July 1st, 2018
Today I’m sitting in the library and I’m reading a book called ‹Lost in the Meritocracy›, by a guy named Walter Kirn. I’m supposed to be making a list of a hundred-something books and then reading it, so that I can progress to the next stage of my PhD.
The book is about Kirn’s time at Princeton, which he experienced as «a private association of the powerful which [he’d] been invited to visit on a day pass that, [he] sensed, might be revoked at any time as arbitrarily as it had been issued.» In his first year, young Walter lives with three other students in a suite with a shared common room and private bedrooms. One day he comes home to find a group of deliverymen replacing the standard-issue college furniture with a luxurious new spread. That evening, he is presented with a bill for his share of the new living room, a bill he can’t and won’t pay. The other roommates deliver a verdict: Kirn is banned from touching any item he had not «bought stock in», including the vast Persian rug that covers the floor of the living room and then some, its edges curling up the walls and blocking the electrical outlets.
I’m reading this in Widener Library which is the main library at Harvard. I walked by this library thousands of times during my life before entering it, since the privilege to enter was only afforded me when I became a student here less than a year ago. Even then it took me months to go inside, because I was so used to thinking of it as a nonentity, an off-limits place, like Kirn’s roommates’ Persian rug. I would walk down Mass Ave, and certain buildings would call out to me – «You should schedule your annual eye appointment!» «Do you want a coffee?» – but the conversation between me and this library never even began. I wasn’t curious about it because I knew it wasn’t curious about me. Now I’m inside and I don’t know what to do. I avoid the dead-silent study rooms, and I sit in the interstitial areas where people go to make phone calls, and I read.
July 2nd, 2018
I’m reading in the library and I run into an old friend. This friend is a sweet person, sometimes kind of tone-deaf, a person with problems like anyone else. She is also a person whose parents bought her an apartment to live in while she attended law school, which they are also paying for. And today she asks me if I can help her find someone to live in her apartment when she moves far away to join a law firm that specializes in the kind of progressive labor law she does. Of course, I ask the first question anybody asks about housing around here – how much does it cost? She says she doesn’t know, she’ll get back to me.
July 16th, 2018
It’s sweltering hot outside and so I don’t go to the office today. I stay home and watch television, specifically a show about skateboarding that seems to be the only thing lately that lets me avoid thinking about how fucked up our society is. The skateboarders take risks and they fail, they support each other and they impale their nutsacks on various parts of the urban landscape as they pursue a list of tricks. Of course, they get to do these things because they’re already successful and somebody has determined this will make good reality TV, but their solidarity is affecting nonetheless.
Earlier this year, I took a side job reviewing television programs for a big awards show. I watched thirty new programs, and my favorite was SMILF – dumb name, smart show. What I like about it is how accurately it portrays the density of overlapping experiences of class in the greater Boston area. Southie, the part of the city where SMILF takes place, is similar to where I live in Somerville – they’re both neighborhoods with new luxury developments that abut vinyl-sided homes of white working class people and to a lesser degree working-class people of color. (Boston heavily redlined its people of color during the New Deal and the decades afterward; according to the Harvard Civil Rights Project people of color are concentrated in only 7 of 126 communities that make up Boston and its suburbs.)
There’s a part where the protagonist, Bridgette Bird (played by show creator Frankie Shaw), talks about writing admissions essays to help rich kids get into college. In Lexington, an overwhelmingly white suburb which always lands on «Best Public Schools in America» lists, this was a common side gig, framed as «editing» and «clarifying» ideas, not as writing the essays, although the difference is fuzzy in practice, as I learned when I took one of these jobs. Anyway, at one point she wrote an essay for a kid who ended up getting into Harvard, and so she felt like she got into Harvard, except Harvard didn’t know who she was.
One time when I was working at Harvard Law School as a secretary, I got tasked with writing blurbs for books on behalf of my boss. Later, when I’d left that job and gotten a $10 subscription to the New York Review of Books, I opened it up to find a full page ad for one of the books I’d blurbed, with the blurb right there. It was strange to see my words – which had passed into my boss’ custody – so big on the page.
It was a good lesson in alienation. Isn’t that what Marx called it, when you make a commodity, and someone else gets to sell it? But my words would have never made it into the New York Review if my boss hadn’t signed them.
At every level the American education system prepares people for the kinds of jobs they’ll probably land in. A couple of years ago my partner was on the admissions committee for a graduate program at an elite university and got frustrated by how often letters of recommendation reflected the milieu the student came from, more than the student themselves. Letters from professors at state schools, where students tended to have a particular class background, would emphasize how good a student was at following directions, while professors at more elite schools, where students more often had the chance (and the capital) to shape their own futures, would emphasize the student as an individual genius. But how could the reader know what these two things looked like in practice – couldn’t they look exactly the same? And if they didn’t, wasn’t that about history and class, not about ability or innate disposition?
I have a professor now who writes about meritocracy in India – about how colleges there, now that the caste system has technically been abolished, do some of the work that the caste system once did. Students enter (or don’t enter) elite educational institutions based on the historically accumulated capital they have – what kind of education and tutoring and food and housing they could afford up to that point. When they arrive, the institutions go about erasing that history and turning it into what this professor calls the virtue of merit – the sense that their accomplishments are earned. It’s money laundering, basically. I’m nervous about teaching at Harvard, because I know the students are going to want to earn something from me – especially the students who start out having the most.
July 23rd, 2018
I go to a housing justice event run by my friend Rose, in conjunction with our local arm of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a new and peripheral member. It’s at City Life Vida Urbana, one of the biggest tenants’ rights organizations around. Rose shows three graphs. The first is what Americans think the income distribution should look like. On this graph, there are poorer people and there are wealthier people, but the curve doesn’t grow too steeply; it looks like a hill you could easily climb. The second is what Americans think the income distribution is. This curve is much steeper; you’d need crampons and ice axes to get up its wealthy end. Unlike the first two graphs, which were based on polls, the third graph is based on actual data about the income distribution in America. The tail is so steep and tall it can’t fit on the same page as the rest of the graph. The top 20% of the American population possesses 85% percent of the wealth.
At the end, somebody talks about how the privately owned educational, medical, and cultural institutions in Boston, which own 10% of the city’s land, don’t have to pay any property taxes. A few years ago, the city implemented a program called PILOT, Payment in Lieu of Taxes. This lets universities make voluntary contributions to the taxes they would have paid; up to half of those voluntary contributions can be write-offs for «community programs», which are often, as one guy said at the meeting, bullshit. (Say you’re a university holding a lecture that you would have held anyway, and you open it to the public and call it a public program, but you don’t change anything about it to make it accessible or participatory.) It’s hard to know what to think about these universities. They engage in social experiments that are not, given the political leadership we have at this point in time in America, possible to engage in on broader scales. Harvard, for example, has spent almost two billion dollars on financial aid in the past dozen years alone. These expenditures are real and they change lives. I didn’t attend Harvard as an undergraduate, but I went to a tiny school also known for its progressive financial aid policies. Because my family had almost no money – buying that tiny piece of property in the wealthy suburb so that I could go to high school there represented a financial peak, and it was all downhill from there – we paid next to nothing for my education, and I was able to become one of the few Americans in my generation to graduate from my BA debt-free. The school reminded us that it was their benevolence that made us so lucky, asking those of us who received school money to write thank-you notes to the wealthy alumni who had donated to the financial aid fund. We worked side jobs like crazy. We came together after most of the student body had left campus for the summer to clean the dorms, working on teams manned by different janitors, who bought us big jars of peanut butter and marshmallow fluff to make sandwiches with on our breaks. In the past, we knew, the scholarship kids at schools like Harvard and schools like ours served as waiters and butlers to the wealthier kids.
The cost of Harvard and other universities engaging in their own social experiments is their nonparticipation in any other social programs their local governments might want to try out. Harvard is one of the wealthiest entities around, it doesn’t contribute to taxes, its leaders are not democratically elected, the public can’t enter its buildings even as it buys up more and more property. It’s its own small kingdom.
When you walk through the gates of that kingdom a lot of things change for you. One of my clearest memories from my first week of my PhD is of going to the small library that’s attached to the department where I am now enrolled. I print out some assigned readings and go to staple them and I see that there’s also a bowl of paper clips out for student use. This small gesture confuses me and moves me. Confuses me because so many systems in America are designed to trip you up and turn you away if you don’t have the right form already printed, or the right form of payment, or the right piece of mail to confirm your address. Moves me because this small bowl of paperclips is signaling that this space is different, that here one doesn’t have to worry. But the problem is that these worry-free spaces are so rare, and where they exist, they often do so at others’ expense.
July 14th, 2018
I’m at a hearing in my neighborhood because the developer that’s building a train station and a 27-story building across the street from my apartment would like to be exempt from having to do certain types of environmental testing on the site, which is filled with toxic waste. A woman in the back stands up and declaims, «You people who make decisions about Somerville, you don’t even live here! You don’t live here because the schools aren’t good enough for your fancy children!»
A state environmental official, who has been visibly nervous throughout, calls for decorum.
The woman in the back is right – the head of the development company lives in Concord, where Walden Pond is and where the air smells alive, and we live in Somerville, which has some of the highest rates of heart disease and cancer in the state, because there’s a highway running through our neighborhood, and also we have some of the least green space per capita of any city in the country. Now that construction’s starting on the train site, the city sent us a mailer about how massive rat populations are going to be displaced from the site, and our «responsibilities» pertaining to them. When we turn on the lights in the backyard, rats scatter and take cover. Our landlord tells us to stuff the rat holes with dry ice.
July 31st, 2018
Right now I’m reading a book called ‹Conflict Is Not Abuse›, by Sarah Schulman. Everyone I know seems to be reading this book and using it to think through their altercations with roommates, boyfriends, classmates, whoever.
There’s a part in the book where Schulman writes about people who approach conflict from a place of guilt, and people who approach conflict from a place of shame. Those who come at conflict from guilt want to negotiate, can apologize and admit fault, can make concessions, and are invested in positive resolution. Those who come at conflict from shame direct anger, aggression, and blame towards the other party. Those who come at conflict from shame seem to have more at stake in maintaining the status quo – a brittle self-concept they can’t amend, or an inability to see how their own actions could contribute to positive social change – or they simply can’t imagine the status quo otherwise, which can happen if routes to social change are blocked.
My friends and I, who historically haven’t made much money, act with skepticism toward the wealthy – the things they spend money on, the way their overblown concerns about safety justify the carceral state, their obliviousness to certain kinds of problems. To demonize the wealthy, we know, diverts attention from something that can feel more painful: the recognition that being wealthy can, in certain ways, make a person better, make their life easier, shelter them from certain forms of pain. Some of the ways the wealthy can claim goodness are illusory or coerced: everyone tells the landlord he’s a good guy because they’re afraid that otherwise he’ll raise the rent; someone else gets into Harvard because their essay was heavily edited by a smarter, lower-income person. But some of the ways are real: Harvard librarians can put out free bowls of paper clips without worrying about the expense; the Harvard administration can spend billions on financial aid.
At a party this week my friend tells me that my personality is «pretty salt». I bask in the afterglow of this for a few days. Being kind doesn’t get you very far if you’re part of an easily exploitable group of people; I have tried to learn to be less kind. But I also feel an adjacent sadness that this project has worked.
In America, I think, everyone is ashamed of, and mad about, living in a system where simply being alive guarantees you so little. Where everything you get is from a pool of resources artificially limited by our bizarre tax policy, unless you happen to be residing in the separate kingdom of a place like Harvard for a moment, where meritocracy, which is too often money-laundering of class in disguise, dictates who can enter. The system is such that everyone has cause to feel shame and to be mad, though sometimes in very different proportions. We feel shame because we have too much – we’re sitting on a pile of paperclips – or because we’re living with the consequences of having had too little – we don’t have any paperclips to give out. We feel because we once had less and now have more, or vice versa. We feel because we don’t see many ways to get out of this, because the paperclips are held by people we know, and we so rarely talk about how we arrived at this place. In the end, this limits who we can love. I can’t love the developer and his fancy children, I can’t love my friend with the free apartment, I can’t love the institution that arbitrarily opened its doors to me twenty-seven years into my life. Right now I can’t and won’t, but I am trying to imagine a world where I could.