5
THERE IS A GENUINE WORKING-CLASS CULTURE
Nothing epic. Just the small heroics of getting through the day when the day doesn’t give a shit.
Philip Levine
If I’m not what the white man thinks I am, then he has to find out what he is.
James Baldwin
In the summer of 1999 in Youngstown, Ohio, I attended my first working-class studies conference. I had just finished Striking Steel, and a tangential part of that book articulated what I saw as core differences between professional middle-class and working-class cultures. For the conference, I planned to read a twelve-minute passage from the book describing how weird and unproductive it felt to displaced steelworkers to be taught to write résumés in the 1980s. To account for this phenomenon, I boldly explained that in contrast to middle-class culture, “working-class culture emphasizes being and belonging, not achieving and becoming.”1
I was nervous about reading this passage because I had never heard anybody articulate the idea that there were distinct class cultures, let alone sum up their differences in a sentence. What’s more, my favorite sociology book at the time, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, firmly declared that for the past century “the middle class … has so dominated our culture that neither a genuinely upper-class nor a genuinely working-class culture has fully appeared. Everyone in the United States thinks largely in middle-class categories, even when they are inappropriate.”2 Though I knew this was wrong, Habits of the Heart is such a rich appreciation and critique of middle-class Americanism by a team of five authors who seemed to know everything that it seemed preposterous that I could be so firmly right and they so terribly wrong.
At the conference, however, counseling psychologist Barbara Jensen delivered a paper including references to the exciting potentials of middle-class becoming and the warm advantages of working-class belonging.3 What’s more, in the question-and-answer period, a room of some thirty people argued with Jensen about this or that, but they all seemed to assume that becoming and belonging marked core differences between the class cultures. Through a wave of vertigo, I went from “how could I be the only one who knows this” to “geez, everybody here knows this, and I have nothing to say.”
Maybe you have to be an academic to realize what an existential panic this can put people like us in. But that panic passed quickly into a sense of both relief and excitement. I realized what a burden I had been carrying around trying to think through on my own what I saw as an impenetrable middle-class misunderstanding of working-class people and therefore of themselves/ourselves and of our society and its social, political, and economic prospects. I quickly made friends with Jensen and her cohort of mostly women academics and for four days soaked up stories about how fucked-up the middle class was contrasted with warm though often troubled remembrances of working-class pasts. I learned about imposter syndrome, survivor guilt, and code-switching, common phenomena among people who cross over from working-class families of origin to professional-middle-class jobs, especially in academia. I had known lots of middle-class people from working-class backgrounds, of course, but what was distinctive about this group was their fiercely stated preference for working-class ways and their ability to articulate what they liked and disliked about each way of life. Many of them loved their jobs but felt stressed and uncomfortable around their colleagues while also no longer feeling quite at home with their parents, siblings, and old friends. I found myself sharing stories I could tell briefly and easily because I didn’t have to explain context and insist on nuance; instead, I got knowing looks, nodding heads, and yes-but responses. I was joining a conversation they had begun a few years before, so there was an intellectual seriousness to their discussion that went beyond a support group experience. But for me it was something like therapeutic.
I discovered, however, that others from working-class backgrounds were less positive about their culture of origin, especially if they were from hard-living or poverty-class families, including both those who were and were not comfortable in their current middle-class environments. They had made great efforts to wean themselves from that culture and were eager to help others do the same, but they were not interested in defending or preserving a culture they did not see as separable from poor living standards and bad working conditions. Other crossovers didn’t like our “essentializing” or “stereotyping” the two class cultures, which seemed to them to ride roughshod over the complex individuals they knew in each class. Often these were folks who identified themselves as working-class academics, proudly coming out on their campuses as committed to working-class ways (especially an egalitarian antistatus ethic) and actively resisting the impulse to code-switch or see themselves as imposters in a professional middle-class world. Working-class academics also saw aspects of working-class culture as positive, but they tended toward the specific aspects of lifestyle, tastes, and manners of speaking rather than the kind of more universal characteristics Jensen had asserted. Meanwhile, those from middle-class backgrounds often express frustration with our navel-gazing penchant for autobiographical thinking, and they fear that romanticizing the working class and its ways might undermine the broader project of transforming workers’ living standards and working conditions.
What many of us from working-class origins share at these conferences, however, is an ability to relax and just be our complete selves. Since midlife I haven’t felt alienated from either middle-class or working-class worlds, fancying that I can move back and forth with relative ease, being a little working class in middle-class environments and a lot middle-class in working-class ones. But the emotional power of that first encounter—a feeling of finally being at home that had me uncontrollably weeping when I had my first quiet moment at the end of that 1999 conference—suggests that I had been more alienated than I realized. Others have told me about similar experiences, including people now in their twenties and thirties. Swapping poignant stories about our first encounters with working-class studies is now a standard part of evening socializing at these conferences.
This experience of class cultural clash and of how deeply it is felt has been thoroughly documented over the past thirty years. Anthologies such as Strangers in Paradise, This Fine Place So Far from Home, and Working-Class Women in the Academy have gathered poignant accounts of how difficult and complicated college can be for students from working-class families.4 Class-culture differences are widely recognized today in academia, with many universities paying increasing attention to the specific problems of first-in-family (or first-generation) college students, including criticism of how middle-class biases exacerbate the obstacles these working-class students typically face.5
Cultures cannot clash unless there are more than one of them and their differences are substantial. But this does not mean that the clashing cultures are both genuine and of roughly equal value. Working-class culture could be, as often envisioned, merely a deficit culture—one characterized by the absence of mainstream values, skills, and ways of thinking and doing, a culture that is best understood as deficient in the kinds of things necessary to be a fully developed human being. A deficit culture is not genuine in the sense that it is just a backward version of the mainstream, a culturally lagging receptacle of another culture that it is gradually, perhaps all too slowly, adopting. Or working-class culture might be a dominated culture—one shaped, indeed deformed, by the material, social, and psychological conditions of its domination. A dominated culture is not genuine either. Since it is merely a result of its domination and exploitation by others, it does not fashion its own way of doing and seeing things but instead is a series of programmed responses to stimuli manipulated by someone else. Finally, working-class culture might be a residual culture—one destined to fade away.6 A residual culture is genuine and may once have been (and for some still be) valuable, but it no longer suits current circumstances.
My argument is that working-class culture is genuine in the sense that it has an internal coherence that is separate and distinct from middle-class culture, has positive value both in itself and for US society, and vitally contributes to the shaping of middle-class life and culture even as it forms itself within and around that dominant culture. Working-class culture does indeed have some deficits, some of which I have spent my life as a teacher trying to fill, and it has been formed in conditions of domination. But professional middle-class culture has some deficits too and is not without its conditions of domination either, even if not as severe and if weighted more toward the social psychological than the economic and material. Finally, I suggest that the working class’s deep culture—as distinct from lifestyles, tastes, and changing norms—is not merely residual but instead is shared by the majority of Americans of all ethnicities and colors, including many standard-issue middle-class professionals as they reach midlife. Working-class culture embodies what some labor historians have called a “making do” or a “getting-through-the-day” culture and what Jensen calls “a roomier sense of now.”7 It is more reactive than proactive and thus can benefit from exposure to the more ambitious and aspirational character of middle-class professionalism. But its greater agility within the force of circumstance and its narrowing of life to the immediacy of being and belonging have a lot to offer in filling those empty spaces in middle-class life, with its relentless pursuit of status and achievement. If the working class is not what we think it is, then we middle-class professionals may have a valuable opportunity to get a better sense of who we are.
Class Blindness and the One Right Way of Middle-Class Life
Habits of the Heart is unique in declaring outright that there is no genuine working-class culture. But the book was merely being explicit about what is still conventional scholarly practice more than three decades later: casting arguments about American society as a whole by focusing on its “main element,” the ubiquitous but nevertheless elite middle-class—meaning people with a college education, a professional or managerial occupation, and a healthy family income. Today this practice can seem quaint amid the array of sociological studies of ethnic/racial, gender, and, to a lesser extent, class differences. But that habit of mind that thinks it’s okay to take the professional middle-class part as if it were the whole of American culture and society is still the predominant one among the education-communications wing of the professional middle class. It’s a combination of a relatively superficial but widely accepted intellectual convention supported by a deep class insularity and prejudice.
The claim that there is only one genuine culture in the United States was made in Habits of the Heart’s original preface and was neither developed nor supported there or later in the book. We are not told what the authors think constitutes a genuine culture. Nor are we told why they think middle-class culture is genuine and working-class culture is not. The bald statement in the preface is merely a dismissive gesture that allows them to conflate “middle class” with “American” for the rest of the book.
This is common practice. Books such as American Manhood and American Cool make similar claims, often admitting a certain narrowness in their prefaces but then proceeding to treat their version of middle-class culture as synonymous with American culture. Peter Stearns, for example, not only admits a middle-class narrowness in his introduction to American Cool but furthermore lets the cat out of the bag by granting that “like many studies of the middle class, it is biased toward evidence from Protestants in the North and West.”8 Likewise, Claude Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character grants in his first chapter that his sense of a singular American culture “originated among Northeastern Protestants and then spread and gained power over time.”9
I can see why authors and publishers would not want more descriptive but unwieldy titles such as “American Middle-Class Protestant Manhood in the North and West,” but this is more than a matter of deceptive marketing. The practice of excluding working-class and other cultures from the discussion and of assuming “people like us” are the singular norm is what Benjamin DeMott has called “middle-class imperialism.”10 It is not direct economic or political domination but supports that domination. It also is unlikely to be conscious and intentional, since it is hard for any culture not to take itself as the norm, experience its ways as appropriate and natural, and assume that the way it understands things is the correct way. It is convenient to assume that other cultures are best understood simply by what they lack in comparison with the dominant mainstream one. But what if that understanding is simply false? What if working-class culture has a coherent but different set of values and norms that fit into and around the dominant mainstream culture? If that were true, then the mainstream culture, though dominant, would be subject to a series of mistakes and illusions about the society it culturally dominates. It would also be likely to misunderstand itself as a culture.
The professional middle class in America is culturally dominant, even though we are economically subordinate to a ruling class and somewhat less politically subordinate but in a more complicated way. But the concept of a dominant culture presumes that there are other cultures different from the dominant one, for example, Protestants in Italy, Slovaks in the former Czechoslovakia, Kurds in Iraq, or new and recent immigrants in all countries. A dominant culture cannot be understood by excluding reference to the ones it dominates, how and why it predominates, and how it influences—and is influenced by—other cultures.
Claude Fischer’s Made in America marshals a wonderful combination of statistics, survey research, and insightful historical interpretation to demonstrate that across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “increasing proportions of women, youth, ethnic minorities, and the working class adopted [middle-class] culture, even after sometimes resisting it.” Fischer is undoubtedly right that today “the American middle class lives and promulgates the distinctive and dominant character of the society” and that across the twentieth century “more and more Americans joined the mainstream culture.”11 But “increasing proportions” and “more and more,” like “dominant,” don’t mean that middle-class professionalism is the one and only culture or the only valuable one. Nor does it mean that even after all the increasing proportions, it is the culture that is lived and promulgated by the majority of Americans. It just means it is dominant.
A dominant culture does not need to dominate. It can be predominant, the preferred culture, first among equals, if you will. But when it construes itself as the one and only right way, it cannot help but dominate other cultures and the people who live within those cultures, whether it consciously intends to or not. Black studies and women’s studies as academic fields have decisively shown how narrow-minded and harmful construing white maleness as the norm has been. Likewise, those whose regional cultures differ from northeastern Protestantism often resent how their differences are routinely seen as mere backwardness. Indeed, Colin Woodard has cogently argued that there are no less than eleven “American nations” with not just different regional cultures but also “rival” ones.12
When you consider how diverse we actually are by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, region, and life stage, it can make your head spin. And spinning heads naturally desire some mainstream unity among this potentially explosive diversity. To a large extent, a rough unity can be productively provided by middle-class professionalism but only if we don’t lose sight of our middleness, our ability to see and live our positioning between a ruling class (whether you call it capitalist, owning class, or an oligarchy of wealth) and a working class that have genuinely different ways of living a life. Superficial conventions that allow and indeed encourage us to talk among ourselves, to mistake our part for the whole, let alone dismiss other classes as uninteresting, backward, and not genuine, blind us to fundamental realities of the society we are trying to understand. Habits of the Heart’s more fundamental intellectual flaw derives from this simple but blinding convention. The convention allows a rather spectacular lack of curiosity about working-class life and how it must be distinct from middle-class ways—just logically, without any empirical investigation let alone daily experience of working-class people.
Habits of the Heart poignantly bemoans a narrowing of middle-class life as now centered on a career rather than a calling. Once upon a time “to enter a profession meant to take up a definite function in a community and to operate within the civic and civil order of that community.” A calling was less individualistic, less focused on developing one’s self, and more focused on fulfilling a social role that functioned to benefit one’s community and a broader social good. A career, by contrast, “was no longer oriented to any face-to-face community but to impersonal standards of excellence, operating in the context of a national occupational system. Rather than embedding one in a community, following a profession came to mean, quite literally, ‘to move up and away.’ The goal was no longer the fulfillment of a commonly understood form of life but the attainment of ‘success,’ and … whatever ‘success’ one had obtained, one could always obtain more.”13 For the authors of Habits, this constant urging to self-improvement, to achieving higher and higher levels of success, led to “unprecedented psychic demands,” resulting in a “therapeutic culture” that has come to define the dominant middle-class and thus American culture.14 They called for a more civic form of professionalism, restoring a sense of calling and a greater sense of social vision and mission.
This is still a powerful critique of “American life” that has engaged subsequent generations of social scientists and other thinkers.15 But how could it not occur to these authors that there are lots of people, probably an overwhelming majority, who do not have careers and have never thought of their lives that way—people who have “just a job,” neither a calling nor a career but merely a way to earn a living? How could these people not have a culture, a way of living a life, that is very different from one built around a career?
Let me start with that relatively uncommon group of people who hate their jobs and are willing to tell you that even if you haven’t asked. People such as my father and also Joan C. Williams’s father-in-law, who dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help support his family and eventually “got a good, steady [factory] job he truly hated … for 38 years.”16 I’ve always admired people like this. Most people who hate their jobs find ways to tolerate them. They enjoy the workplace social life of the people they work with. Or they value the work they do even though they don’t like doing it. Or they find ways to create little spaces within their work that they like living in. And above all, they avoid calling attention to how much they hate their jobs, especially to others but also to themselves. “It’s not so bad” or “it could be worse,” they tell me. On the other hand, those who can flat out say “I hate what I do every day” and keep it in front of them have a special strength of will that may not be good for their mental health but is an extreme form of the dignity and self-respect working-class people win with the unadulterated grit of sticking with a bad job, taking it, and hanging in there. Their job complaining is often a backhanded form of bragging. My boss is worse than your boss, all the people I work with are assholes, what I do is worthless, and my job is dirtier, scarier, or more tedious than yours, but I get up every day and get the job done. I’ve witnessed these “my job is worse than your job” competitions dozens of times in working-class settings, albeit mostly among men with some alcohol in them but also less dramatically among sober working-class women. I have yet to witness, and cannot imagine, a middle-class professional describing their job as so bad they deserve respect, even a round of applause, for simply enduring it.
Many working-class people don’t hate their jobs, of course. Even though, like the job haters, they take pride in showing up every day and doing a good job, they genuinely enjoy enough aspects of their work to keep them satisfied at the level job surveys ask about.17 Many have intrinsically interesting and satisfying work, from skilled building trades workers at the high end of wages (when there is work) to personal care workers at the low end. But even this varies a lot across a work life, as supervisors vary from great to awful, as work is deskilled or sped up, and as the aches, pains, and injuries of aging accumulate to make lifting or standing all day more difficult and painful. Still, they take it.
If you have a career, it makes sense to view life as a journey, one where you constantly strive to see what you can achieve and who you can yet become. But if you have a job, especially one that pays decently, it makes more sense to see life as a daily cycle of punishment and reward, of their time and my time, of necessity and freedom, of earning a living and living. People with jobs invest much less of their selves in their jobs than people with careers. As a result, what they do to earn a living has less of a hold on them than people with careers from which they are never quite free. I’ve been part of hundreds of conversations in which people debate the relative merits of “leaving the job behind when I walk out the door” versus “being engaged with it more or less all the time.” As a middle-class professional with no fixed workday, I could see how much freer people with jobs were when not working than I was or could ever be, even though I was so much freer at work. I’ve always felt like they were more present in the present than I was, as my mind could never quite empty itself of the schedule of tasks ahead of me. I cannot remember a time when I did not appreciate their way even as I realized I could never live that way.
How could having a job rather than a career not result in and require a different kind of culture, a different set of predispositions and expectations, norms and values, and ways of living a life? This different culture could not simply be the absence of dispositions required to have a career, norms, and values that could eventually be handed down like secondhand clothes to cultural laggards. The culture needs to be different to accommodate different circumstances. Nor could this different culture be merely residual, a leftover from the past that will eventually disappear, so long as our economy still produces more jobs than careers, which it does and will go on doing.18 And who is more dominated, those of us who invest so much of ourselves in our careers that inevitably tie us into larger systems of command and control or those who keep the biggest part of themselves free of responsibility for those systems?
Middle-class observers, even the newer class-aware generation of sociologists, often assume that professional middle-class careers are objectively better not just as jobs but also as ways of life. That’s why even the most empathetic observers—from Paul Willis to Julie Bettie—focus on the irony and tragedy of working-class young people reproducing their class positions with the cultural choices they make within educational and societal systems in which they are “unpreferred,” at best.19 The best of these sociologists, such as Willis and Bettie, appreciate the immediate logic of working-class antischool cultures among young people but see only the long-term hardship, the absence of broader choices, and a future without becoming that seems only negative and unfortunate in reproducing a system of inequality. The presumption that careers are always and everywhere better than jobs blinds them to the preservation of self and the choice for a simple integrity that are often at the core of working-class young people’s rejection of middle-class ways. An aspiration to get a good job, defined as one that is decently well paid and steady, can seem like no aspiration at all unless you see it as an affirmative choice to avoid the selling of one’s soul that seems to them involved in pursuing careers that are highly structured by others and that can dig deep into your self and your relationships with friends and family.
As an exercise, let’s say you could get the same pay and benefits for being either an advertising executive or a personal care worker. Would it be irrational to choose the latter because you thought advertising was mostly a form of lying to people, whereas you found everyday satisfaction in helping people who need help (as one of my middle-aged nephews does)? That, of course, is not the way it works. These are not the kinds of choices any American actually has. But what about the choice between being an operations manager getting $81,000 a year versus a union-protected but highly monitored UPS delivery driver getting $66,000.20 As an operations manager, the perception is that “you can’t be your own man,” “you’re simply a tool of upper management,” “you’re cut off from the people you work with,” and “you no longer own yourself.” Might not the sense of independence you get from simply being bossed, being scheduled and monitored by others but not having responsibility to enforce and reproduce the system, and not being responsible to force, cajole, and intimidate others—might not that be worth earning $15,000 less? I have talked with scores of people who think so, including some UPS drivers, and it has never occurred to me to argue with them.
Advertising executives and operations managers may take offense at this way of stereotyping them and their jobs, but such perceptions and evaluations of middle- and upper-class people are widespread among the working class, as documented in numerous social science investigations.21 Working-class people with just jobs could be too simplistic or outright wrong in their assessment of middle-class professionals and the way our careers can twist us into inauthenticity in our interpersonal relations. But this does not mean there is nothing in these assessments but “class envy” and the “healing of class injuries” or a merely “reactive identity” that compensates for the shame they are thought to feel for not being successful.22 Instead, they may be making an affirmative choice for simple integrity, because either they value integrity more than we do or are cynical about the more complex integrity we middle-class professionals think we can achieve, especially when we’re young. In my judgment, their cynicism about complex integrity is usually too sweeping, but it’s not as if there’s no evidence for their view. I have known and read about advertising executives, operations managers, and even sociologists who were either a little or a lot twisted by careerism. Indeed, a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior.”23 As in gymnastics, we middle-class professionals should get some points for attempting the more complex, but we should at least be aware that there is more than one right way to live a life; that there are advantages and disadvantages to any culture, even ours; and that there may be profoundly legitimate reasons for folks to choose a different culture than the one we know and love.
Today the disadvantages of choosing eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what you will instead of a career are larger and stronger and getting more so. Because I graduated from high school smack in the middle of thirty years of rising wages and expanding opportunities, I was especially aware of the value of a choice for simple integrity and preservation of self because we talked about it as working-class teens and young adults and because my working-adult students often brought that discussion into my classrooms in later years. In current conditions I can’t be sure that the choice between a job culture and a career culture is still as palpable and affirmative as it was for my generation. Logically it would seem unlikely, as steady jobs with decent wages and benefits are so much less readily available now. But I still see working adults with sturdy job cultures all around me. I think they often exaggerate how terribly corrupting having a career can be, but I still often witness the same ingenuity in living a job life even as the work is less steady and not paid as well as it used to be.
Of one thing I’m sure. Careers are not as readily available today as most middle-class professionals think, and forcing, cajoling, and scaring all young people into college tracks and college is a fool’s errand. Barely more than one of five jobs today require at least a bachelor’s degree, the document required for entry into most careers. And while that proportion is growing, there will only be one of four such jobs twenty years from now.24 By this measure, the vast majority will still have jobs, not careers. For them, a “taking it” job culture that frees up the rest of life for what you will makes a lot of sense if and only if we can get back to the kind of steadily increasing wages and decreasing work time the United States had for the thirty years after World War II when unions were strong and productivity gains were shared with workers.
But as conditions in the working class are steadily eroding, dramatically increased by periodic economic collapses such as those in the early 1980s, late 2000s, and 2020, the professional middle class is not untouched. Those deteriorating conditions are coming our way, and some have already arrived, as we can see with the rise of contingent academic labor and other forms of short-term contract work for even the most highly skilled professionals.25 And it’s not just economics. As the gap continues to widen between their and our life conditions and life chances, our middle-class fear of falling intensifies as the fall becomes steeper and scarier, if not for us then for our children and grandchildren.26 As more of us are forced into defensive crouches, middle-class professionalism can turn into its opposite—less and less about achieving and becoming and more and more about preserving our privileges so we can pass them on to our progeny. My guess is that jobs and careers—the waged and the salaried—stand and fall together, not all at the same time but like erosion followed by an avalanche.
It is an act of generosity that so many of our professional big thinkers seek to share our cultural capital with the poor and working classes by using that great equalizer, education at all levels, to help them and especially their children become more like us.27 Despite this generous impulse, however, such approaches cannot work for two big reasons. First, there are not and will not be enough jobs requiring our kinds of social and cultural capital, not enough professional jobs with possibilities for careers. Most of the work that needs done in our society—cleaning, cooking, caring, clerking, moving and making things, selling, waiting, and guarding—does not require much education, and people who do that work generally do it simply to earn a living.28 What they most need is not our cultural capital but rather steady work, much more income, and increasing amounts of free time for what you will. Second, they have their own cultural capital and, though open to and often hungry for education, they have a strong tendency to resent and resist the kinds of cultural capital we’re trying to sell them. Sometimes this resistance is irrational and unproductive, especially from a professional perspective that tends to see the potential of only one individual at a time, but mostly it is based on a strong attachment to the culture they already have, a realistic appreciation of how it works in their lives, what they value more than we seem to, and a gut-level wish not to be like us.
If free wage labor has divided itself, or been divided, into jobs and careers with distinct class cultures, as I have come to believe, then it would be important to recognize this. If middle-class professionals go on treating working people as if they are just underdeveloped versions of ourselves, it will just continue to piss them off, often mixed with dangerous levels of ethnic, racial, and nativist resentments as economic conditions worsen. But if we realize how much we depend on them and how much they depend on cultural dispositions different from ours, we might just recognize how much a job culture of being and belonging might offer us, especially in midlife as most of us run out of potential to achieve and become. We might also come to political accommodations that would enable us, together, to mount the kind of strong countervailing force to our ruling class that would provide the economic base for both class cultures to flourish once again.
Class Identity: A Journey from Principled Crossover to Unintentional Straddler
As I was writing Striking Steel in the 1990s, clearly identifying myself as decisively middle class was helpful in order to explain and appreciate the union-drenched, working-class culture of my steelworker father. “Othering” him and his class was essential to presenting him and his kind in an appreciative way without having to directly challenge middle-class ways that tend to disdain or dismiss people like him. But it was more than just a rhetorical tactic. It helped me think through how I was so very different from him. I was in my fifties then, and I had long identified as working class, referring to both my roots and my Marxist faith but also to certain leftover manners, mores, and behaviors that I either couldn’t or didn’t want to overcome. It was psychologically hard for me to admit to being middle class, but once I did, so many streams of observation and thought opened up that I got pretty rigid about defining myself and people like me as class crossovers.
When Alfred Lubrano showed up at a working-class studies conference in 2002 to try out his notion of being a class straddler, I was immediately and argumentatively dismissive of the concept. Lubrano, the son of a bricklayer, had worked his way up from street reporting to feature writing at the Philadelphia Inquirer. His going to college had involved leaving his family’s home in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn every day to commute on the subway to an entirely different world at Columbia University in Manhattan. When I met him, however, he and his wife had a healthy six-figure income and lived on a farm with horses in the Philadelphia countryside; he dressed pretty fancy and spoke with the polish you’d expect from an Ivy League grad. “Hell, Al,” I told him, “you’re no ‘straddler,’ you’ve crossed over even more than I have!” Lubrano insightfully developed his notion of class straddling in Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots and White-Collar Dreams, based on a moving account of his own experience and poignant stories from his interviews with other crossovers, many of them from that working-class studies conference.29 The book and the concept of class straddling resonated in a fully compelling way with most working-class academics, but not me. As long as our feet were planted in professional middle-class jobs with professional middle-class incomes, it didn’t matter that parts of our minds and hearts were still working class, straddling the cultures. What mattered was where our feet were planted, and not to admit that we were middle class bordered on bad faith. Over time our minds and hearts were bound to catch up with where our feet were.
I was already dug into this notion before I met Lubrano based on sporadic discussions with other working-class academics, most especially David Greene, a psychology professor at Ramapo College in New Jersey. David had grown up working class in West New York, New Jersey, and even though he was a tenured professor who had served a stint as the dean of arts and sciences at Ramapo, he fiercely identified as still working class, rejecting not only my designation of class crossovers but even Lubrano’s concept of straddling. In our conversations he was fine with my identifying as a crossover, but I couldn’t abide his thinking that he was still working class. Our lives and careers were so similar. David was born in 1945, and his formative years were during the entirety of the Glorious Thirty, including political radicalization as a student. He had married young and had one child, and he had a twelve-semester-hour teaching load at a fourth-tier university, as I had. He taught mixed-class kids, not working adults, but like me he loved working there. Even our sense of working-class life and what we thought was valuable about it were more than simpatico.30 I unmercifully picked on his having been a dean, as I had twice turned down that horrifying opportunity. Our argument never concluded, but over time I came to the conclusion that David had indeed led pretty much the same life as I had but had lived it very differently. He had stayed working class culturally in a way I had not. Where he lived, how he dressed, and how he acted, evidently even as a college dean, were working class. He didn’t have a full, if flawed, middle-class mode he could slip into like the one I had and was pretty comfortable with. Even though we had the same class position and the same appreciation of working-class life, we did not have the same values that guided the way we lived. Though we had the very same class position as middle-class professionals, that position did not come with a ready-made class identity for folks like us.
There is an irreducible element of subjective choice amid the drift of our spontaneous reactions to the specific people and situations we encounter as we move from one class position to another. The specifics of where we come from in the working class determines some of the identity we end up embracing to guide us into and through a middle-class profession, not just rural, small town, or city or region and religion, let alone race, sexuality, and gender, but above all how hard or settled our growing up working class had been and specifically how our parents had handled their life situations and us as their offspring. Some hard-living working-class young people have such destabilizing and loveless (or inconsistently loving) family lives that once they see a way out, they run into it as hard and fast as they can, closing doors in their minds and hearts behind them, intentionally or accidentally, and not looking back—at least not until they feel like they have arrived at a safe place with a secure identity as a self-sufficient middle-class professional.31 These folks, in my observation, tend to be more culturally middle class than even generationally middle-class people, and they are unlikely to show up at working-class studies conferences. Others from hard-living families had at least one parent whose unconditional love for them and whose street-level ingenuity in managing difficult circumstances keep them tied to their working-class roots even as they negotiate middle-class life without any help from their parents. These folks tend toward fierce family loyalties even as they flee into “another country,” and they can hardly help but be straddlers. Settled-living working-class people such as me, on the other hand, were “damned near middle class” (as a friend told me) when we started out; especially during a time of expanding opportunities, we can just sort of drift into the middle class without being fully aware of the valleys and borders we’re crossing. For me I didn’t realize I had crossed over until it was too late to go back, even if I had wanted to. Still, within the play of circumstances, patterns, and tendencies, there is individual agency. What is a meaningless event for one is an epiphany for another, and the effect of a particular epiphany may last for a week for one of us and a lifetime for another. In there somewhere we are deciding, choosing which way to go, going with the flow or resisting it a little or a lot.
So, while even a college dean may have an authentic working-class identity and while there are multitudes of straddlers among us, it was important and helpful for me to define myself—or recognize myself—as a crossover, to fully adopt a professional middle-class identity consistent with my class position. Sure, I had lingering working-class loyalties and some leftover stylistic differences, and I was weirdly uncomfortable with a middle-class identity, but Judie and I were a professional middle-class couple living in a distinctively middle-class suburb with a professional middle-class son, daughter-in-law, and grandsons who would grow up with the social and cultural capital of the educated middle-class. This did not just happen to me. I had chosen it, not all at once but instead by degrees and pretty consistently across several formative decades. What’s more, I didn’t want to change it. Though it had not been inevitable, my head and heart had chosen to live near my feet.
Writing Striking Steel helped me reconcile and become comfortable with my middle-classness and actually spurred me to double down on my commitment to working-class causes, mostly through union educational activities, and to be more professionally productive. With a less complicated definition of myself, I was able to focus more steadily on the world outside.
But it didn’t last. The consistency of my identity and position and the clarity it brought me blew up some years later in a single afternoon as I read the first hundred pages of Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods.32
Lareau is one of those sociologists who hangs around a family at home and on the road, taking careful notes about what everybody says and does. Most of the book consists of case studies of the various middle-class, working-class, and poor families she (and her research assistants) hung out with in an unnamed northeastern city, probably Philadelphia. Using this exhaustive approach with twelve families chosen from extensive interviews with eighty-eight families of different classes and races, Lareau found a categorical difference between middle-class and working-class child-rearing approaches but relatively small differences between working-class and poor families or between blacks and whites of the same social class.
Lareau’s first two case studies, of fourth-graders Garrett Tallinger and Tyrec Taylor, present strongly positive examples of each of the categories. Garrett had two very dedicated parents with professional jobs who are highly engaged with their three children, with lots of challenging dialogue and with a demanding schedule of activities their children enjoy but are also educational in one way or another. This concerted cultivation, Lareau says, is characteristic of a middle-class child-centered approach. Tyrec has loving, though separated, working-class parents who see their parental duties as providing food, shelter, and moral guidance but otherwise leaving their children free to find their own way in life through the accomplishment of natural growth.
Whereas Garrett spends little time outside of adult-structured activities with children exactly his own age, Tyrec is much more free “to make his own fun” with children of different ages, both within a large extended family and in his neighborhood, and mostly outside direct supervision by adults. Tyrec lives in an adult-centered world where the adults are busy with other things as they provide him with broad directives, which he generally follows, and so long as he does, he has an enormous amount of freedom for himself. Garrett, on the other hand, is encouraged to challenge adult authority, including doctors and teachers as well as his parents, by asking questions and probing for the reasoning behind adult directives. As a result, Garrett is much more comfortable in the presence of adults than Tyrec, but Tyrec learns to manage a wider range of peers in being part of organizing their self-generated activities. Because school and related organized activities share the middle-class ethos of concerted cultivation, Garrett lives in a continuous lifeworld that reinforces his commitment to constant and continuous improvement of himself. Tyrec, on the other hand, crosses back and forth between two worlds—the adult one of family and school, where he is compliant, and the one among peers, where he is sometimes the leader and sometimes the led and is always free to withdraw from any given activity and initiate one of his own.
I immediately recognized that as middle class as Judie and I had become, we had raised our son Judd with the working-class natural-growth approach but without the advantage of an immediate extended family. As I read Lareau’s first case study on the Tallingers, I was existentially thunderstruck at what lousy parents we had been. Don and Louise Tallinger both had professional jobs that required regular travel; Judie’s and my jobs required no travel. The Tallingers had three kids; we had only one. And yet as they advanced in their demanding careers, they managed their children’s lives through a daunting array of activities in a way that I could not imagine Judie and I being capable of. Though I had an unusually flexible job, working at home a lot of the time, our son Judd was necessarily a sometime latch-key kid—letting himself into our apartment, walking the dog, and then being on his own until Judie got home from work on the nights I was teaching. What’s more, the Tallingers, like other middle-class parents in Lareau’s study, were actively involved with teachers and other school activities, which is what the school expected of parents. Judie and I, on the other hand, relied on the school professionals to have our child’s best interests at heart and to make the right decisions about his academic direction. Like the working-class and poor parents in Lareau’s study, we relied almost exclusively on Judd’s reports of what was going on at school, giving him directives from time to time but mostly expecting him to manage his school life, both the formal classroom work and the informal social life with his peers. We had moved to Oak Park for its good schools, and once we did, we rarely “interfered.” We did involve him in some after-school activities, but more to provide some adult supervision when we could not be home and to involve him in various sports we thought were natural for a boy. The Tallingers, on the other hand, carefully cultivated any interest each of their three children expressed by providing ballet and piano lessons or enrolling them in soccer and gymnastics and then regularly taking them to and attending their events. Judd naturally ended up hanging out with other kids who were not involved in a lot of activities, all of them with working-class parents, mostly settled living. In retrospect, as Judd was in his early thirties and married with children when I was reading Lareau’s study, I realized that the troubles he’d had with the police and initially with college had been the result not of his bad choices but instead of my poor parenting. As highly educated as I was, I had not known any better!
The Tallingers should not be confused with helicopter parents or tiger moms who are manically obsessed with their children’s achievement, but even parents like them are practicing a historically extreme form of concerted cultivation. Middle-class-origin contemporaries of mine report having considerably more free time to run than the middle-class families studied by Lareau. In their day, with such dramatically expanding professional jobs, middle-class parents could be more relaxed even as they tended to be child-centered and very attentive to their children’s intellectual and psychological development in a way working-class parents usually were not. The extreme economic differences between professional and working-class lives today have sped up middle-class children’s concerted cultivation, reducing their free time and bringing the stress and anxiety of passing tests into their lives earlier and with much more intensity.
Though I initially read Lareau’s case studies as revealing how deficient working-class child rearing could be, she did not see it that way. Lareau is a cultural sociologist who thinks her job is to describe child-rearing practices and the class cultures they reflect with an understanding that any practice or culture has both advantages and disadvantages. Among the advantages she found in working-class families were less stress and exhaustion for both parents and children, less sibling rivalry and more of a connection between siblings, less boredom and impatience among children who were more creative in using unstructured time in a satisfying way, and a faster route to adult self-sufficiency. She also observed an emerging sense of entitlement among middle-class youngsters that would serve them well in school and an emerging sense of constraint among working-class kids that hurt them in school and in dealing with other middle-class institutions but also might tend them toward greater cooperation with others. Recognizing how a sense of entitlement generates a more proactive approach toward life that is more likely to lead to success in a career, Lareau puts this latter difference in context:
Nor are the actions of children who display an emerging sense of entitlement intrinsically more valuable or desirable than those of children who display an emerging sense of constraint. In a society less dominated by individualism than the United States, with more of an emphasis on the group, the sense of constraint displayed by working-class and poor children might be interpreted as healthy and appropriate. But in this society, the strategies of the working-class and poor families are generally denigrated and seen as unhelpful or even harmful to children’s life chances.33
As I read the second case study on Tyrec Taylor, it made me recall how happy I was as a child just running the neighborhood, and as Judie and I discussed it, she had the same reaction: “Mom just opened the door and let us run.” Likewise, we remembered how happily independent Judd seemed running the urban streets of Oak Park and how happy we were that he was having a free childhood exploring what we then overestimated as reasonably safe streets. And we loved his friends, every one of them down-to-earth, decent, lively kids of many colors who respected us and our rules as they were in and out of our apartment. Would we have done it differently if we could? It’s hard to decide. When Judd was eighteen to twenty-two years of age, we would have jumped at the chance. In his early thirties, when I was reading Unequal Childhoods, I was ambivalent and confused. Now that he is in his forties, though there are specific things I wish we had done differently, I wouldn’t change the basic approach even if we could have, and we probably couldn’t have. He, however, without ever reading Lareau, steadfastly adopted a concerted cultivation approach with his two sons, partly because it was the most readily available cultural repertoire in his adult world but mostly as a reaction to the mistakes he thought we had made with him. Now, however, he worries that his college-graduate sons may be “much too entitled.”
That’s the way it is with genuine cultures. They give us guidance or put pressure on us to behave in certain ways and not others, to expect certain things and not others of ourselves and of other people, to feel natural and comfortable in some situations and awkward and want to get away in others. But they are not like recipes, specifying exact amounts of this or that. No matter how measured we are, the bad just comes along with the good, and what’s more, even as we adopt certain well thought-out strategies, other ways of doing things just occur within us without our choosing them. As I see it, a culture is a collective entity outside an individual, and individuals can wholeheartedly imbibe it or wholeheartedly resist it or anything in between. That’s why there is so much individual variation, even within the most unified cultures. But some parts of a culture just get embedded in us without our being able to consciously imbibe or resist them. Sometimes we don’t even know they’re there. Just taking them for granted, they seem as natural as breathing.34 Judd consciously adopted a child-rearing strategy. Judie and I just breathed ours in, like air.
It turns out that I am more of a class straddler than I’d thought. Class cultures exert their influence over us even when we’re not looking. The severe divisions between Tyrec Taylor’s adult and peer worlds—the one with accepted constraints, the other with free-floating activity—prepared him for a job culture, where you give away part of your day in order to have free time for what you will with the rest. And indeed, I remember countless adults telling me and others countless times to enjoy our childhoods because adult life was a grind of work and family responsibilities, yet again cuing us to understand life as time blocks of freedom and necessity, the one paid for with the other. It is a limited and limiting view of life, even tragic in some versions of it, but there’s also a space for creativity and enjoyment in it, a way to preserve your true self and a simple integrity by giving a large piece of your time to the bosses without giving up who and what you really are. The proletarian wager is that there will be enough left of you at the end of a workday, a workweek, and a work life to be able to create and enjoy a life of your own. Some do, some don’t, but how could that wager not be genuine?
The Complex Half-Lives of Class and Culture
Both class and culture are complicated in a way that race and gender are not. Even though societal definitions and expectations may change around you, as they have for race, gender, and sexuality, and though there are lots of exceptions to the rule, race and gender are relatively fixed and clearly defined. Class, on the other hand, has no even illusory biological component any more. It is a social position that can change across a lifetime. In American culture at least, working-class people are expected to want to change and assumed to have the power to change their class position. And yet the class position of your family of origin, which may itself have been changing during your childhood and adolescence, affects both your formative experiences and the taken-for-granted cultural repertoires you use to interpret that experience. Many of those cultural repertoires tend to go with you as you change class positions, and as I’ve noted, there is an irreducible element of subjective choice to one’s class identity and thus to which cultural parts get consciously brought into the future as is, which get modified, and which get abandoned altogether. Some of it is conscious, and some of it is not. I thought I had been unusually conscious, for example, but in retrospect I relied a lot more on a job culture as I pursued a career than it seemed at the time.
Betsy Leondar-Wright, on the other hand, has shown in her exhaustive study of social justice activists that class trajectory matters as much as class origin in determining what predispositions, expectations, and assumptions people bring into their behaviors. Not only where you come from but also where you’re going matters. Leondar-Wright produces one of those graphs with boxes and arrows that social scientists sometimes use to portray both structure and dynamism. As you’d expect, there are lifelong poor, working-class, professional middle-class, and upper-class people with continuity between where they’re from and where they’re going, and Leondar-Wright shows how they routinely misunderstand or otherwise rub each other the wrong way based on different class cultural dispositions and predispositions. But there are a variety of class straddlers as well, not just the upwardly mobile professionals from working-class backgrounds for which straddling has been documented and reflected upon but also the downwardly mobile, both involuntarily and voluntarily downwardly mobile. This wider variety of people with internal experience of more than one class position and culture should help lifelong members of the various classes bridge cultural gaps, but Leondar-Wright’s observations show it doesn’t often happen that way. The voluntarily downwardly mobile are an especially interesting group. Though they tend to show up more readily among the kinds of activists Leondar-Wright studied as purpose-driven people on a mission to reject their own class privilege, they may also reflect a broader and more instinctive dissatisfaction with the pressures to achieve and become within professional middle-class cultures. This kind of reverse class straddling was especially prominent in the late 1960s and into the 1970s—as illustrated by Leondar-Wright’s own trajectory as a community and economic justice organizer and by the scores of labor “colonizers” who were my contemporaries in the labor movement—but as Leondar-Wright documents, downward class straddling is still alive and well and crucially important for progressive social movements today.35
The reasons upward and downward class straddlers don’t often act as cultural bridgers are complicated (and Leondar-Wright provides guidelines for how they more readily could), but the broad takeaway is that the cognitive dissonance involved in mixing and crossing classes is either blinding or disorienting, especially when you lack a class cultural vocabulary to help you make sense of it. The broader takeaway is that there could not be such cross-class misunderstanding or such strongly felt cognitive dissonance if there were but one genuine mainstream culture that everybody could or should live up to.
No matter which way you’re going in changing your class position, there is a kind of half-life to the culture of one’s original social class. And this means that working-class ways have been and are being infiltrated into middle-class professionalism, just as some middle-class ways get adopted in and adapted to working-class life. Jessi Streib has shown the continuity in what she calls class sensibilities among professional middle-class couples from different class backgrounds. Though the couples themselves see their differences as strictly related to their individual personalities, Streib found clear correlations between class backgrounds and the couples’ differences not only in parenting styles but also in feeling rules and in how the individual spouses manage money, balance work and play, and share housework and family time. Streib concludes that unlike professional middle-class couples in which both partners are from middle-class backgrounds, the presence of unassimilated upwardly mobile class crossovers “injects new sensibilities into middle-class spaces” and that “a culturally diverse middle class is more favorable for those striving for upward mobility than a culturally homogenous one.”36
There cannot be a “culturally diverse middle class” if there is but one and only one genuine class culture. In fact, as documented in part 1, when people of working-class origin flooded into an expanding professional middle class during its period of class formation, there was much give and take between the cultures. There is undoubtedly less today, as professional-managerial occupations are growing more slowly, while middle-class professionals have increasingly isolated themselves in where they live and with whom they interact.37 It is the possible loss of this class-cultural dialectic, whereby one culture helps balance and enrich the other, that I’m warning against. Professional middle-class isolation breeds both hubris and ignorance, a dangerous combination in any situation but especially if you are the dominant culture responsible for explaining the ways of the world to everybody else.
There is another way that working-class culture might influence middle-class life across the life stages of professional careers. As Habits of the Heart itself points out, professional careers inevitably flatten out for most of us, as “the grade grows steeper at the peak of a professional field, the ledges narrower at the top of the corporate pyramid.”38 This often occurs in midlife when our family responsibilities become more demanding and, if we have children, more interesting and potentially fulfilling. What was a career with its aspiring, striving, achieving, and exciting sense of individual becoming slowly morphs into a job, mostly a means toward another end, no longer much of an end in itself. It might be helpful at that point to know that there is an alternative job culture that has already worked out some ways of living with a job rather than inside a career. Those of us from working-class backgrounds may have an advantage in falling back to a job culture we’ve always known was there, though we may also tend to flatten out prematurely without testing our full potential. But this flattening-out moment is so common and widespread within middle-class lives that there are likely internal resources among more purely, less mixed-up middle-class cultures as well. As the authors of Habits of the Heart observe, “For the fortunate among the career-weary, the private world of family and friends grows brighter, and a more expressive self comes to the fore.”39 Still, most middle-class professionals would benefit in this moment from knowing and interacting with some working-class people who have long favored belonging over becoming and being over achieving.
Paul Osterman’s study of middle managers who had experienced waves of restructuring and downsizing during the 1990s, as Judie had, observed a common reaction among managers who had either plateaued or been downgraded. Many redefined (or perhaps recognized) themselves as craft workers rather than professionals. This involved a shift in focus from their own individual development to the work itself, which they found more intrinsically interesting and worthwhile as they used their existing skills to address constantly changing problems and to better handle the ever-recurring ones day by day. In doing so, they developed a craft pride whereby the work itself, neither a career nor a calling, became “an end as well as a means.”40 Such a craft pride is very common within working-class life and not just among craft workers such as those in the building trades. Even so-called low-skilled work that may not seem intrinsically interesting is often ingeniously made so by workers who mindfully attend to the work itself as if they were Michelangelo carving a statue. Sociologists Tim Strangleman and Tracey Warren use a Jim Daniels poem about a short-order cook handling a rush of orders at a diner to introduce how common craft pride is among workers in a variety of jobs that are not considered crafts.41 Personal care workers, among the lowest paid of the proliferating low-wage workforce in the United States, love to tell me about the various situations they’ve faced with clients and how creatively they’ve handled them. There is craft pride with or without such bragging, and while it is not nearly universal within a working-class job culture, it is very common. It requires a strict focus on the work itself in the moment, undiluted by any attempt to meet external professional standards of excellence or by any long-term planning for career development.
It would be interesting to know how many of Osterman’s middle managers or other standard-issue professionals who find a satisfying job culture in midlife are from working-class backgrounds or otherwise learned from interaction with people who make a sharper distinction between living and earning a living. My idea is not that every professional middle-class person lives a career culture and every working-class one a job culture. It’s much messier than that. Rather, the two broad class cultures with various ethnic, regional, and other variations are socially available within our society: middle-class professionalism with a much louder megaphone and also a working-class culture passed along from hand to hand through generations in families and communities without megaphones but with a powerfully realistic logic that, for all its limitations, may be more sustainable across a lifetime. In any case, the availability of both cultures enriches and strengthens us as individuals and as a society. A middle-class professionalism that either through ignorance or imperial arrogance sees only one right way and doesn’t recognize a valuable alternative culture ready-to-hand is likely to misunderstand itself and the society it becomes, achieves, and lives in.
The Value of Having Two Class Cultures
What I most like about professional middle-class life, besides the income and working conditions, is its openness to evidence and reasoning and a general willingness, when not obsessive about it, to constantly improve whoever or whatever we currently are. There is a basic stream of reasonableness and decency in our manners and morals that we share with the working class, but we have a broader willingness to change and adjust ourselves to changing circumstances. That willingness may tend to make us less rooted in people and places as well as in core principles. But our rational suspicion of eternal laws of life, such as those expressed in a litany of folk sayings repeated much more commonly among the working class, leaves us generally more open to alternative points of view—or at least we have a stated commitment to doing that. That openness and commitment is what I’m appealing to. My wager is that the absence of a class cultural vocabulary is some part of why middle-class life has been narrowing for the past few decades.
As numerous scholars, including Annette Lareau, have pointed out, our educational efforts at all levels could be greatly improved if we educators understood that working-class young people come to us not with an empty cultural bucket or with one full of only bad habits but instead with a genuine culture that has strengths and weaknesses intimately related to one another, just as any culture does. But equally as important for us middle-class professionals is that working-class strengths could complement or offset some of our weaknesses, just as we could offset some of theirs if we understood their culture and how it productively contrasts with ours.
The next chapter will try to explain what I and some others see as those contrasts. I’m not convinced that I have everything lined up in exactly the right way, as I rely a lot on my own direct observation and experience, which is pretty limited to that of a white guy in the Rust Belt. But the oppositions I develop should be suggestive, even if not precisely accurate, for all regions of working-class life. For the time being, I hope I’ve shown that there is both logic and evidence that there is a genuine working-class culture, one that is not simply deficient, dominated, or residual. Built around having a job rather than a career, it is a culture that can and has worked on its own, contributes mightily to our society as a whole, and has helped shape our dominant mainstream culture, mostly for the better, and could do so again if good times for them should ever return.