Our discussion will address the notion of class and safety in the context of two poles of American socioeconomic experience--the loyal, modest, working class communities that for generations have served American industry with their labor and their health, and the elite institutions where the captains of those industries educate their sons and replicate their privilege. Neither exists, it could be argued, without the other.

Kerri’s book, Mill Town, is an investigation of legacies, both environmental and familial - the death of her grandfather and then father and the century-long effort to silence the truth about how the paper mill in was poisoning her small rural community in Maine. Lacy Crawford’s Notes on a Silencing is an investigation of her sexual assault at the elite New England boarding school St. Paul’s, (Concord, NH) where school administrators, physicians, priests, and ultimately state officials buried her assault and those of dozens of her schoolmates.

We come together as women now whose lives have crossed at points inflected by class; one of Kerri’s 86 jobs (as detailed in this piece in the NYRB was nanny to four children in a wealthy enclave in Maine, children educated alongside Crawford. When the self-made founder of Kerri’s mill, Hugh Chisolm, found himself a millionaire in the early 1900s, he sent his own son to St. Paul’s--and he sent his son, and so on. The money made by poisoning my community was poured into the school that poisoned Lacy, and so many other girls.

In both communities, loyalty was a higher aim than honesty, and information is buried in the name of civility. Working-class laborers value their positions and their identity, and deny their cancers to some degree; elite children value their opportunities and deny their rapes, or the victimization of those around them. What goes unchanged is the dominance of the elitist patriarchy enabled and enriched by American industry since the nation’s founding.