If you haven’t been on social media at all this week, you have missed out on the controversial Kim Kardashian interview that she did for Vogue, where she gave her now-infamous advice to women in business – to get off their butts and work hard, followed by a comment on how people don’t want to work anymore.
It didn’t take long for the interview to spark major controversy across all social media platforms, with many calling the reality TV star “tone-deaf,” a comment I agree with.
While the Kardashians have made a name for themselves in the business world, regardless of how they initially achieved it, let’s not turn a blind eye to the advantages and headstarts each and every one of them have had since birth.
A high-profiled attorney for a dad, a high-profile Olympic athlete for a step-dad, and a businesswoman for a mother who all helped set them up in great schools and mansions for houses. They never faced any sort of financial instability, a luxury that is not given to most everyday people.
When you have been set up since childhood for success, it is easier to get your foot in the door, and let’s be honest, money does buy opportunities, many of which children of poorer families have to work twice as hard to achieve and even then many people never achieve them due to other obstacles. As the popular saying goes, they are “working twice as hard to get half as far.”
For example, take the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal, where children of the participating wealthy, including America’s Sweetheart Lori Loughlin – who played Aunt Becky in Full House – were admitted to high-profile Ivy League Universities on false tests scores, athletic ability, and academic achievements all because their parents could afford to pay $500,000 in bribes.
With this in mind, it’s important to change the mindset around how financial success is a measurement of hard work.
As we see the housing market, renters market, car market, and inflation hit almost every aspect of our day-to-day lives we need to start recognizing that the majority of people work to survive, live paycheck to paycheck or at least relatively close to that, and do not have the same 24 hours in a day as the super-wealthy. The idea that celebrities and other wealthy people have control over the narrative of “hard work” has to go out the window.
The reality is that the majority of us, like our parents, put in hard work, long hours in sometimes physically demanding jobs just to survive. According to the Los Angeles Times, in 2019 53 million Americans, which equals 44 percent of the nation’s workers between the ages of 18 to 64 held low-wage jobs, with a median wage of $18,000.
The majority of these jobs offer no benefits, no sick days, no vacation days, and no healthcare- with medical issues being the leading cause of bankruptcies in the country. A job requiring a bachelor’s degree in your dream field could only be paying you $35,000, which most times is not enough to afford decent housing, especially when a studio apartment in Habersham County is running you close to $1,300 a month.
When I heard Kim Kardashian’s comments I thought of my mother, who worked six days a week from 4 a.m. to around midnight for years in order to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads, I thought of how even working two jobs as a full-time reporter and part-time at a donut shop I could barely make my $920 rent and car payment while working in Texas, or how half of the families in the United States struggle to pay their basic bills. I am once again dumbfounded that anyone who is not born into wealth would take Kim’s comments to heart and decide that if they only worked a little harder, they too could achieve billionaire status.
As a first-generation Mexican-American, it’s important for me to try to establish my future children in a better financial situation than I had, the same goal my parents had when they arrived in this country but to do that I need to be aware of how the system is built, what is actually going on economically in the world for the working class so that I am able to find a way to navigate it.
Now my feelings towards Kim K’s comments do not apply to others who have come from humble beginnings, had no generational wealth or family name to cling to, and have succeeded on their own merit. I am all for a Ted Talk on success, defying the odds, and creating a better future for yourself, however, I just don’t want it to come from someone with no real-life experience of what the real world is like for the majority of people.
Amaris E. Rodriguez is a staff writer for The Northeast Georgian. Reach her at arodriguez@cninewspapers.com or 706-778-4215.