Nickel and Dimed -- \"It\'s

Nickel and Dimed -- "It's the Race (not the class) that's the problem with the American Economy, Stupid!

Over the course of her text, Nickel and Dimed the author Barbara Ehrenreich admits in the first chapter to her reader that she holds a PhD in biology. She deploys, in the words of Hughes and Kroehler, the interactionist technique of becoming a part of her sociological subject's environment. She is masquerading as a member of the working class as a reporter. But Ehrenreich was not always a member of the privileged elite. (Ehrenreich, 2001, p.3) in fact, "the last time anyone had urged me to forsake my normal life for a run-of -- the mill low paid-job had been in the seventies when dozens, perhaps hundreds of sixties radicals started going into the factories to 'proletarian' themselves and organize the working class in the process. Not this girl. I felt sorry for the parents who had paid college tuition for these blue-collar wannabes...my own family, the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away...to me, sitting at a desk all day was a privilege."(Ehrenreich, 2001, p.2)

The author thus is not an alien to working class life, even though many of her friends experience shock that she could 'pass' for such, when, as a middle aged woman, she chooses to do so for the purposes of her book and her sociological experiment. However, Ehrenreich's experiences, even before writing the book are testimony to the fact that race more than class limits one's chances in American working class life and one's access to opportunities. It is unlikely that had she been a Black university student, she would have been encouraged to cease her education and take to the factories. While serving in Florida, her ability to speak English and her whiteness gains her access to more lucrative waitressing jobs. Although working, as a waitress was not ideal, it is worthy of comparison that as a waitress, the author has access to protein in the form of hamburgers and a free lunch. When she did secure work as a maid to supplement her service career in Florida, "my appetite fades when I see that the bag of rolls she has been carrying around on our cart is not trash salvaged from a checkout but what she has brought for her lunch." (Ehrenreich, 2001, p.44)

At least as a waitress, Ehrenreich is visible. Maids, which are usually, except in all-white areas like Maine, utterly invisible and socially isolated in the socially stratified community. Worse yet, while Ehrenreich might have had some anxiety about passing, even educated Black women occasionally have trouble 'passing' for the class they are a part of. 'Oh Look Mommy a baby maid," Ehrenreich quotes the poet "Audre Lorde" who "reported an experience she had in 1967," as the poet "wheel[ed] my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket." (Ehrenreich, 2001, citing Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A.: Perspective on Gender [New York, Routledge, 1992, p.72] footnote p. 79) Even in infancy, Lorde's daughter was targeted as a potential maid, not a potential poet.