Nickel and Dimed -- "It's Term Paper

" (Ehrenreich, 2001, p.44)

At least as a waitress, Ehrenreich is visible. Maids, which are usually, except in all-white areas like Maine, utterly invisible and socially isolated in the socially stratified community. Worse yet, while Ehrenreich might have had some anxiety about passing, even educated Black women occasionally have trouble 'passing' for the class they are a part of. 'Oh Look Mommy a baby maid," Ehrenreich quotes the poet "Audre Lorde" who "reported an experience she had in 1967," as the poet "wheel[ed] my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket." (Ehrenreich, 2001, citing Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A.: Perspective on Gender [New York, Routledge, 1992, p.72] footnote p. 79) Even in infancy, Lorde's daughter was targeted as a potential maid, not a potential poet.

If Ehrenreich were not white, in other words, she would have had no trouble 'passing' as lower class and securing the worst type of work, wherever she desired. Although she states that "no one ever questioned by background" (Ehrenreich, 2001, p.6) she admits "I ruled out places like New York and LA where the working class consists mainly of people of color and a white woman with unaccented English seeking entry-level jobs might only look desperate or weird." (Ehrenreich, 2001, p.7) Ehrenreich, although she does not downplay the influence of race on her work, wishes to focus more on economics than on race -- or on immigrant status, even though the ability to speak English is a clear asset to her ability to appear in occupations, such as waitressing and selling, before the public, rather than to be relegated to the status of a cleaning woman or a nanny. But the less one interacts verbally with the public and one's superiors, clearly the less one has opportunities for advancement -- and if African-American, or of a racially marginalized group, even if one speaks perfect English, one may find one's self cast as a maid, despite one's best intentions to the contrary.

Works Cited

Ehrenreich, Barbara. (2001) Nickel and Dimed. New York Henry Holt & Co/

Hughes, Michael & Carolyn J. Kroehler.….....