do that to me. How dare somewhere that was a safe space for me publicly shame me for something completely out of my control. How dare somewhere that literally had the motto "constant effort ensures success" disregard mine so flippantly.
The focus on poverty in Māori and Pacific Island communities - and more crucially the systemic racism and discrimination that has lead to it - is vital and important. I stand with people who have this lived experience though I'm Pākehā and this isn't my experience. I've faced my own challenges but at one point it became easy for me to dress and style my hair differently and pass as a middle class Pākehā.
Among middle class Pākehā I found racism that made me far more deeply uncomfortable than the overt but bravado fueled slurs I cringed at during my life with people from a similar upbringing to mine. Kids who grew up poor and disenfranchised then graduated to white supremacy. I in no way agree with the rhetoric and actions of these people, many of whom I care for deeply. However, I think that to take an overly shallow approach in condemning them outright without understanding the why is doing a disservice to my lived experience as a child below the poverty line.
The system fucks a lot of us up in complicated ways and sometimes people grow up to perpetuate and even amplify the harms they have experienced. Power dynamics are toxic and play out in toxic ways, always seeking someone perceived to be lower as a target.
Along with the middle class Pākehā racism I found SO MUCH classism. And it usually goes unchecked. This is a necessary conversation. I have a secret hope though that once we make inroads into the complex issues surrounding race and poverty we can be mature enough to detangle the classism in this country and the reality of Pākehā poverty. Left unfettered and fed by a broader but subtler culture of casual and systemic racism this is an issue that directly perpetuates white supremacy particularly in it's extremist forms.
Today I’ve written out some of my deepest shame and I released it. It's slightly mortifying putting this out there but I don't feel ashamed anymore. I do feel anger though. And I kinda like it. Hopefully the next thing I burn will be metaphorical, like my inhibitions or some philosophical shit like that that allows me to be a more functional human. Or, you know, we could just burn this whole system to the ground 😉.
I fucking love this. Was your ocean of empathy nurtured through these experiences or was it always there?
wooo! go Ash - an appropriate name for that last line if ever there was one! :)