Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America by Barbara Jensen

Author:Barbara Jensen [Jensen, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780801464522
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2012-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Together We Stand

Some working class people make no apologies for what they are; they do not try to parrot or enter the middle class. From white bikers in black leather on Harleys to the African American gangstas that once decorated my neighborhood with dueling tags of red and blue to the Latino and Southeast Asian gangs that have taken up where the black gangs of the 80s and early 90s left off to the white kids on my block who sag their pants and talk street. Recently, from my front porch on Columbus Avenue, I overheard one white teenage boy chastise another, as they slouched down the street, “Dude, you sound so white!” Some working class people define themselves by resistance to the established order. Like the white, Latino, and even African American greasers (what would you call Chuck Berry?) of the mid-twentieth century, these members of the working class upset the middle class the most, and they also disturbed the orderly, settled-living, routine-seeking people in the working class. These are people who don’t waste much time or effort on a race where, they believe, their starting point is miles behind where “rich kids” (who are usually really middle class) start.

My friends and I came to excel at rebelling—not as solitary rebels, like actor James Dean in the movie Rebel without a Cause, but as a community of resistance to the authority of school. Report cards and teachers may have said we were bad kids, but “Who died and made them God?” My friends and I were losers and nobodies to the teachers but a very big Somebody all together, a Somebody that was strengthened by acts of resistance. Together resisters reinforce their knowledge that real smarts are measured by things other than what the classroom offers.

Working class children know the teachers and school have favorites, and they know they are not among them. In the small alternative high school where I counsel young people, we can tell when new working class kids come from public schools because they still hang together and resist, even when their new teachers are on their side. Like my friends and me back in the 1960s, they share an intuitive grasp that the scholastic cards are stacked against them, and they resist making themselves vulnerable by trying to select their successes from that particular deck.

If I found a reflection of my rural and more religious relatives in Heath’s white working class community of Roadville, I found the action-seeking part of my family—my mother, my uncle Rick, my brother Eddie, his many friends, and most of my own friends—in the “Hallway Hangers” of 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.

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