Someone I met a long time ago only once and saw again this weekend at a Dallas wedding – Robert – said something quite revealing: that all our friends our rich.

He was referring to his particular set of friends, who are mostly medical students/doctors based in Texas or were once in TX for school. But his friends and my own overlap significantly. If they didn’t, I probably wouldn’t have been sitting two chairs down from him in a trendy part of Dallas.

I live in TX and at one critical juncture, considered medical school and doctoring as a career, nay, a rather long-winded way to pursue a passion for economic and social justice. I decided doctoring was an immensely circuitous way to do something I could do just by moving to the Bay Area or NYC, which my mind had somehow constructed as an activisty haven.

People like me could somehow feel safe challenging the status quo in these places. Later, I realized that this work is structurally unsafe; that to work to change the economic and social constructs around us is no easy task, but in a post 9/11 world, our actions are increasingly documented, looked at, databased, catalogued, privy to new privacy concerns. Where you are cannot change this.

So I did move, and I learned some stuff. But Robert’s comment re-opens a thought process about privilege and doing social justice. What does it mean to want to change a status quo which you and your community depend on, and often act with respect to? I come from a middle-upper class family in TX. And the folks I went to college with also have a similar upbringing.

I think committing class suicide is a viable option. I got this idea through contemplating model minority suicide (a la Vijay Prashad), which I think is a great idea (for me, so far so good, but I am going to law school so structurally, I fit the script, except my daily thoughts often indicate an anti-model minority pathology). But class suicide is different because it means you acknowledge the dependency you have on this class you grew up with or have expectations of conforming to, and you make the conscious choice of severing that connection.

So all my friends are rich. But I’m not going to sever my connections with them. I’m going to embrace them as people I love and care for, but I’m not going to attempt to sustain my class status, consciously or otherwise. Nor do I plan to live up to the expectations of the class I come from.

Sounds hard, but I will probably be in debt for the rest of my life while making significantly less than most of my similar-class-upbringing peers.

Class suicide, then, may be the only option I have.

Posted by Vivek on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 1:11 am.