Is Cross-Class Friendship Possible?
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My class consciousness was forged in the blast furnace of Green Bay, Wisconsin. My hometown is a factory town. Everyone worked in the paper mills, or packed meat, or drove a bus. My friends were hilarious and smart and insanely adult. I stuck out like a jammed pinkie— a kid from a professional family, protected from so much, in a two-story house on a bus route of shoebox ranches and trailer homes. My friends were working class. Their dads’ bumper stickers said, “Shit Happens.” My mom’s said, “Stanford.” At Washington Middle School, I’d exhale a sigh of relief when I got picked up in our rusted ‘78 Chevy rather than Dad’s shiny new Honda. I didn’t want to stand out, or make anyone else feel diminished. I didn’t want to draw attention to our differences.
According to Barbara Jensen– a cofounder of the field working-class studies– these are working-class values. Jensen, the daughter of a meat cutter and magazine saleswoman, is a community psychologist, academic, and author of Reading Classes. She recently won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Working Class Studies Association and has been working for decades to “make class visible.” Here’s our conversation.
When did your awareness of class really emerge?
In junior high: it was them and us. A very dramatic difference. You could tell who was who because we wore different clothes. We had a full face of makeup on by 7:30 a.m. <Laughs> We would draw these eyeliners, have a big wing coming off of it. We were much more precocious about things like that than the middle-class kids. We were already going steady with boys.
That’s just like the middle school I went to in Green Bay! All the girls had boyfriends in 6th grade. They wore thick eye makeup and had these amazing helmets of perfectly sprayed hair. I tried it but my hair just collapsed in a sad heap.
The middle-class kids were there to become somebody. For us, school was like jail.
How do you define “working class”?
Generally, working class means people who work with things for a living, and middle- and upper-class people have professional jobs where they work more with symbols than things, like you and I do. But I think that it misrepresents how much intelligence goes into working-class work.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Temple Grandin. She’s trying to elevate what she calls visual thinkers, people who are mechanically minded and do mechanical work. She describes it as a different kind of intelligence.
My father was like that. He never finished high school. He was working from the age of 13 outside the home. But he was a mechanical genius. He said, well once you take a whole car apart, you know where everything goes. And I'm like, Dad, I could never do that.
Class is about more than money. Machinists make fabulous money. They have to cut metal within a hundredth of an inch, you know? My cousin became a machinist. He made a lot more money than I did. But he is indelibly working class, if you take things like what he does for leisure, his attitudes about family. I believe the classes have fundamentally different cultural foundations.
What are some of the key cultural differences?
It’s about “belonging” versus “becoming.”
Can you say more?
These are generalizations, of course, but people who are raised in working-class backgrounds really grow up thinking about other people. The whole point of life is about people—about how you treat other people and about belonging with others. I think working-class men are much more sensitive to what other people are feeling than middle-class men. And sometimes than middle-class women.
One researcher looked at White and Black factory communities. And the groups had really different customs, but they were way more alike than either of them was with the middle-class group, both Black and White. When working-class people say an opinion, they had a tendency not to say “I.” If we're talking about capital punishment, they’d say, “You wouldn't wanna find out two years later that it was somebody else.” And they would use “sympathetic circularity sequences— these suffixes where they'd say, “You know?” or “Know what I mean?”
The whole point of life is about people—about how you treat other people and about belonging with others.
The middle class said something that people in the working-class group never said. Before every statement: “I think.” Which is an invitation to debate and it's an assertion. It's part of becoming a person.
I gave my dad a birthday gift one time, in front of other people-- a check for fifty bucks. His wife was telling me a router was $60 and how hard it was to come up with. So I gave him a check so she only had to pay ten. We were in his hospital room-- we didn't know he was gonna die within a few months-- and in front of people, he said, “Oh, for Christ's sake, what do you gotta be a big shot for? Why can't you write a $20 check like everybody else?” Of course my feelings were hurt.
You’re saying the cultures’ goals are different.
Yeah. I did a bunch of interviews in my family. When I said, “What would you say is the most important value? How would you wanna be remembered at the end of your life?” Without exception, they said, “I was good to other people, I helped them. I was always willing to pitch in.”
Middle-class people tend to say, “I wanna go here, I wanna be a psychologist, and I wanna be a gigging musician, and I wanna go to art school.” Now I'm talking about myself. ‘Cause I did those things. <Laughs> It’s about becoming, versus belonging.
What challenges did you face, moving into the middle class?
Well, the whole process of going to college is an exercise in class confusion. You don't know what you're doing wrong. You keep tripping over hidden hurdles, like how you speak.
Middle-class people are taught self-promotion. So much of every conversation is about promoting something—yourself, an idea. For working-class people, that's rude. The most important thing is how you're making other people feel and whether things are fair or not. That humility is actually much more common in the world in general.
I think working-class men are much more sensitive to what other people are feeling than middle-class men. And sometimes than middle-class women.
This woman I was just meeting was from a poverty class background. She’s now a professor and dean. She said, “When people ask me what I do, I'm embarrassed that I'm a college professor. I tell people, ‘Oh, I teach.’” That's exactly me. When I'm with middle-class people and they ask me what I do, I say, “I'm a psychologist.” I never say that to working-class people. I say, “I'm a counselor.” So there's a leveling.
Not wanting another person to feel diminished.
Solidarity is a really powerful. The solidarity between us is way more important than any individual accomplishments.
When I had my [Lifetime Achievement] award party at my house, they read the things that had been said at the award ceremony. My niece– she went on a couple book events with me—the first thing she said is, “I never saw anybody lose their boarding pass so fast.” Everyone just broke up laughing. I appreciated it so much. ‘Cause the tension of being put up as an important person— for somebody from a working-class background, that tension's considerable. Being singled out as being outstanding just violates something so fundamental in me.
I had a genuine lightbulb moment reading one of your papers. You described how everyone who works as a “public voice” is in the professional class by definition. Everyone in a critical role for shaping how we see the world— writing and publishing and reporting and directing and speaking in front of a camera— is in the same class.
Or writing curriculum. Or any part of the media. I mean, you name 'em, they're all professional jobs.
So how we see the world is totally shaped by a particular class perspective. Not only are they bringing that perspective to their framing and content, but they’re doing all the voicing. The working class doesn’t see themselves represented in any of these roles.
That’s why we invented working-class studies.
In what way?
It was a way for the people who were representatives of the group to actually start doing the voicing.
You know, I think about the tech companies in Silicon Valley. We’ve been having these conversations for years about diversity and inclusion. Racial diversity, gender diversity. An engineer I interviewed years ago said, you know who nobody talks about? All the contract laborers working in the cafeterias. The contract janitors. Nobody talks about equity and inclusion for them. It’s not even part of the conversation.
That’s right.
What issues do you see working-class folks facing In your own counseling practice?
Well, I do cross-class couples counseling.
Oh, fascinating. What comes up?
Self-promotion and individuality versus solidarity and taking care of others. An example—I’ll call them Carla and Tim. He's from the middle class. She's from a working-class background. They’re just married. Tim says, “Do we have to see your family every Sunday dinner? We need time for our friends.” And she goes, my family are my friends.
What happens a lot in cross-class relationships is that the working-class person feels inferior. What I work on with couples is help build up the working-class person. Like, “Wait a minute. You just said it's really important to you that your kids start being read to immediately. But your husband's saying these kids are not getting enough time to just play, to be themselves, what Annette Lareau calls ‘the accomplishment of natural growth.’”
Is it possible to have friendships across class?
Oh, of course. I have many dear middle-class friends, and from very privileged backgrounds. And I have some upper class friends. Actually, working-class and upper-class in some ways get along better than either of 'em do with the middle class. On the shop floor or in factory settings – and every working-class person I know has worked in those settings-- you're with peers. And that's true of people in wealth. They’re with underlings or others with wealth. Middle-class people literally are in the middle. They have to manage the working-class, so it’s hard to be friends with them. Upper class, they’re striving toward.
The people I know that are actually from ruling-class backgrounds, they like working-class people because they're more real.
What would be important in order to maintain a friendship across classes?
Some understanding that we're not all middle class and working-class people are just worse at it. They are fundamentally different cultures. What happens often in cross-class relationships, is the working-class person feels like they're inferior. I don't think that was always true. Our parents were really proud of being working class. They said, “We do the real work. What would they do without us? Pour their own highways?”
In the larger society we have this achievement myth that everybody gets where they got because of their individual initiative. That makes a hierarchy. That's when working class people start to feel ashamed. Not when they're with other working-class people.
What do you think is important for the middle class to understand about class and culture?
The whole project of working-class studies is to make class visible at all, as more than economic injustice.
When everybody's kind of considered “middle class,” the working-class people just look like they're dumb ‘cause they don't know as much as I do. They are educated, but it's not in formal settings. They know things. Working-class people themselves know—though they don't have the language necessarily to describe it-- that the cultures have fundamentally different foundations.
What happens often in cross-class relationships, is the working class person feels like they're inferior.
The Republicans see it really clearly. In fact, they're better at class and culture than the Democrats.
Biden only got 30% of White voters without a college degree. Why do you think that is?
The Democratic party has abandoned them. We all thought Obama would change it. Obama, in his acceptance speech, had something for every group. “Women, I will get you equal pay.” And he said to workers, “I will send your children to school.” So they can become strangers and look down on their family? That's what happened to me when I first went to college.
Fox really plays on the resentment they're already feeling because they can't do what their dads could do, what their grandfathers could do-- get a good job, buy a house. Because of the gig economy and the jobs that working class people have, they feel like failures. They can't do what was done before. The only reason those people could do it was a hundred years of strikes and having the Democratic party on their side.
Why do you think it's so important for a class to become visible?
Because we're at an incredible political impasse and we gotta get past this. I think class is a big part of it. I want middle-class people to fight for working-class people instead of feeling superior to them.
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I’d love to hear your thoughts/ reactions/ disagreements in the comments below!
I think that there's a missing piece here, and that's social mobility. For social mobility to exist, it would have to be possible for working-class people to become ruling-class, and generally that involves a stint in the loathed middle. But as soon as a working-class person starts to move toward the middle, to see Obama's promise of higher education for their children as an opportunity rather than a threat, they become that dreaded middle class, disdained by both high and low, described here as self-promotion-obsessed and lacking in empathy.
So it's seen as a positive here that "the people I know that are actually from ruling-class backgrounds, they like working-class people because they're more real [than the middle class]". But couldn't you also also frame it as, "ruling-class people like working class people who know their place" (because if they don't they are, in this framework, middle class by definition). And couldn't this dynamic undermine social mobility?
"I never say that to working-class people. I say, “I'm a counselor.” So there's a leveling.
Not wanting another person to feel diminished.
Solidarity is a really powerful. The solidarity between us is way more important than any individual accomplishments."
This is a really positive framing of the exchange, and I'm not convinced. Is it necessarily kindness for the feelings of others on the part of the psychologist/counselor, or is it also fear of the attack that will come if she dares to acknowledge her job title? The same attack, perhaps, that she got for writing a $50 check. I don't know if I can see this as a system of mutual solidarity if it is enforced punitively. (Especially against women. I wonder if a male psychologist from a working-class background would feel the same degree of pressure to minimize his career.)