I'm not sure how old I was before I knew that you could buy brand-new furniture from a store, that there were things like furniture stores. When I was growing up, my mother got furniture in three ways. She would take things off the street; she would buy them in junk or antique stores; and she would find furniture at the dump. How many people on this campus had parents who would go scavenging in the town dump for furniture?

Classless Society Stories Project

The closest most folks come to talking about class in this nation is to talk about money. For so long everyone has wanted to hold on to the belief that the United States is a class-free society - that anyone who works hard enough can make it to the top. Few people stop to think that in a class-free society there would be no top.

bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters (New York: Routledge, 2000), 5.

"Successful people want to be with other successful people." Kitredge said. "Birds of a feather," he added. "On Nantucket you don't feel bad because you want a nice bottle of wine. If you order a three-hundred-dollar bottle in a restaurant, the guy at the next table is ordering a four-hundred-dollar bottle."

Geraldine Fabrikant, "Old Nantucket Warily Meets The New," in Class Matters, ed. Bill Keller (New York: Times Books, 2005), 168.