When I read that the Justice Department had ruled against Yale and determined that it does indeed discriminate against Asian-American and white applicants, I shrugged my shoulders. I had the same response to the lawsuit against Harvard last year, in which a group called Students For Fair Admissions claimed that Harvard discriminated against Asian-American applicants.
This is not the reaction I would have had five years ago, when I was serving in the military. I would have believed that race-conscious policies were clearly wrong. Back then, I still held the middle-class belief that hard work and education were the most important factors for getting ahead. But since graduating from Yale, I have learned that there are subtler, rarely discussed, aspects of social class.
According to Paul Fussell, author of Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, people at the bottom think social class is defined by how much money you have. The middle class, though, believe it’s not just about money. Equally important is education. But for the upper class, money and education aren’t enough. Upper-class people assign great importance to tastes, values and opinions.
I have observed these benchmarks first-hand, as I moved along the class ladder, adding one ingredient after the other. My mother, an immigrant from South Korea, was unable to care for me. I grew up in foster homes and broken homes; my first job at 15 was working as a dishwasher. In this milieu, we all indeed thought that money was what defined class. If you had it, or appeared to have it, you were rich. If you didn’t, you were broke. And we were broke. It seemed like all conversations eventually became about money — or the lack of it.
But during this time, I was also watching a lot of TV. I may have watched more TV from birth to age 17 than most upper-class Americans watch in their entire lives. The characters in these stories were better off than me. Furthermore, they were absolutely obsessed with college. The stress of applications, getting into the right schools, the possibility of going away and breaking up with high school sweethearts. I had the impression, observing these fictional characters, that money wasn’t the whole story. College was important, too.
But for me, not important enough. My home life was a mess, and, as a consequence, I was a terrible student. After graduating from high school in the bottom third of my class, I joined the military. There, I learned from actual, rather than fictional, people from middle-class backgrounds about the importance of education. Near the end of my enlistment, I decided to apply, still believing that merit, hard work and excellence should be prized more than anything.
The military, a more meritocratic institution than most, did not take race into account for positions or promotions. Perhaps surprisingly, non-whites and women who serve in the military report higher levels of job satisfaction and quality of life compared with white males. Perhaps less surprisingly, many people, including me, join the military in pursuit of a middle-class life. After my discharge, I was finally ready for college.
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