Rachael Sacks Sits Down With the Free Press
Last Thursday, literary studies student Rachael Sacks submitted an untitled article to the blog site Thought Catalog. The blog post was then published with the title, “I’m Not Going To Pretend That I’m Poor To Be Accepted By You.”
By the time the weekend had come around, Sacks’ article had gone viral. The New York Post published a photo of Sacks on the cover of its October 19 issue, calling her a “mean little rich girl” in white bold capital letters. The Post and other tabloids painted Sacks as daddy’s little privileged girl.
She sat down with the Free Press to set the record straight.
How did the New York Post get in contact with you?
They basically had someone look online and figured out somehow where I lived and they ambushed me at my front door. I was walking with my friend back [to her apartment] at three o’clock last Friday and they were all outside my apartment. Joking to my friend, I was like, “I wonder if they’re here for me,” but then I was like, “No that’s so self-centered to think that.” Then they were like, “Rachael, Hi” and I was like “Oh f*ck they are here for me!” Then they started. They said, “Can we do an interview?” I didn’t want to be mean and be a bitch and say no.
Do you want to clarify what your article was supposed to be about?
I feel like I didn’t write it well enough. I didn’t edit it well enough. I made it seem like I was a lot brattier than I was. I write a lot of poetry, like persona poetry, where you have an exaggerated version of yourself that I write as a lot, like a brattier version of myself. I was indignant and mad about it and had so many other things that I felt for a long time off of it, and was like this is my rant, whatever. I didn’t even think [Thought Catalog] would take it because it was pretty poorly written. I didn’t take time to edit it. I didn’t take time to check it. I didn’t take time to do anything.
What was the main issue in the article that you were trying to convey that you feel got misconstrued?
The main issue is that I accept that I’m privileged. I accept that’s just the way I grew up and that’s the way that I am. It’s not like I’m so privileged that I’m eating caviar for lunch. It’s just that they are lumping me into so many things, like I’m a modern day Marie Antoinette, which I’m not. I’m privileged, but I don’t look down upon people who are privileged or who aren’t. It shouldn’t matter what you come from. But how you present yourself is what people should judge you upon. Being rich or poor isn’t a personality trait or a character trait and it should be completely irrelevant to what people think about you. I guess I didn’t write it out well enough or intelligently enough to convey that point, and I should have edited it better.
I think people are allowed to say on Twitter that they didn’t like my article or they didn’t like my stuff. I’m not mad if they’re like, “I don’t like the way you said it. I don’t like whatever.” But if you’re going to attack my appearance or my family that’s where it gets into bullying. I think it’s really scummy to pretend to be something that you’re not to make other people more comfortable or happy, to try to pretend to be something that you’re not to gain sympathy. I don’t think that’s something you should do and I don’t think I expressed that well enough. I’ve never had to struggle with money in my entire life, and that’s who I am, and that’s what shaped who I am. People shouldn’t be punishing me for that.
What kind of hate mail have you received?
I’ve been getting hate mail since the article was posted last Thursday. People have been saying, “Kill yourself,”“F*ck you, you little cunt,”“You’re a stupid bitch,” “Close your fucking mouth,” “Leave this earth,” “You’re a fucking idiot,”“Go cry to daddy.” It’s just rude. People could be nice and respectable and say I don’t agree with what you said, it wasn’t the correct way to convey it, etc.
How do you feel about the New York Post putting you on the cover?
I feel very exploited. I have to keep my life very private now. I can’t say what I want on Twitter. I can’t post Instagram photos with my friends anymore because people will criticize them and I don’t want other people to be punished for what I’m doing. The way they portrayed me, I mean, I kind of let them do what they wanted a little bit, and the photo of me flipping them off was staged. I wouldn’t do that normally. They were like. “Flip us the bird, do this, do that.” They were like. “Do you have anything flashier to wear?” I was like, “No, not really.” I’m not particularly extravagant. I have to be careful for potential employers. I don’t want them to think this is who I really am. That’s how the media wants to portray me, as a brat who doesn’t work and who’s never going to work and who’s going to live off of daddy forever or end up with a rich husband. The media has background checked me and fact-checked me but they completely ignore the fact that my Facebook page says I’m interested in women.
What’s a day in the life of Rachael Sacks?
I roll out of bed at 6:45 a.m. and look out the window and yell “Why did I take such an early class?” I stumble to the bathroom, then throw on some clothes because I’m pretty much a slob. Get ready, walk out the door at 7:30, go to Starbucks, then I haul ass to class and have class until 11:40. Then I’ll walk around a bit.It depends on if I’m working or not. Mondays and Wednesdays, I’m a nanny. I go and pick up the kids from school, I take them to swim practice, and then I go home and get dinner. I’m not particularly exciting.
How did your parents react to this?
My parents said “Good for you, I’m proud. Just be careful with how people are seeing you.” My dad got me in contact with the family lawyer and now I have to be advised on decisions and stuff from the lawyers and my dad. My parents are divorced, my mom lives in Florida. They haven’t said anything about her. They made it out to seem like I’m a daddy’s girl. They totally ignored any potential issues with anything. My mom is flying up next week cause she knows I need support.
If you could, what would you say to the New York Post?
I know you’re exploiting me for publicity. I know you have a job to do and papers to sell, but you have to realize I’m a human being. I’m not a puppet; I’m not here to do crazy stuff for your entertainment. I’m just going to deal with it. People are going to see me how they want to see me. I know I’m a good person inside and I’m not going to get too wrapped up in this. I don’t think I’m hot shit, so, whatever.
There’s so much awful stuff in the news lately and people just want someone they can hate. They need to realize that I’m a human being and I’m just trying to focus on school. They even made up the titles for the articles on Thought Catalog to get more publicity. I’m a person. I’m not special. Don’t treat me differently, nobody should treat me differently. I’m not above anybody. Nobody is above or beneath anybody.
I want a little more privacy to go on with my life and make mistakes and figure myself out.
Shea Carmen Swan is a junior at Lang, majoring in Journalism + Design, minoring in Gender Studies. With 4 semesters of Free Press under her belt, she enjoys writing all things LGBTQIA and currently writes for Posture Magazine, a queer arts publication. Kyriacrchy.wordpress.com & Soilscript.wordpress.com host most of her literary work.
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Rachael is a phenomenon within our society which reflects its rotting core. Your 1940s “if you don’t like uncle sam you can get out” argument is beyond absurd. Also where can I move to that there isn’t capitalism?
Why is ‘fuck’ censored but not ‘fucking’ or ‘cunt?’
Rachel,
Honestly I’m heartbroken at your inability to discern cogently when confronted with conflict and antagonistic viewpoints.
You can’t wish away class. You can’t say the structural inequalities of capitalism don’t exist because they make you feel bad about yourself. Everyone born into this society is in someway implicated in the system of capital, and it just happens that your birth has garnered you privilege in an incredibly unequal and unfair social system. To say, “Being rich or poor isn’t a personality trait or a character trait and it should be completely irrelevant to what people think about you” is a completely flawed way to view your relation to the larger society and structures you find yourself in. We as humans are not atomized in some grand libertarian dreamscape of individual pursuit and gratification. We are all intimately linked by decisions and common parlance and economic factors, such as your decision to purchase that handbag which Joseph so astutely mentioned as most likely being made by slave labor in the Third World.
To ignore slave labor, to ignore growing chasm-like inequality in this country that is threatening to swallow up everything in its wake, is a travesty of the first degree, and for that reason Rachel not only am I angry at your brazen indifference to suffering but I am ashamed that you call yourself a member of the New School community, and affiliate yourself with an institution that I had hoped sought for a more radical and critical approach to a society ravaged with violence and misunderstanding and petty reproach.
I speak to you as a young person with wealth. I can understand your perspective of being attacked. Yet your reaction has been gross and vile in its arrogance. You have a responsibility as a person with wealth to work for social change, to bring about massive redistribution in wealth, and use your privilege as an impetus to transformative and egalitarian social progress. Otherwise I’d clutch your handbag while you can cause capitalism’s days are numbered.
If there is any part of your soul that exists outside of narrow-minded consumerist clinging I would check out this website: http://www.resourcegeneration.org/
Joseph- Spoken like a true communist… Wake up call we live in capitalist nation. Unfortunate or not Rachael reflects one aspect of this society. If you don’t like it start a revolution or move!
P.S. stop saying ‘like,’ it’s a terrible habit. damn and you like a writing major too. smh.
Rachel,
Thanks for contributing your piece, and the follow up interview with The Free Press. You’re like the student who raises their hand in class to say that you don’t understand something when there are other students who similarly don’t understand it but don’t raise their hands. I’m not trying to be insulting, just kinda sassy in that little opening. I wanna yell at you and call you a bourgeois cunt as you get sent to work on a rice paddy, but that’s probably not how political discourse should work. I won’t call you any names, but I want you to know that your opinions are wrong in a quite dangerous and insensitive way.
You remember that song ‘Accidental Racist’ that came out earlier this year? People are reacting to your story with the same vitriol, confusion, and cringe. The song was horrifyingly funny because it essentially communicated that the singers were apologists for being privately racist. But whatever, they’d just agree to keep to themselves, right? If someone said, ‘You know, I really hate the jews,’ you wouldn’t ask ‘Well do you keep that to yourself or do you smash in bagel shop windows?’ before reviling that opinion as fundamentally misguided, whether morally indefensible or just rationally incoherent, even if that opinion exists in a vacuum.
If Ms. Sacks buys an overpriced handbag in an empty forest, is she still a bougie bitch?
New York City isn’t a desert or a vacuum and your wrongness comes from a false dichotomy of private and public choices. You go to The New School so you should know the phrase or its variations, ‘The personal is political,’ which points out that very few of your actions create no externalities or are totally separate from the lives of others. New York City is a city of precipitous inequalities. Whatever you were buying at the grocery store that day is something you voted for with your dollars and said ‘yes I will give you money to keep up this sort of production and the systems which got it here.’ Your apologism for haughty consumption directly supports the institutions that mark up food, clothes, the things that everyone needs to live post-industrial America; supports luxury industries that sap wealth into unproductive production from things like health and education; and driving the rat-race of conspicuous consumption. There is a whole school of thought and science studying the patterns choices on large scales it’s called economics and it’s kind of important. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” says the wilding Yngrid, who is contemptuous of Jon’s inability to see his own privilege even though Jon Snow thinks he’s such a hardass for being a bastard already: don’t you see how accepting inequality corrodes solidarity for society, that this corrosion spreads like a rust from you to everyone around you as the social sphere is one of spectacle and mimesis? None of this is even to speak of the production processes that went into that handbag you got for 70% off. Great, you avoided the price point. Does that redeem the crime of paying the textile worker a miniscule wage so an already privileged girl can get a new purse and the CEO can retire to a mansion at fifty? How people spend their money might indeed be their own choice, but you are as small minded as a rat who thinks pressing a lever actually creates the food pellet to see your economic behavior as having no other consequences.
I think that you should pretend to be poor. I think you should not endorse with your family’s money the institutionalized deprivation of resources from the starving majority who choose their lot just as much as you did. I think you should gain a sense of literal belly hunger and go work a job where you stand on your feet and get yelled at by a manager for eight hours because that is the experience of the lion’s share of Americans. Meanwhile, your kin, being in control of the means of production and thus sitting on the top of that differential of political power, thereby engaging in a tacit and all-consuming hegemony of bribery, coercion and violence, meanwhile your kin complain about the wine that was paired with the swordfish at the Michelin-bestarred restaurant. Your affluence should be a spectacle ‘cause it’s so damn disgusting when you crunch the numbers, when you read the anecdotes, when you think of all the honest-to-goodness suffering, deprivation, ignorance and hate which is institutionalized by the capitalist system of production and its lackey the state government, which is not blunted but only better sold by your flaccid apologies.
All I’m saying is that somewhere a little boy or girl can’t read a book because they shut down the libraries, because his mother lost her job and can’t buy him a book, and you can sleep at night in the apartment his grandmother used to live in, but was kicked into East New York, where there are no jobs and no books but merely the spreading blight of capitalism doin’ its thang and making the market more efficient, hallelujuah ah-men and god bless the united states of america.