On succeeding in a world made for other sorts of people

Sometimes a book is so informative, so mind-expanding, that I find it hard to write about it here. I want my readers to share my intellectual delight. But I doubt my ability to describe my enthusiasm.

That's how I feel about Fiona Hill's There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. Let's simplify this: Hill has written a must read volume! And for the best experience, I highly recommend reading the audio version as she reads it herself and her accent is a part of the story.

So what is this book? It's a memoir from the Russian expert few of us had ever heard of until she testified at Donald Trump's first impeachment -- the impeachment for trying to strong arm the Ukrainian president by withholding congressionally authorized weapons unless he helped with potential dirt on Joe Biden. (Looks even worse now than it did at the time, doesn't it?) Improbably she's a naturalized immigrant from England's depressed north who ended up, through sheer brains and grit, working on Trump's national security council .

Hill's Trump impeachment saga adds little to what journalists have reported; DJT is a corrupt pig surrounded by moral monsters. But we knew that. Her Russia expertise is valuable now that we're in a quasi-war with Russia. She's long been a Russia hawk, and she seems to have been more accurate than I might have admitted a few months back. However the really interesting content of this book is not about Trumplandia; the memoir consists of two themes, each so engaging and important I'm going to write two posts about this book over the next few days.

First, this is a book about how inherited class position and its grinding injuries, as well as being a woman, shaped challenges and opportunities for this accomplished and accomplishing woman.

The young Fiona was from nowhere, otherwise known as the desolate former coal mining town of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in the North East of England. Her father had expected a decent living and life as a miner; he was lucky to end up an orderly moving bed pans in the local hospital. The title of her memoir is her father's summation her prospects: she must find a way to get out, to leave the home she loved.

Yet her parents were people who could envision aspirations for her and she could for herself. She always aimed high:

Education was the key to changing my circumstances, but the kind, quality, and affordability of the education would be critical factors. Based on my background, as a schoolgirl in Bishop Auckland I could consider becoming a nurse like my mother. I could aspire to be a teacher like some of our relatives. All this would require hard work and also some good fortune. If the stars aligned and I really excelled at school, I might leave town for a regional university. I might reach higher to acquire other qualifications and become a white-collar professional, a doctor or maybe even a college lecturer. In this way I might attain a place in the British middle class. ...

It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when I was thirteen, that I became aware that there was a working class and that I was in it. I was on a school exchange to Tübingen, Germany, sponsored by the education authority of my regional government, Durham County Council. With only one exception, the other students were not from my school or town. In our first encounters, many of them grilled me with a set of three questions that would follow me from childhood to adulthood, all in the following order : “So, where are you from, then?” “What does your father do?” (there was no follow up about my mother), and “What school do you go to?” 

The questions the kids first posed to me in Tübingen were generally on the mark in terms of predicting my prospects ... 

That trip itself was a consequence of policies of the Labour government in Britain in the mid-1970s. There wasn't a lot of opportunity for young people from a coal mining family, but Labour reforms did away with the exam, taken at age eleven, which had foreclosed education forever to so many working class Brits. The very determined young Hill was able to attend a secondary school even if it had only a few books and hardly any qualified teachers. And despite being humiliated for even trying to aspire to Cambridge, she was accepted at St. Andrews University. Her scholarship didn't support her, but she took service jobs and persisted. And she was fortunate to find mentors who saw her potential.

As it is for most poor kids anywhere in the world, not only in the UK and the United States, university was a sudden, wrenching, and exhilarating life change. I was propelled up the social ladder with little practical preparation for confronting Britain’s class divides. ...

When she excelled in a French class, an astonished class mate from one of Britain's fancy "public" private schools asked her without apparent shame:

“Did you sleep with Mr Hunt? How could you have done so well? You’re just a common northerner.” She had a stern, harsh look on her face. She was completely serious. She clearly couldn’t fathom it. ... 

I too was shocked. And not just because of my classmate’s disparaging comment. Like most people who find themselves well outside their social and cultural comfort zone, I had an acute case of imposter syndrome. ... The accusation landed like an open palm across my face. 

I avoided [the accuser she labelled] "Ms. Cheltenham Ladies’ College" for the rest of my time at St. Andrews. It wasn’t especially hard; there were a few snobs who would never deign to talk to the likes of me. She probably never gave it a second thought. But she scorched herself in my memory. She also spurred me to keep on doing better. I didn’t want people like her to take any pleasure in my failure. 

... for some of my well-heeled classmates and their parents, I was a curiosity — a bit like a performing seal. There was a small seal colony in the Eden River Estuary at the end of St . Andrews’ West Sands beach. I used to walk along to watch them pull themselves out of the water and bask in the sun. I felt like a seal out of water most of the time, without the basking. No time for that.

With a little help from the Durham Miners’ Association and the Bishop Auckland Rotary Club, she managed to win a scholarship to pursue her interest in the decaying Soviet Union in 1987. That was an eye-opening experience. Here was a place where in some ways she fit.

For me, the year abroad in Moscow was a surprisingly easy transition despite the language and cultural differences and learning to navigate a big city for the first time. The dreaded determinative questions of “Where are you from? ” and “ What does your father do? ” met with instant approval. I was from a world-famous coal-mining area and my dad had been a miner. I was a standard-bearer of the working class. This gave me cachet in the Soviet Union. People could relate to me and my family story. 

... Social mobility through education was the norm in the USSR. Most of the Russian students from my institute, including those from the Communist Party elite, were only one or two generations away from a factory or collective farm or were the first in their families to pursue higher education. Many of my friends’ parents were factory workers in the outer reaches of Moscow.

The dying Soviet Union didn't make her a communist; instead it put her on track to become a Russia expert and to win a graduate fellowship at Harvard. In the United States, people she encountered didn't ask her the class questions; they found her accent intriguing. But she soon learned that her gender could hamper her advancement. The established authorities in her field were not ready for a woman Russia expert. 

I was finally beginning my career and carving out a portfolio of research on Russia. This was when the issue of being a woman in the workplace came into stark relief in some very specific contexts. In the 1990s, I began to understand that while gender — like place, class, and race — could be an almost insurmountable obstacle to personal mobility and success, women were not necessarily pitted against men in some kind of permanent zero-sum contest. Instead, the professional opportunities for women were there, but the work environment was unequal and I quickly learned that as a woman, appearances, not just being well prepared, mattered — and most things, including the buildings themselves, were set up with the expectation that men would predominate. Sometimes, for example, women’s bathrooms were few and far between, uncomfortably reducing the opportunity to pee during breaks. I often deliberately dehydrated myself in important meetings so I wouldn’t have to go out and miss something crucial as I searched, and then waited in the inevitable line, to use the tiny ladies’ bathroom.

She tells an hilarious story of a female colleague taking her in hand to buy a "professional" suit for interviews and thereby render this serious scholar a more suitable decorative object. On trips to Russia, being a woman was even more of an impediment.

The hurdles of gender were far higher than in the UK and the United States. Senior Russian men didn’t like Russian women to speak out or speak up in any way.

So much for any residue of "socialist" equality.

Meanwhile, rising in her profession to a series of eminent positions, Hill gradually came to understand that she was being paid less than men, often men with fewer credentials. Usually she found out after being hired at lower rates. This included her service in Trump's White House, an environment which seemed very familiar to her.

The Trump White House was a man’s world — predominantly one man’s world — and Trump was a very familiar type for me. In many respects he was not that much of a surprise in the way that he acted and interacted with people, apart from the fact that he was the American president. He was definitely and unabashedly a 1980s man in his approach to life and politics.

For all her hard acquired eminence, Fiona Hill has never forgotten the class consciousness she learned in Bishop Auckland.

... if there is one message that I hope to convey more forcefully than any other, it is that opportunity does not materialize from thin air and no one does anything alone. Barriers to opportunity and social mobility are personal and universal. Any individual success is a team or collective effort. ... 

Far too many people who were born into similar circumstances in the generations after me did not have the same opportunities. Deprived and disadvantaged, they will continue to be preyed upon by unscrupulous politicians who offer them a promise of opportunity in return for their votes. These left-behind people deserve better. But their problems are everyone’s.

The concluding chapter of this book includes some recipes for a more equitable place, class, race, and gender society. To be continued.