A reality check on social capital
reflecting on research that cross-class connections are a secret to ending poverty
When I was a teenager growing up in Colorado Springs, I would religiously flip to the back of books to read the biographies of the authors I loved. I wanted to be a writer. I figured the best way I could figure out how to do that was by studying what writers do, but I only knew one in real life—a children’s author and mother in the neighborhood. By reading author’s bios, though, I started noticing a pattern; the authors I aspired to be like all seemed to live in Brooklyn.
I didn’t know much about Brooklyn, beyond hip hop lyrics, but I began to think of it as a magical island of writers. If I could get to New York, some mysterious alchemy would turn me into a writer.
It was kid logic, but it wasn’t far off.
I eventually made my way to the city that never sleeps, but writes a whole hell of a lot, and sat in conference rooms and listened to panels about “how to break into journalism.” Gen X editors, with long memories of the romance of print magazines and hostility towards the wild west of the internet, would recommend never cold pitching anyone. Make sure someone introduces you, they would urge us. I can still feel the frustration flowering in my belly at that advice. But what if you don’t know anyone to introduce you? I wanted to scream at them. The casual callousness of people who are already in a club, urging you to make your way in via contacts you don’t have has always struck me as one of the worst forms of elitism.
I thought of it when I saw headlines last week: “Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor.” In short, the study, which analyzed the Facebook friendships of 72 million people, found that, for poor children, living in an area where people have more friendships that cut across class lines significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood.
Why? For a few reasons, but much of it goes back to that not-at-all-benign phrase: make sure someone introduces you.
I was a cultural migrant, not a class one per se; my dad was a bankruptcy lawyer and my mom a community activist, so I had economic stability, but no network when I moved to New York City. I had to hustle for the connections—what researchers call “social capital”—in order to find someone to introduce me. But once I did, I experienced firsthand the deceptively simple flow of it.
One introduction leads to another. That person invites you to an event where you meet three more. One of those people knows a writer who needs someone to tutor her kid and maybe do some research for her new book. You make yourself useful. You try to be easy to work with and a joy to be around (this is so coded with race and gender and all the things, of course). You get a bunch of free meals and more introductions and the ball is rolling. It happens in fits and starts, but before long, you are a person who knows people. You can make your own introductions. You can sit on panels and say cruelly casual things like, make sure someone introduces you. (You don’t. Ever.)
This has all been flooding back to me as I think about this research and talk about it with friends. One friend of mine, who grew up working class in Queens, remembers when a professional connection I had made for her turned putrid; the person said, “Well, Courtney recommended you, so we’re giving you a chance,” as if her own education and experience were worth nothing without my seal of approval.
Another, who met her business partner on Instagram, said: “He’s a White guy, but grew up homeless. I’m a Black woman and had more economic stability. But we both grew up pastor’s kids and have a passion in common, so we leverage our privileges for one another.”
Another remembered going to rich friends’ country homes during high school and realizing a whole new world of what was possible. It wasn’t that she wanted to live that way, necessarily, but the aperture of her understanding of how people lived widened and agency came with that, even if not pure admiration.
My own husband grew up in a boisterous house of six kids, two parents, and one grandfather in Milwaukee, and wondered about other ways to live. He became a caddy at 12-years-old and figured out that if he hitched a ride with the rich golfers in the neighborhood, he could not only skip the line of caddies, but learn about the way they thought about the world on the ride over. In some ways, this was probably the start of his career in philanthropy.
So many of us have these stories—moments when our stomachs turned, moments when the aperture widened, moments when we were child anthropologists, piecing together the secret puzzles of social capital. As intimate as they may feel in the moment when you are experiencing them, they are actually structural—the emotional fall out and subtle scheming of people in a country so profoundly divided by wealth.
One piece of the study’s write-up really stood out to me:
“The pressure that parents feel to try to give their kids a competitive advantage is amplified when society is unequal and there’s more to be lost,” said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University who studies inequality in schools and among families. “Our society is structured in ways that discourage these kinds of cross-class friendships from happening, and many parents, often white, are making choices about where to live and what extracurriculars to put their kids into that make those connections less likely to happen.”
This is just part of why I’m so committed to being in integrating communities—like my kids’ Title I school in Oakland. I know the transfer of social capital isn’t without its complexity; it couldn’t be any other way in a country this divided. But I also know that it can have transformative, emergent, and unpredictable impacts.
We like to think of our relationships as a sort of benevolent good. When we make introductions between people we think could be collaborators or friends, when we open up our world to someone—whether at a conference or a dinner party—it feels generative and generous. But the true measure of how transformational that introduction might be is how disparate the worlds (and how genuine the connection, of course).
If we are trusted and if we trust, if we can bridge worlds that are truly unlikely to be bridged in our profoundly segregated society, we experience a whole different level of beauty. Art gets made that wouldn’t have otherwise been made. Organizations are built more equitably and wisely that would be riddled with blind spots. Bellies are filled that would otherwise be hungry. People remember that we are all, every last one of us, worthy of consideration whether or not we “know someone.”
Brooklyn wasn’t magic, exactly, but the relationships I was able to form there were. Some of them were with gatekeepers at elite publications. Many of them were with my hustling peers, many of whom have gone on to do all kinds of incredible, creative things, and sometimes even become gatekeepers themselves. May we all remember that the magic can be used for either good or evil, for widening access or narrowing it, and that our best way of living lives of delight and generosity is by joining communities (schools, neighborhoods, religious institutions, organizations) full of difference.
What memories did this study spark for you of catalytic friendships and/or kid anthropology of your own?
Such a stimulating read - thank you! Your words about the panel reminded me of the first writer's conference I went to and how intimidated I was when a (clearly tired and burnt out) agent responded to an audience member's question about getting representation by saying, "The agent will come to you when the time is right." Every part of me bristled at the elitism of that response, and I have kept that fire in my belly to do whatever I can for new writers to hold the door open for them and not make that The Way Things Are.
Your use of the phrase “child anthropologists” reminds me of how I grew up poor but smart, and so met people with very different socio-economic backgrounds as a result. Moving to the U.K. at 25 meant that the process was repeated, and still continues, to a lesser extent. I can stand aloof from other people’s melée and think, “What do I see that might be of use to me?”