Social Class On TV Shows - Rob Henderson's Newsletter

At first, I thought class was about money. I started off in what most people think of as the American lower class. I was given up for adoption when I was three by my birth mother, who was addicted to drugs; I spent the next five years in seven different foster homes in Los Angeles. My mother was from Seoul. I never met my father and had no information about him until I took a 23andMe test last year, which revealed that he was Hispanic, with ancestry from Mexico and Spain. When I was seven, I was adopted by a working-class family and subsequently settled in Red Bluff, California (pop: 13,147; median household income: $27,029). Red Bluff is consistently ranked as the third or fourth most dangerous city in California, just behind Oakland. Eighteen months later, my adoptive parents got divorced, after which my adoptive father severed ties with me. When I was 15, I got my first job as a dishwasher at a pizza joint, and on breaks, all my conversations with coworkers eventually turned to

At first, I thought class was about money. I started off in what most people think of as the American lower class. I was given up for adoption when I was three by my birth mother, who was addicted to drugs; I spent the next five years in seven different foster homes in Los Angeles. My mother was from Seoul. I never met my father and had no information about him until I took a 23andMe test last year, which revealed that he was Hispanic, with ancestry from Mexico and Spain. When I was seven, I was adopted by a working-class family and subsequently settled in Red Bluff, California (pop: 13,147; m