If you go to Harvard undergrad, you’re a spoiled brat, and you probably got in through some legacy, and you’re not even getting that good of an education, most Harvard people, but Harvard grad school is where serious professionals get their degrees and licenses.The context here is that Louis C.K.'s parents met while grad students of some kind or another at Harvard, and - and this is what comes right before the passage Amber cites - this fact has been brought up to delegitimize his claims to a working-class persona. He's being intentionally imprecise, I suspect, with the identity of Harvard undergrads - who are of course not all legacies, and of course the legacies are often enough multigeneration school-nerds who benefitted from an extra leg up - because he's trying to prove that he's no child of privilege.
That interview's easily the finest (written) example I've ever encountered of the kind of picking and choosing that I've heard since high school from those who grew up some form or other of definitively-not-underprivileged. Even rich kids have biographical details that make them sound ordinary, just as even working-class kids have biographical details that give the opposite impression. There's generally an overall answer, albeit one that can be evaded by highlighting the details that cut against the greater truth. C.K. worked crap jobs as a youth, for pocket money his parents weren't giving him? Who among us did not? The relevant class signifier is, did his parents work at the KFC too? Lots of upper-middle-class parents who did not grow up that way themselves live in utter fear of having bratty kids, and - whether through explicitly keeping allowances low, or subtler forms of persuasion - make it so that their offspring feel obliged to work well before college-graduation-age. Lots of parents with cultural-educational capital lack equivalent economic capital, which sounds as if it may have been the case with C.K. This does not, I'd think, amount to blue-collar authenticity, but a relative lack of capital in either direction can be spun as such.
(I'm thinking also of how New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, in a recent interview with Leonard Lopate, responded to Lopate's remarks about how his own family never went to nice restaurants because they didn't have any money by admitting that he - Gopnik - went to some, on special occasions, but that he also didn't grow up with much money because his parents were academics, as if they were adjuncts in the hinterlands. Two parents who were both McGill professors - this isn't the same as two parents who were both hedge-fund managers, but... yeah.)
And this seems to be a common factor in revisionist histories of socioeconomic upbringings: mentioning that one's own parents were born poor or working-class. While this can, as I've said, have an impact on how their kids, in turn, are raised, if you're the child of parents who've socio-economically reached whichever point, you yourself do not get to somehow atavistically claim their childhood experiences. Your parents may get to claim self-made-ness, but even they don't get to claim underdog status past a certain (admittedly hard-to-pin-down) point. They probably don't, and their offspring definitely don't.
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