After 12 years of teaching language arts at a middle school that serves many working-class children, Ellen O’Neil has decided to change careers.
“I come home every night, bone-tired, feeling like the blood has been drained out of my body,” she explains. “It’s like we’re trying to educate a population that doesn’t want to be educated. They show up late or don’t show up at all. On a good day, half of them do their homework.
“The parents aren’t much better,” she continues. “They don’t show up for back-toschool night, they don’t check their children’s work, they don’t return my phone calls.
“At the beginning of the school year, I work hard to get everyone involved. But the ones who don’t follow through – I just stop wasting my energy. And that feels really bad. I know it’s wrong, but I don’t know what else to do.”
On a slightly lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder lives Ryan James,1 a prison guard. James is also perturbed by certain unnamed, amorphous, yet very real social class issues that keep cropping up at his daughter’s preschool. For example, a teacher met with James to view and discuss his daughter’s portfolio – a book of “work” that was supposed to express his daughter’s unique self through selected pieces of art, the activities she chose in class, and things she said.
James found this exercise to be ludicrous. “I mean you’re psychoanalyzing a 4-yearold kid that is standing there with their hand in paint,” he says. “If you ask them to draw a picture of a flower and they drew a weed, maybe you could figure something out there, but I don’t think you’re gonna figure out hand paintin’. So I told [the teacher] it was just a little too much, and I said, ‘You’re getting a little too serious with the 4-yearolds.’ She said, ‘Well, this is the board of education’s rules, now, so we have to do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to hear it. This is bullshit.’”
Class-Based Styles of Individualism
Throughout the social sector, many highly educated, well-intentioned, predominantly white middle-class people like Ellen O’Neil are attempting to reach out across the class divide – to educate, to help, perhaps even to reveal new paths into the middle class. At the same time, many motivated, conscientious, lower- and working-class people like Ryan James are attempting to use these services. All too often, however, these attempts to transcend class differences end in failure, and leave service providers and clients. scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong.
My anthropological research suggests that one subtle classbased difference may underlie many of these frustrated crossclass encounters.2 That difference is what working-class versus upper-middle-class Americans understand “individualism” to mean. After many years of contrasting “individualist” Americans with people from other, “collectivist” cultures, social scientists are now recognizing that within the United States the meaning of individualism varies widely. We are also finding that not all communities practice, use, or socialize the same strands of individualism.
Through my fieldwork in Manhattan and Queens, I identified two styles of individualism: a “soft,” upper-middle-class individualism, which focuses on the cultivation and expression of unique feelings, thoughts, ideas, and preferences; and a “hard,” working-class individualism, which focuses on the cultivation of self-reliance, perseverance, determination, protectiveness, and toughness. These two styles of individualism aren’t rigid boxes; people of all social classes can and do fluidly use each style. However, the working-class Queens residents in my research leaned more toward a hard individualistic style, just as the upper-middle-class Manhattan residents tended more toward soft individualism.
Hard and soft individualisms not only reflect class differences in material worlds and everyday realities, but also shape parents’, teachers’, and children’s everyday attitudes and habits. Additionally, soft and hard individualisms correspond to the class-based futures that parents and teachers envision for their children – trajectories that are seen as normal and natural, the “of course,” obvious choice. (Of course she isn’t going to be a waitress. Of course he isn’t going to get a Ph.D.) Insofar as children internalize these different styles of individualism, social inequality is reproduced, generation after generation, despite the myth of American mobility.
Studying Class in a “Classless” Society
When Americans think about social class – which is not often, given our culture’s myth of classlessness3 – we usually think about the material evidence: different forms of transit, different kinds and sizes of houses, different neighborhoods, different jobs, different access to healthcare, different exposures to pollution and violence, plus different styles of music, clothes, food, and pastimes.
But class is not just about the material world, and class cultures are not just skin-deep. They penetrate the core of our being, down to the way we hold our forks, tell our stories, console or discipline our children, talk to our neighbors, remember our pasts, or view our futures. Social class is not simply shown and taken off in the manner of a Harvard degree or a gold wristwatch, but lived in the flesh, held in the cells of one’s self-image and one’s visions of life’s possibilities.
To examine how white Americans from different social classes4 think about, internalize, and express their individualism, I spent two years interviewing parents and teachers, observing classrooms, attending community events, and conducting home visits in three New York communities: Parkside, Kelley, and Queenston. (“Kelley” and “Queenston” are pseudonyms.) Rather than bluntly asking people, “What does individualism mean?” I studied how parents and teachers talk about or interact with their preschool-aged children. By studying preschoolers and their caregivers, I not only learned more about social class differences in understandings of individualism, but also examined how those different ideas are transmitted to new generations.
I focused on white preschoolers and caregivers to control for the confounding influence of race. Americans tend to confound class and race, on the one hand equating the lower working class and the poor with people of color, and on the other hand equating the middle, upper-middle, and upper classes with whites. My research is a reminder that relatively homogenous, white working- and lower-class neighborhoods still exist in America.
Growing Soft Individuals on the Upper East Side
Parkside is a wealthy, mainly white, Upper East Side neighborhood in Manhattan that consists of neo-Georgian townhouses, Beaux Arts mansions, art galleries, boutiques, and museums. In Parkside’s relative safety, comfort, and affluence, soft individualism thrives. The parents and teachers that I observed emphasized the delicacy and uniqueness of the child’s self, the extreme care, resources, wide canvas, and gentle touch needed to help this fragile self unfold and realize its full potential.
One of the most common metaphors used to describe the child’s unfolding was that of a flower growing, blossoming, and blooming to reveal its unique contents – its feelings, desires, talents, tastes, imagination, and creativity. Most important among these contents were the child’s emotions, which were held to be the markers of the idiosyncratic, “true self.” Sociologist Steven Tipton calls this emotion-focused style of individualism “psychologized individualism.”
Parkside parents linked the careful cultivation of psychologized individualism to their children’s eventual achievement: In their interior well of emotions, children can find both the uniqueness that will set them apart from their peers and the motivational fuel to propel them ahead of their peers. But because the flowering of the psychologized self is a delicate process, Parkside parents often worried that any large, clumsy, or harsh interference might stunt it. For example, many of the Parkside parents and teachers I met refrained from giving direct commands to their children, and instead disciplined them through gentle or almost tentatively voiced questions. (“Do you really think you should be bouncing that ball now, Timmy?”) Parkside parents and teachers also tried to save face and voice a lot more than working-class Queenston and Kelley parents, masking their anger, annoyance, and frustration with children so as not to hurt their feelings or keep them from opening up.
Producing Hard Individuals in Queens
Across the East River from Parkside are the Queens neighborhoods of Queenston and Kelley – harder realities that give rise to harder individualisms. Queenston is a lower-working-class community that includes housing projects, a school for juvenile delinquents, and miles of chipped cement, graffiti-covered signs, garbage, and the occasional prostitute. And close to Queenston is Kelley, a tight-knit, white working-class community of tidy, close-set houses and a few small storefronts, churches, and schools.
For Queenston parents, hard individualism flowed from their tough environment (gangs, drugs, racism, violence), their often-difficult pasts (child abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, divorce), and their belief that the future holds struggle and hardship. Phrases like staying put, standing your ground, minding your own business, keeping up your pride, and not letting others get under your skin were common. Parents implied that these tougher boundaries of a resilient self are better able to keep out the negative influences of the street (gangs, peer pressure, violence, alcohol, drugs). Hence, individualism in the form of “not relying on or trusting anyone else,” self-determination, privacy, and self-reliance were often seen as ways of surviving the rigors of a bad system, a system that could not be trusted.
Kelley parents likewise endorsed hard individualism, but of a slightly different variety. When Kelley parents spoke of hardening the self, it was often in the context of enabling children to burst through to a higher socioeconomic level. Class-climbing images like stepping out, putting one’s best foot forward, Superman, rockets, and building momentum were common. A thick, tough skin was needed not for protection from danger, but for surviving the hard work and perseverance needed on the way up the socioeconomic ladder.
Raising a hard individual requires different techniques than does raising a soft individual. Teasing, yelling, spanking, issuing direct commands without a “please” or “thank you,” openly expressing one’s annoyance or boredom with a child, directly contradicting a child’s story (see sidebar, p. 45), and not immediately responding to a child’s questions or crying were all practices that both Kelley and Queenston adults used more regularly and with less guilt than did Parkside adults. Through these acts, the Queens parents not only revealed that they wanted their children to become tougher and more resilient, but also showed that they believed their children to be tougher and more resilient to begin with.
Class in the Classroom
As teacher Ellen O’Neil’s and parent Ryan James’ frustrations reveal, class cultures often collide in schools. Education is allegedly America’s great social leveler, the institution through which people, regardless of their class backgrounds, are resorted according to their intelligence, talent, perseverance, and fortitude. But as Harvard assistant professor of sociology Prudence Carter points out, “School is predicated on the values and practices of the middle class, and so lowerand working-class kids are automatically at a disadvantage.”6 Included in the middle-class values and practices of school are those of soft individualism.
In a few of the Head Start programs I observed, for example, the clash of working-class hard individualism with the more softly individualistic middle-class educational culture often manifested itself with the lower-working-class children simply being silent, as if mystified by the fairylike teacher who moved around the classroom with a constant glow and smile, showering praise upon them. When these children scuffled with each other, I saw how confused they were when their middle-class teachers took them aside and asked them to explain why they wanted to hit each other and how it made them feel. Coming from families where they were used to being spanked, shamed, or simply ignored for fighting, they seemed bewildered by this new, therapeutic way of dealing with conflicts.
Working-class children may also be flummoxed by some of their more softly individualistic academic requirements. “I tell these kids to use their imagination, and they say: ‘What do you mean? I don’t have an imagination,’” says O’Neil. “It’s so strange. I can see some stony old man not having an imagination, but a 12-year-old?”
Some of these requirements may even directly conflict with a working-class family’s values. O’Neil recalls one such instance: “One of the last projects in my class was putting together a poetry book. So this working-class kid wrote these very sweet poems about how weird it is to feel yourself growing into a man. I asked him, ‘Don’t you want to take your poetry book home?’
And the kid said: ‘Oh no. If my dad saw these he would beat me.’” O’Neil says that although the kid was joking about the beating, he was serious about how deep his embarrassment would run should his sensitivity and imagination be discovered.
This kind of dissonance between one’s home culture and the culture of school can seal children into the mind-set that education is not for them, and that school is not a key and relevant part of their futures. Their alienation from school may then set up a cascade of events that hinders their progress in other life domains.
“As children disengage from education, they are labeled as uncooperative and hard to reach,” instead of just out of cultural sync, says Carter. Once pigeonholed as problematic, many lower-class kids then get tracked into lower-level and remedial classes. “Tracking then has a long-term impact on who goes to college, and on what kind of college you go to,” reports Carter. In this way, the supposedly level playing field of education slowly becomes a long and unlikely uphill climb for workingand lower-class kids.
In contrast, “Middle-class parents make sure their kids know how to communicate with teachers and other adults in power,” says Carter. “[Middle-class children] know how to be curious and inquisitive and how to ask questions.” As a result, when middle- class children show up for their first day of school, they have already mastered a large, albeit implicit, portion of the curriculum. Their middle-class ways get called “talent,” “intelligence,” “imagination,” “sensitivity,” and other supposedly inborn traits necessary for scholastic success – rather than classbased knowledge.
This identification of soft individualism as natural, innate behavior further hides the process that middle-class children went through to learn it, making soft individualism seem even more ungraspable and mysterious to working-class children. Meanwhile, middle-class children often “think they hit a triple, when in reality they were born on third base,” says Philip DeVol, who writes and consults on poverty issues.
Working-class parents are often just as put off as their kids by the softly individualistic demands of school. In the Queenston preschool that I observed, for example, posters in classrooms and hallways advertised the more “sensitive” and child-centered values that the New York Board of Education hoped would filter down into the classroom and into the child’s home. These posters usually focused on how to avoid damaging the child’s self-esteem and gave specific recommendations for showing appropriate appreciation for his or her uniqueness and individuality.
For example, the following poster aimed to instruct Queenston parents on how to affirm children of different ages:
Queenston Preschool Family Affirmatives List Infants: I’m so glad you’re here. You’re wonderful. Toddlers: I love watching you grow. I’m glad you’re who you Preschool: I’m glad you have your opinions. I love how curious you are. School Age: I love who you are becoming. It’s wonderful to watch you make your own decisions. Adults: I am a wonderful parent. I’m glad I’m who I am.
What was most ironic about these posters were the ways in which they sugarcoated the rather grim realities most parents were confronting. Most parents were exhausted, overworked, raising a child as a single parent, fighting a drug or alcohol addiction, struggling with welfare, and worn down by poverty. Clearly, their reality was not accurately reflected by the watercolor language of the softly individualistic posters.
Social Class in Social Services
This same kind of soft-hard dissonance can be found not only among American working and upper classes in educational institutions, but also between predominantly middle-class social service providers and the lower- and working-class clients they serve. For example, as psychologist and author Mary Pipher notes, “Our Western mental health system is dependent on verbal expressiveness, self-disclosure, and a belief in individualism.”7 In her work with refugees resettling in the United States, Pipher observes that they often have more immediate concerns – work, sleep, housing, transportation – than dealing with past psychological pain. Many are also not used to speaking about their traumas so honestly with a stranger or are simply not used to speaking about their pain in a psychological (versus spiritual or physical) idiom.
Moreover, “Many working-class people see musing upon their own psyches as selfish, and see the therapists who insist that they do so as impolite,” says Barbara Jensen, a psychologist and trainer who has worked with lower- and working-class clients for over 30 years. She adds that many clients will endure “talk therapy,” though, if it is required for them to get the other resources that they perceive they need.
The Clash of Hard and Soft Individualisms in Coalitions
The rift between hard and soft individualisms can also undermine very well intentioned social sector attempts at building cross-class coalitions. Betsy Leondar- Wright, a social justice activist and author of “Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists,”8 recounts one such class clash: “I was facilitating a mid-Atlantic regional antinuclear meeting in 1979. There were about 50 people there – mostly white, mostly middle- class. We were planning a massive No Nukes march on Washington, D.C.
“Now keep in mind that this was ’70s activist subculture – a lot of loose hair, a lot of cause-buttons, a lot of singing. We were doing our first go-round [of introductions], and to make it more playful, I had asked people to answer the question ‘If you were an animal, what animal would you be?’
“Then in walked about six union guys, all with short hair, suits, and ties, from the United Mine Workers of America – an organization with the motivation and manpower to send thousands of protesters to the march. These guys didn’t do animal names. They didn’t do small groups. Their muckety-muck gave his speech, and then the union guys just walked out, most of them without saying a word.” The UMWA did not send delegates to the D.C. march. “I knew I had done something wrong, but I didn’t know what.”
Over time Leondar-Wright came to understand that many activists’ desire to get in touch with and express their quirky, wacky, creative side – while often a fine way to build camaraderie among middleclass coalitions – can estrange their working-class counterparts. In her workshops on building stronger cross-class coalitions, she now advises activists not to introduce these “inessential weirdnesses.” “Most people get it,” she says, “but some don’t understand why you can’t always just be yourself.”
Movin’ On Up to the East Side?
Social scientists, educators, and policymakers seem to assume that middle-class soft individualism is indeed the best and natural endpoint of development – of course a child should have her feelings mirrored, her unique talents discovered, her self unfolded, and her Ph.D. granted. The understated American discourse on what to do about class divides therefore usually recommends that the lower classes assimilate to the middle-class norm.
Yet class is not something that can be wiped off like the frosting on a cake or relearned like a new sport. If soft and hard individualisms were extremely similar in their values and practices, this kind of relearning would not be so tough. But basic assumptions about the nature of the self, the future, and reality (e.g., Is the world safe or dangerous? Do people need to know and express their emotions to be happy? Can children handle teasing? How do you heal yourself ?) are at the root of these differing styles.
As Philippe Bourgois notes in “In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio,”9 even when ex-crack dealers tried their hardest to keep low-level jobs in middle-class workplaces, they couldn’t change the ways they spoke, moved, and dressed enough to satisfy managers. After donning white button-down shirts, removing their gold chains, and cutting down on their swearing – all acts that called into question their sense of masculinity – these men still found that the better jobs of receptionist or plant caretaker were reserved for those who looked, spoke, and acted the middle-class part.
Assimilating to the middle class isn’t only difficult, it’s also painful. “Everyone talks about how wonderful upward mobility and the American dream are, but no one mentions the loss and the cost,” notes Felice Yeskel, co-director of Class Action, a nonprofit organization that works to raise awareness about the impact of class on individuals, relationships, and institutions. “People who change classes – what we call ‘straddlers’ – don’t feel at home in either their class of origin or in their new class.”
DeVol further explains why moving up and out hurts. “You have to give up relationships. You have to dump that guy. You have to stop listening to your mom. These transitions are seen as betrayals. The people you are leaving behind not only won’t support your transition, they will sabotage your efforts. When you begin transitioning, you have to replace that lost social capital.”
The pain of transitioning does not cause Ruby Payne to question its necessity. Payne is the founder and president of aha! Process, Inc., a company that teaches organizations about social class cultures. “When you are required by law to participate in middle-class institutions, like educational or legal institutions, and you don’t know the hidden rules of the middle class, you can get crucified,” she says. And while Payne’s company teaches both middle- and lower-class people about each other, she puts the onus of assimilation on the lower classes.
Christina Hoff Sommers, on the other hand, is not sold on one-way assimilation. Sommers, author of “One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance,”10 says:”We have a word for middle-class people’s preoccupation with their inner world. It’s ‘depression.’” She asks, “Who would you rather have as a co-worker – someone from a precious middle- class environment who expects lavish praise and falls apart at the first criticism, or someone [from a working-class environment] with self-discipline and a strong work ethic?” Sommers suggests that the working class’s harder selves may be what restores the United States’ competitive edge in the global economy. “These working-class kids might be able to move ahead while the middle-class kids are sitting in circles sharing feelings and wondering what happened.”
Yeskel likewise sees value in maintaining class diversity, especially if the sting of inequality and classism can be lessened. “There are gifts and struggles, strengths and limitations at each step on the socioeconomic ladder. But because of classism and tremendous amounts of segregation, people from different classes don’t benefit from each other.”
Admitting Class
So what should well-meaning, would-be class-bridgers do? An important step is becoming aware of one’s own culture-based style of individualism and the ways in which it unconsciously seems natural, right, true, and inevitable. Leondar-Wright points out that this awareness brings with it both forgiveness and responsibility: “You shouldn’t feel guilty for who you are or for your limited consciousness. But you should take responsibility for doing as much as you can to raise your own consciousness and to improve your own behavior so that you aren’t oppressive to other people.”
Close on the heels of this first step is acknowledging that one’s own class culture is not necessarily the best or only way to live. Jensen observes that this second step can be especially difficult for practitioners who have changed social class. “Look at your own background,” she says. “If you are swimming away from it as fast as you can, you may have a very wrong-headed approach to your clients,” who may have different goals and values than you, and who may indeed perceive your contempt.
A third step is learning the local worlds of those who would be “empowered.” “These worlds have an integrity all their own,” says Jensen, “which means you just have to go and experience them for yourself. When your client is sitting in your office, trying to fit into your middle-class world, you aren’t going to get any sense of who he or she really is.” With deeper knowledge of lower- and working-class contexts, practitioners may also get a sense of how tough, unfair, or helpful proposed changes would be for their clients.
Even with the greatest insight into their own and others’ class cultures, practitioners will still face the hardest question: “Given that mainstream American culture is dominated by middle-class practices, values, and institutions, isn’t it my responsibility to teach these class-based ways to my working- or lower-class clients, students, or constituents?” There are no easy answers to this question. Perhaps the money and stability from a better job, more education, or different habits would be worth the discomfort of the shift in cultures. Or perhaps the soft psychologized middle-class culture would be so strange that it wouldn’t stick – even if liberally applied – or so jarring that it would cause shame or withdrawal. Since each case is different, the implications of social class should be carefully and explicitly discussed.
More broadly, the assumptions of social class should be admitted into the broader American discourse on social change. Doing so might not only help bone-tired practitioners like O’Neil and fed-up parents like James understand that their frustrations and failures are not any one person’s fault; it may also guide them to more effective techniques for short-circuiting the perpetuation of social inequality
Source 1 Some names have been changed to pseudonyms.
2 A.S. Kusserow, American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
3 For an excellent analysis of the myth of classlessness in America, see B. DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Class (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1990).
4 Social class is a measure of a person’s relative social standing, and is usually indicated by income, education, occupational prestige, and wealth. Since people of similar social classes tend to cluster together in residential areas, I used neighborhood of residence to indicate social class. I also considered parents’ education in determining the social class of my respondents.
5 S. Tipton, Getting Saved From the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).
6 See P. Bourdieu, “The School as a Conservative Force: Scholastic and Cultural Inequalities,” in Contemporary Research in the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Eggleston (London: Methuen, 1966): 32-46. Some social scientists disagree with Bourdieu’s theory that social class is reproduced in education, such as P. Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Aldershot: Gower, 1977).
7 M. Pipher, The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community (New York: Harcourt, 2002): 281.
8 This anecdote also appears in Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle- Class Activists (British Columbia, Canada: New Society Publishers, April 2005).
9 P. Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996).
10 C.H. Sommers and S. Satel, One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
Read more stories by Adrie Kusserow.