Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

The keynote speaker made no apologies about speaking only to the “special” students, describing our education system accurately, if heartbreakingly: “For those of you have done well here, things will only get better!” What he didn’t say was: “For the rest of you, the Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and National Guard have had recruitment tables set up in our school all year long. Go fight for the country these people will inherit.”

As Shirley Heath wrote: “[Middle class] children continue friendships initiated within their parents’ network of friends. Hence both in-school and out-of-school activities, the [middle class] young choose as friends the children of those adults with whom their parents interact in specific clusters of voluntary associations” (1996, 241–42). All of this contributes to middle class kids’ sense that the world is theirs to inherit. Since they do not see the barriers working class teens face, they believe that their achievements are determined by nothing but their own individual efforts. This is cultural capital in action.

Lareau (2003) found that while middle class kids generally flourished in school, working class kids had a gathering “sense of constraint” in school and other institutional settings. Far from blossoming or thriving in school, working class kids all too often merely survive school. I see the same thing today; for working class kids who want to “make it” in school, it is all about buckling down, not about blossoming or becoming. In this very different way, school does prepare working class kids for adulthood, but in their case it is to learn to dampen big dreams and get ready for a life of submitting to authority in the workplace in order to bring home the bacon.

Dimaggio (1982) tested Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital with 2,900 eleventh-grade girls and boys (discussed in MacLeod 1995, 100). He included measures of cultural attitudes, information, and activities. He concluded the impact of cultural capital in high school was “very significant” and that his study “dramatically confirmed the utility” of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction. Many others have also argued that the middle class bias of schools results in structural inequality (Bernstein 1971, 1972, 1977, 1990; Bowles and Gintis 1976; Willis 1977; Anyon 1980, 1981, 1997; Giroux 1983). But, of course, people experience their lives in intimate, personal terms, not in abstract statistics. People do not want to see themselves as “a pawn in a behavioral game of chess” because it violates and erases a dignified sense of self (Sennett and Cobb 1972).

MacLeod concludes: Theories that give primacy to the family inhibit critical scrutiny of the nation’s schools. The problem is not that lower-class children are inferior in some way; the problem is that by the definitions and standards of the school, they consistently are evaluated as deficient. The assumption of some mainstream sociologists that the problem must lay with the contestants, rather than with the judge, is simply unfounded…. Clearly, what is needed is a comprehensive analysis of how the educational system’s curricula, pedagogy [manner and methods of teaching], and evaluation criteria favor the interests of the upper classes. (1995, 100)

Even in the “counterculture,” I assimilated middle class attitudes and values, such as educated people are smarter, reading is better than television, and we only find life’s meaning within our individual selves on our long individual journey or path in life, where it is our responsibility to keep growing, improving, and evolving. In short—I made it through accidental cultural capital. Only much later did I decide to apply this learning to pursue and gain, through higher education, meaningful and well-paid work. Once I realized that my new friends believed they deserved a meaningful work life, I wanted one, too. Indeed, in the middle class, you are somewhat suspect if you have not achieved something considered valuable, suspected not of being working class but of having failed to achieve. Yes, I worked hard in higher education; I got that precious 4.0 grade point average, but it was not nearly as hard as I had worked as a waitress, or as a fry cook, or in a ceramics factory, or in bakeries for far less reward.

In the now-classic 1982 book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan reanalyzed interview data on moral development in middle class boys and girls. While using the model psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg created, the boys scored higher in moral development than the girls did. Gilligan analyzed the actual text of the initial researchers’ questions and the student’s responses and found that the girls’ responses clearly indicated a different kind of thinking from that of the boys. Interpreted from a male model, the girls’ responses led interviewers to believe they could hardly grasp the question. While the boys made the moral exercise a kind of “math problem with humans,” the girls persisted in trying to meet the needs of all people involved in the story, rather than choosing decisively between one relationship and another. Gilligan demonstrated that, read differently, the girls’ responses indicated a much higher stage in Kohlberg’s theory than the boys’ stage, and suggested girls often develop superior emotional and relational intelligence, or ability to form and tend to relationships with others.

Whether parents went to college is still the most reliable indicator of whether or not their children will attend college. This is social reproduction in action.

I call it a class-crossover constellation. Common psychological reactions are anger, shame, grief, elation, a shining sense of promise, cognitive dissonance, dissociation, imposter syndrome, survivor guilt, and more. No public voice addresses these issues, and these feelings are often so muffled as to be invisible to crossovers themselves.

Central to the crossover’s experience is an existential dilemma, problems and decisions about how to best live one’s life (literally problems of existence). Existential issues most often surface at times of change in our lives: having a child, choosing a life partner, dealing with the death of a loved one or the decline of an aging parent. An existential dilemma can stem from anything that alters one’s usual life so much that previous assumptions are no longer enough to explain the present. In crossing classes, previous assumptions can include one’s entire former worldview, the basement upon which the house of personal psychology is built. For working class people who travel across the class divide, there are stories and sacrifices that have precious little voice and find no ear to listen.

For Shelley, previously happy with her family, life-long friends and working class life, there is a blazing new star on her horizon: a life of the mind. This complicates her psyche and her life because she wants to both keep her working class roots and develop her intellectual abilities. She loves her husband and kids, her family of origin, and her best girlfriends, she can barely stand the strain of not “doing it together.” The upset in her relationships is a mirror of her own gathering ambivalence, her own feeling of being torn—torn not between success and failure in college, but between two different notions of what it means to succeed in life.

“The real function of the Bachelor’s degree in our society is certification, all right, but it is class certification, not professional certification. The B.A. stamps a [person] as a candidate in good standing for the middle class. It is the great social divider that distinguishes the working class from the middle class.” (Dahrendorf, quoted in Ryan and Sackrey 1996, 104).

In This Fine Place So Far from Home, a 1995 collection of essays by graduate students and college teachers from the working class, Stephen Garger describes how a colleague interrupted his presentation three times to argue against it in the same way: Where I came from, the immediate and practically the only response to a fellow ignoring or contradicting an explanation three times is to yell and go for the throat—literally and figuratively. Early in my college career silence was the only way to override that response, and this is exactly what happened…. All the verbal cues I was receiving indicated the questioner was insulting me and pushing for a fight. However, his physical demeanor most certainly contradicted that impression. The mixed message I was getting was further clouded by the fact that we were violating the unwritten [working class] rule that you don’t fight with the people you hang with. (Dews and Law 1995, 41–53) After a friend of his explained that intellectual arguing was something of a recreational sport among academics, Garger mused, “John, the questioner, just may have been opening the door for fun. When I did not respond to the protocol, he tried again and again. Undoubtedly, he was receiving mixed messages, too.” He concluded: “It was as if we were engaged in different and separate rituals in which neither of us understood the rules the other was playing by” (Dews and Law 1995, 41–53).

“Working-class families,” Carol Leste Law, coeditor of This Fine Place, observes in her introduction, “whether they are able to articulate it or not, know that a college degree has everything to do with class, unlike professional or managerial-class families, who believe it has to do with merit and entitlement. They know that somehow the very existence of a college degree undermines and actually threatens their children’s and consequently their own working-class identity” (Dews and Law 1995, 5).

In the world of work, the middle class is employed by the upper (or capitalist) class to inflict severe control, and sometimes appalling abuse and neglect, on so-called lower class workers.

To succeed in higher education one must learn to adopt and represent middle class culture as one’s own. This culture does not grant dual citizenship. You must leave behind your low-class ways, your “bad” English, your values of humility and inclusion (don’t “show off” and be a big shot because it might make someone else feel bad) and much more—not least of which are the people you love most deeply.

William Pelz proposed that “most college teachers are proudly and boastfully anti-working class. If the civil rights movement, the black empowerment movement, and the women’s movement have created more self-consciousness about open expressions of racism and sexism, the typical professor still thinks nothing is wrong with being anti-working class. The same person who would never use the word girl to refer to an adult female openly rails against ‘blue-collar slobs’” (Dews and Law 1995, 281).

The assimilation of a new culture that is hostile to the one that feels like home threatens psychological integration, the internal process of layering new experiences on top of old ones. Linking old and new experiences creates an ongoing evolution of personal meaning—where I’ve been, who I am, what I can expect, or hope for, in the future—of one’s own story in life. If you take the basic differences between these cultures, stir in the unchallenged assumption that the “new” culture is far superior, and fold in our cherished national myth of equality of opportunity, you have an excellent recipe for personal dis-integration.

Those attempting to cross over the class divide are likely to either reject the new culture—there is a much higher dropout rate among working class students—or try to eject their former culture from their current sense of self.

The clashing worldviews that create cognitive dissonance creates an inner instability, an anxiety that pushes one to come up with something more or new in one’s personal psychology to accommodate conflicting values.

The deeper the conflict and the more powerless one feels, the greater the need to escape the pain and confusion. Michael Schwalbe reported a telling example of this: Once when I was talking to a professor in his office, another professor leaned in the doorway and said, “I just heard a new excuse for missing an exam. A student said he couldn’t come in today because he had to move a trailer house.” The professor to whom I was talking laughed and replied, “That’s one I never heard before. I guess it tells you you’re really at a blue-collar college.” Part of me liked being privy to this exchange. I took it to mean I was being treated as an insider. But I also sympathized with the student. It made sense to me that you might have to miss an exam to move a trailer house. What was funny about that? (Dews and Law 1995, 312) Rosa Maria Pegueros answered his question. “Being working class,” she observed, “means never knowing with certainty why someone is laughing at you” (Dews and Law 1995, 96). “All the awards and honors cannot convince you you’re in,” Mary Cappello reflected on her cultural struggle in higher education. “You still think analogically in a profession that welcomed you into its precincts for your clarity and logic” (130).

bell hooks is a once-working class black woman who went through the process of elite higher education with her eyes wide open: Throughout my [Stanford University] graduate student years, I was told again and again that I lacked the proper decorum of a graduate student, that I did not understand my place. Slowly I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality.

Those class straddlers who court or are courted by the “classiest” schools, that is, Ivy League and tier 1 colleges and universities, appear to suffer the most dissonance and personal dis-integration. The conflict increases because elite schools require more cultural capital than community, state, and other colleges, which more commonly serve first- and second-generation college goers. Ivy League colleges are the intended reward for Jean Anyon’s top two groups of elementary school kids, the children of affluent professionals, or the upper middle class, and the children of the executive elite, or the upper class. Second-generation middle class college kids, from Anyon’s first middle class school, also have trouble when set to compete against those who have been groomed all their lives, not just for college, but for an Ivy League education.

My list of working class difficulties in college includes any of the following: (1) serious mental health problems such as major depression (including suicide), dysthymia (a lower level, long-standing depression), post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse; (2) a complicated and confused bereavement, or grief process—of leaving home forever; (3) internalized classism; (4) anomie or a sense of placelessness; (5) imposter syndrome; and (6) survivor guilt.

Seeing one’s parents as an embarrassment and a liability is not only painful and confusing, it also can result in the worst kind of separation from family: a separation of meaning and a loss of respect for the family. Moreover, internalized classism can mean a loss of one’s own self, at least all the parts that preceded the new, improved self. Psychologically, this is dangerous. Something inside resists the new successes: if “those people” are too stupid or lazy or whatever to do this, and I was—am—one of those people, sooner or later someone will find out. This may give rise to an internal hypervigilance, in which one constantly edits and corrects oneself. Some of the most contemptuous and hateful classism toward working class folks comes from people who long ago chose to side with the middle class part of themselves and to annihilate the working class part. Dissociation, a psychological defense that separates conflicting parts of the self and buries unwanted ones, results in a compartmentalized inner life that can backfire when least expected.