Laura's Response to Check

My Working-Class Roots in an Academic War Zone: Creating Space to Grieve and Honor
by Ed Check

In this article, Ed Check describes his experiences as a homo-sexual male coming from a working class family that is also Polish-Catholic. He struggles with the negativity and misunderstanding that his colleagues and friends have of the working class as well as his methodology in his research. Ed Check finds himself caught between several opposing forces; working class versus middle class, activist versus academic. He finds that he is different from his colleagues because he does come from a working class family and although he may be considered middle class now, his past can not be forgotten. He finds himself taking on the role as an activist for all the working class students and professors who now find themselves in academia. He wants to create a space where these people can feel welcome, safe, and a place where they feel they belong to. Ed Check feels that grieving is essential for healing and also for honoring. As he gives light to his new middle class values, his working class values are buried. Grieving is a natural process that one needs to go through when something is lost. Grieving marks the beginning of the healing process. Grieving also honors what has been lost. If grieving was not necessary, then what was lost really did not carry much value. The heavier the grief felt, the larger the loss.

Ed Check describes his hometown in Manitowoc, WI where he grew up in a Polish Catholic neighborhood among family members who valued hard work that paid “good” money, family, and community. His town was primarily white and racist and the working class kids were often stereotyped and advised towards vocational classes. He knew he was different as he aspired for more than a “good” paying job and as his homosexual identity began to emerge. He found healing through his artwork that combined images of religion, homosexuality and social class. He feels that our schools today do not teach the students enough about the working class people, grief, loss and healing, queers, and politics. These are topics that he feels would have prepared him better to deal with the loss of his gay friends to AIDS, and his loss to his working class roots. As an activist to these concerns, he is developing a Worker’s Center in his hometown that will archive oral histories and artifacts of local workers as well as showcase working class artists and other art related to working class issues.

What I related most to in this article is Ed Check’s struggle between working and middle class values. My father grew up in the Chicago area with a family that was primarily working class. He was the first to move away from his family. He enlisted in the Air Force and became an Electrician for the aircraft. This experience led him to a fine job as a programmer for IBM. My father was always an avid reader and always wanted to learn more and more. He took evening classes at community colleges and continued to climb the corporate ladder in computer programming. He decided to raise his family away from the town that he grew up in and even married a Spaniard. It was very important to him that all of his children went to a great school and he instilled in all of us the middle class values. We were all expected to go to college. The only question that was asked was which ones were we going to pick. The more competitive the College or University was ranked, the better it was for my father’s children. Because of my father, I grew up with middle-class values and I like them. I like to learn and sometimes that is what I gauge my self-worth on. I have gone back to Chicago many times to visit my family that my father left years ago and I do see that they are different. Although I love my family very much and I have a great time when I am around them, I do find that I am different than they are. There are parts of me that can not relate to them. Sometimes I feel that I have to leave a part of my identity back at home when I go out for a visit. What is considered “normal” at home may be a very different “normal” when I am visiting my cousins. I am always happy to return home too.