Privilege and adversity come in many shapes and forms. Our society is geared to recognise some more than others.
This was highlighted in a documentary about the life of Martina Navratilova. The programme takes you through Martina’s life as a child in communist Czechoslovakia. Life was tough and Martina had to work hard to overcome many obstacles and reach the pinnacle of her sport.
I found it very inspiring to see someone who came from poverty and reached the top of their field. I felt I had connected with her and could relate her struggles to those I and my friends faced growing up in a poor community.
The fight against poverty appeared to be the core subject of the documentary.
However, at the end of the programme I was shunned. Martina described the many causes she supports - almost too many to list - so she explains who doesn’t need support.
“The only people who have nothing to fight for are white men, straight white men. They're all set.
But if you're outside of that, you're an outsider. And there's a mountain to climb.”
Apparently the problems of poverty do not apply to me and other straight white men. It made me think of how I came to be “all set”.
I was born into a middle-working-class family. We were well off. We owned our own home, a car and had a garden. We went on summer holidays and had big Christmas presents, like bikes and a set of drums.
All that changed when my parents broke up. We moved into temporary accommodation while we waited for our application for social housing. It was one step up from being homeless. Even so I had it set. The concrete stairwell in our block stank of bleach or rotting food, depending on the day of the week; all the other blocks on the estate stank of piss, bleach and rotting food.
As a kid you don’t question your social standing. You accept where you are as how it is.
I was eight-years-old when we moved into that block of maisonettes. I didn’t care the stairwell stank of bleach; I was more excited about the garbage chute. On our first evening there I went to watch my step dad put out the rubbish. My only thought was whether I could fit in the hatch and slide down the chute into the bin below.
How to have fun is all you think about at that age. We’d been given a tennis racquet which my brother and I shared. One day we found another boy on the estate who owned a tennis racquet. We immediately headed for the abandoned garages at the back of our block. We usually played rallies versus ourselves up against the wall but today we had two racquets and could play each other.
Even though the court was cracked concrete, even though there was no net, and one racquet had some strings missing, and our tennis balls were all punctured - we shared what we had and we had fun playing.
I made some great friends during the time we lived on that housing estate. When we moved out we didn’t go far. We moved into a terraced council house on a street at the edge of the estate.
We had more space: a garden to explore and separate bedrooms for me and my brother. We still didn’t have the things the posh kids at school had, like central heating, double glazing, hot water on tap or a shower. But looking back I see some of these as an advantage.
Council houses in the early ‘90s still had single glazed windows with wooden frames. The windows in my bedroom had rotted creating gaps where the wind came in. In winter there would be ice on the inside of the window, where the condensation had frozen. I’d usually do my homework in the living room in front of the fire, but on occasions I’d need more space and the only option was the desk in my bedroom.
It was too cold to sit and study for any length of time. After ten minutes my hands would be numb. I found a workaround: I would sit on my hands to warm them and, when the feeling came back, I would quickly write what I could before putting my hands under my legs again.
This gave me an advantage. It would take me longer to do my homework and that meant information had more time to sink in. I was forced to think about my work before I started writing, which, in the days before word processors, was a good technique to learn.
When I went to university I had more good luck.
I was in one of the last years to be offered a student grant. Grants were in the process of being phased out, so applications at the time were means tested. I qualified, of course, and wouldn’t have been able to go to university without it.
The system is even worse now. Yes, student loans are cheaper and allow you to delay payments until you have a reasonable income, but the total cost is so much higher. There is no way someone from my background would undertake such a loan.
The average student debt is £55k. When your family income is only £15k per year, it’s difficult to see a future where you can pay back a loan that’s 4 times your annual income.
I would not have gone to university if I had been born a year or two later.
Another fortuitous aspect was the job market boom at the time I graduated. Even with a degree students job seeking difficult. I was lucky not to have this problem. In 1998 the country was in a financial boom and I found a job within 3 months of leaving university.
My parents struggled to afford my bed and board for those 3 months. I was under pressure to get a job - any job. While I was applying for software engineering roles I was also applying for jobs in electronic retailers. I even applied at bowling alleys - any job I could take that would bring some money into the house.
If you live in a family where living at home is an option, where your parents can afford to house you and feed you, you wouldn’t even notice this problem. Re-training is floated as a solution to the demise of industries like coal mining or motor manufacturing. What the well-off fail to realise is that re-training is a privilege to those with money in the bank or parents to fall back on.
I feel very lucky to be where I am today. I have many straight white male friends who didn’t make it out of poverty. I know from experience there is no pass given to straight white men that lets them jump into a high-paid job.
There are many positions of power occupied by rich straight white men. And if you analyse the main reason why those people find themselves in those jobs: it’s not because they’re straight, white or even men, it’s because they came from a rich family.
There are many mountains different people have to climb. If you catalogue them all, measure them and compare the scale of each ascent you will find the climb out of poverty is the biggest of them all. Yet, it’s the mountain people forget to mention when the subject of equality comes up.
Just Call Me Martina, 4th July 2016
“I've been fighting on all the different fronts: for kids, for animals, for the environment, old people as well - people who basically can't help themselves - and of course gay and women's rights - we still have a long way to go.
The only people who have nothing to fight for are white men; straight white men. They're all set.
But if you're outside of that, you're an outsider. And there's a mountain to climb.”