ABSTRACT
As a kid from a lower-class home who was privileged enough to attend university, I spent two years in women’s studies classrooms watching the same token superficial analyses of racism and classism get regurgitated over and over again. Few academics that I encountered were comfortable or even conscious enough to deal with the ways that university works as a mechanism to perpetuate class hierarchy. I was not an ideal candidate to broach the subject either—as a poor kid, I was in that classroom precisely to get myself out of the lower-class social group that I had been a part of my whole life. If I spoke up against the classist aspects of the academic industry and the values that permeate it, I knew that I would be attacking everyone in the classroom, including myself. I didn’t know if my thoughts were rational or if they were simply the product of misplaced resentment, 238and I didn’t know if I could even speak for a group that I was in the process of trying to escape. I laid low for a long time.
