Wal-Mart
On my way up to teach at UChicago's Splash, I was asked to stop in at a Wal-Mart to pick up some tape. After asking if there was anything else, I was asked to pick up some origami paper. I got the tape, and I failed to get the origami paper. That's the short version. The long version is how much I learned in the process.
I live a pretty isolated experience. I can only think of one friend over the age of 22 who I'm still in touch with that doesn't have a bachelor's degree (and he's a pretty smart guy, a voracious reader, raised in a middle-class white suburban neighborhood---just not the academic sort). Virtually all of my friends have their degrees from somewhere that's a "top 10" academic institution---MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Cornell. Many other friends of mine are graduate students. Let's face it, I live as part of a white, upper-middle class community ("community" in both the geographic and non-geographic senses). My fellow shoppers at Wal-Mart---and, if it's not clear, this was my first visit to a Wal-Mart in several years---do not share this background.
I know, on an intellectual level, about the factors that contribute to the life of a Wal-Mart shopper in the south suburbs of Chicago. I read news articles, and in the field of education, I read academic papers. I read fictionalized accounts, and sometimes nonfiction. Yet, it's still words on a page. I know what it's like to count money carefully as a graduate student, but not that carefully. I know what it's like to worry about your family's finances, to have everyone unemployed, to feel impotence when it comes to getting someone gainfully employed, as my family has gone through that on several occasions and is doing so now. Yet even if my economic status is relatively low, my SES, my socio-economic status, is quite high.
At Wal-Mart, most of the shoppers were black and all of the employees were black. Those who were white tended to appear clearly "lower-class," independent of their dress. They tended less to their appearance even than I do as a mathematician. They were often overweight, walked with a stoop, or had some physical disfigurement. The sort of thing that instinctively makes folks like me keep their distance, even though there's no reason to do so. There were more subtle things, too.
One of the major difficulties in education---a big motivation behind early-childhood education---comes from the differences in cultural literacy, and in how one is raised. As a child of a family with low social status, you are much more likely to have physical discipline used as a way of controlling your behavior, and you are likely to be allowed less flexibility in how you carry out tasks. You will be spoken to much less, and you will hear far, far fewer words over the course of your early years. You won't appreciate the value of books on a fundamental level. In school, your peers are likely to be from the same situation, and so you will again be faced with a lack of opportunity to learn those words and concepts. (For an intriguing approach to fixing all this, see this wonderful story on This American Life.) This was all running through my head as I asked three employees where I could find the origami paper. None of them had ever heard of such a thing before. One asked, "would it be in the computer section?" Now, origami is hardly something you need to know about to be successful, but there's a gap that this question exposes. Indeed, this is a two-way gap. It's just that one side of the gap has all the money and influence; as someone raised in a middle-class background, it makes no difference to my economic prospects if I understand the assumptions and knowledge underlying those from a lower-SES background.
In addition to these observations about a cultural literacy gap, I also got to see first-hand the economic impact of differing backgrounds. There was one woman who was ahead of me in the line, a white woman with somewhat bad teeth. She put her items on the checkout belt very methodically, and I had to wonder about the reason. I even thought to myself to question if there was something psychological, some variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder, that required that kind of positioning. No, as it turns out. After about four fifths of her items had been checked through, she asked the cashier what the total was so far. He gave a sum (not very much), and she responded, "ok, keep going." She had been prioritizing, so that if the total was above her means, she could stop it there.
While waiting in line---a long line that would be unacceptable even in a Target, let alone Whole Foods, where for many folks time is more important than money---I saw three people take items off of their carts and shove them on the shelves with candy or magazines near the checkouts. At a store with higher prices and higher-class shoppers, this would be rude. It puts things out of their order, which goes against our instinct for how we should behave. Here, it's practical: if you go through your cart in the middle of the long line and find that the total is more than the money you have on you, you've gotta put the extra stuff somewhere.
I was the only person around me that I saw paying with a credit card. Everyone else paid cash, and counted it out carefully. I carry six credit cards in my pocket, one of which is a business card for Mathcamp and has a limit of over $15,000. The other five are personal, with total spending power over $20,000. I am in a position to have so much credit---beyond my yearly salary!---and so I can worry about trivial details, like which card offers a 3% return from grocery shopping, and which offers a 5% return at restaurants. (How frequently can these folks even go to restaurants?) Even with all these credit cards, I still probably had more cash in my pocket than most other shoppers.
I've been thinking about these issues a lot lately, in many contexts. One is myself: I've decided to dedicate myself to education (the egg choice of the chicken and the egg). Another is the election; simply by virtue of watching the election closely, I've gotten more exposure to at least the media's perception of this segment of the population (for example, I suggest this wonderful Washington Post article about a voter in Michigan). Indeed, I credit the election with drawing much more attention to economic difficulties. (There's an interesting question here---how much does a President need to understand viscerally rather than intellectually the economic troubles facing Americans? This question is the source of an amazing debate moment from Bill Clinton.)
I've learned a lot from my forty-five minute visit to Wal-Mart. I wonder what, with a little training in what to look for, we could all learn from spending more time among a mix of people. And yes, I wonder if the president we elect will make a difference, and how. I wonder if I will make a difference, if I can even make an appreciable difference, and how I can get involved when I just don't have the cultural literacy to begin.
I live a pretty isolated experience. I can only think of one friend over the age of 22 who I'm still in touch with that doesn't have a bachelor's degree (and he's a pretty smart guy, a voracious reader, raised in a middle-class white suburban neighborhood---just not the academic sort). Virtually all of my friends have their degrees from somewhere that's a "top 10" academic institution---MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Cornell. Many other friends of mine are graduate students. Let's face it, I live as part of a white, upper-middle class community ("community" in both the geographic and non-geographic senses). My fellow shoppers at Wal-Mart---and, if it's not clear, this was my first visit to a Wal-Mart in several years---do not share this background.
I know, on an intellectual level, about the factors that contribute to the life of a Wal-Mart shopper in the south suburbs of Chicago. I read news articles, and in the field of education, I read academic papers. I read fictionalized accounts, and sometimes nonfiction. Yet, it's still words on a page. I know what it's like to count money carefully as a graduate student, but not that carefully. I know what it's like to worry about your family's finances, to have everyone unemployed, to feel impotence when it comes to getting someone gainfully employed, as my family has gone through that on several occasions and is doing so now. Yet even if my economic status is relatively low, my SES, my socio-economic status, is quite high.
At Wal-Mart, most of the shoppers were black and all of the employees were black. Those who were white tended to appear clearly "lower-class," independent of their dress. They tended less to their appearance even than I do as a mathematician. They were often overweight, walked with a stoop, or had some physical disfigurement. The sort of thing that instinctively makes folks like me keep their distance, even though there's no reason to do so. There were more subtle things, too.
One of the major difficulties in education---a big motivation behind early-childhood education---comes from the differences in cultural literacy, and in how one is raised. As a child of a family with low social status, you are much more likely to have physical discipline used as a way of controlling your behavior, and you are likely to be allowed less flexibility in how you carry out tasks. You will be spoken to much less, and you will hear far, far fewer words over the course of your early years. You won't appreciate the value of books on a fundamental level. In school, your peers are likely to be from the same situation, and so you will again be faced with a lack of opportunity to learn those words and concepts. (For an intriguing approach to fixing all this, see this wonderful story on This American Life.) This was all running through my head as I asked three employees where I could find the origami paper. None of them had ever heard of such a thing before. One asked, "would it be in the computer section?" Now, origami is hardly something you need to know about to be successful, but there's a gap that this question exposes. Indeed, this is a two-way gap. It's just that one side of the gap has all the money and influence; as someone raised in a middle-class background, it makes no difference to my economic prospects if I understand the assumptions and knowledge underlying those from a lower-SES background.
In addition to these observations about a cultural literacy gap, I also got to see first-hand the economic impact of differing backgrounds. There was one woman who was ahead of me in the line, a white woman with somewhat bad teeth. She put her items on the checkout belt very methodically, and I had to wonder about the reason. I even thought to myself to question if there was something psychological, some variety of obsessive-compulsive disorder, that required that kind of positioning. No, as it turns out. After about four fifths of her items had been checked through, she asked the cashier what the total was so far. He gave a sum (not very much), and she responded, "ok, keep going." She had been prioritizing, so that if the total was above her means, she could stop it there.
While waiting in line---a long line that would be unacceptable even in a Target, let alone Whole Foods, where for many folks time is more important than money---I saw three people take items off of their carts and shove them on the shelves with candy or magazines near the checkouts. At a store with higher prices and higher-class shoppers, this would be rude. It puts things out of their order, which goes against our instinct for how we should behave. Here, it's practical: if you go through your cart in the middle of the long line and find that the total is more than the money you have on you, you've gotta put the extra stuff somewhere.
I was the only person around me that I saw paying with a credit card. Everyone else paid cash, and counted it out carefully. I carry six credit cards in my pocket, one of which is a business card for Mathcamp and has a limit of over $15,000. The other five are personal, with total spending power over $20,000. I am in a position to have so much credit---beyond my yearly salary!---and so I can worry about trivial details, like which card offers a 3% return from grocery shopping, and which offers a 5% return at restaurants. (How frequently can these folks even go to restaurants?) Even with all these credit cards, I still probably had more cash in my pocket than most other shoppers.
I've been thinking about these issues a lot lately, in many contexts. One is myself: I've decided to dedicate myself to education (the egg choice of the chicken and the egg). Another is the election; simply by virtue of watching the election closely, I've gotten more exposure to at least the media's perception of this segment of the population (for example, I suggest this wonderful Washington Post article about a voter in Michigan). Indeed, I credit the election with drawing much more attention to economic difficulties. (There's an interesting question here---how much does a President need to understand viscerally rather than intellectually the economic troubles facing Americans? This question is the source of an amazing debate moment from Bill Clinton.)
I've learned a lot from my forty-five minute visit to Wal-Mart. I wonder what, with a little training in what to look for, we could all learn from spending more time among a mix of people. And yes, I wonder if the president we elect will make a difference, and how. I wonder if I will make a difference, if I can even make an appreciable difference, and how I can get involved when I just don't have the cultural literacy to begin.