Rich Cat, Poor Cat
Re: re: working-class at Oberlin College Saffron Forsberg Editor-in-Chief In September 2019, I was commencing my first semester at Oberlin College. I wince now, as anyone might, remembering how naive I was. I had just graduated from my Southeast Texas high school, in a town smackdab between Houston and Galveston, where I grew up. There, I had spent the summer following graduation in a red polyester vest, teaching small children toilet-paper-roll, googly-eye crafts at my craft-store job. My girlfriend-at-the-time worked across the street and would pick me up in their coughing black Mustang – that which promptly, theatrically, died the last week of summer break – everyday so we could escape the oppressive swamp heat together. They drove us to a nearby beach town where we swam in the Gulf, exchanged pulls from a weed pen, and listened to punk rock. Where I grew up, just about all there was to do was work 7.25-minimum-wage and sit stoned in someone’s shuttering car. Much of Texas is composed of these sprawling, working-class suburban wastelands: those realms which manufacture boredom and recalcitrance. In such places, Oberlin – and places like Oberlin – seem not to exist; it is almost impossible to not be naive when one is moving away to a place that feels mythological. In September 2019, I stumbled into my first Grape meeting, and subsequently contributed my first article for publication, “Working Class on Campus: An Ode to the Connectionless”. In it, I detail the classism, elitism, and general alienation I felt constantly at Oberlin, as a workingclass person from the South. Reading the piece now, in 2023, as I apply for post-grad jobs in a handful of big cities and toil away at an English capstone, I’m surprised by its insight. How had I understood, with less than a month of college under my belt, the complexities of class at Oberlin? Had it hit me that fast? Had I already encountered those archetypes which still populate, which may perhaps always populate, Oberlin: “trust fund punk-rockers, upper-middle-class anarchists, and the socialist offspring of ivy league professionals” as I put it at eighteen? Well, sort of. But I certainly
Photo by Saffron Forsberg Editor-in-Chief
had more to experience. My first article – though still, surprisingly, quite truthful – really only grazes the surface of Oberlin’s socio-economic landscape. Now, as a senior who has become quite acquainted with both the campus and the town, I admit that there is more to the story…and there will still be far more to the story than what I am able to communicate in this article. First of all, I must assert that Oberlin did not “radicalize me”, whatever that means; my working-class family did. Both because I come from a
politically-aware, Leftist family, and because I grew up low-income, I’ve understood that I am working-class since before I can remember. Where I grew up, it was completely normal to belong to the working class, to struggle financially. And it is completely normal. It is the experience of a very large swath of the American population…just perhaps not here, not on this campus. I won’t be the first to suggest Oberlin’s unnerving talent for maintaining a bubble of upper-class, elite urbanity in the middle of pseudo-rural Ohio. Many have spoken of it, written of it, suffered over it. Just a couple of issues
ago, The Grape staff writer Skye Jalal wrote of the phenomenon in her own article, aptly titled: “If you hate living in Ohio, maybe you should think about why”. Because of the culture alive on our campus, and those New Yorkers and Los Angeles-ites who traverse it, Oberlin is not representative of most small, Northern Ohio towns. Still, though, we attend college here. And how Obies love to giggle about that fact! How quaint and provincial it is that they, of all people, are in Ohio, among….well…the poor! The “uncultured”! The trade-schooled! But not really. Not among, but rather withinthe-bounds-of. Temporarily. They, we, will eagerly flee again soon – to NYC, to LA, to Chicago or DC or Philly or wherever. The anti-Ohio sentiment alive in Oberlin is strange to me because, when I arrived here, I was unaccustomed to it. I was excited to move to Ohio as a teenager. I never understood it as a bad place to live. This might be because my own hometown is significantly less attractive and more culturally desolate than Oberlin, or because the South and the Midwest are, in some ways, quite similar insofar as values. But the main reason is probably that, living in the South, I seldom heard much about Ohio other than from my mother. As I detail in another early Grape article, my mother also, coincidentally, lived in Northern Ohio when she was around my age – but just to live, to have her first baby (my older brother), and not to go to college. She lived in Akron and then Wooster, loving her time in both. Thus, the word “Ohio”, from her mouth, was almost musical. In Ohio, the trees are gorgeously orange in the fall! In the winter, snow covers everything like powdered sugar! There are small, Christmas-village towns full of 100-year-old clapboards! Apple cider abounds! And real maple syrup siphoned from the trunks of very old trees! What magic. The mythical narrative that Ohio was a place I should think myself too good for was introduced to me by the wealthy, major-city-natives I came to know in my first year at Oberlin. To them, everything about Ohio was
April 14, 2023
19