Reply to The Social Class Ladders—Labor, Gentry, and Elite

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wow, this is an interesting discussion that hits a nerve. I, too, find the undercurrent in the comments depressing. I understand why the PP with an L--&gt;G husband was put off. I am a combination of L (by birth) and G (by education, profession). Being told that Gs can sniff you out from a mile off, secretly pity you, and don't want their kids marrying your kids is a pretty nasty gut-punch.

If that's playing nice, I wonder what playing nasty looks like. I understand the social class is very powerful, but do you really enjoy feeding it crackers? Don't all the college degrees inspire some cultural flexibility?

And here I thought working hard, going to honors college, getting a graduate degree, and trading in ideas and information was supposed to earn me gentry street cred. No?[/quote]

Well, of course the Gs don't want their kids marrying Ls -- more risk of falling lower down the social ladder, and, if you far enough down the L chain, you start running into people not only not sharing your values but openly disdaining them.  My G mom married an L, and, though he never said anything until they were headed towards divorce, I think it broke my grandfather's heart that he'd spent so much time and effort making sure his kids got a college education to have her end up with someone uneducated (that she ended up supporting).  I've been called over-educated, had my job mocked because the profession is seen as uppity, told I'm going to hell for not taking my children to church, and I've been criticized for not knowing who particular NASCAR drivers are.  Humans are pack animals, and we're more comfortable with people who are like us.  I love my in-laws dearly - they are wonderful, caring people - but I am always on guard around them not to come off as too smart and smile and nod rather than attempt to discuss any sort of nuanced political or social issue with them.

The idea that working hard, going to college/grad school, etc. is your entry to a higher social class is a myth and it's why the whole pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality is so maddening.  Very few people make it on sheer grit. Most people have a leg up, a connection, a network, or something that gives them the opportunities to stay at the top.  And they see those resources as finite and guard them with their secret club rules.[/quote]

I understand your concern. Since I have some roots in what you are describing, I both understand the rules of that world and have spent a lot energy in fleeing it. One reason I maintain some distance is that, frankly, my own education and interests are sometimes viewed as threat. This is doubly the case because I am a woman. There are some rules I won't live by, and I don't want my child  to internalize them. I wasted too much time and effort getting an education, over economic and logistical barriers, with a certain amount of pushback (as well as some fierce advocates) -- why have the next generation have to repeat the same journey? They should move onto a new project.

That said, thinking back on my own experiences for a minute, I don't see allies and adversaries in this project strictly along strictly class lines. Perhaps this is because my own migration was through and out of a religious movement that itself contained class strata. For example, in my church group, there was some serious L policing of gender and politics, that I found frustrating. But it was always possible to round game that attack a bit by appealing to the value of work and family values. So, I could express my emerging feminism this way, "Don't you think that girls should be able to fix cars and fend for themselves if they need to take care of their children? I'm just saying everyone should be able to stand on their own two feet." However, the lower level "G" strata of the same evangelical world were interested in Theology, and they didn't deal so much in practical questions -- the project from that angle to is coax the world-as-it-is to fit a theological model. Only the model is True. So they would detect nascent apostasy in my advocacy and come out flying -- after all, who did I think I was? And a woman. Go figure. This is why you don't let women get out of line. The Model predicted it. This lower level G self-defense is one where Biblical literacy and the authority to speak about it cloaks both class and gender privilege.

Now, if I could get high enough in the evangelical G strata, they wanted their daughters educated and successful, if also married well. The tone changes considerably in those quarters.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that in my early life I knew Ls who were relatively easy to get along with, from my "uppity" point of view, as well as a plenty of Gs who seemed to have the time, energy, and cultural mandate to make themselves very frustrating.

Needless to say, religion, region and race are all factors that vastly complicate any narrative we want to tell about American social life.

Anyway, here's a point to which I want to migrate, off my long detour: I think that I understand your concerns. But I guess my own experience as a kind of cultural and class migrant, as well as someone who now lives in a fairly diverse community, is that I tend to look for and understand the value of cultural hospitality. Every tribe of people has something they want to defend and conserve. That is natural. But my own experiences and education have led me to value the practice of understanding people and making room for them. It is true that people cannot simply "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps;" that being the case, I certainly hope that when someone has taken the effort to fit themselves in and they will also be invited to stay. I understand your concern about, say, a person with a master's degree marrying someone with a high school education and no particular interest in education. But the working class kid who reads veraciously and put themselves through the same master's program?

The argument that runs, "We will always see their background and know who they really are," is - to me - not so very far off from my old church adversaries who refused, straight up, to understand anything about LGBT people in the same town, or people who want to see immigrants as outsiders even after they've been in town for 20 years. I get it. There's some truth to it.

But let's not stop short at that point. There's some suggestion in the comments that there's a limit to friendships across boundaries. I beg to differ. I know people from considerably different backgrounds, and while that can often be a barrier, I have seen people move across those barriers many times.[/quote]

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