It is typical for people of my background who build their careers in academia to meet two concurring challenges.
1) At their workplace, they have to overcome stereotypical expectations by overcompensating in areas where they can do so; This is because (as new faculty members) they would blatantly fail in at least one of the areas in which they are evaluated (either knowledge of their fields, or collegiality; funny enough, collegiality seems to be simply how colleagues feel in their presence). It is obvious that in most academic environments, being unprepared for relational aggression means that touting your academic achievements translates into extremely poor collegiality. When faced with stiff competition, people of relatively modest backgrounds can find themselves very odd, and actively isolated under the (articulated) basis of their area of weakness.
2)In their own families (often facing many financial difficulties), they can be the target of ridicule by the majority, those who would have preferred them to be financially wealthier, or would just have preferred them to be more like everyone else. Family members tend to be proud of their educational attainment but find the long path to educational attainment to be practically odd and to be financially useless. Social success could have been achieved without much education.
Under normal conditions, education attainment offers people of modest backgrounds a stable life. These individuals add value to their workplace with the quality of their work, and they contribute to diversity in their adopted communities ( they just need to calmly keep doing their job). Over time, people of my background can project an image of success and stability and can serve as role models to anyone from a modest background.
In some rare but extreme cases, the overt interest of people of modest background in building capacity, and in being successful in fields in which they are an obvious minority, exposes them to the curse of majority valuation. Despite their visible hard work, the intrinsic value of their work gets overwhelmed by various other interests that competitively, and arbitrarily challenge their intellectual contribution (opinion of the majority), and disqualifies them as contributors to society (even up to support to their own families ). Some life events (divorce) can open a floodgate of magnified challenges that target the very stability that was the only visible outcome of their long years of educational achievement. These challenges are triggered by the entering into action of groups that defend interests protected by large pools of resources, therefore amplifying the unfairness gap that existed originally because the victim was a person in minority. The sourced and targeted valuations by others would easily convert them into despicable people, because they spend time and energy struggling to gain control of their careers, at the expense of broader social interests, and everything else.
Because successful people of modest backgrounds are in minority, they can easily be given socially reprehensible attributes (troublemakers, activists, crazy...). A popular tool for discounting the valuation of hard-working minorities is the insertion of a less qualified relatable person as a supervisor/evaluator. This strategy produces negative recommendations or evaluations (in a logical survival move from the less qualified relatable person). Faculty members feeling uncomfortable in the presence of a qualified minority, do not hesitate to use strategies that dismiss any marginal abilities, and simply align the qualifications of the minority with stereotypes commonly attached to their original group. Confidentiality acts as a cover under which the members with access to protected information operate an apparent redistribution of qualifications to maintain the validity of stereotypes.
In the end, because they have chosen to overcome challenges, the survival of people of modest backgrounds depends upon facing and overcoming those challenges many times over the long run. They would certainly be more visible in their communities and would be delivering their advanced contributions to society if they had a reduced number of challenges. This is probably the story of every early generation in any type of activity; I am proud to have come this far.