I was pretty sheltered, growing up at a prep school. Like many, mine tried to make a fair showing of celebrating cultural diversity; that kind of exposure, that worldliness, is considered an asset to give your children. Bluntly, it’s seen as a form of currency.
Where you get the least exposure to different people, in a school like that, is to people of different socioeconomic class. I didn’t hear the word “class” used that way in a classroom until after I graduated. I didn’t meet anyone who was worried about where their next meal was coming from until I went to college.
What always stood out to me on road trips, as a kid, was the other kids I had conversations with. Sometimes the grown-ups, too, but I was more likely to have long conversations with strangers who were kids.
Here’s a couple of journal entries from a road trip in the western US with my dad, stepmother, and sisters, I think after my sophomore year of high school. I’m struck by how I wrote about these other kids, how strange I thought they were and for what reasons, what I projected on them and what it says about how I thought about parts of the US that were alien to me.
I remember the first girl asking questions about my sister Sylvie as we watched Sylvie dive into the pool in her forest green and orange swimsuit, over and over. I think my sisters and I would all agree the word “tomboyish” fits us pretty well. But the girl asked, “Is your sister wild? She looks like a wild girl.” I was puzzled by how she used the word, wondered what should be read into it.
I had to add from memory another incident that’s missing from the journal; it’s formative to my understanding of the phenomenon of “white flight.”