Class Reunion

The Remaking of the American White Working Class

Lois Weis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135932978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Noted scholar Lois Weis first visited the town of "Freeway" in her 1990 book, Working Class Without Work. In that book we met the students and teachers of Freeway's high school to understand how these working-class folks made sense of their lives. Now, fifteen years later, Weis has gone back to Freeway for Class Reunion. This time her focus is on the now grown-up students who are, for the most part, still working class and now struggling to survive the challenges of the global economy. Class Reunion is a rare and valuable longitudinal ethnographic study that provides powerful, provocative insight into how the lives of these men and women have changed over the last two decades--and what their prospects might be for the future.

Part I
1985

1
A TIME OF PAIN: Young Men at Freeway High

ROB: It’s like a dictatorship here [school]. Mr. Smith, Mr.Amsdel; Mr. Strong is the worst He’d take me out of school for being late to class. You woke up late or something, and he comes and kicks you out. He suspended us for two days for skipping class… that just makes you more mad and you want to get even with him Next time you come late again. Put a stink bomb in his office. Walk by and throw it in.

LOIS: So, who wins in the end?

ROB: Probably he will. Or we do, when we graduate.

Rob, grade 11, 1985

White male adolescent working-class identity in Freeway is forged along three primary axes: (1) an emerging contradictory code of respect toward school knowledge and culture not in evidence in key previous studies of white working-class male youth; (2) a set of virulently patriarchal constructions of home/family life which position future wives in particular kinds of subordinate relationships; and (3) constructed notions of African Americans and Yemenites (“Arabians”), which are intensely racist and which split along distinct gender lines. Here we hark back to 1985, when the Freeway youth are in their third year of high school, exploring who the young men are as they wind their way through adolescence at a time of intense reorganization of the American economy. As they strike out on the road to manhood, they carve a set of paths like no generation before them—paths strewn with trashed hopes of working in the steel mill like their fathers and grandfathers, worn with disillusionment and discontent. Like the lead character in the BBC serial The Missing Postman, or the motley crew of men in the fully and justly celebrated The Full Monty (Walkerdine, Lucey, & Melody, 2001), they and their fathers struggle with what it means to be a man in the midst of a radically changed economic context.

Attitude Toward Institutional Authority and School Meanings

Previous studies of white working-class boys suggest that opposition to authority and school meanings is deeply etched within the class cultural formation, ultimately reinforcing an “us versus them” ideology appropriate to the historic struggle between capital and labor. The most obvious dimension of the lads’ culture in Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977), for example, is generalized opposition toward authority and school meanings. The lads engage in behavior designed to show resentment while stopping just short of outright confrontation. Unlike the “ear ’oles” (so named because they simply sit and listen), they exhibit extensive absenteeism, signaling their generally oppositional stance: their “struggle to win symbolic and physical space from the institution and its rules, and to defeat its main perceived purpose: to make you work” (p. 26). The core skill here is being able to get out of any given class, thus preserving personal mobility within the school. Personal mobility encourages the preservation of the collective (cutting class means meeting friends elsewhere) and can be seen as a partial defeat of individualism, positioning the group as a collective “we” in the face of anticipated future external control over their labor.

Work by Howard London (1978) in a community college in the United States, and by Robert Everhart (1983) in an American middle school, affirms Willis’s findings regarding the rejection of school-based meanings among white working-class students. A common thread runs through these studies: the often overt and sometimes covert rejection of school meanings and culture. In all these studies there is an attempt on the part of working-class male youth to carve their own space within the institution—space that can then be filled with more personal meanings, ones fundamentally anti-school. Such school-based conflict sets the stage for later enacted capital and labor struggles during times of high activity in an industrially based economy.

Comparable resentment toward authority characterizes the 1985 Freeway boys, being linked primarily to perceived institutional control over student attire and the use of time and space. As with Willis’s lads, resentment tends to be caged in practice, stopping just short, on most occasions, of outright confrontation.

TOM: I don’t like the principals. Most of the teachers are assholes…They have a controlling power over the kids, or at least they try to. Me, I won’t take shit from no one. That’s the way I am…. Whatever they do, they can’t bother me, ‘cause when I get my diploma, I can say what I want to them….

The kids should have some rights. Like, let me say, for one example, I know there’s smokers in this school. A lot of kids smoke…. To solve all smoking problems with kids going outside and skipping classes, give the kids at least once a day a place to go to—a room—and have one cigarette or something. Five minutes a day….

They [school authorities] play head games with kids They think they can push you any which way they want.

LOIS: If they’re pushing you around, why stay for your diploma?

TOM: ’Cause it helps for, like, a job or whatever. It’s like a reference for this, this, this. It’s like a key that opens many doors.

* * *

BOB: I think Mr. Strong is an asshole. He’s an assistant principal. I know he’s in an authority position, but he just seems to think he has control over anything that happens in this school at any time The way the control is handled [is what I resent]. Mr. Strong, that man has no sense of humor. He’s like, blah, and he just starts acting like God or something They have to have control somehow. It’s their job. It’s just the way they’re going about it [that is bad]. The way Mr. Strong is going about it bothers me.

* * *

JIM: I’d like to see the students pick what they want to wear…. In the summer it gets extremely hot. You got to wear jeans; you can’t wear shorts.

And I think that administration is a little too harsh on students…. A kid skips a class. Three days’ detention. School policy. They’re going out of their way to look for what’s wrong. They’re going out of their way! Like they [the principals] go to [the local donut shop] to find the kids.

* * *

JOE: There should be a smoking lounge. Because why should kids get in trouble for smoking? Other schools have smoking lounges. It sounds reasonable…. [Also] the detention. The reasons why kids get detention are stupid.

LOIS: Like, give me an example.

JOE: Like being late a certain amount of times. You get a detention. That should be changed.

LOIS: Why?

JOE: Because why should somebody get detention for something that might not have been their fault? A locker that won’t open. Reasons like that. Go to the lavatory. If you have to go to the lavatory, you’re gonna be late. Teachers don’t let you go during the period.

While it is arguably the case that I could find such a group of likeminded male students in virtually any school, the expressed collective resentment of authority, particularly as related to control over time and space, is deeply etched in working-class male culture. Middle-class students may feel the same way, of course, but most accept that schoolbased knowledge is utilitarian, that it provides an important steppingstone to a desired lifestyle (Anyon, 1981). What is noteworthy in the Freeway case is that in spite of an expressed anti-authority stance, students by and large adhere to school rules. When overtly challenging the institution, students may skip a class here or there and go to the local donut shop, smoke a cigarette or marijuana, or drink alcohol in the parking lot, but significantly, students generally exit the school building rather than confront authority directly within it. Although they escape to the parking lot (which is directly behind the school) or the donut shop a few blocks away in order to smoke, they inevitably return before the day is over. Such short-term “visits” tend to punctuate the school day rather than the large-scale absenteeism so prevalent among the urban poor. While such grumbling and short-term visits to the parking lot are certainly not seen as positive by the teachers (who often interpret such behavior as not caring, and therefore inhibiting learning), Freeway male challenges to schooling in the mid-1980s are relatively benign.

As I probe further, it is clear that students express a noticeably more positive attitude toward schooling and accompanying mental labor in general, at least in the abstract, than students of comparable social class background in previous studies. Students in what is called the advanced curriculum (a specifically college prep curriculum which involves approximately twenty-five students per year out of a possible three hundred) express a desire to attend college more frequently than other students, but virtually all students assign value to education, albeit in highly utilitarian terms. This is a distinctly different response than was gleaned from students in previous studies of white working-class males. The wholesale rejection of school knowledge and culture expressed by Willis’s students, for example, is not in evidence in Freeway, and it is indeed significant that a group of “lads” does not exist in this school.¹ While a distancing from school knowledge and culture certainly does take place (going to the donut shop, for example, instead of attending class, or attending class stoned), students are nevertheless, by and large, physically present in school and do not generally overtly and directly battle school culture or authorities. In light of the economy, schooling is, for good or bad, seen as the only game in town.

JOHN: College prep [is my major]. It’s the only thing to do.

LOIS: What do you mean?

JOHN: Well, around here, ’cause there’s nothing else. Everything’s going down south. Like any kind of good jobs, a better education’s what you’re gonna hafta need. Unless you plan to sweep the floors someplace the rest of your life. And that ain’t really gonna be my style…. Like, I work at the Metro Club [a private club in the city] now, and he’ll [dad] pick me up and I’ll be complaining and he’ll say, “See, get a good education, get a good job.”

I’m a busboy. I wait on people. Serve ‘em shrimp cocktail. Pick up their dirty dishes, things like that…. You’re there and you do nothin’ but runnin’ around. Do this and do that for this person. Get their dishes and bring these people soup. It’s a bitch. He [dad] says, “Wouldn’t you rather have these people waiting on you? Go to school and get an education.” My father never got a high school education. He got a GED [high school equivalency diploma]. He wants me to keep going.

* * *

BOB: Well, I want to go to college. I don’t know what for yet. I was thinking of something like biology, something like that. Probably [City Community College] or [Suburban Community College]. Probably transfer [to a fouryear school]….

My mother wants me to [go to college]. So does my father. My mother has post-education [at a local hospital]. She was a worker there. But my father quit school in the middle of twelfth grade.

* * *

LOIS: What do you hope to do when you leave high school?

JERRY: College, but I’m still not certain which one. I’m looking around here, but if I get a scholarship, I’ll go away. Right now it looks pretty good, whether it be sports or educational.

* * *

JIM: I’ve got a couple of colleges I’ve been looking at. University of Maryland or University of Seattle. And I was thinking of pursuing the commercial art field and becoming, eventually, a comic book artist or an illustrator…. I’ll probably take out student loans. [I’m] working part-time. I’m a stock boy. I have a bit of money put aside. I’ve been doing it six months.

* * *

SETH: I’m going to go to college, hopefully an aeronautical school in Chicago. I been thinking to myself, I’m really going to do well in college.

LOIS: What made you decide to do that?

SETH: The greediness. The money. I want a well-paying job.

* * *

LOIS: What do you plan to do when you graduate?

STEVE: Go to college.

LOIS: For what?

STEVE: I haven’t decided…I just wanna go. Can’t get a job without going to college. You got to be educated to get a job, a good job: you don’t want to live off burgers when you’re old.

* * *

LOIS: What do you plan to do when you leave school?

LARRY: Go straight to college.

LOIS: Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?

LARRY: You know, I can’t tell you specifically, but I want to make money…. I don’t want to end up like my parents. Nothing against them.

LOIS: What do you mean?

LARRY: Well, I want to own a house. I don’t want to use the term “make ends meet.” I don’t ever want to have that in my vocabulary.

Not all the 1985 white working-class males intend to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Freeway Steel’sRetirees Left Scrambling for Benefits
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: 1985
• Part II: 2000
• Notes
• References