Straddling Class Borders
April 17, 2007
Renny Christopher once wrote that class is essentially invisible until we stand at the very point of crossing class borders.
I thought of this as I read this account of class as lived experience, from a young person home on spring break.
I can’t think of anything since Sennet and Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class that has sought to capture the experiences of the parents of the upwardly-mobile, but it would seem that there are indeed stories to be told, even when such stories are lived as tales of personal pain and resentment.
Over-Achievement, Salvation, and Alienation
March 27, 2007
While I’ve been away, I’ve been catching up on reading the ever-growing stack of books on my desk. I have been reading and re-reading sections of Telling our Lives: Conversations on Solidarity and Difference, a remarkable and complex account of a multiple-year conversation among three women from the working class: One African-American, one Jewish-American, and one Irish-American. One is lesbian, the other two straight; all are now academics who have been meeting around kitchen tables to record their many-layered conversations about their lives and work.
They each talk about early engagement in school, the development of a keen competitive edge, the centrality of early literacy in their identity development. They write:
For all three of us, public presentation of self, enacted within and through the discursive regimes of the school, would become extremely important. At the same time, however, outstanding academic performances indicative of high levels of public literacy do not tell the whole story. The flip side of our overachievement (and to some extent, its motivation) was marginalization — primarily class based, although other factors contributed. The houses we built of words always had shaky foundations.
I come back again and again to these questions of how to best serve children poised at the boundaries of class divides that they can’t possibly understand, sensing the precariousness of their footing, floating between the joy of accomplishment and the quiet sense of unease that they cannot name.
Certainly, we can educate the teachers of these children that so much is going on beneath the high test scores and competitive treks through the classroom library.
Yet I know of few teacher education programs that come even close to engaging in such work.
Middle and Working Class “Losers”
March 13, 2007
Thanks to Jim Vander Putten on the Working Class Academics List for sending this beautifully written post from Heo Cwaeth about the very different ways in which middle class grad students and working-class grad students might come to define themselves as “losers”, and about how the ground seems to shift beneath our feet when we come to recognize the depths of those differences.
The Burdens of Social Change
March 6, 2007
Today, I’m going to quote at some length from an article by Michelle Fine and April Burns, in the assumption that not everyone has access to academic journals.
Speaking of other articles in a special issue of the Journal of Social Issues on Social Class, Fine and Burns write:
“…We note a floating, under-articulated but consistent fantasy about economically oppressed people. The fantasy goes something like this: poor and working class people will see themselves as a collective, pool their subjugated wisdom and critique, organize, rise up, and slay the evil dragon of economic oppression. Within the fable, of course, there is bitter disappointment by scholars (ourselves included!) that “their” critique is not without complication. “They” contaminate it by believing in mobility. “They” voice critical consciousness, but it’s littered with shame and hopelessness, not action. Or, most distressing, “their” social critique boomerangs into self-blame or distancing as far as possible from others in like circumstances. If only, we seem to plead, “they” would realize the strength of the working class and stop victim blaming. Perhaps “we” have projected our own contradictions onto “them”. So, while “they” yearn for mobility, we “yearn” for a revolution (by them!”)
We witness this fantasy as a predictable, but not so useful, tendency within critical psychology toward reifying the poor/working class subject as the new hero. …yet the data presented here suggest that the working-class subject is aware of inequity and yearns for a better life. She is almost too tired to slay the dragon, much less get all the other women in the neighborhood to join her for a collective slay.
This academic class fantasy of the under-developed working-class critical spirit places an enormous burden on poor and working-class youth in America, for whom no social movement equivalent to feminism or civil rights, queer liberation, or even disability rights, exists outside of the trade union movement. [data on decline in union membership]. In the United States, there is little pride in being poor or working class (Sennett and Cobb, 1972). It is still, here, a condition defined as “lack”. [A] significant area for research involves the study of the creation of critical identities in the absence of large-scale social movements.
I’ve been grappling with what a class-conscious pedagogy might look like. It is very common for educators to invoke Friere as a first response to the question of what poor and working class kids need.
Yes.
And I’ve wondered, often, where else that conversation might go, as we wonder what complications might be expected as we adapt methods developed for adults in informal settings, to children in compulsory public school classrooms. I’ve wondered what Friere might have had to say about identity formation in a global economy grounded in consumerism, about convincing poor children to not want the very things that seem so central to others’ contentment.
Paul Willis recently wrote that it is harder now than ever to talk with working-class kids about a positive class identity because now, more than ever, they can access the symbolism of global materialism (music, clothing, fast-food) and draw their identity from these things, not from the social position afforded them by the work done by their parents.
So, what does a pedagogy of class look like, in the absence of much of any conversation about class, let alone a social movement toward class equity? How do we share with poor and working class kids the “enormous burden” of social change?
Fine, M. & Burns, A. (2003). Class notes: Toward a critical psychology of class and schooling. Journal of Social Issues 59(4). 841-860.
Willis, P. (2004). Twenty five years on: Old books, new times. In N. Dolby and G. Dimitriadis (Eds.) Learning to Labor in New Times. New York: Routledge Farmer. pp.167-196.
Class Passing
February 22, 2007
I had another one of those stealth class experiences while I was away.
I was sitting around with a group of people who didn’t know one another well. One of the men started telling stories about growing up, and I sat up a bit straighter when he started telling of his time working in one of those jobs in which men live in camps and perform grueling physical work.
He implied that this work was part of his journey of discovery of who he was, how he came to realize that he was not someone who would do that labor as his life’s work, how he then left to spend the next few years exploring other roles.
A few years ago, I had an uncomfortably intense argument with a (now former) friend. I was trying to explain to him that class is more than income — that walking around in the skin of someone who had been raised working class was a very different experience from being raised to simply assume that the world will fulfill all of one’s needs.
My friend insisted that he knew what it was like to be working class, because his father had required that he spend a summer working construction so that he’d understand “real” work.
His insistence that he “understood” class from these few months when he was 19 — when he was the kid whose father got him the job that someone else’s kid really needed — is one of the reasons that we eventually had a hard time finding things to talk about.
Both of these stories romanticized manual labor as something that builds character and affords insight into one’s “real” self.
And both imply that class is something from which we can just walk away, whether it’s the middle-class kid walking toward something more “real” or the working class kid deciding that better things await elsewhere.
There is another layer to these stories, though.
There was an almost indiscernible ripple of respect last week as my new friend was telling of his foray into the woods. Points were definitely scored in the subtle little contests for admirability that were being enacted among that group of relative strangers.
I thought, of course, of how often I and many of my formerly-working-class friends have learned to just not talk about what our parents did, about how we’ve learned that if we do, we should expect not admiration but condescension when people learn that we walked away from such backgrounds, even when our leaving required much more than packing our bags and calling home for the money for a bus ticket out.
Stephanie Lawler recently wrote that while the working class in the abstract is admired by middle-class liberals, working class people are a different matter entirely.
So middle and working-class kids who cross class boundaries both learn the implicit rules of class passing — the middle class kids learn to frame their temporary downward mobility as fable: “I learned some thing about myself, part of which was that I can be so much more”.
Working class kids, whose parents did not find existential meaning in years of demeaning work, learn to just nod along in admiration.
Lawler, S. (2005). Disgusted subjects: The making of middle-class identities. The Sociological Review, pp. 429-446
