scwilliamson

The farther I traveled from poverty, the more fashionable it became to romanticize the conditions I had escaped. I grew up in poverty in Los Angeles and was taken from my mother when I was three. She had immigrated from South Korea, but her life unraveled amid drug addiction. I never met my father and learned only as an adult, through a genetic ancestry test, that he was Mexican. I spent the next several years moving through foster homes and chaotic circumstances. At seventeen, I enlisted in the United States Air Force. After some setbacks, I arrived at Yale at twenty-five and studied on the GI Bill. Along the way, I climbed nearly every rung of the American class ladder. I moved from poverty through working-class and lower-middle-class homes. In the military, I encountered the middle class. At Yale, I was surrounded by the upper-middle class and the wealthy. Moving through these worlds, I noticed that beliefs changed with social class. At Yale, I heard ideas I had never encountered before: abolish the police, empty the prisons, promote polyamory, dismantle traditional marriage, and decriminalize drugs. These ideas were popular among elites, but their costs often fell on communities like the ones where I grew up. I had seen addiction, abuse, neglect, abandonment, and disorder up close. At Yale and later during my Ph.D. at Cambridge, I studied research on class and social status. It helped me understand what I had witnessed and led me to some startling statistics about social class.