ABSTRACT
When I was growing up among the labouring people in my part of the world, class had no articulated vocabulary. I was not familiar with the language of class until I studied sociology in college where the discourse was not even about economic class (which smacked of communist class struggle and conflict), but rather about “socioeconomic status”. To speak of socioeconomic status in the United States is to imply striving for a better position. So if you are striving for a better position, which nearly everyone is, you are supposedly not located in the working class. It is as if because everyone aspires to be middle class, everyone is middle class. Nor did we talk about social inequality in college; rather we talked about social stratification. I did not know my family was part of the proletariat until graduate school where the class discourse picked up and the status discourse left off.
