There is an issue, right?

Ithaca College, although situated next to a very expensive prestigious institution, Cornell University, still falls far above the median for undergraduate tuition. In the upcoming 2024-2025 year, Ithaca College averaged a cost of $75,013 without aid. Looking at the economic demographic of this school, The New York Times reported 58% of the students come from families within the top 20%. The median family income is $123,300, which is well above the national median household income of $74,580 in 2022 as reported by the Census Bureau.

There is a high concentration of students at Ithaca College who are wealthy, even if it is not ‘wealthy’ as we understand it. This lack of economic diversity can lead to echo chambers of class conversation. In trying to understand how class–conscious students navigate this at Ithaca College, I spoke with Sergio Cabrera, assistant professor of sociology. At Ithaca College, he teaches Rich and Poor in the U.S., which functioned as the lens for our conversation.

My main questions, when it comes to class difference and indifference, worked along a recognition axis. I was concerned with whether or not privileged people like the students at Ithaca College were aware of their own intersectionality in the way that lower-class individuals would be. Working through these, I will include Sergio’s insight as well as the details that may fill in student relations from my perspective. 

Maggie: “Nobody seems to know where they sit on the class spectrum [at a place like Ithaca College]. It’s just sort of there for them. With your students, how does Ithaca College work itself into that?”

First and foremost, Sergio made it clear that within Rich and Poor, both ends of the economic distribution axis are making realizations. That aha moment of, I am rich or I am poor. He says a large part of our indifference has to do with our age group. 

Sergio: “18, 19, I was a fucking idiot when I was that age. There’s a lot I hadn’t had to deal with [finances]. I was so much more focused on the weekend sports scores.”

That being said, he also notes the nature of the American system thriving off ignorance. Instead of realizing the structural nature of these things, or seeing yourself as a dot on a sliding scale, it is easier to individualize circumstances. 

Sergio: “…our culture provides us with categories for understanding the poverty-related suffering that people experience as individual level phenomena. This person must have some kind of mental illness, not taken advantage of an opportunity provided to them. There must be some physiological or moral, individual level failing that explains their living in poverty.”

Of course, this works inversely; wealthy people tend to see themselves not as special because of their or their family’s wealth, but as normal and thus deserving. This has perhaps less to do with a need for individualism and more to do with a collective acceptance that aristocratic forms of entitlement have largely fallen out of favor.

Sergio: “Rich people have a number of pressures acting on them from different directions to see themselves and convince the world that they are very normal, ordinary people. This is a necessary first step in justifying or legitimizing their privileges… And in most ways people who grow up privileged are normal. However, their wealth and privileges are not statistically normal, and this fact is often obfuscated when stressing wealthy people’s normalcy”

There are many other factors that play into a lack of class consciousness though; we also spoke about the different factors of intersectionality. It is difficult in a progressive society and a liberal school to equally weigh the parasites of inequality, let alone see class in conjunction with marginalizations of race or gender. 

Maggie: “Is there self-pity or a societal victimization that plays a part in the difficulty of having honest conversations about class?”

Before having this conversation, I was aware of the many ways people were talking about class. In my limited experience, it has felt misguided. Sergio recognized the victim complex I was referring to. While I thought it was hurting the honesty of our class conversations, Sergio noted that society plays a much larger part in ‘self.’

Sergio: “I would wonder whether this phenomenon is best understood as a desire to be the victim, or if it might be more helpful to see it as a desire/demand to

have one’s reality and lived experiences acknowledged. In the way our culture constructs debates around inequalities, there is a certain authority, or something close to legitimacy, that often comes with naming and owning one’s experiences of being victimized.”

The legitimacy of being seen and realized as a human is something that all class conversations deeply lack, but that we are constantly doing it for ourselves. This is where victimization plays a part: not as a tool being used by students here or elsewhere, but as a bridge to openness. 

There is room for our own realizations when talking about class. In any conversation about intersectionality and class, there are seats taken up by the people speaking, but there is another seat taken up by this ‘societal mold.’ 

Maggie: “If we are recognizing ourselves, if we are being honest, then why are we still struggling to assume presence in these conversations?”

I told Sergio that I personally deal with this struggle; that my main effort in talking to him was to understand class and to know how to speak with people about it. Sergio made it clear that this struggle does not just exist in echo chambers like Ithaca College. Of course, though, it does amplify them.

Sergio: “Those terms, “capital,” “surplus labor value,” “ownership,” are terms that make sense to me but in my experience, the vast majority of people could not explain those terms in ways that actually help them better understand their own experiences or class inequality generally. I think that’s where we are. And it’s not a coincidence given the hegemonic power of capital is in shaping the categories that we use to make sense of ourselves and our society.”

The tricky part of all of this, is recognizing where these words fit as cogs in the machine. Not only that, but how we too, fit into the system. 

Sergio: “I think that where we are as a community: class is named when we acknowledge the need for and benefits of intersectionality. Yet, while we say it, I don’t think we’re as far along—compared, for example to the strides we’ve made in thinking with the concepts of patriarchy or white supremacy—in our collective understanding of the categories necessary to really take class analysis seriously”

Educating yourself and becoming well-versed in the societal and structural aspects of class is integral to consciousness. He makes this very clear. As students that notice class as a word, notice wealth as an idea, notice capitalism as an economic structure, we’re at a standstill. There is content there and we can recognize all that and still feel normal.

The ‘we’ in question is a generalization, but I statistically speak to the majority of Ithaca College.

Sergio ended on a familiar and enduring metaphor: two fish are swimming, one asks: how’s the water? The other replies, what the hell is water? 

I am writing this article both to: ask how the water is and remind you that we are swimming. 

Recognizing class and where we situate ourselves not only individually but structurally is difficult when it is deeply ingrained in our lived experience. You, much like me, might not have realized that the ‘money issue’ is the water all around us. It is a privilege not to, after all. 

For those that are keenly aware of the class indifference at Ithaca College and the unnoted wealth privilege all around us, there is no such privilege.

Threatening the Ithaca College echo chamber starts as simply as recognizing privilege.

Maggie Childers is a sophomore writing major who looks beyond engrained class structures to seek answers. She can be reached at [email protected].