At 5, Framingham Woman Got A Lesson On Class; She’s Been Talking About It Ever Since

FRAMINGHAM, MA — Denise Moorehead was 5 when she began to understand social class and how it influences the thinking of others.

The now 68-year-old Framingham woman was the first and at the time only child of working, lower-middle-class parents. They were “strivers,” a young Black couple who wanted their daughter to have advantages they hadn’t. Consequently, she had things and experiences her peers in larger families didn’t, including a pretty party dress for a friend’s birthday celebration.

It seemed curious to Moorehead that the honoree, who had five brothers and sisters, wore her nightgown to the party. It looked like the name-brand nightgown in her own closet, so she assumed her friend simply hadn’t had time to change before the guests started arriving. When it came time to cut the cake, Moorehead asked her friend if she wouldn’t like to put on her party dress.

“I know you’ve been wearing your nightgown,” she recalled saying. “This is my party dress. That looks like my nightgown.”

Moorehead, the co-founder of UU Class Conversations, a nonpartisan nonprofit offered through the Unitarian Universalist faith, didn’t know at that tender age the affront her comment had been.

Her mother, however, was aghast.

“She snatched me up, and said, ‘Not everybody is as lucky as you. You apologize,’” Moorehead recalled, saying it was her first conscious awareness of classism.

Class Isn’t Determined By Race

Later, when the concept made more sense, she would begin to understand some of the nuances of classism, and that even in her childhood neighborhood in Springfield, Massachusetts, social stratification existed. She learned, too, that while classism exists within races, class isn’t determined by race.

“People get confused about class versus race versus other parts of equity,” Moorehead said. “Race is part of the definition, but they are not the same. They overlap.”

Every race has an upper class, Moorehead said.

As a child, she had two sets of friends: her neighborhood friends and “my friends from the extra stuff I got because my parents put time, energy and money into me.”

“I went to camp with doctors and lawyers at the fanciest camp in town, to the best dance studios, I got to take French lessons, and went to a middle-class Black church in Springfield, Mass.,” she said. “Those kids didn’t live in my neighborhood.”

When she talked about those experiences, some of her peers — the people she had most in common with — were sometimes resentful. One even ripped a hole in her coat, saying something along the lines of, “You think you’re so fancy with your fancy coat,” Moorehead said.

Again, her mother, who was involved in the civil rights and women’s movements, took her aside. “I know you don’t think you are bragging, and you’re not,” Moorehead recalled her mother saying, “but you have to be careful about how you talk about what you are doing.”

“So I knew early on that I had privileges and advantages my neighbors didn’t,” she said.

Class Isn’t About Money, Either

Those early experiences greatly influenced Moorehead’s work around social class. She founded UU Class Conversations with the late Rev. Dr. Dorothy Emerson in 2013 after they had been invited to a “train the trainers” session put on by the now disbanded social justice group Class Action.

She wasn’t working on anything specific to class conversations in her marketing and communications job, but it was tangentially related to her advocacy and activism around women’s rights.

The organization’s aim is to help people learn what social class is, and importantly, what it isn’t, and how it influences their and others’ perspectives. The program focuses on teaching effective communication about social class issues and encourages collaborative efforts to combat classism.

Moorehead doesn’t start her training with a definition of how social class, the hierarchical division of people in society, is decided, but rather what social class isn’t.

“People think it’s just about money. They talk about social class in terms of how much money you make, or a person’s income is such-and-such,” Moorehead told Patch.

That’s part of it, because money, or income, does come with certain advantages, she said. But those advantages can vanish with the stroke of a CEO’s pen. A person with wealth, on the other hand, can ride out a loss of income without losing the advantage or, as some people parse it, privilege.

“Opportunity is part of it,” Moorehead said. “People don’t think about that.”

In short, a person’s socioeconomic status is based on myriad factors such as wealth, income, education, occupation and how that influences their access to resources, opportunities and social status.

Why It Matters

Eighteen years after UU Class Conversations was founded, Moorehead and other steering committee members are navigating discussions in the choppy waters of “class in the age of billionaires.”

Numerous systemic changes have assisted in the rise of the billionaire class, for example tax breaks for the wealthy and extremely wealthy, along with campaign finance laws that permit affluent individuals and corporations to spend limitless amounts on the campaigns of politicians who have their own social advantages.

In society at large, the billionaire class is regarded with outsized respect, Moorehead believes.

“It’s very sad when that’s what makes a person a fine person,” she said. “People do think that way. That’s where we got to this point with the people leading this country.”

That was reinforced in the innocent remarks of a young nephew, who observed that people living in certain Long Island enclaves must be better people because they had nicer houses.

Much as she did as a 5-year-old, thoughtlessly commenting on her friend’s nightgown, “this 9-year-old is going to have a long lecture,” Moorehead said.

How To Bring About Change

In her training, Moorehead adds “aspiration” to factors such as education, income and wealth that influence social status and power.

“I think from the time you’re little, if you’re told to aspire, you’ll aspire to whatever you’re told,” she said.

“Some kids are never told to aspire for more than what they may already have, not just in terms of wealth, but how they think about their worldview. Social class plays a large role in that.”

Although social class can influence opportunities and accomplishments, it doesn’t determine a person’s fate. People are not bound to the social class they were born into, as they would in a caste system, where social mobility is severely limited or nonexistent.

The first step in social mobility is understanding class background. That’s out of a person’s control. They’re born into it.

“Your parents didn’t have much education and experienced homelessness, or you went to elite schools and took multiple classes, summered in wherever or wintered in wherever,” Moorehead said.

Disadvantages are inherent either way.

“You know what, sometimes if you grow up very scrappy, you gain a whole lot of strength, while the middle and owning classes are limited by what they don’t know,” she explained.

“They have the class advantage of being better able to understand people, because they need to be able to ‘read people’ faster. The owning class never had to understand why something is a problem, and there is so much suffering when people don’t.”

One glaring example: Elon Musk, as the world's richest person and a leader in the technology industry, had the social advantages to win President Donald Trump’s appointment to head the Department of Government Efficiency, Moorehead explained. However, he lacked the social background to fully grasp the significant impacts of billions of dollars in federal budget cuts, which could lead to 14 million deaths worldwide and strip millions of Americans of their health care coverage.

“People don’t always think about that,” Moorehead said. “What if they are told, ‘This is what you got by having less class advantage, and look what fellow folks in this class background were disadvantaged’?

“Everybody has strengths, and limitations based on class. There are feelings tied to that — feelings of superiority or feelings of inferiority. I think that’s when you’re able to help people understand — that no matter what class, there are limitations.”

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