Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

The looks this mother and son exchanged were by far the strongest part of the communication. As Bernstein wrote of working class speech, it is not only that what is not said is more important than what is said, it is how it is not said (1971). Vicky is teaching Rashad something as crucial to working class success as the middle class ability to articulate and debate is to middle class culture. She is telling him, implicitly, to tune in—to her, to others, to what is happening around him. Working class speech and culture imply, they do not spell things out. Children are taught to pay attention to a lot more than words. Words become mere buoys that float on a sea of shared assumptions; they point you someplace you already know. Vicky cares about the kind of person her son will become, too. In order to belong in their shared world, Rashad must listen past the surface, hear beyond the words into the meaning behind them. He must learn that words are markers that lead into a nonverbal realm of communication and shared meanings. In the working class community she studied, Shirley Heath observed that “though young children often use the same language forms for doing [many different verbal acts], they and their audience recognize that interpretation of these forms derives from intonation and voice quality and from the interpersonal context, not the actual words used” (1996, 83).