Stephanie Land’s latest book “Class” is a must read for DEI professionals. In vivid common man’s language, Land shows us how a single white mom in poverty tries to navigate the great American higher education experience.

“Every single aspect of higher education felt like a particularly cruel game, or like I was getting an advanced degree in irony,” she writes chastising a system that sank her into more poverty while trying to improve her life.

Land’s first book “Maid” was a memoir that later became a Netflix hit. “Class” describes white fragility, white poverty, white struggle and what it takes for a single white woman to raise a kid and go to college.

Land shows us that a poor single mom’s life is really hard in this country. She feels ashamed dealing with government aid and its bureaucratic hassles.

In crisp, conversational-style English, Land walks us through her struggles of waking up early in freezing Montana, dropping her kid to school, cleaning houses to survive and attending classes in between.

She struggles, juggles, fumbles and feels lost but prevails. This book shows how a single, poor white woman’s life is linked to the social determinants of health like poverty, food insecurity, financial instability etc.

DEI practitioners forget the travails of the poor white single mom. This unique demographic gets missed among other common demographic groups like Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, LGBT etc. Land’s struggle to endure, fight back and be a writer is a powerful story of resilience that transcends race.