In every field, the answer to the question of diversity tends to hinge on questions of representation. With the arts and media especially, there’s the question of seeing a version of oneself (or one’s actual self!) on a magazine cover or onscreen. With written stories, there’s the hope for diversity not just among authors and characters, but stories themselves.

Writing—both fiction and the various forms of personal writing that now occupy that same storytelling space—is, like most everything, easier for the rich and upper-class. While the act of writing is technically cheap enough to accomplish (it’s to oil painting what jogging is to skiing), getting published is less of a hurdle for life’s haves. The end result: a lot of stories about people with fairly similar lives and concerns, albeit, these days, with disclaimers tacked on about how the author is very aware that surely things are much harder for the less-privileged.

The call for literary diversity is now beginning to extend to class. In a Literary Hub essay from last month, Lorraine Berry describes the alienation she’s experienced as a writer from a working-class background, and makes the case for adding socioeconomic status to the “essays, articles, charts, graphs, and surveys”-driven conversation. “[J]ust as the expansion of the literary world to more fairly represent a world in which people are more than white or male or straight has added untold riches to the canon,” she writes, “so too would the stories of working-class folk go a long way toward improving our representation of and understanding of the greater world.”

Meanwhile, at Hazlitt, Andrea Bennett described the extent to which writers from less-posh beginnings aren’t so much excluded as invisible—it only seems that writers are all upper class because the ones who need to work for a living aren’t, she explains. Bennett discusses “making the reality of my background invisible,” as well as her own seasonal night-job at an unnamed chain bookstore, and specifies, “I didn’t embed myself […] in service of a tell-all; when I clicked apply four months ago, my intention was to pay my rent.” (It’s worth noting that both Bennett and Berry acknowledge that socioeconomic diversity is intersectional. Neither piece is a class-is-what-actually-matters argument, along the lines of what Alana Massey recalls putting her off of an already-lacking first date, where the pseudo-concern about class just amounts to a dismissal of the continued existence of racism.)

When reading both of these essays, though, I wondered whether class is, in this context, just one more box to check, one more injustice to correct. Is it simply a matter of locating structural obstacles and raising awareness?