For example:

If your parents never had to work in fast food or other service industry jobs earning minimum wage.

If your family never had to “dumpster dive” to have supper.

If your family owned a car.

If your ever had a CHOICE about wanting to attend college or not.

If you have health insurance and dental insurance.

If you make more than minimum wage.

If you live in a neighborhood that is NOT beside train tracks, cement factories, main streets, city dumps, strip clubs, high crime areas. Or if you DON’T live in trailer parks and the “projects”. Or if you DON’T live in a high crime neighborhood. Or if you DO live in a gated community.

If you do not HAVE to buy your clothing at thrift stores.

If you have cash to pay for food instead of relying on food stamps or credit cards or do without.

If you think it is a choice that poor people do not go to college.

If you think it is a choice for people to drive cars that are unreliable or “ugly”.

If you think it is a choice that people have decayed or missing teeth.

If you think everyone, in America, has what they need and if they don’t they just don’t work hard.

If you don’t have the fear of being homeless.

If you don’t know anyone who is or has been homeless.

If your parents (or you) will ever receive an inheritance (even a modest one).

If your parents have family property. Or if they own property – including a house.

If your parents did not have to work two jobs.

If you were not raised by a single parent.

If your family never had the power turned off or the water turned off because your parents had to decide whether to pay the bills or buy food.

If your parents even knew that college is not only for the wealthy.

If you own a contract cell phone. (prepaid cell phones that are usually what poor people use are more costly because usually you cannot call people for free, have to pay for even the cheapest quality of phone, and have to buy minutes every few months even when the minutes have not run out).

If you are able to say “I (or my parents) have worked hard for everything we have. Not thinking about the people in low service industry jobs who work very hard but whose wages are so low that they will NEVER be able to afford more. Also, not taking into account the college tuition your parents paid for you to attend college and thus not taking on student loan debt, the jobs you got because your parents knew someone, or the family business you took over.

If you don’t have to be ashamed of your home (that you own), your clothes (that you purchase new), your car (instead of having to walk or rely on public transportation – not by choice), etc.

The high earners whom she interviewed seemed to be completely naive and ignorant about what class was. They tended to see themselves as a lower class than they actually were. Because you can always buy a bigger boat, many saw themselves as under-privileged.

This naivete, ignorance and refusal to examine, and identify class really makes me quite angry. But thats because the people who write our culture are generally the privileged, with a few notable exceptions.

Yes, you can buy a computer for a few hundred dollars, but that’s not really the point. Its the language of the computer thats the problem, its the language of higher education that makes it less accessible to underprivileged people. No wonder working class folk have a mistrust toward middle class institutions, it’s those institutions that have made them poor.

Class is a question of choice and the ability and agency to enact that choice, As money talks so loudly in our western societies yes that is a factor, but there are other factors, values and beliefs that also need to be taken account of when examining class.

Also, the POINT of being privelaged is that you probably don’t know that you are – because you don’t have to think about how much the heating bill is, or whether someone you went to school with wore these second hand clothes before you. So you don’t – can’t! – realise how life-changingly, earth-shatteringly devastating it is to have to think about those things… at any age, but as a child, especially.