Reading Classes

On Culture and Classism in America

Barbara Jensen

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801444760
• eBook ISBN: 9780801464522
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Classes & Economic Disparity
• Index: Social Sciences

Discussions of class make many Americans uncomfortable. This accessible book makes class visible in everyday life. Solely identifying political and economic inequalities between classes offers an incomplete picture of class dynamics in America, and may not connect with people's lived experiences. In Reading Classes, Barbara Jensen explores the anguish caused by class in our society, identifying classism—or anti–working class prejudice—as a central factor in the reproduction of inequality in America. Giving voice to the experiences and inner lives of working-class people, Jensen—a community and counseling psychologist—provides an in-depth, psychologically informed examination of how class in America is created and re-created through culture, with an emphasis on how working- and middle-class cultures differ and conflict. This book is unique in its claim that working-class cultures have positive qualities that serve to keep members within them, and that can haunt those who leave them behind.

Through both autobiographical reflections on her dual citizenship in the working class and middle class and the life stories of students, clients, and relatives, Jensen brings into focus the clash between the realities of working-class life and middle-class expectations for working-class people. Focusing on education, she finds that at every point in their personal development and educational history, working-class children are misunderstood, ignored, or disrespected by middle-class teachers and administrators. Education, while often hailed as a way to "cross classes," brings with it its own set of conflicts and internal struggles. These problems can lead to a divided self, resulting in alienation and suffering for the upwardly mobile student. Jensen suggests how to increase awareness of the value of working-class cultures to a truly inclusive American society at personal, professional, and societal levels.

1

Getting Class

Welcome to my worlds. Both of them.

I come from a stable, solidly working class neighborhood and large extended family. On my dad’s side, the Jensens, nine brothers and sisters survived to adulthood, married, and had children. I now have an extended family of over 140 people; many still get together to celebrate Christmas each year and a slew of graduations, confirmations, bridal and baby showers, weddings, anniversaries, and retirement celebrations. We still have a family picnic every summer. My family is real, funny, and wise. The uncles and aunties in my prologue started out their adult lives dirt poor and worked very hard to move on to stable, skilled working class jobs, a mobility that makes them proud.

I worked hard, too, and have also moved up the class ladder in America. But instead of going from a job in a poultry plant to a good union job as a railroad worker, a security guard, a meat cutter, or working in a school cafeteria, I worked my way through a lot of school (with a variety of working class jobs) to become a psychologist. My uncles and aunties didn’t have to change cultures to change jobs; I wandered into a whole new world where few of the rules from my first world—their world—apply. I also entered a world where people view my wise, funny, and loyal family as something quite different from what they really are.

Now I am in my mid-fifties, and I am a professional counseling and community psychologist, a university instructor, and a scholar—in short, a member in good standing of the upper middle class in America. As an official member of the professional middle class I have framed degrees, licenses, certificates, and awards displayed in my office, proving my membership. I am a working class to professional middle class “crossover” or “straddler” who really enjoys many aspects of each class-related culture I know (Lubrano 2004).

Unlike many people who have crossed this class divide, I enjoyed growing up working class and remain in relatively close contact with my extended family. I still love ball games in the street, roller-skating, playing country music on my guitar, and belting out rock ’n’ roll songs. Conversely, I have developed a taste for Chilean sea bass and pine nuts, Beethoven, exotic travel, and the kind of theater that leaves many people frowning and scratching their heads.

Growing Up Working Class

My dad was a meat cutter and my mom a telephone solicitor (long before they were upgraded to “telemarketers”). Everyone we knew was working class. In my childhood, we were often driving across the state to see more relatives. With dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles, I got to stay in many different houses, saw different ways of living, had different kinds of fun, and saw different kinds of difficulty—all of them working class. At the farms belonging to my Dad’s brothers and sisters we had animals, huge fields of corn and soybeans glistening in the summer sun, barns, haymows and attics within which to play. Being one of the oldest children in the Jensen family, I often told stories to my younger cousins, as my big brother, Eddie, had told stories to me. I was as close to my cousins as I was to my neighborhood pals in Mounds View.

My big family gave me a sense that my world was very large and included more people than I could possibly count who were either related to Dad, friends from jobs he had worked, or friends from the many places they had lived as he grew up. My childhood map of the world was mostly in Mounds View, and then mostly four streets: Pinewood, Terrace, Oakwood, and Hillview. But Dad was always driving us somewhere else, and Minnesota seemed a very big place, with endless new landscapes and towns. Glenville, where Grandma and Grandpa Jensen lived with Uncle Ricky in that long-ago little white house with a back porch and deep yard, outdoor clotheslines running the length of it. Alongside the house, there was a small hill and at the top was the railroad track, just off Main Street in Glenville. There was an outside toilet that people used even when the one inside worked. Glenville was the center of the Jensen family, way back when Grandma was still alive and I was little. We spent nearly every holiday there and all Dad’s brothers and sisters and, as they were gradually added, new spouses and more cousins still went there as often as possible.

My childhood map also had two very far-away lands: Denmark, where Grandpa Jensen came from, and New York, where my mother was raised and where Grandma and Grandpa Milstein still lived. Not just New York, we knew, but Brooklyn, New York.

There wasn’t much happening in our little village of Mounds View, just quiet rows of identical tract houses (there were two types, small and medium) and tiny trees planted by hopeful young couples. Now I can’t help but laugh when I say the name Mounds View: there were no mounds to view. It was dead-flat prairie and even swampy in parts. There was no town center, no library, no town, actually. My best friends were Terrie Blanchard, Marie Butler, and Rene McDonough, and we had plenty of time to invent our own fun.

There were half-done housing developments to play in, mountains made of dirt to climb, big bumpy laps of sprawling old oaks we climbed into in the school yard across the street from our house, the slurpy bog you went through to get to the woods, and an even slurpier expanse of black peat to explore. We had the farmer’s yard on Hillview Drive with a tire swing we loved to ride, countless games of dodgeball and statuemaker in McDonough’s yard, led by Rene’s older sister and brother, a record player and a passel of 45 rpm records in their basement that all of us took turns pantomiming to each other. There were countless overnights in each other’s houses, and many more whispered stories and secrets between us. Things weren’t always easy for our parents—some of them worked too hard at difficult, often multiple, jobs, and every once in a while their frustrations rocked our wood-frame houses and shattered the quiet suburban air. But we were not alone in the world. We always had “us.”

In our neighborhood there was one primary school—Pinewood Elementary. In first grade, kissing Mrs. Johnson’s old papery-white cheek as we left school each day, I dreamed of being a teacher’s pet, but I never was. I loved books, but there weren’t any in our house, or in Pinewood Elementary. (They finally got a library just as I was leaving sixth grade for junior high.) My godmother’s house had a piano, because their Pentecostal religion said they couldn’t have a TV, and I begged my parents and pined for a piano and lessons all through grade school. I never got them. One sad lesson I learned at the time: try not to wish for things you can’t have, it only makes you feel bad. As my father always said, “You can’t have everything.” Also, as everyone in Minnesota still says, “It could be worse.”

I’m sure no one read books to me in the 1950s and ’60s, because I still remember getting my first and only books in childhood. Two of them. I remember being surprised, and a bit disappointed, to open them under the Christmas tree. They were fairy tales I eventually came to adore and imitate. Mostly, I read the grisly stories in the National Enquirer, The Star, and Weekly World News at a neighbor’s house with horrified fascination. I then wrote stories about mutilation and brutality, and my mother praised my writing skill. The only books I saw adults read were the Bible (and then only my godparents Mary and Milton) and what I later learned to call “potboilers,” like Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers or Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door, that my mother read and that I eventually learned to plow through. Also, my mom made sure we always had lots of magazines.

Sometimes I awoke to Mom’s sobbing in the night, “I want to go home!” I had no way to know what she meant by “home,” since our house on Pinewood Drive was the only home I had ever known. I remember going into the new living room Dad had built and finding him sitting on the edge of the couch, his miserable head in his hands, until I said, “Dad?” And he looked up, surprised and, for a moment, truly lost.

“Mom’s had a little too much to drink, Barbie,” he said, looking like my ever-confident, competent dad again. He said, “Go to bed, it will be better in the morning.” But Dad didn’t look convinced. I know now that she missed New York, but then I went to my bedroom afraid and deeply puzzled, while Mom’s noisy sobs shook the house.

And it would be better in the morning, and better still by Friday night when we relaxed into another long car ride and cruised up Highway 65 to the cabin. Dad bought my brothers and me a handful of candy bars to choose between, and he let us listen to rock ’n’ roll on the radio. Long car rides turned quiet and intimate as we eventually lost radio reception and began to sing. Everyone had special songs to sing, and we took turns, the more tender the lyrics the better. Dad sang “Rocking Alone in an Old Rocking Chair.” Mine were “Patches,” a tragic tale of class prejudice, and “Scarlet Ribbons,” a magical tale of a little girl whose faith brought her gifts beyond human comprehension. And when we didn’t know the lyrics, we all made goofy ones up together, and we laughed out loud.

There was a spaciousness to life, and it seems to me now that people in my childhood heard inside of words. Words were buoys, instead of building blocks—buoys floating in a world dense with shared images: farms and factories, haymows, shanty towns, and neon city streets; cows, horses, pigs, dogs, and chickens; shining meadows, swamps, and fields of corn; dense forests of birch, pine, and oak; a wonder of pheasants, grouse, deer, moose, and black bears. The meaning in our lives changed together, like weather. Everyone in the neighborhood watched together as good times and bad times, odd times and usual times, came and went.

Then came sudden events, all in a tumble, like the Tornadoes of ’65 (sixth grade) that flattened two blocks of houses. A rush of people and danger and excitement. We always knew there were frightening things beyond our understanding, beyond our control: we saw shattered houses and scattered treasures. But we already had seen hands with a missing finger, people whose faces had burn scars, animals struck and bloodied by cars, and other great, troubling mysteries of childhood. We also knew that, mostly, people like us survive. Everyone came around to help and rebuild. Eventually, those battered streets ended up having the nicest houses in the area. Then we coasted again through another endless summer.

If we were deprived, we didn’t know it. Later, as an upwardly mobile young adult, I would curse and mourn the lack of good literature, art materials, and music training in my childhood, how far “behind” I felt among my new middle class friends. But, at the time, in our relatively homogenous suburb, we were unaware that anyone else had anything we did not. I enjoyed being a working class kid, riding my bike all over Pinewood and beyond to Greenfield and Red Oak neighborhoods, making new friends and finding new adventures.

Adventures in Adolescence: Discovering Class

In junior high we got a school library, but I wasn’t looking for books to read anymore. (Okay, I did sneak a few Beverly Cleary books home.) I was far more interested in getting more and more cool, as my brother Eddie had six years before me. Some of the teachers even called me “Little Jensen,” remembering my brother and expecting me to be a hood too. I did not disappoint them. I exhibited bravery, sheer nerve, willingness to face consequences (detention), and humor—sometimes at the teacher’s expense—in front of the whole classroom.

When Terrie, Marie, Rene, and I were twelve, we started going to Teen Night at the Bel-Rae Ballroom every Tuesday. It was always packed with kids and live bands that played songs of the ’60s like “Let The Good Times Roll.” “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas was the song that always made everyone get up and flood the dance floor. We freely smoked cigarettes. The management didn’t even try to stop us. I don’t know if I ever missed a Tuesday night from age twelve through my high school graduation at seventeen.

I was a most unlikely candidate for college.

But when I was fourteen (in 1968) an old friend from Pinewood whom we saw every week at Bel-Rae, Jeanie, started inviting me to her house. My parents’ dream neighborhood had only been a stopping place for her family. They had moved into a real middle class neighborhood in nearby New Brighton—a real town with a library, a couple of restaurants, a post office, a bank, and different classes of people. Mom went there often for a “smidgen of civilization,” as she called it.

On my first visit to my friend’s house I had a “we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto!” experience. This house had books galore, special “reading” lamps, no TV in the living room (the object around which every living room in Mounds View revolved), and a component stereo system with no cabinet her brother had brought back from Vietnam at the end of his first tour. Her parents were divorced (that was different), her oldest sister was a model, and her other older sister had my name, Barbara, and went to the University of Minnesota. Her mother was also attending the U to get a master’s degree in library science. They welcomed me into their family.

My own family was in trouble. By the time I was in high school, my parents and I were fighting all the time. My mom had become increasingly dark and stormy as the years wore on in Minnesota. Six years older than me, Eddie had married his high school sweetheart and moved a mile down County Road I; he was trying to help me understand my parents. Eddie and I had many talks about our family while parked in the driveway where no one would hear us, exhaust pluming up around his car like ghosts in the winter air. Mom fought an unintelligible battle that only started to make sense when Eddie finally told me, when I graduated high school and left home at seventeen, that Mom’s parents were Jewish.

Since I was not getting along in my family, I more or less took up residence in New Brighton. Staying with Jeanie’s family changed the course of my life forever. In particular, her older sister Barbara reached out and brought us to the West Bank (of the Mississippi River) by the University of Minnesota campus, where she lived with other students.

The streets of the dilapidated West Bank neighborhood inhabited by skid row alcoholics and cockroaches was now packed with university students with long silky hair or gigantic tousled curls, flowing East Indian Nehru shirts and long billowy skirts of brightly colored prints. Barbara was completely at home there, with her long straight hair, blue jeans, and sweatshirts. She was a protester of the war in Vietnam, a natural foods eater, and an athlete who worked with kids every summer. She had a big and ready smile and always talked to me like I was an adult.

I remember my first night on the West Bank with her, going up a long flight of stairs in an old house to the Coffeehouse Extempore. We gave a donation at the door to a small man with black hair in two long pigtails, while I tried really hard not to stare at him. This may be hard for people born after the 1960s to imagine, but boys and men back then always had short hair. This room was full of men with long hair, women in tie-dyed clothes, cigarette smoke, and the smell of coffee. I had never seen anything like it; I was fascinated. Wandering in, I found a room where a guy played guitar and sang folk music on a small stage while people sat at tables and listened. Everyone was very friendly and sweet, loving even. This was quite different from my tough-guys neighborhood, because I was a stranger and yet they treated me like one of them (though I was only fourteen and dressed like myself—a working class tough girl in black shorts with make up and long black wings...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: What Part of Fridley Are You From?
• 1. Getting Class
• 2. The Invisible Ism
• 3. Belonging versus Becoming
• 4. Behaving versus Blooming
• 5. Identity and Resistance
• 6. Across the Great Divide
• 7. Pain in the Promised Land
• 8. Gathering in Glenville
• Notes
• References