Graham Platner and class conversion

Graham Platner grew up as an upper class kid by any reasonable definition — his father is a lawyer, his mother owns a restaurant, his paternal grandfather was a big deal modernist architect whose designer chairs sell for $20,000, he went to Hotchkiss, which is about the fanciest prep school in the country, etc. — but it’s also fair to say that Platner went to genuine extremes to convert himself into a working class person, to the extent that is possible to do in our culture. He joined the military straight out of high school, did three combat tours, acquiring what seems like a legitimate PTSD diagnosis as a result, went to college for awhile on the GI bill but dropped out, and then started working as an oyster farmer. He did eventually buy the company, along with his wife and another business partner, but despite that bougie detail this still adds up to a really impressive effort to become a completely different person than the one he was supposed to be based on the circumstances of his birth. (The photo above captures among other things that Platner looks way older than what a typical 41-year-old upper class man is supposed to look like).

This made me think of a couple of other examples of at least loosely analogous attempts on the part of upper class people to declass themselves:

George Orwell Born into what he very precisely identified as the “lower upper middle class” in early 20th century England (he was actually born in India where his father was a colonial administrator), he went to Eton as a scholarship boy — his family, which was essentially shabby genteel, couldn’t have afforded to send him otherwise — then joined the imperial police in Burma. After several years of that he was sufficiently appalled by the imperial project that he semi-intentionally and voluntarily spent a few years living a life of real poverty, some of which is recorded in Down and Out in Paris and London. This seems to have been on some level an attempt at a sort of expiation of class guilt, although books like The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia record Orwell’s lingering ambivalence about both his actual class status, and the English working class itself.

Alice Goffman The daughter of a famed sociologist and another elite academic, her upbringing was straight East Coast upper class. During and after college she spent several years more or less living with a street gang in West Philadelphia, including such highlights as actively participating in a conspiracy to murder a member of a rival gang. In the book she wrote about this — which does include several obviously fabricated incidents, a circumstance that no one involved in its publication and promotion has ever acknowledged — she emphasizes how successful this declassing was, when she enrolls as a graduate student at Princeton:

The first day, I caught myself casing the classrooms in the Sociology Department, making a mental note of the TVs and computers I could steal if I ever needed cash in a hurry. … The students and the even wealthier townies spoke strangely; their bodies moved in ways that I didn’t recognize. They smelled funny and laughed at jokes I didn’t understand. It’s one thing to feel uncomfortable in a community that is not your own. It’s another to feel that way among people who recognize you as one of them. …

More than discomfort and awkwardness, I feared the hordes of white people. They crowded around me and moved in groups. I skipped the graduate college’s orientation to avoid what I expected would be large numbers of white people gathered together in a small space. In cafeterias and libraries and bus and train stations, I’d search for the few Black people present and sit near them, feeling my heart slow down and my shoulders relax after I did.

Above everything, I feared white men. Not all white men: white American men who were relatively fit, under the age of 50, with short hair. I avoided the younger white male faculty at all costs. On some level, I knew they weren’t cops, they probably wouldn’t beat me or insult me, but I could not escape the sweat or the pounding in my chest when they approached. Office hours were out — I couldn’t be in a room alone with them. When I had to pass them in the hallways, I could feel my heart racing, like I was getting ready to run.

I mean maybe this is a pose, but maybe not, or at least not wholly so?

What strikes me in thinking about this kind of thing in the context of Platner (who I have no strong views on as I haven’t paid attention to him or his campaign beyond doing a bit of Wikipedia-based ethnography for this post) is how, in American culture, we seem more or less comfortable with the notion of class conversion as long as the attempt is upward, while being much more skeptical if it’s downward, hierarchically speaking that is. The working class person who strives to become “genuinely” upper class is a Horatio Alger story: the upper class person who rebels against an upper class identity is treated with suspicion, with the baseline assumption being that they are some sort of shamming poseur, as opposed to someone who might be rebelling against it for, as in Orwell’s case at least, perfectly understandable and legitimate — and “ideologically sound,” as they used to say — reasons.

As to the extent that it’s even possible to undergo true class conversion, in either direction, that’s a question for another post. But I do think this aspect of Platner’s biography is quite interesting, both in his specific case, and in terms of the more general phenomenon.

. . . Aimai explores the gender component here:

Hm: maybe someone else got there first, I haven’t had time to read the thread yet, but I think this is a very truncated and odd way of looking at it. First of all you can’t avoid gender as a key issue. Men who choose to ally with the working class are generally working out issues arising specifically out of the crucible of masculinity/power/class as demands on them that they can not fully inhabit (not masculine enough, not rich enough, not well connected enough, competition with the father without ability to compete with the father). Anxiety about masculinity and upper class neurasthenics goes way back in the US, certainly to Teddy Roosevelt. So an upper class boy who runs away to sail before the mast, to join the rough riders, to join the military is really nothing new.

Historically women have risen and fallen in society through marriage or sexual contact with the right sort (powerful/wealthy) or the wrong sort (nostalgie de la boue). When you marry up you are despised as an outsider and when you marry down you are hated as a class traitor. These are simply not issues for Platner, for some reason. He just gets to go ahead and do it.

As for why some love them or some hate them for this form of passing well—we generally love and admire men for all sorts of shit that we absolutely hate women for. Look at the admiration and shoulder pats some of us are giving Platner for cosplaying a man of the people, an outsider speaking for all of us against the upper class/insiders while we condemn women who pass as non white (Rachel Dolezal, Buffy St. Marie) even though their cosplaying amounted also to actually living out their lives, insofar as they could, in alignment with a disfavored group.

In what sense has Platner given up his middle class/white/male privilige by enlisting in the army? The answer is: not at all. All these things gave him the lisence to do it. He found himself in a group which embraced him for all these aspects of his identity. Risk seekers and joy-killers have always existed in all classes.

Several people have mentioned that class is not just how much money you do or don’t have which of course is very true. One thing about the absurd “classless society” conceit that’s a big part of a certain sort of political discourse in the US is that what that really means is that we are or should be a pure plutocracy, in which wealth is the only measure of social hierarchy. But we’re a long way from that, if a lot closer than societies like the UK, or at least the UK historically speaking.

Speaking of Orwell, from his essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish:”

RAFFLES, no less than GREAT EXPECTATIONS or LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, is a
story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the precariousness of
Raffles’s social position. A cruder writer would have made the ‘gentleman
burglar’ a member of the peerage, or at least a baronet. Raffles,
however, is of upper-middle-class origin and is only accepted by the
aristocracy because of his personal charm. ‘We were in Society but not of
it’, he says to Bunny towards the end of the book; and ‘I was asked about
for my cricket’. Both he and Bunny accept the values of ‘Society’
unquestioningly, and would settle down in it for good if only they could
get away with a big enough haul. The ruin that constantly threatens them
is all the blacker because they only doubtfully ‘belong’. A duke who has
served a prison sentence is still a duke, whereas a mere man about town,
if once disgraced, ceases to be ‘about town’ for evermore.