This is Rumblestrip. I'm Erica Heilman, and we are back with episode four, season seven,

of what class are you? I met Arwa and Habib Malud because they are Anne's kids,

and Anne works at the post office in the village here in East Callas. They live in the house right

across the road from the post office. Arwa and Habib's father is from Mauritania and he

lives out of the country. But both Arwa and Habib were born in the U.S. and their mother grew up in

Vermont. Arwa is 17 and Habib is 18. In this conversation, we talk about the roles that race and

class have played in their lives so far?

I would probably consider us lower middle class for the most part.

We are still able to get food, transportation mostly.

I do believe that because we live paycheck to paycheck,

like I know that we definitely have to stretch things out to the next paycheck, that I could not call us middle, middle class.

That's probably what I would count as middle class is like relative safety in knowing that you don't need to like wait until that next paycheck.

We do have family here and so we do have a fallback for financial support.

There are definitely times where we get fiscal support from our family.

Our grandparents very often will transport us, for example.

But there is just a lot of people who in general I would

consider to be wealthier, but I think it's kind of hard because I use us as a baseline. So to me,

a lot of people seem wealthy, but honestly, most of them are probably middle class or like high

middle class.

And just to me, that seems so like crazy.

Like I'm like, oh, wow, you like have your heater on all the time.

I'm like, whoa.

...