Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

Lillian Rubin’s Worlds of Pain and Richard Sennett’s Hidden Injuries of Class, two groundbreaking books about the inner lives of working class people.

I began to realize that the invisibility of working class culture is part of the larger injustice of class in America (alongside concrete issues like workers’ rights, fair pay, decent benefits, and control on the job). This missing personal and cultural dimension of class seemed glaring to me when I was among left-wing radicals who would champion working class liberation, then make fun of rednecks and trailer trash.

In my early thirties I wrote my graduate thesis, “The Invisible Culture: Psychotherapy and the Working Class Client.” I focused on class, culture, and classism. I set out to find the facts that would support or disprove the experience-based subjective knowledge that came from my own and others’ life experiences (Belinky et al. 1986). I found very little research on the inner life of class, but what I did find firmly supported, and expanded, the subjective knowledge I had received (Bernstein 1971; Jones 1974; Meltzer 1978; Heath 1996; Ryan and Sackrey 1996).

My particular profession, counseling psychology, all too frequently considers working class people and cultures unhealthy in and of themselves. By that I mean that to help the working class folks that come to see us, we encourage them to”get ahead” by going to college, to find meaningful work, as we see it, and to actualize (use) their abilities. In short, to become more middle class. Among professionals in general, just the fact of someone being in the working class is considered a sign of failure to achieve, at least in the “socioeconomic status” model. This model sees class in the United States as having steps on a ladder and that those who work the hardest move to the upper rungs while those nearer the bottom belong there and are thus granted much lower pay, power, and control in their work lives (Torlina 2011). This view is pure bullshit.

Working class people, too, can puff themselves up with a sense of moral superiority to those farther down the class hierarchy, and sometimes those above them (Lamont 2000; Torlina 2011).

I uncover a wide cultural divide between the professional middle class, who mostly use their minds to work with symbols such as writing, designing, and teaching, and the working class, who use their hands and heads to make and work with things, such as building houses and growing or cooking food.

the anguish of class issues in our society.

Class can be broken down into more subtle categories within both the working and middle classes (Labov 1970; Vanneman and Cannon 1987; Fussell 1992; Lareau and Conley 2009).

I prefer a vernacular approach to defining class in America: rich, middle class, working class, and poor, though some very good arguments have been made for other definitions, for example: capitalist class, middle class, and working class (Metzgar 2005; Zweig 2005, quoted in Russo and Linkon 2005). The kind of cultural differences and societal injuries I describe in this book are true for people within the broader categories of working and middle classes. In other words, I am favoring a categorical use of the terms working class and middle class, rather than a gradational or socioeconomic status one. I believe class-related family and cultural practices clearly cohere into foundational psychological patterns within these categories (Lareau 2003; Lareau and Conley 2008; Torlina 2011).

Education is also a class indicator as, after high school, most working class people do not obtain a college education but, rather, go to trade or tech schools, no schools, or to community colleges. In middle class life, getting at least a four-year college degree is expected (and saved for), and it matters a lot whether one goes to the “best” schools, best being defined by how much prestige the school has in the work world.

Nor are class divisions static; they are dynamic “living fighting entities,” and the borders and boundaries between all four classes change with the times (Zweig 2005, from Linkon and Russo 2005).

Even so, it is a mistake to reduce working class experience to nothing but jobs and justice. A small, ordinary example of power in cultural action is found in Sennett and Cobb’s The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972), in which they describe two men, a construction worker and a schoolteacher. They were next-door neighbors, friendly, and their incomes were roughly the same. Nevertheless, the schoolteacher called the construction worker by his first name and the construction worker called his neighbor “mister.”

Class is an injustice that says some Americans deserve much more time, leisure, control, and far more financial reward than others. Classism is the set of myths and beliefs that keep those class divisions intact, that is, the belief that working class cultures and people are inherently inferior and that class itself demonstrates who the hardest workers and the rightful winners are. My concern in this book is to highlight how culture plays into class, and especially classism. By “culture” I mean a constellation of accepted values, customs, mores, attitudes, styles, behaviors, and, especially, worldview—the shared unconscious mind of a community, to put it in psychological terms.

Since both parties had mostly Scandinavian Americans in attendance, holding ethnicity constant, they are useful for seeing class as culture. Because of my odd ethnic heritage, I can tell you that all Minnesota Scandinavians are quiet compared with New York Jews, but when compared with other people of Scandinavian descent, the working class folks were quite a bit louder than the middle class ones. The trick is to be able to identify cultural differences in their own context, instead of merely assuming the superiority of the one that is most familiar.

Geertz' thick description.

the first girl’s psychological ability to open up emotionally and connect, her genuineness and lack of personal defense versus the other girl’s intellectual ability to conceptualize, articulate, and present the meaning of the event. Both girls were smart and sensitive; I feel each of them was capable of either response. The cultural difference is in which kind of response first “came naturally” (Adlam, Turner, and Lineker 1977).

In the middle classes some amount of “self-actualization” is expected, and individual accomplishment is admired. Community generally trumps individuality in the working class; being a show off might make others “feel bad,” and how you treat others is more important than being a winner.

extroverted personal warmth and intimacy versus emotional reserve and friendly politeness; conversation about the intimate details of people’s lives (the women) and things or activities, especially cars and fishing (the men), versus discussion of ideas and one’s special activities—achievements, awards, travel; the importance of being able to just hang out and feel comfortable together versus individual verbal ability and intellectual sparring; hanging out to “see what happens” versus structured activities.

Classism in America is based on the assumption of the superiority of middle (and upper) class styles, tastes, attitudes, and values. Everyone is taught in school which ones are the “good” manners, “proper” English, the “good” schools, the “best” occupations. Everyone sees the movies and other media telling which are the “normal” people. The assumption that professional and managerial advancement is the measure of human worth is hammered at all of us from virtually every major social institution. Classism delivers its harsh judgments on working class styles, values, and behaviors. These features are seen as having “no class,” or being subnormal, by middle class people, but they are really threads in a larger fabric of working class culture. Classism has been the single most destructive psychological factor in my process of crossing, then straddling, classes. At the heart of the invisible passage from one world to another is the assumption, everywhere in the middle class, that working class life is simply inferior in all ways. This is classism. Classism is psychologically destructive to people because, once internalized, it can result in a profoundly divided self, the loss of life-long family and community ties, and/or a confusing present where one feels “nowhere at home” (Ryan and Sackrey 1996).

In 2004, Alfred Lubrano wrote about privileged students at Ivy League colleges who held coins to a flame and then dropped them from a second-story window onto the sidewalk below, laughing at the scholarship students who walked by and tried to pick up the hot coins. In 2007, “sport killings” of homeless people hit the headlines, as did a popular computer game called Bum Killing. In 2011, the phrase “tea-tards” is gaining traction, describing the “retarded” “tea party” sympathies of some––a magnified minority––working class folks. But the most common form of classism is solipsism, or my-world-is-the-whole-world, what I call class-blinders. This is the tendency to assume everyone has had the same experience we have had and to be blind to the experiences of people unlike ourselves. “We

Solipsism is often accompanied by judgments of taste: another form of classism. “Oh my God, she had plastic flowers and the couch was orange plaid! Plastic flowers are so tacky. She had no class at all,” a counseling client said of her new mother-in-law when they first met, as if a few style indicators said everything there was to know about her mother-in-law. “He was a real Archie Bunker type, you know, a redneck racist pig,” another client once said when he first met his adult older brother, who had been given up for adoption as a baby by his teenage mother. As it turned out, they had not discussed race at all. My white, college-educated client simply assumed this guy with a billed cap and nonstandard English must be a racist.

Negative judgments and stereotypes of people who have working class styles, values, speech, and behavior serve to punish people for being raised within their own cultures (Bernstein 1971; Bourdieu 1984).

Classism is also societal or systemic domination, and this is the most complicated, and effective, method way of keeping working people at or near the bottom of the economic ladder. For example, responsible working class adults routinely have to ask permission to go to the toilet if the need arises before their mandated fifteen-minute break from work, or to bring in a note of proof if they take half a day off work to see a doctor. Other Americans, in the middle class, would never dream of having to ask, indeed, are not required to do more than tell someone they will be in late because of an outside appointment.

Class is the concrete division of groups of Americans into varying levels of control and authority, and increasingly unequal reward for different kinds of work. But, again, the medium of this control, or how it works, is through cultural mediums in everyday life (school and work). Nowhere is this as clear as in public education, the very system designed to produce greater equality of opportunity, perhaps our most cherished American value. Public schools enforce the exclusion and control of working class children through the routine use of middle class culture’s assumptions and expectations, that is, expecting them to be from backgrounds other than their own.

Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out (1989), the professional-managerial middle class, by definition, selects and creates all the images and representations of society that everyone sees.

I have seen people on the receiving end cope with classism in a variety of ways: a reciprocal, generalized contempt for “rich people” or “yuppies” (by which they usually mean upper middle class people); a creeping dislike for their own culture and a drive to climb the class ladder; sometimes a paralyzing jealousy and sense of powerlessness. Some purposely embrace everything that might upset middle (and some working) class people, reveling in “outlaw” status, or at least the image of it (bikers, hippies, gangstas). I have seen reactions to class prejudice range from a shrug of indifference to feelings of profound shame and rage. But for those who struggle their way into the middle class, encountering classism can lead to the silencing of one’s internal voice—and the whole of one’s childhood. That denial, in turn, can lead to serious psychological obstacles inside one’s own head and heart.

Their responses clearly cohered into three different points of view or philosophies about their lives as winners in the American Dream and the nature of winning in the United States. Lamont’s descriptions of attitudes and values in the upper middle class closely match my own observations as a counseling and community psychologist, as well as my personal experience as a middle class professional from the working class. In my extrapolation, these philosophies are three popular recipes for classism—three different ways to say, “I am better than they are.” As we will see later, they arise from three different cultural ways of becoming, of self-actualizing, in middle class America. For all three groups the exclusion of people who are not “my kind” was openly discussed without embarrassment or apology. The people excluded by our boundaries are those with whom we refuse to associate and those toward whom rejection and aggression are showed, and distance openly marked, by way of insuring that “you understand that I am better than you are.” (Lamont 1992, 10)

As Betsy Leondar-Wright put it in her 2005 book, Class Matters: Few middle-class people would say we have prejudices against working-class or low-income people, of course. Our classism is often disguised in the form of disdain for Southerners or Midwesterners, religious people, patriotic people, employees of big corporations, fat or non-athletic people, [heterosexual] people with conventional gender presentation (feminine women wearing make-up; tough, burly guys), country music fans, or gun users. This disdain shows in our speech.

Since this kind of classism is common, indeed is currency, in higher education, its reach is very long. Though fewer than a third of the Americans in Lamont’s sample fell into this group, the rest of the upper middle class men she interviewed admitted they were most intimidated and insecure around the people and qualities of “high culture.”

“I was eating lunch with a friend—someone who’s proud to call herself a Massachusetts liberal—and the waitress got her order wrong. My friend treated the waitress just fine, but after she left the table, said to me, ‘Well, if she was smart, she wouldn’t be a waitress’” (Levison 2007). William Pelz, a college teacher from the working class, had this to say about liberal arts: The point is that, at least for the working class and the mass of common people throughout history, much of the liberal arts are not liberal at all. What they are, even if cloaked in politically correct rhetoric, is profoundly conservative—conservative because while they may question the “meaning in life” or even the “problem” of poverty, they flinch like a vampire in sunlight from a concrete examination of the sources of class oppression. (Quoted in Dews and Law 1995, 283)

Folks in this group may not see that some people come from cultures that consider individualism and competitiveness rude or wrong.

Among those long on ambition but shorter on cultural capital, styles are conservative and described with words like tasteful, clean, and, especially, appropriate. Values about behavior match style factors: as colors are muted, so are voices, opinions, amusement, and anger, in favor of a friendly reserve. This classism harshly judges people who “put on a show” or have a “big mouth,” people who come off “too strong” in style, opinions, food, or behavior. While these values may well serve those aspiring to power and fortune in America, many working class cultures put a premium on colorfulness, taking up space, and bein’ real, rather than on reserve and diplomacy. Classism sees and judges louder, more expressive and emotional human behavior as flaws of personal character, which is called tasteless rather than customs of class or ethnic cultures.

People on my block hang out to chat, to enjoy the summer evening, to watch kids race down the sidewalk on scooters and skateboards. They welcome me to shoot the breeze. On this evening, hurrying home to spend the night writing, I envy them their casual, spontaneous life that is very much like the working class world where I grew up. For middle class people like me, too often, work is our life.

The third upper middle class group in Lamont’s study was made up of men who described and defined themselves and their kind of people by their financial success. They believed that material success is an indicator of a person’s value; worldly success is admired and achieved for its own sake. People in this group are likely to be first-generation upper middle class. They also valued ambition, hard work, competitiveness, and the drive to achieve, not for their own sake but for their result in visible success. They did not necessarily feel they owed society anything. This group lived in a dog-eat-dog survival-of-the-fittest world, a world of winners and losers. People’s worth was judged by external status: professional prestige, financial standing, power, and visibility in prestigious social clubs, boards of directors, and the like. People who are unsuccessful in material terms are simply “losers.” This form of classism disdains losers.

This segment of the upper middle class has taken on significantly more meaning since the 1980s and ’90s made it shamelessly cool to be rich. I remember the very moment I realized that the look-out-for-the-underdog 1960s and ’70s were over. In the early 1980s, I was in a hurry and I was cutting through a poster shop to meet a friend. As I took in the pictures around me one stopped me dead in my tracks. It was huge. A sexy blond woman in a mink coat leaned against a sparkling new Mercedes Benz. Across the bottom, in large bold letters, it said, “Poverty Sucks.”

The number of millionaires doubled between 1986 and 2006, and the number of billionaires increased from thirteen to perhaps a thousand, while the net worth of everyone else fell by 15 to 20 percent in order to fund this redistribution of wealth (Frank 2007; Zweig, quoted in Yates 2007). Only the upper middle class kept its previous value (while net worth in the upper class skyrocketed by over 70%). In these decades, the “power” 1980s and ’90s, with its celebrity CEOs, as in the Gilded Age of robber barons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, being a winner did not necessarily bring a sense of responsibility toward others less fortunate. Then, as now, this inflation of the upper class eventually led to joblessness and financial devastation for the rest of the population, working class and middle class folks alike. Cultural classism sees these socioeconomic winners as crass and vulgar; moral classism sees them as selfish because they do not necessarily feel the need to give back to society. But, as Lamont pointed out, people who fall into this group strive for a comfort level in material things that is clearly valued across classes.

A freelance writer and editor who “makes enough to get by” told a story that illustrates this kind of classism, the belief that material success is an indicator of a person’s value. He was talking with his nephew, a law student. The uncle was concerned about his nephew’s incessant drive to win every competition, to be better, smarter, faster than anyone else. I gently informed him that his competitive attitude would in the end work against him—be counterproductive—because it consistently alienated the people surrounding him—both family and friends. He was most often described as obnoxious. His response pains me to this very day. He said, without missing a beat, “Why should I listen to anything you say—what have you got to show for yourself?” (Mark 2007, from Leondar-Wright 2011)

As she writes, “Exclusive behaviors are experienced as repugnance, discomfort, embarrassment for the excluder and as snobbery, distance, and coldness by the excluded” (Lamont 1992, 10).

Lamont is describing boundary work.

The social meaning of “individual” implies independence from others. You are a person all your life, no matter how entwined your life is with the lives of others. But to be an individual you must be (or imagine you are) independent and somehow prove yourself so.

In most psychotherapy, individuality is prized above many other human characteristics. Though many theories of personality have also described a basic need for social connection in humans, psychotherapy is generally preoccupied with creating sturdy individuals. But rugged independence and individuality do not reflect the lives of most people. It is certainly not a good fit for a mother who devotes her life to raising and keeping her family together, who practices “interdependence” (Kegan 1995). Is she less of a person because her life and identity are tied up with her family? Of course not. But she is less of an “individual” (Gilligan 1982; Belinky et al. 1986; Chodorow 1989). Individuality, striking and standing out on one’s own, is not a good model for most working class people either, who have traditionally worked together to make things happen: clearing land, building houses and barns, sewing quilts, working in factory lines, bringing hotdishes to potlucks. Working class people, who tend to favor human connection, cooperation, and community over individuality and personal ambition, like middle class women before feminism, are treated (at best) as if they are underdeveloped people.

For the last forty years, this fierce individualism, with an attending decline in community and collective action, has moved slowly over the United States like a thunderstorm (Putnam 2000; Putnam and Feldstein 2003).

To write that thesis I slogged through a zillion psychological abstracts (paragraph summaries of scholarly articles) and photocopied about a hundred academic articles and read them. In 1986, I found just three that spoke to anything of the substance of working class life or psychology, that pointed to working class ways of thinking and seeing the world.

Bernstein recorded and analyzed speech in different class groups (working and middle, all English) that pointed to different psychological frameworks and social orientations. Working class and middle class speech samples from his studies were different enough from each other to suggest that the groups used the similar language for different purposes. The middle class groups used language and discussion to think and argue, to display their individual ability, and to uncover differences of opinion and debate them within the group. The working class groups used language and discussion to find agreement within the group and to connect emotionally with one another. Bernstein discovered that middle class and working class speech “selects and makes available” different human qualities “from a range of human capabilities.” Class differences in speech were consistent and profound enough to point to different cultures (Bernstein 1962, 1971, 1990).

Bernstein found that middle class language and culture tend to promote individual achievements and competition between outstanding individuals, or people who “stand out.” Working class language and communities tend to recreate values of social connection, solidarity, and mutual aid.

Bernstein’s example of psycholinguistic training in middle class children starts with a mother who says to her child, “I’d rather you made less noise, Darling.” However idealized (and British) this sentence may be, it is a good model of middle class language use (1958, 162). To demonstrate how culture is communicated through language, Bernstein took the sentence apart to see what it does besides asking the child to be quieter. This sentence has a clear “I” and “you,” which helps in the development of a sense of individuality through the negotiation between the “I” of the mother and the “I” of the child. On her porch, when Sally asked Jacob to be quieter, Jacob banged the toy truck a wee bit softer, saying, “Is this less?” “Not enough, Jacob.” He banged a little softer, “How ’bout this?” “That’s still too loud, Honey.” At this point he started barely touching the truck to the porch floor, “Mom! What about this?” “That’s better, thank you,” Sally said. Don’t ask me where Sally gets her patience, but she did run that child-care center for years. Jacob then tapped it louder, repeating his question, “How ’bout this?” It is not so much that Jacob was concerned with finding the exact amount of noise he could make as that he was taken with the game of negotiation (and keeping his mother’s attention). Sally, too, was as interested in how they were engaged as she was about the noise Jacob was making.

In addition to the I/you distinction, there is “rather” and “less.” Jacob is trying to figure out just how much is “less.” More precisely, he is figuring out how much “less” is enough to please his mother. “Rather” is not “must,” and again there is the “I” who can decide whether or not he will please his mother. Throughout this process he was learning the art of negotiation, in general as well as across power hierarchies (parent and child). He is also developing an individual sense of agency, his own ability to affect and maneuver the world around him.

All of the things I have highlighted—individuality, negotiation, learning how to negotiate across different levels of power, a choice of means to lead to desired, and often delayed, ends—are basic to becoming a person in America’s middle class culture. Jason is learning the art of individuality through negotiation with his most significant other. He is “becoming.”

“Discussions between parents and children are a hallmark of middle-class child rearing,” Annette Lareau writes in her 2003 book about middle class, working class, and poverty class child rearing in the eastern and midwestern United States. “Organized activities, established and controlled by mothers and fathers, dominate the lives of middle-class children…. By making sure their children have these and other experiences, middle-class parents engage in a process of concerted cultivation. From this, a robust sense of entitlement takes root in these children”

Shirley Heath found the same thing with middle class people she studied in a different region of the United States: “Within these households, there is consistent emphasis on the baby as an individual, a separate person, with whom the preferred means of communicating is talk. Nonverbal means are somewhat limited, since [middle class] townspeople frown on the fondling of babies by any but a very few intimates”

Lareau found in her study of eighty-eight middle class, working class, and poverty class children that “concerted cultivation places intense labor demands on busy parents, exhausts children, and emphasizes the development of individualism, at times at the expense of the development of a family group”

In a similar situation to Sally’s, a child banging a toy truck against the floor, a working class parent might say, “That’s enough!” A more gentle approach, on a less harried day, would simply be to guide the child away from the offending truck and distract him with something else. Often, an older child will be pressed to “keep your little brother out of trouble.” The first thing that strikes the middle class observer is the lack of all those middle class psychological skills: development of self, negotiation in general, means and ends, a sense of individual agency, and role negotiation across power differences, as with parents and other authorities, in particular.