Self-Reinvention or Self-Erasure? An Abiding American Dilemma

Washington Post — September 2, 2022

How I ditched my poverty tells
By Tracy Moore

A study published in the journal Nature last month about something called “bridging social capital” elicited many no-duhs on social media. The study’s big takeaway was that when the poor get a chance to meet the wealthier among us, they have a greater chance at succeeding. It is beyond obvious, many have noted, that good connections increase the odds of getting a good job.

But as someone who jumped classes, from living below the poverty line to solidly middle class, I can shed some light on the numbers. Being around the better-off didn’t just forge connections that would lead to employment opportunities. It taught me something more crucial: how to act like I belonged in the first place.

There was only one catch: I would have to stop acting poor, which meant polishing aspects of myself that would prevent those friendships from sticking. Smoothing those edges paid dividends, but at the uncomfortable cost of erasing parts of myself. To create a better life, I had to mask the outward signs of a chaotic home life, troubled self-esteem and the mental health effects of growing up for stretches without even basic amenities. Everyone’s history, painful or not, is intertwined with who they are.

The study analyzed 72 million Facebook relationships of U.S. adults ranging from age 25 to 44, a very large sample. It found that poor children, if raised in neighborhoods where a majority of their friends were wealthier, enjoyed a 20 percent jump in earnings on average over counterparts who lacked those relationships.

If it were that easy to hop classes in this country, all you’d have to do is start packing. So, I was heartened that the study acknowledged this is no easy feat in itself: in areas that are largely Black, or where Black and White residents are equally poor together, economic isolation made that jump all but impossible.

But, if you’re lucky enough to simply be around “better,” you’ve got a fighting chance. That’s what happened to me. I grew up in a poor Appalachian town of 900 people, but then moved to a town of about 20,000 in Tennessee, where we lived in a trailer park with a handful of other families like ours, single mothers on welfare.

That didn’t give me instant access to wealthier friends, but it was still a small-enough town that public school did. Nearly all my acquaintances were better off. This meant that by sheer virtue of seeing how other kids acted in school and going to their homes, I saw what middle class looked like — what “better” was.
It was an eyeful. I went to McMansions in new suburbs, to houses with pools, closets stuffed with brand-name clothing and fridges stuffed with brand-name food. I didn’t want all of it, but I wanted a bunch of it.

But it was my friendship with one family that gave me a window into how I might attain it. Alison’s parents weren’t ostentatiously wealthy, but their lives held all the hallmarks of middle-class aspiration. Books, games and art projects were scattered around the family room; they read newspapers and magazines, and they discussed current events.

They not only set a high bar for their children but also reinforced their children’s ability to meet it, daily. Good grades were a baseline. Extracurriculars were not optional. Success was treated as inevitable — not some lucky break, as it had been among my class of origin.

And acting “right” was the secret sauce, and that was heavily dependent on knowing what was considered acceptable and unacceptable even in normal conversations with other people. They didn’t burp the alphabet, like my sister could, or tell crass jokes, like I did. Money wasn’t discussed. Bringing up my con-man father whose name I didn’t even know, or the struggles of my less-educated kin? Not great table talk. Learning when not to talk was a big hurdle.

Middle class meant napkins neatly folded in laps, pleases and thank yous unrolling sincerely and automatically. It would be outrageous to suggest that poorer families don’t value these things — my mother certainly did. But working two jobs and the exhaustion of raising four girls alone made those conditions impossible to create to the degree this two-parent family could.

So, I memorized these behaviors and ditched my poverty tells until I figured out my own values. You can still catch me eating bologna, and no study would ever convince me that growing up poor was a loss when I consider the resilience and gratitude it imparted. But it didn’t take a good SAT score to notice what I was supposed to act like, dress like, talk like, and seem like to make those friends, to improve my lot. The sooner I accomplished that, the sooner I realized no one knew what class I grew up in — unless I told them.

On some level, shedding an upbringing requires distancing yourself from where you started. That can put a disadvantaged person in the position of erasing themselves, their history and their people just to feel worthy of a better life. I have no doubt it was critical to succeeding, but it’s still not easy to admit to myself the extent to which I was willing to happily join in on that erasure all on my own. For all the study’s merits, that’s a cost it did not seem able to account for.

Tracy Moore is a Los Angeles writer.