This is somewhat uncomfortable for me to write and may be uncomfortable for you to read. But just because a topic causes discomfort, doesn’t mean it is not worth discussing.
I grew up in a town of roughly thirty thousand people. I lived, at the time, in a newly built middle class neighborhood in the 1980’s. I lived there for 18 years of my life and saw families come and go, but the go was still in the same town. They moved just a little more south to the “rich neighborhood”. To the “rich ward”.
I felt the sting of rejection when the families did this. I felt bothered that our neighborhood wasn’t good enough for them, now that they were making more money. I saw that the rich ward (church congregation) got to do cooler activities that required more money.
The great equalizer however, was that we all went to the same high school.
Much later when my own little family was moving to Utah for one year of my husband’s educational training, my desperate search for an affordable apartment close enough to the University of Utah, landed us in the Avenues of Salt Lake City. This neighborhood consists of many beautiful homes built by wealthy homeowners in the late 1860’s and kept up to date by their descendants or buyers able to afford the remodel, sprinkled with meth houses where the unhoused found refuge in the homes that were left to rot. I found myself in an interesting situation of not liking the wealth I saw and lived around and hating the drug abuse I saw used by those in dire circumstances right next door as well.
I would then drive my daughter to kindergarten in Rose Park on the “west side” of town for dual language Spanish immersion. Rose park, for those who don’t know, is considered a “scary” side of the valley and it is in large part because it is also a very ethnically diverse side of the valley. The fact being, that in reality, it wasn’t any more dangerous than the less diverse Avenues on the “east side” where I lived.
As my family prepared to move to Texas for my husband’s job, I worked hard to find another affordable place that would help my kids continue in their Spanish Immersion education. I connected with members of the church there to help me find the best place to live. Many of them discouraged me from certain parts of town that were “unsafe”. These were the parts that had the Spanish immersion schools. There was one section however, a very wealthy side of town, that had a Spanish immersion school, but rental costs kept us out.
We moved to the center of where I was warned to avoid. We were safe and I loved my neighbors.
Our ward was majority Latinx and one Sunday, as I was leaving the building to get something out of my car, an older man drove up and asked me where the “Anglo ward” met. I was flummoxed by the question as I thought through what he meant. “You mean the English Speaking ward? We are English speaking.”
Our ward, after a year or so of us being there, was combined with another ward. A richer, more “Anglo” ward. On fast and testimony Sundays, members who were by their own description forced to be a part of our ward, would bemoan this fact and claim that all was well because they knew that they were “good branches being grafted in to strengthen the bad tree.”
I was invited by a woman my age, one of the new “good branch” ward members, to her home in an effort to be friends. As I showed my license to the guard on duty, and passed through the gated neighborhood, I felt nauseated and wanted to turn around.
A few years later, we found ourselves in Utah again. My husband’s job and Spanish immersion schools, once again dictated where we lived. However, at the time with 40 language immersion programs in the state, we could really choose to live anywhere.
As I asked around and talked to realtors, I realized there were major town biases in the state of Utah. I looked at homes on the East side and felt my own biases that I grew up with, rise. I did not want to live in a “rich neighborhood”. I wanted to avoid the High Schools everyone thought were better than others…because I could see a clear economic and unfortunately unintended racial divide.
My kids go to a “title one” elementary school, and their middle and high schools are 48% minorities. Their teachers come from the same Universities that the East side schools teachers come from, so I take a critical look at what the online school ratings really mean.
Out of 20 or so houses in my neighborhood that have school age kids; families send their kids to about 10 different schools. This is because in Utah, you can “permit” into schools you want to go to within your school district. For example, we want Spanish, so we permit our kids to go to the school that is not, by its boundaries, assigned to us. Other families want what is called the “Alps program” which are accelerated learning classes, and others want charter schools that are more religious, more patriotic, or have more technical skills. Then there are the schools with the “better” sports programs (football, basketball, cheer….). Some parents are not granted their desire to “permit” into the school they want. These parents have been rumored to forfeit their rights of parenthood to other parents who live in the school boundaries they want, or lie about their address by using a friend’s, or rent an apartment in the boundaries to use its address, so that their kids can go to the school they want them to.
We self segregate, but we all have our reasons. Reasons that don’t have anything to do with race, but unintentionally..and sometimes intentionally have everything to do with race.
I wish our kids would all go to the same school. I wish there weren’t “rich neighborhoods”.
I’ve been desperately trying to start a booster club for my kid’s high school. Seven title one schools (give or take on the year’s enrollment) funnel into my kids’ High School. Many of these students qualify for free school lunch, which means they also qualify for a waiver for sport participation fees, so the kids who don’t qualify for fee waiver have to cover the kids who do by paying more. Then there are the parents that cannot afford $250+ for their kids to play soccer, or well over $1,000 for cheer, but don’t qualify for free lunch, so their kid either uses money from their own job to pay for the activity, or they don’t participate.
These kids from the west side, then play against east side kids whose parents can pay the fees plus anything extra to help the school raise funds for new gear. Our kids have to have their tournaments at better supported schools, because our tennis nets all have holes in them.
My kids’ school had the first and second fastest runners in the state. Our track team had the chance to win state and it would have helped us get more attention and possibly more funding. But one of those runners transferred over to an “east side” school because of the reputation and money that they have. Rich schools are taking away poor unnoticed schools’ chances of becoming great.
There is no equalizer. The divide just gets bigger and this is to say nothing of how people have voted to divert tax funds from west side schools, or legislatures have voted to give more funds toward non public schools.
Our wards/congregations could be that equalizer.
This was possibly the goal the stake president had when combining our economically struggling ward with the wealthier ward in Texas. Ward boundaries in other states/countries are much larger than Utah. It makes it easier to include a diverse group of people, ethnically and economically. This works well if the mindset of the people is in the right place of course.
My current ward boundary includes two different streets, not a wide enough net to really mix things up.
But what if the boundaries were drawn in a way that made sure there was a diverse mix? That economically struggling families became friends with economically advantaged families? The kids went to school together and the advantaged families helped support the school financially, so that the disadvantaged family’s kids benefited? What if a disadvantaged kid was shown opportunities by an adult from a more advantaged family and learned all the different ways to obtain a higher education and the advantaged adult wrote letters of recommendation and maybe even introduced the disadvantaged kids to contacts they made in their field and opened doors to these disadvantaged kids that their own parents could not unlock themselves?
What if the disadvantaged family opened the eyes of the advantaged family to a fuller way of viewing humanity and the meaning of life? The advantaged kids could see how hard others work and gain a perspective that is hard to obtain when everything is provided for you. What if the advantaged kids actually realized that their advantages could stunt their ability to really understand what it takes to work hard for something valuable? Their “advantages” have the power to stunt their desires of achieving something on their own merits rather than their parents.
How would either type of family know the other’s needs if they were not closely associated with them? How would they know or care that a poorer school was lacking funds if their own kids did not go there?
If we lived our lives closer together, not segregated by rich or poor neighborhoods, what would the impact be? What would poverty rates look like? Would we hate as deeply or negatively categorize each other as much? Would the political divide be as wide?
Malcolm Gladwell in his book, David and Goliath, brings up the idea of the “U” curve. He interviewed a “wealthy powerful person in Hollywood” who was struggling to raise his kids that had been given every advantage possible. He himself grew up in much poorer circumstances before they, through a lot of hard work, pulled themself out of their disadvantaged circumstances. They said this, “My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment. People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s some place in the middle which probably works best of all.”
“Inverted- U curves have three parts, and each part follows a different logic. There’s the left side, where doing more or having more makes things better. There’s the flat middle, where doing more doesn’t make much of a difference. And there’s the right side, where doing more or having more makes things worse.”
Point being, no one wants to live in the slums. No one wants to live in high crime, low income housing, where schools struggle. No one wants to live in poverty (ironically enough, I didn’t realize, October 17th is International Day for the Eradication of Poverty when I started writing this). But the same concern may not be given toward that multistoried house, gated with guard access that has schools with unlimited parental funds.
“There is no such thing as unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have cost that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.”
Pastor Jamie White at Salt Lake City’s First Presbyterian church said this, “When we are poor we recognize our needs, but when we have wealth, we don’t see our needs or know what is missing…It has the power to distract us from what really matters.”
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20 Responses
Melissa, so well written.
I think the biggest “ism” in our culture is classism. The haves and have nots.
Thank you.
Yes, agreed❤️
Thank you Melissa. This essay makes me wonder how our priorities and focus might shift if time spent in community and volunteer prusits was emphasized as much as temple time.
100% this!! Can we focus on the living? I feel your comment so so deeply.
I made a conscious choice and effort to do exactly that and it’s been a heck of a ride. One of my daughters wanted to join Boy Scouts (since they allow girls now), and now our whole family is all in and I was just asked last month to be the Scoutmaster at a Presbyterian church. Not where I thought that was going to go … Choose your issue and find a group that’s working on it, and good luck!
Thank you for bringing this conversation up. The area I live in has similar economic divides, and I have conflicting feelings about living in the wealthy part of town. I generally opt out of contributing to my kids’ school fundraisers because I hate that it’s a source of inequality between schools. There’s an excellent podcast called “Nice White Parents” that I’d recommend. It’s only a few episodes long, and is well worth the time:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-parents-serial.html
I’ll give it a listen, thank you!
You give me an idea. What if schools who really have their needs met, gave to the schools they compete against for a fundraiser?? I know our elementary school fundraiser took a lot of effort to raise just over $10,000 for the whole years funds, while a very wealthy high school across the valley dropped $8,000 on prom night.
I’ve already listened to the first episode- so many feelings and so many good points brought up! It’s one thing for white people to move into a school and act better than or over step their boundaries (side stepping the PTA and creating their own committees) it’s another when a white neighborhood had people of color move in and they then move out or change schools (what Utah is/has experienced). “White flight” vs gentrification …. Mirror image problems of the similar issue of racism.
Thank you so much for sharing. So much to learn here.
Fascinating blog post, Thanks, Melissa. I lived on the east side of Salt Lake Valley when I raised my children and saw classism firsthand. It could be brutal, and sometimes my kids were the victims. I also saw classism in the Church. In addition, I was privy to a ward division concerning a wealthier ward adjacent to a poorer one. The stake leaders wanted to divide the ward by including both populations, but the wealthy ward leaders forbade it. They won the battle and the poor ward remained isolated in its poverty. A friend suggested it might be helpful if each wealthy ward adopted a poor ward in another country. With 100,000 infants in the LDS Church severely malnourished, at least those children could hopefully be fed since the Church refuses to do so.
The LDS church bus capable of so much good. So many needs are not being met. Thank you for your comment.
Where do I even begin? As someone of mixed blood-I’m a quarter Mexican-but take after my Irish/Dutch roots, I’ve encountered racism not only outside, but within the church. At BYU I had an interview at the one restaurant on campus. The person interviewing me assumed, like many people, that I was white. She went off on those disgusting, dirty ‘Mexicans’. She informed me she just fired one. The spirit told me to, ‘get up and leave.’ But I needed a job, so I stayed. I didn’t get the job, but I vowed I’d never be silent again. At one of my ward Sunday School classes, a man went off on a lengthy rant about those ‘Mexicans’. I was furious. I raised my hand and told him how offended I was by his statements which frankly had no place in church. I remember people looking very uncomfortable. And the man approached me after class, apologizing. I’ve attended Spanish-speaking wards where I felt the love of the members. I still remember how strong the spirit was when I attended a Tongan ward. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but I knew they were speaking truth by the spirit.
Your voice matters. I’m so glad you are speaking up now.
Several years ago, my stake created a new ward by redrawing boundary lines that combined the richest and poorest neighborhoods in the area. While many were supportive, a subset of the wealthy members were very loud in their disapproval. Some would only attend Sunday meetings in their newly assigned chapel, refused to home/visit teach in the “scary” parts of town, and would send their kids to the old ward for weekday activities and seminary. The primary and youth programs withered in the toxicity and by the time a new stake presidency dissolved the ward, it was the size of a branch.
A ward can be a place for people to interact with members from different backgrounds or a place where some of our worst prejudices are expressed in words and action. As Christians, we should do better.
I am so sad that it didn’t work out. Heart breaking really. As Christians, we really should do better.
This was my experience growing up in a Midwestern city with a history of segregation and redlining! Most members of the stake lived in the wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods and suburbs, and were horrified when boundary changes made them attend a building in the predominantly Black part of town, and in the few wards with Black members, and even refugees who had recently joined the church. Also worth noting: a church history site and the only temple in the entire state were also located in the majority Black part of town.
My parents have been in six different wards over the past 11 years, without moving once. Three of those wards overlapped with my four years of high school. I honestly think the frequent boundary changes are because so many members are classist and racist enough that they cannot handle more than two years at a time attending church with poorer people, especially people of color.
I happened to attend middle school and high school in the majority Black part of town. These schools were wonderful, and I am deeply grateful for my experience there. They were also magnet schools, with the sole purpose of attracting wealthier white students like myself to attend. This school district allows students to choose to attend any schools in its boundaries, though it only provides busing to schools within a certain distance of the student’s home. This practice began after the district was sued by the Department of Education for segregation. But most of the local church members had no idea, and would leave the district for another, wealthier, whiter one before their children entered middle school. My mom was once asked by a white woman in the stake if my siblings and I were getting shot at on our way into school each day.
Our church community can do better, and needs to do better. It’s what Jesus would do.
I really appreciate the message and values in this post. The chart on the optimal income for parenting is fascinating. I grew up in a middle income family in a very wealthy ward. I benefitted from the adult women such as my YW leaders not being stressed out and having lots of time and resources to put into building church community and being mentors. Now, I live in a low income inner city ward that has only a handful of really stable families that are not struggling financially, and only a few wealthy members. Families move out of the city to buy homes because it is cheaper further away. Most of the time, I feel overwhelmed in my ward and I don’t feel that connected to many people. But I also can see that my family’s presence and our interactions with people and our bandwidth to organize and make things happens makes a huge difference in the ward. People care that we are there. Someone recently told me about a presentation on how to help others who are disadvantaged and it said one of the most effective things you can do is have them over in your home. Studies show this leads people from lower incomes have a leg up in a way that can really help. It can be powerful social networking. (Can lead to things like job references, job and educational opportunities, new career ideas). I have seen things like that happen in my ward. A wealthy woman with a big career’s influence led inadvertently to me getting the job that I have now, and I’m grateful for that. I agree with you that even though Zion is not happening in secular circles, places of worship should be places where we seek to remedy this and love and connect to others whatever their racial or socio economic background, and where we actively try to help educate and mentor young people. Recently, I had the chance to mentor a teen struggling with a behavioral and mental health issue that their family didn’t have bandwidth to understand or deal with. My family has dealt with the same issue for decades and read numerous books. I normalized what he was going through and bough him a tried and tested book on the subject. I think it changed his life.
Candice, Your lived experiences are so beautiful and put hard core examples to what I am speaking. Thank you. It can be tiring to constantly give so much and I am sure your family is so needed in so many ways. We all need each other so much. This is what makes community (that you speak so well on) so vital! Memories of how people in my community and church community are what keep me tied to our church, keep me desiring that give and take of all, so that we can lift each other as a group.
Melissa, thank you for writing about this issue. The issue is manifested in this country silently, loudly, subtly, or obviously. The people/children on both side continue to feel the sting, shame, nausea, or guilty quietly. You mentioned some ideas that systemically help the unequal opportunities and gaps. Also how do we spread the awareness in individual level?? When my daughter was in 3rd grade, she was the only girl whose parent did not buy the American doll for her that costed near $100 at that time and more for each outfit for the doll. The doll was the topic for the girls daily in the 3rd grade. Did those parents really mean to gift a doll for their daughter’s birthday or on a weekend out of good meaning love? Or did they want to secure their daughters social circle? How and when do those parents become aware of what they do?
Masako, Such a good point! I think parents often don’t want to see their kids “suffer” (emotionally in the short run), and hate to be thought of as a mean parent, but to their kids detriment (in the long run) by giving in and buying that expensive doll. On a larger scale, I have extended family who grew up in Mexico and now that they are in Utah do not want the stigma of being a “poor uneducated Mexican”, so they sent their kids to an expensive private school…creating issues of social privilege. Money hits as something deep within us to want to be accepted.
You articulated this so well. Thank you, Melissa. I have so many complicated feelings about this subject . . . As someone who grew up in one of those low income, government funded, ethnically diverse, “unsafe,” neighborhoods in Utah, I deeply love them . . . And I see where I have pushed my people and my history aside when the opportunities arise because I also witnessed the deep wounds of generational poverty, drug abuse, sexual abuse, and child neglect . . . It breaks my heart. But I didn’t want to raise my kids there. And I know that these traumas are not exclusive to low income areas AND I have also witness the most compassionate, strong, resilient, brilliant, generous, and happy lives in these spaces. . . These spaces made me! Ugh. Thinking and talking about this makes me feel ill with regret and loss and privilege. I don’t think society is meant to be this way. America was supposed to stop this segregation. Anyway. This is SUCH an important topic and discussion.