Taylor Hawes | Recognizing the other kind of diversity

The other day, I was sitting in one of those 200-person lectures where everyone has a laptop and no one pays attention.

My gaze fell upon a girl sitting a row ahead of me. As I watched her fingers flying nimbly over the keyboard of her MacBook Pro, she navigated to the webpage of the iPhone 4S. She bookmarked it and then moved on to Bloomingdales.com. There, she went straight to a shopping cart already loaded with two dresses, each costing upwards of $300, and proceeded to check out. Finally, she finished her spending frenzy with a leisurely stroll of Jetsetter.com, where she began to check hotel availabilities for spring break 2012 in St. Tropez.

I felt dizzy. Glancing down at my clothes, I calculated that I had bought more than half of what I was wearing from a thrift store. Prior to starting Penn, I’d always heard things from Philly friends about Penn students — careless, occasionally derogatory, comments that usually classified all Quakers as rich snobs who were completely ignorant of the world beyond their upper-class environment.

I chose not to believe the stereotypes, and this decision has proved to be richly rewarding the vast majority of the time. I’ve met a lot of fantastic people at Penn, some rich, some not so rich, nearly all of whom are aware of the economic differences among people that exist both within Penn and the world at large.

But there are times when the cultural divide seems harder to bridge. I came to Penn from a Philadelphia private school, having moved here from New Jersey after my family’s home was foreclosed on. Although it was a private school that catered to low-income inner-city students, my family still struggled to pay the tuition. I share this not as a sob story, but as a different story — a story the likes of which I have not heard much of on campus.

My parents’ income, my upbringing, my educational background — all of these are things that I have found to be intrinsically divergent from the experiences of the average Penn student. They have made me who I am and given tools and life skills that I have brought to Penn.

There were times when these differences amused me, even made me feel superior — like the time freshman year when a hallmate didn’t know how to do her laundry because “usually the housekeeper does it.” There were other times when I felt angered, frustrated and small, like when my secondhand laptop crashed before finals first year and a friend flippantly told me to just ask my parents to buy me a MacBook.

There have been countless battles with Student Financial Services, a thousand phone calls to relatives begging for help with tuition and a million tearful phone calls home wondering if maybe girls like me just don’t belong at a school like Penn.

But I do belong. We all do. Economic diversity, class levels and income discussions are uncomfortable subjects, topics we all steer clear of out of what I feel is an honest, well-intentioned desire not to offend our friends and neighbors. But they are issues that, because of this innate avoidance, have created a population of students that is nearly invisible on campus.

“This [economic diversity] is a difficult issue to discuss,” said English professor Peter Conn, who participated in a recent panel discussion that addressed economic diversity on campus. “It’s getting discussed more now, due to the increasing recognition that the entire economy has become more and more bifurcated between the 1 and 99 percent. That may be a slogan, but it’s also true.”

It’s time to shatter the taboo. There is no shame in being from a low-income family. It’s time that we as a community begin to recognize all of our differences; they can only make us stronger. To be fair, this is a national — even global — problem that is older and bigger than Penn. Increasing class mobility, making college accessible to all in both word and deed is possible and achievable. But we need to reach low-income students like me long before college — long before even the critical junior year of high school — and show them that august institutions like Penn are feasible.

If we call ourselves a leader in higher education, then it’s our job to lead — and to lead everyone.

Taylor Hawes is a College junior from Philadelphia. Her email address is tayhawes@sas.upenn.edu. Tattle-Taylor appears every other Friday.

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