"My parents had been involved in the labor movement; if we'd grown up in the city, we would have been red-diaper babies"
About this Quote
The line lands with the offhand candor of someone who’s spent a lifetime watching “political identity” get treated like either a costume or a crime. Holly Near isn’t bragging about radical pedigree so much as naming the ordinary mechanics of how politics is inherited: not through manifestos, but through dinner-table talk, picket lines, and what your parents consider decent work and fair pay. The labor movement sits here as a moral atmosphere, not a hobby.
“Red-diaper babies” is the strategic spark. It’s an old Cold War slur-turned-shorthand, and Near wields it with a wink that refuses shame. She borrows the term’s menace, then drains it by framing it as an accident of geography. That conditional clause - “if we’d grown up in the city” - does a lot of quiet work: it points to how urban proximity to unions, immigrant neighborhoods, and organized workplaces makes politics visible and contagious, while rural or suburban life can launder the same values into something less legible, less suspect.
The subtext is that ideology is as much infrastructure as belief. Near suggests that class consciousness doesn’t appear because you read the right books; it shows up when you can’t avoid the machinery of collective bargaining, strikes, and solidarity. In a U.S. culture that loves the myth of self-made individualism, she’s reminding you that being “political” is often just being raised close enough to see how power actually operates - and daring to call that upbringing by its loaded name.
“Red-diaper babies” is the strategic spark. It’s an old Cold War slur-turned-shorthand, and Near wields it with a wink that refuses shame. She borrows the term’s menace, then drains it by framing it as an accident of geography. That conditional clause - “if we’d grown up in the city” - does a lot of quiet work: it points to how urban proximity to unions, immigrant neighborhoods, and organized workplaces makes politics visible and contagious, while rural or suburban life can launder the same values into something less legible, less suspect.
The subtext is that ideology is as much infrastructure as belief. Near suggests that class consciousness doesn’t appear because you read the right books; it shows up when you can’t avoid the machinery of collective bargaining, strikes, and solidarity. In a U.S. culture that loves the myth of self-made individualism, she’s reminding you that being “political” is often just being raised close enough to see how power actually operates - and daring to call that upbringing by its loaded name.
Quote Details
| Topic | Family |
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