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).

“Now” is the time everything is happening. Now he should stop: “Quit that!” Her tone and gaze said now is the time consequences could come. In working class life people often get together with others when they feel in the mood, rather than scheduling social dates.

Middle class culture, through its emphasis on means and ends that are placed farther apart as a child ages, creates a psychology based on delayed gratification that has significant rewards in education and professional work later in life. Working class people may miss out on this in childhood, sometimes to devastating effect in later life, but they enjoy a larger and roomier sense of now. Rashad, who had a lot of time on his hands, liked to start up football and baseball games with other kids on the block in the vacant lot. He was developing different skills—self-reliance, initiative, industry, how to make the best of things, negotiating peer relationships, and how to make his own fun. Lareau found that working class children “tend to take real pleasure in their playtime. The lack of adult attention and involvement in their activities leaves children in working-class and poor homes free to concentrate on pleasing themselves. The children we studied tended to show more creativity, spontaneity, enjoyment, and initiative in their leisure pastimes than we saw among middle-class children at play in organized activities” (2003, x).

In my experience, the higher their status in and the longer people have belonged to the American middle class, the more individuality, competition, the pursuit of public excellence, and having power over others figure significantly into what “feels right.” I have found a fair amount of agreement about this among scholars (for example, Bourdieu 1984; Heath 1996; Lareau and Conley 2008; Peckham 2010). Individuality, standing out, and competition are central cultural features of middle class life. Since Bernstein and others first described them, these characteristics have become increasingly pervasive in the middle class. These features both reflect and recreate a strong (middle class) cultural value of individuals, needs, desires, improvements; competition between sturdy selves; delayed gratification; the pursuit of individual status, including the achievement of entrance into high-status groups; and the pursuit of excellence.

Working class communities may have almost as little relation to one another as they do to the mainstream middle class. While the entire working class is a large group of people, as defined by work and status in our larger society, each community may still be marginal to mainstream middle class culture. In working class communities, “them” describes not only the professional middle class (an enduring and cross-ethnic Other) but a variety of other “thems” as well, and only one, very specific, “us.”

But part of belonging, as a central feature of culture, is a tendency toward peer relationships (where power is equal) and a tendency to shy away from hierarchical relationships. Children play with other children; workers talk together when the supervisor isn’t around; women feel free to leave their men in one room and go off visiting together in another; guys are buddies with other guys who have no power over their work lives. Equality invites human interaction that is relaxed and playful. No hidden power agenda is to be served or suspended.

This self-directed “peerness” among working class children was evident to Lareau, who commented repeatedly about the great playfulness and “boundless energy” that these children shared together when grownups merely said, “Okay, go out and play now.” In contrast to the concerted cultivation of the middle class families, she called working class child rearing “the accomplishment of natural growth”: Parents tend to direct their efforts toward keeping children safe, enforcing discipline, and, when they deem it necessary, regulating their behavior in specific areas. Within these boundaries, working-class and poor children are allowed to grow and thrive. They are given the flexibility to choose activities and playmates and to decide how active or inactive to be as they engage in these activities. Thus, whereas middle-class children often are treated as a project to be developed, working-class and poor children are given boundaries for their behavior and then allowed to grow. (2003, 66–67) Lareau noticed that these children, despite significant economic hardships, played more, whined less, and never once complained of being bored

Working class adults, at the end of the day, are similarly released into their real lives and the companionship of friends and family who they can generally expect to be loyal and basically supportive. Work is left at work. Living is where you “come as you are,” where we can “just be ourselves” and get comfy. Being down-to-earth is important. Our friends invite us back into our selves and our lives. Yes, others may run the schools, the factories, and the government, but in all the smaller ways working class life invites activities that require cooperation between “people like us.” Indeed there is often an antistatus ethic because it threatens solidarity within the group.

He came to the conclusion that working class and middle class people used different language “codes,” unspoken rules that govern how, when, and why a person should speak. There was an “elaborated” or public code in the middle class and a “restricted” or private code in the working class.

“I think” is a prefix of differentiation; it separates the speaker from the listeners and invites an opposing “I think” from others. “I think” begins a sentence by establishing individuality, first and foremost.

By contrast, the restricted code used by working class people is implicit rather than explicit. Not one working class person used “I think” in Bernstein’s speech samples. Rather, they used what Bernstein called “sympathetic circularity” suffixes, ending sentences with “wouldn’t he?” or “you know?” or “isn’t it?”—something that would invite agreement and put the speaker at ease.

The middle class groups used language and discussion to display their individual ability to think and argue and to uncover differences within the group. The working class groups, on the other hand, used language and discussion to connect emotionally with one another and to find agreement within the group.

Payne employed Martin Joos’s 1962 work The Five Clocks to describe five different registers, or types, of language. These registers are (1) Frozen: language that is always the same, for example, the Lord’s Prayer, wedding vows, the Pledge of Allegiance, legal language; (2) Formal: Standard English, the kind of speech expected in schools and in middle class work with complete sentences and very specific syntax and word choices; (3) Consultative: formal register as used in conversation, discourse pattern not quite as linear as formal register; (4) Casual: language between friends characterized by a much smaller vocabulary; with sentence syntax often incomplete and dependent on nonverbal assists; and (5) Intimate: language between lovers, twins, best friends, or other close family members. Payne used Joos’s work to discuss class differences in the uses of formal and casual registers of language. Joos noted that it is socially acceptable to go one register down in a conversation. To drop two registers or more in the same conversation, however, is to be socially offensive.

Studying language and culture helped me understand and explain intellectually what I felt about class and my life; others have used different methods and measures to arrive at a similar cultural logic (Sennett and Cobb 1972; Meltzer 1978; Heath 1983, l991, 1996; Bourdieu 1984; Metzgar 2000; Lareau 2003; Lareau and Conley 2008; Torlina 2011, and others).

His five-volume body of work was called Class, Codes, and Control. In school settings, he developed his theory about how middle class culture, as an educational medium, reproduced societywide inequality between middle class and working class people.

the medium of culture creates and recreates inequality (Hollingshead and Redlich 1958; Bernstein 1971, 1977; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Willis 1977; Vanneman and Cannon 1987; Sadovnik 1995; Anyon 1997; Finn 1999; Peckham 2010).

Annette Lareau found and described the same thing with respect to professionals who work with kids and dispense wisdom on proper psychological development to their parents: Professionals who work with children, such as teachers, doctors, and counselors, generally agree about how children should be raised…. Because these guidelines are so generally accepted, and because they focus on a set of practices concerning how parents should raise children, they form a dominant set of cultural repertoires about how children should be raised. This widespread agreement among professionals about the broad principles for child rearing permeates our society. A small number of experts thus potentially shape the behavior of a large number of parents. (2003, 4)

The particular patterns of middle class parenting that Heath tracked so meticulously through the 1970s have only accelerated since she did her original study (Rosenthal and Wise 2001; Levine 2006).

The education scholar Jean Anyon (1980, 1981, 1997) has called class bias the hidden curriculum of schools, channeling some children into adult lives as successful professionals and others into lives of supervised manual labor that requires obedience and discourages initiative.

Heath (1996) found that both white and black middle class parents made early childhood a learning laboratory of school-related activities.

Heath’s middle class children were trained by their parents to name, hold, and retrieve content from books and other print materials. They were further taught (1) to ask questions frequently; (2) to expect answers they can understand; (3) to answer questions themselves; and (4) to elaborate. It is as though in the drama of life, [middle class] townspeople parents freeze scenes and parts of scenes at certain points along the way. Within the single frame of a scene, they focus the child’s attention on objects or events in the frame, sort out referents for the child to name, give the child ordered turns for sharing talk about this referent, and then narrate a description of the scene. Through their focused language, adults make the potential stimuli in the child’s environment stand still for a cooperative examination and narration between parent and child. (Heath 1996, 251)

By the time they go to kindergarten, gathering around the teacher in a circle and being ready to listen feels entirely natural when the teacher simply says, “Story time!”

Annette Lareau found the very same thing: middle class children come to school with skills working class children do not have. “Here the enormous stress on reasoning and negotiation in the home also has potential advantage for future negotiations. Additionally, those in authority responded positively to such interactions. Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages” (2003, 6). In contrast, the children from both of the working class communities that Heath studied “had difficulty interpreting these indirect requests for adherence to an unstated set of rules” (1996, 280).

In direct contrast to the concerted cultivation of middle class children’s language skills, the black children of Trackton simply picked up language by being in the constant company of adults and older children who continued their usual conversation topics.

Children learned to speak by jumping into the flow of conversation. It was the child who made what he or she said clear and entertaining enough to get adult attention. Once they could walk, Trackton children were given lots of attention by older children and adults: “Small children are looked on as entertainers, and all of their waking hours are spent in the company of others” (Heath 1996, 77).

Working class children from any talkative, emotionally expressive ethnicity may feel lost and confused by the long periods of quiet expected in a classroom. All their lives they have heard a steady stream of talk in their community. They may burst out in the middle of someone else’s speaking, showing they are appropriately aggressive and entertaining. “Entertaining” will be the last word a boy’s teacher would use to describe this behavior, however. On the other hand, although eager to interrupt when something exciting occurs to them, kids like Teegie and Lem may be lost when asked a direct question and left in absolute silence to answer it.

Cultures also instill foundational and unconscious psychological ways of understanding space and time. Personal space and possessions were defined very differently in Trackton than in the other two communities Heath studied. The children learned and were allowed to use whatever was at hand. Trackton kids usually played with other kids, outside. They played together with a variety of things that may not even be welcome inside the house, let alone having a special space for them, where they “belong.” A strong cultural emphasis on caring and sharing with others, combined with material scarcity, created a people-over-things value among Trackton residents.

When a schoolteacher says, “What do we do with things when we are done with them?” the kids are supposed to know what the teacher means: put them away. But where is away? Where they belong. Where do they belong? Where you got them from. Oops, where was that again? Teachers in Heath’s study were confused, and annoyed, when these kids left tasks undone to go play with each other, or when they took materials and did the wrong things with them. They appeared to be disobeying the teacher, but they were simply doing what they normally do, just like the middle class children that the teachers praised.

The sociolinguist William Labov, in his study of African American children in Harlem, found that the artificial (and strange) atmosphere of talking with white professionals, as well as the one-on-one nature of the testing, altered children’s speech significantly (1969, 1970). The children gave their interviewers one-syllable answers to questions and were judged slow-witted and verbally inept. When given a black, inner-city interviewer and allowed to have a friend present, the results were very different. In a more familiar cultural context, the children were highly verbal and utilized skills of analogy and other skills considered to be beyond their age level.

Notions of time were also quite different in Trackton. For the middle class time comes in structured blocks. When middle class grown-ups say, “Time’s up,” kids learn to abandon an activity and be ready for the next one in a busy schedule. Trackton kids experienced time as a flow—they usually got to finish what they started; they were not accustomed to people saying, “Time’s up!” In school, the phrase simply confused them, and when they continued to play they were scolded and punished.

What I find particularly significant is that the children of Trackton learned a highly complex language without any of the concerted cultivation or one-on-one coaching that middle class kids received. This is important because, as we will see later, there are problems that come with concerted cultivation that are now calling it into question (Rosenfeld and Wise 2000; Levine 2006). So it is not simply a matter of teaching these same techniques to working class parents, as many professionals would advise. The children of Trackton also learned essential rules of human interaction within their community, which were embedded in their young minds and that conflicted mightily with the middle class rules of school.

In Roadville, respecting elders meant not talking back, or being mouthy, as my family would call it. In their close-knit community, Roadville children were taught traditions, not innovations. They were raised to say it “right,” meaning the way it has always been done. White kids in Roadville were instructed and coached to tell memorized stories verbatim, and adults would correct them midway, “But what happened before that?” They were taught to stick to the right facts and to use the particular language of the community.

Here the emphasis was on the role of blood kin. When mothers went back to work, they left their babies with relatives, or close friends, and sometimes in a church preschool, rather than with professional child-care centers. Family connections were “carefully drawn and much talked about.” Relatives and family friends made special efforts to interact with babies, especially to touch, hold, and cuddle them, in direct contrast to the middle class families of Laurenceville, who frowned on too much handling of their babies. Cousins were encouraged to interact with babies and include them early on in their sense of “us.” Parents in Roadville told cousins, “You will be like brothers and sisters.” Children were introduced to others by their position in the family, for example, “This is your Uncle Donnie,” “your cousin Debbie,” and so on.

the most common questions directed at small children were “question statements” that required no verbal response from the child, for example, “Momma’s got to get some softer bed sheets, don’t she? Bobby’s getting a rash.” These comments are said to the child but are actually directed at other adults such as Dad or Grandma to let them know that mother needs some help. Accusation questions, “Now what are you doing there!” call for only one answer on the part of the child: “I’m sorry.” As Roadville children grew there were innumerable occasions where parents ask “question-directives” such as: “What do you say?” (“Thank you”); “Can you say, ‘Come again?’” Often, all that was needed was a particular look from parent to child to prompt the right response. When this failed, parents asked, “Don’t you have anything to say?”

Absolute truths were sought, with little room for shades of gray: “Both church and home activities called for bounded knowledge which is exhibited in the repetition of memorized words exactly as they have been taught” (Heath 1996, 140–41; emphasis mine). In the black church of Trackton, the particulars were very different. A model of creative interpretation and spontaneous audience participation mirrored a cultural tendency that favored creativity and spontaneous expression of feelings, in words or other sounds, such as “A-men,” “That’s right,” or “Mmm-hmmm.” Likewise, the preacher made up much of his sermon as he went along, joining with and building on the murmurs and words the congregation gave him. Very little of the actual service was predetermined; the vocally spontaneous congregation was as important in creating the sermon as the preacher.

At the end of telling the story of an event in their lives, working class clients may say, “So, I guess that just goes to show you can’t fight City Hall” or “Best to let sleeping dogs alone, right?” Often they repeat some advice I have given them previously and then look at me with a question in their eyes, as if to say, “Is that right?” Since I first wrote about this I have noticed how often I also close a story with something similar. This is akin to Bernstein’s working class group saying, “you know?” and “isn’t it?” at the ends of their sentences. The cultural command is that the speaker reconnect with the listener(s) and also to bring the story back home to something familiar, something connected to the worldview of the listeners.

Herbert Gans studied a working class Italian neighborhood and saw four major behavior styles: “The maladapted, the middle-class mobiles, and—the two most important ones—the routine-seekers and action-seekers” (1962, 28–32). Joseph Howell’s terms “settled living” and “hard living,” popularized by Lillian Rubin, also roughly translate into “routine-seeking” versus “action-seeking” (Howell 1973; Rubin 1976).

In my neighborhood, and in my rural extended family, we did a whole lot adults did not know about. Still, we knew how to behave, which meant how to act with adults around. After hugging my aunties and uncles at reunions, my cousins whisked me off for fun on adventures the adults never knew about.

Early on, I developed the idea that the world was divided up into the real people and the fake people. And somehow, the fake people were the ones who got to run things; they were the ones who had all of the official power. They got to make up and enforce the rules. The fake people actually got to tell the real people what to do. And the things that they told them to do—how to talk, how to dress, how to eat, how to act, how to think and what to value were, just like they were, phony, lifeless and without real substance. Their goal seemed to be to prevent the real people from living their lives and to force them to become just like they were. (Greene 2003, 6–7)

In both Roadville and Trackton, storytelling, not printed text, was the coin of the realm: children grew up hearing stories, not reading them. In both working class communities, language was specifically aimed at members of the community and was laden with buzzwords, local abbreviations, and references understood only by them. In both communities the meanings of speech could be hard for outsiders to understand, but, again, the shared ways within them created intimacy and a powerful sense of “us.”

Beyond their early training and the gradual learning of the community’s stories and rules of speech, these kids were left alone to play with other kids, often from their large extended families. By the time kids were school age, their parents simply turned them over, trusting school would take care of the rest. They believed, or hoped, they had prepared their children for school. No one told them anything different. At work, working class people are forced to submit to authority if they want to keep their jobs, and this attitude is passed to children: pay your dues and enjoy your free time.

Bernstein challenged schools to bridge this gap for working class students by attending to their different cultural orientations; Heath’s work reads like a case study for his theory, adding the dimension of race to the puzzle of language, class, and culture. We have seen that middle class children learn that books and print offer knowledge of things outside of personal context: stories and ideas that exist independently of one’s personal life. In other words, they learn to interpret and use both public and private voices, both elaborated and restricted language. We have seen that working class children and adults live very community-oriented lives and see the world in the context of that community. But serious problems, and false assumptions, can arise when working class people need to use formal public speech in order to negotiate with authorities and other middle class people.

Control seemed to be the primary concern for teachers: students could not leave their desks without permission, they were frequently held after class ended for reprimand, and they were often ordered to “shut up” (1980, 76).

“Rule by the ignorant and easily swayed lower classes led to grave errors in judgment like the Syracusan expedition … when ‘common men’ became leaders of Athens: the rationality, direction, and sensible restraint that had characterized policy in Pericles’ day suddenly evaporated, leaving a splintered, chaotic, and impulsive Assembly in charge of formulating policy” (Anyon 1981, 27).

Finn (1999) summarized Anyon’s work well: The working class children were learning to follow directions and do mechanical, low-paying work, but at the same time they were learning to resist authority in ways sanctioned by their community. The middle class children were learning to follow orders and do the mental work that keeps society producing and running smoothly. They were learning that if they cooperated they would have the rewards that well-paid, middle class work makes possible outside the workplace. The affluent professional children were learning to create products and art, “symbolic capital,” and at the same time they were learning to find rewards in work itself and to negotiate from a powerful position with those (the executive elite) who make the final decisions on how real capital is allocated. The executive elite children? They were learning to be masters of the universe.

U.S. schools reproduce economic inequality, and the voices within them most often reflect society’s dominant groups and their values (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Willis 1977; MacLeod 1995; Heath 1996).

It has not always been the case in American history that working class kids have felt threatened by school and built identities based on resisting it. Reflecting on their school years, my aunts and uncles reported no such thing. But the mid-twentieth century, with its massive post–World War II baby boom, gave rise to “tracked” oversized schools and multitiered mass education that invited such divisions in a way the smaller schools attended by the aspiring children of immigrants in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s did not.

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).

When Sennett and Cobb (1972) named this choice fraternity versus ability, they were referring specifically to the choices available to working class children in school. They further pointed out that schools are a competitive environment, with only a few spots at the top, as such they are designed to create winners and losers, the “few” and the “many.” They concluded that the losers in the school system forge a sense of self-respect by being nobodies together. But I suspect that highly educated people overconceive the immediate influence of schools on working class kids’ self-esteem, certainly in secondary schools, and underestimate the power and pull of working class community. The immediate experience of being part of a very tight group that approaches school success by turning it on its head must also be factored into the education equation. Still, my friends and I certainly did, collectively, protect ourselves and one another from “teacher shit.” Indeed, that is an understatement. Kids like us didn’t compensate for bad grades and negative attention from teachers, we reveled in it. We cut up, acted up, acted out, and took delight in our ability to “turn this classroom into a circus!”

Like Sennett and Cobb and Bernstein (1971, 1972, 1990) MacLeod criticized “the system,” especially our class-based economy, as “a race by the many for relatively few positions of wealth and prestige” and concluded that the low aspirations of the Hallway Hangers “seem to be a decision, conscious or unconscious, to withdraw from the running. The competition, they reason, is not a fair one when some people have an unobstructed lane.” The Hallway Hangers feel that “only a sucker would compete seriously under such conditions” (1995, 74).