This article is composed of highlighted quotes from an interview with an anonymous Bowdoin student. It is a detailed look into one Bowdoin student’s thoughts on wealth and its impact on their lives. It is color-coded by theme. Blue represents the development of the wealth stigma based on one’s previous and current friend groups and environments. Red represents the perception of material goods and actions as symbols of wealth and the conclusions drawn from that information. Purple represents the notion that wealth is a challenging and uncomfortable topic that people avoid, due to its stigmatization.
“If this wasn’t for the point of a project, and you just randomly came up to me, like, ‘hey, so what do you think about wealth?’ You know, that’s weird. I don’t know… [I’d probably be like,] ‘I’mma walk away now.’”
“I think [Bowdoin does] try to do a good job of recruiting people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. But, it’s not a complete range. You have a clump here and a clump there.”
“Canada Goose jackets are huge [wealth symbols]. I mean AirPods…? I don’t know if those are so much a wealth symbol. I don’t have an iPhone. I don’t know if you get them when you buy an iPhone or you have to always buy them separately. But I mean, so many kids have AirPods around campus and flaunt those pretty much. I mean, backpacks.”
“We made fun of [my roommate] whenever he had [his AirPods] in, ‘oh, he’s got earphones in, he can’t hear us,’ [to] go along with that meme. He would always just only have them in [our dorm room], and going outside, he just used the normal ones with the cord.”
“If you see people with AirPods, that’s one of the first things people can notice about you and then that can be their first impression about you.”
“[AirPods] were a greater flex [last year].”
“I know some of my friends who definitely don’t need to go thrifting who go thrifting for clothes just so they can look cooler.”
“Some people have BMW cars [on campus.]”
“I haven’t [had any negative experiences with wealth]. I don’t know anyone who has, [either.]”
“Wealth isn’t something me and my friends talk about much at all. There’s just no reason we need to. We might try to talk about sports and what’s going on, or each other’s classes, or play video games together. But not talk about the real world.”
“My [friend] group I feel is pretty diverse, socially and economically. And I feel like we all kind of know where we sit, but we haven’t expressed ‘this is what my parents make’ but we all have an idea just because we’ve spent so much time together now.”
“I went to high school where we all had to wear a uniform. Everyone wore khakis and a polo shirt and then a pullover. There wasn’t really any way to differentiate yourself or flaunt anything. You saw it through athletics by seeing who had new cleats every single season versus a kid who’s been using the same cleats for the last three seasons in a row.”
“[A wealthy person might say,] ‘Oh, my daddy bought me this,’ but I haven’t found that at Bowdoin at all.”
“I’m naive in a sense that I don’t know how someone who’s living in poverty lives versus how someone like Jeff Bezos is living.”
“I think someone who’s really rich doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. They don’t [tell] their friends how much money they have, so then their friends don’t ask them for money or ask them to get them something. [For someone who isn’t wealthy], maybe there’s embarrassment of living in poverty, not having what everyone else has.”
“I think [the stigma around wealth] goes back to embarrassment and shame and jealousy and guilt.”
“There’s a certain point where, how much money do you actually need, and then that’s enough.”
“I don’t know if wealth really can be destigmatized. We’re all coming from our different paths, and we all have different views of what wealth is and what equates to wealth. It would be really hard to resocialize everyone and say, ‘don’t worry about wealth,’ or ‘this is what the [new] norm is.’ So let’s just move forward.”
“For me, [the stigmatization of wealth] was really apparent when transitioning between high school and college. In high school, we all wore uniforms every single day; we were all the same, so I couldn’t recognize different symbols. At Bowdoin, you have the freedom to wear whatever you want. That’s when it became clear, with different people choosing different things to spend money on.
“It comes to the point of when you look [at your wealth, you have to say], ‘okay, I have plenty of clean water, [for example,] and I have enough money to have that for a while. What’s the cost that I can send it to someplace else?’”
“I am very open about [talking about wealth]. I’m not gonna show it off and I’m not gonna put it in people’s faces, but if anyone wants to talk to me, I’m an open book about pretty much everything. I’d be comfortable having similar conversations like this in the future, but also, if it doesn’t happen, then it doesn’t happen.”