Reply #6: No, that would have been impossible with my upbringing

[Nikia]

My parents were divorced and poor when I was little. We lived in a relatively poor neighborhood. We did belong to the Y and my mother belonged to social oranizations, but we wore clothes until we grew out of them or wore them out, had trouble coming up with lunch money right before pay day, and had my parents run out of gas in line at the bank to cash their checks. Despite this my mother always pushed me academically ever since she found out I had a high IQ as a three year old. In early elementary school, I did not hold the belief at all that poorer children were less intelligent.
Of course, our family background was not poor. My great grandparents owned a great deal of rental property in our town and did spend a lot of money on certain things of value as well as traveled. Both sets of grandparents were middle income/middle class. Neither set were materialists and my mother's father literally saved half his income.
I was not raised to be a materialist nor believe that wealth had anything to do with one's value as a person.
My mother, on the otherhand, wanted to be wealthier and resented her father's thriftiness. She tended to date established professionsals. One man who she dated had rich parents who were principal chair holders of a large corporation and had everything that they wanted including live in help. I never thought that any of these people were better than us. Then she married another upper middle class professional who turned out to be an abusive sociopath and my sister and I didn't really benefit at all from his money.
I didn't really start to notice classism until I moved to my new school after my mother married this man. Our school was a rural district including the richer subdivisions, farms, and trailer parks. I was initially pegged rich kid on the hill, but a couple trailer park and farm kids were nicer to me at first. Go figure.
I couldn't have ever been right wing then. Oh yes and during that time there was the deeply moving book and movie the Lorax, which made me equate corporations only concerned with profit as evil.