Today at my work, two Latina girls came in and I was trying to help them. They didn’t speak very good English, I thought at first. Until I realized an important difference: they didn’t speak any English. They were asking me if I spoke Spanish, but I was too dumb to get what they meant at first because they were speaking very quietly. Then one of them said, “trabajo”, a word that I recognized after a second.
“Work, trabajo,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think we have anything. Sorry.”
I felt bad about it and very embarrassed. Having obvious misunderstandings with other human beings can be very embarrassing. I wanted to be able to give them work, though I’m not really in any position to do so. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that I was living a life somehow parallel to theirs, but I’m clinging to the bottom of the bracket in some respects within the social group to which I happen to belong, by birth and by circumstances (and not to mention decisions on my part). There is no real comparison between experiences within any of them, but we most certainly have something not unlike the caste system here in America. It’s almost never talked about. I don’t know how you want to rank who’s on the bottom exactly. Immigrants, the homeless, the poor blacks, the poor Hispanics, the poor whites, the middle class whites, the upper middle class whites, the full-on upper class.
The untouchables of most historical caste systems were those people relegated to the death and fecal trades: handling corpses and decaying waste matter. That’s why people didn’t want to touch them: they were physically covered with filth and diseases from their trade which sustained their life. I’m not untouchable, but I’ve spent six months of work cleaning up dog shit and piss, so I at least understand what it’s like, though I never got more than my shoes pissed on a little bit by the dogs.
I guess I’m just feeling more sensitive towards issues of labor lately, having been doing work and research of my own and felt foolish that I didn’t sooner understand what these women were asking me. I don’t know if anyone else in the store was even aware of the brief interaction that had taken place between the three of us. The whole thing just made me want to be more conscious of other people, of myself and of social situations in general which I feel like are about to become immensely more common in the United States.
These lessons, I have to say, will be very difficult for certain elements of middle-American caucasians. Many people are able to live their lives blithely unaware of what is required by an army of people they never even see who have little of the rights, recognition, social standing or money of an ordinary middle-class white person who considers themselves “poor.” They will require a much greater self-awareness, cultural sensitivity, understanding, sympathy, kindness, tact and diplomacy. It takes a certain level of balls to walk up to a person you’ve never seen before and ask for work, any work. And then to take it if they give it to you, and not complain because you don’t know where money might be coming next. You’re just trying to land yourself in a good safe position. Millions of people are living exactly that life right now, whether or not White America finally catches up with its own caste-customized economic crisis. May God have mercy on us all.
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