Angela Locke’s essay “Born Poor and Smart” offers a pointed critique of social stratification and the cultural divides between rich and poor that maintain these systemic inequalities. Detailing her poor childhood and the long, arduous road she took to becoming financially solvent, Locke offers a laconic, straightforward essay that speaks truth to power while also demonstrating the problems the poor have in being able to uplift themselves out of poverty. While Locke misses a few fundamental differences between the rich and the poor in her logic, “Born Poor and Smart” offers a significant sense of ethos and pathos in the discussion of how the rich and poor treat success.
Locke’s first major coup is to start with her mother, describing her routine and quickly establishing her as the template for her discussion: “My mother was smart, and she was poor” (Locke 450). These kinds of short, declarative statements are littered throughout the essay, providing a dramatic punch to emphasize her points by distilling them into simple truths.
Another strength to her essay is her use of detail when recounting her stories. Much of this comes in the form of lists and specifics, such as her mother’s endless toiling at the E-Z Bargain Center, her mother’s love of “Martin Buber, Carl Jung, John Gardner” and all manner of other philosophers and erudite writers that established her as intellectual (Locke 451). Contrasting the humdrum details of her petty workplaces with the potential of her intellectual mind, Locke both solidifies her own philosophical bona fides and emphasizes her point that the rich and poor are thought to have vastly different lives.
One of Locke’s major points is that “Oppression can’t perpetuate itself without the cooperation of the oppressed” (Locke 451). In showing the contrasts between her and her mother’s intelligent, curious minds and their poor backgrounds, Locke successfully demonstrates how they were different than those poor around them. She, like her mother, is intellectually curious, and she takes great pains to explain the divide that occurred even after she uplifted herself to a college education. This aids her overall point that class is the most important distinction in American society, as her lower-class background combined with her higher-class education broke the mold in ways that made her an outsider: “the price I paid for trying to break the class pattern I was raised with was that I belonged nowhere” (Locke 451). This is one of Locke’s central concerns regarding these social divisions, as society makes it virtually impossible to consider poor people smart or rich people undeserving of their privileges.
Despite her well-meaning and artfully articulated points, there are aspects of Locke’s argument that threaten to undercut her thesis. For instance, there is an undercurrent of elitism that runs through Locke’s work, particularly when talking about other poor people: “intelligence is scorned within the ranks of the poor” (Locke 451). While she explains that this is due to the pressure elites have to keep intellectualism for themselves, Locke also condemns the poor for promoting anti-intellectualism, which is a broad sweeping generalization about her fellow working-class Americans. This is most notable in stories about her mother, who struggled to get along with her (implicitly dim) male coworkers: “Even if one of those guys had been interested in discussing what Carl Jung said about dream imagery, he wouldn’t have been interested in discussing it with the woman who made his coffee” (Locke 451). Here, Locke paints her mother’s struggle as singular, treating the men and her fellow poor as enemies whose scorn for her intelligence holds her back. While this is minor, it is a certain strain of classism that perpetuates the divide rather than addressing it.
That being said, the overall effect of Locke’s essay is incredibly powerful, and speaks to the need to redefine success as something outside of money or privilege. Locke prides herself on never having developed “the sense of entitlement that distinguishes the rich from the poor,” thus establishing herself as someone sufficiently steeped in both worlds (Locke 451). Locke correctly points out the need to focus on class as the mitigating factor in success; the goal should be to get oneself to a place where you can learn what you are good at and also be able to live off it: “Success is not only discovering your talents and your interests, but being able to make a living using them” (Locke 451). In ending her essay with her personal definition of success, Locke demonstrates the difficulty working-class families have in achieving that, which ties directing into the education/intelligence gap and showcases her greater points.
In “Born Poor and Smart,” Angela Locke breaks down the problems inherent to the confluence of class, gender and intellectualism in American society with a combination of convincing detail and incredible pathos. In essence, the poor are discouraged from being smart, and actively keep their intelligence in check to do so. Despite this, Locke offers herself and her mother up as examples of strong women who refused to allow social stigmas of intelligence to define them despite being working-class. In doing so, Locke provides the possibility of hope that the poor can truly uplift themselves to a place of financial well-being through their intelligence, regardless of other social barriers.
Works Cited
Locke, Angela. “Born Poor and Smart.” Off our backs 35 (Jan-Feb 2005), p. 37.
