But America has few writers who describe as brilliantly what it is like to be poor. At the University of Texas it was easier for the professor to notice that the students who dropped out of school were Mexican or African-American than to wonder if they might be poor. I know something of what it is like to be poor. My parents are both from Mexican villages. Though America made them middle class, they retain the knowledge that life is hard.
Education is fine, if it works.
I meet young people all the time who want to go to college, but Mama needs her oldest son to start working. Anyone who has taught poor children knows how hard it is to teach students not to be afraid of success. Though Americans have argued for decades about affirmative action, only lately have we bothered to notice that most of its black and brown and female beneficiaries are middle class. It still doesn't occur to many that affirmative action might be unfair to poor whites, insofar as poor whites do not constitute an officially recognized minority group. Frankly, we don't even notice the presence or, more likely, the absence of the poor white on the college campus.