‘Luxury Beliefs’ That Only the Privileged Can Afford

You can now read an excerpt from my book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a portion: In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale students come from families in the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%—I found myself thinking a lot about class divides and social hierarchies. I’d thought that by entering a place like Yale, we were being given a privilege as well as a duty to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, I often found among my fellow students what I call “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinio

You can now read an excerpt from my book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a portion: In the same way that you don’t notice the specifics of your own culture until you travel elsewhere, you don’t really notice your social class until you enter another one. As an undergraduate at Yale, I came to see that my peers had experienced a totally different social reality than me. I had grown up poor, a biracial product of family dysfunction, foster care and military service. Suddenly ensconced in affluence at an elite university—more Yale stu