Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

Jay McLeod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It (1995). McLeod studied two groups of teenage boys from a low-income housing project in an unidentified Northeastern city. The Hallway Hangers were the tough kids who thought school was bullshit, expected little out of life, and weren’t about to “kiss anyone’s ass.” They were the kinds of boys my girlfriends and I were watching. They excelled at being cool. “The subculture of the Hallway Hangers is at odds with the dominant culture,” McLeod observed. “The path to conventional success leads in one direction; the path to a redefined success lies another. A boy cannot tread both paths simultaneously; orthodox success demands achievement in school, a feat that only can be accomplished by respecting the authority of teachers, which is inconsistent with the Hallway Hangers’ alternative value scheme…. These communitarian values act to restrain individual Hallway Hangers from breaking away from the group and trying to ‘make it’ conventionally” (1995, 118–19).