Education and Class

The organization Class Action offers terrific resources on class and classism, and in their recent newsletter Building Bridges, they write of the important discourse sparked by Peggy McIntosh’s piece, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (which you can easily find via Google, but since many of the copies on the web may be bit casual about copyright, I’m not linking here), even as they note that many of the items on her list are experienced by middle class whites, but not by lower income white people.

The exercise that Will Barratt and his colleagues developed that morphed into that “privilege meme” a few months ago was one take on developing a parallel class privilege list.

In the Building Bridges newsletter, the Class Action people offer another take on a middle class privilege list, They acknowledge that this list is far from definitive, given the many ways that race and gender complicate class privilege.

Thus, they invite others to contribute their own lists at <privilege at classism.org>. I’d invite you to cc me in the comments below.

Middle Class Privileges

1. The “better people” are in my social class; I know this because they are the ones reported on and valued in the media and in school.
2. People appear to pay attention to my social class; we set the standard.
3. When I, or my children, are taught about history, people from my social class are represented in the books.
4. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the laziness, poverty, or illiteracy of my class.
5. The neighborhoods I can move to, where I feel “at home”, typically have better resourced schools.
6. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization”, I am shown that people of my class made it what it is.
7. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their class.
8. I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my class.
9. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my class.
10. I am never asked to speak for all people in my class.
11. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of poor and working class people who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my class any penalty for such oblivion.
12. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people in other classes.
13. I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection of my class.
14. I can worry about classism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.
15. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my class.
16. If I have low credibility as a leader, I can be sure that my class is not the problem.
17. I can read recipes and purchase whatever ingredients or appliances they might call for.
18. I can invite my friends out for an evening and not have to think about whether they can afford it or not.
19. I don’t need to worry about learning the social norms of others.

What else might you add as a manifestation of middle class privilege?

If we can’t persuade policy makers to invest in young children on ethical and moral grounds, perhaps economic analysis will be more persuasive. The Rand Corporation has recently released a new report, The Economics of Early Childhood Policy, in which they point out that

A growing body of program evaluations shows that investments in early childhood programs can generate government savings by, for example, reducing the need to provide social services later in life or by improving individuals’ earnings, which then generates more tax revenue.

Might such analysis have potential for moving us away from the “fix it after it’s broken” policies that are at the core of No Child Left Behind?

When talking with my students about constraints on the individual choices that families might make on behalf of their children, they inevitably talk of their grandparents and great parents “who came here with nothing” and worked hard and learned English so that they could “make it”. In the family stories as told by many of my students, this transition to economic security and cultural assimilation happened relatively quickly, and, except for the “hard work”, was pretty straightforward

It sometimes seems as if some of these students project their own relative comfort back several generations, even while they also claim a family legacy of “working hard to make it”. It would seem, at least in the versions of family history told in my classes, that immigrants of previous generations enjoyed cozy evenings gathered around the scratched and worn kitchen table, wearied, perhaps, by their day at the factory but profoundly grateful for all that their children were accomplishing at school.

I honestly do appreciate their questions about why, then, they see poor children struggling with English in their classrooms. They wonder why the children of these families haven’t worked harder to learn English, why the parents aren’t working enough to provide for their children, why these families “rely” on public services for things like health care when their ancestors valued taking responsibility for one’s own family, why school seems to not be a priority in some of these families.

And this opens the doors to all sorts of conversations. We trace family economic histories (though I’ve been thinking that I could do this much more formally), and talk about how, historically, it had commonly taken four generations from immigration to the first college graduate in a family.

We talk about the differences between coming with “nothing” in terms of savings or material possessions yet having a marketable skill, and coming with only the strength in one’s arms and back.

We talk as straightforwardly as I can press them about how those of us gathered in a university classroom are not representative of the rest of the population, and advise caution against the assumption that we are the norm while those kids in their second grade classroom are the aberration.

We talk about the Catholic schools during the waves of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe (including the one attended by my father) that taught children in their home language, as families slowly transitioned into English while adamantly preserving ties to home.

We talk about the changing nature of immigration, about how people who arrived after weeks on a boat (and whose letters home would take as long to cross back) had fewer options for sustaining identification with their homeland than today’s immigrants who can text, call, skype, post and view photos and videos on the internet, and can (and do) live simultaneously in multiple worlds.

We talk about the immense differences between immigration that was, for all intents and purposes, permanent, when travel and politics and religion made clear to everyone that leaving was for good, and immigration motivated primarily by the search for jobs.

And we talk about economic times that have and have not enabled people to get beyond the first steps on steep ladders, about jobs and wages and upturns and downturns and the declining earning power of people who do manual labor.

The inability to make a decent living, let alone to get ahead, in spite of working hard is powerfully illustrated in Peter Goodman’s recent NYT article on Latinos being particularly hard hit by the current downturn in the economy. He writes:

The boom in American housing generated millions of new jobs for those willing to engage in physically demanding tasks, from factory work churning out floorboards, carpeting and upholstery, to landscaping, roofing and janitorial services. Latinos occupied widening swaths of these trades and filled large numbers of relatively high-paying construction jobs.

As a great influx of Latino immigrants spread beyond the initial entryways of the Southwest into smaller cities and towns across the South and the Midwest, many found employment doing much of the unpleasant work shunned by those with better prospects.

But now significant portions of this work are disappearing. What were once the fastest-growing areas of the nation, including states with expanding Hispanic populations like Florida, California, Georgia and Nevada, are often bearing the brunt of the pain.

The belief that we can control our economic circumstances through hard work is difficult to shake, but at least with analysis like this, we can delve deeper in our conversations about “them” and “us” as we move into more nuanced discussion about how our families found their own way in very different economic times.

And hopefully, we can also then move beyond talk of education being mainly about preparing people for jobs to also talk about how education can be about preparing a citizenry who can participate in creating public policies other than those that simply leave people to fend for themselves, floundering, in spite of working very hard all of their lives.

It’s very hard work for teachers to rethink so much of what they’ve learned about the place of education in the lives of American families, and to become advocates for those kids in their classrooms, especially in the face of so much public discourse that simply takes the easy route of blaming teachers for persistently uneven playing fields.

Ok, NOW, we’re talking about class, as Ali Eteraz writes (among many other important things)

Anytime the media wants to cast aspersions upon Obama, to diminish his chances to be elected, to give voice to smears against him, to suggest that he is a Muslim, or a black-nationalist, or a socialist, or a Eunuch, or some Chameleonesque mixture of all of those things, suddenly these concerns are put in the mouth of “the working class.”

Read the whole essay. It is worth the effort of a mouse click, and once you’re there you’ll keep reading.

Trust me.

Fox News analysts snicker their way through their demeaning analysis of class in America:

Thanks to TennesseeFree.com for the tip.