Relationship to the Culture of Power?

I see only a few of you have posted on your personal relationship to the culture of power. Please get that up ASAP. I want you to think about who you are in relation to all of this stuff we are reading. Make sue your blogs are completely caught up this weekend!!

Given that I have asked you to share some personal things about yourselves, I will share a few things about me, too. I grew up in an upper-middle class neighborhood where all of my friends had more material assets than I did. However, just being around the privilege of a community where people traveled to Europe on family vacations, or were given cars for their 16th birthdays gave me access to the system of power. (I drove a brown 1979 Datsun 210 and I carpooled younger kids to school each week to pay for my gas money!)

My family had more cultural capital than economic capital. But that really helped me know how to negotiate my schooling to the best of my advantage. My parents are both over-educated, and I even have a grandparent who went to college. My parents knew how to help me with homework and teach me how to type a research paper so that it looked "professional." Going to college was as much as assumption in my family as was brushing my teeth each morning. I started looking for what college I would go to when i was about 12 -- anywhere I ever visited my mom made sure we stopped at college campuses so I could look around. I hated it as a teenager, but it gave me a great advantage at 17 when I was applying to schools and knew what each one looked like. I ended up going to college 3000 miles away from home and feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to live in NYC and be independent at a very young age.

These are some of the ways I was given access to the rules and codes of power.