by Betsy Leondar-Wright
If common culture means that the people would recognize each other as similar — might laugh at the same jokes, talk somewhat alike, have a similar range of habits, etc. — then the answer to the question “Are there class cultures?” seems to be “no”. We in the US experience the class system in ways so specific to our age, race, geography, religion, ethnicity and nationality that class alone rarely seems to create that sense of kinship. If poor people from Appalachia and the South Bronx see each other as kin, it’s probably as a result of some hard political work to create solidarity, not because of close cultural similarity.
For example, the suburban area where I grew up is categorized as “Furs and Station Wagons.” Then I went to college and lived in a “Towns and Gowns” area, then moved to a “Bohemian Mix” city neighborhood full of counterculture folks. I’ve had community organizing jobs in “Smalltown Downtown,” “Emergent Minorities,” and “Public Assistance” neighborhoods.
The 62 types are narrow enough that they each have a particular cultural flavor. Most have a predominant race, a predominant age, and/or a predominant source of income. The people in “Shotguns & Pickups” areas, even in different states, might actually recognize each other as kin. The book arranges the types in order of class privilege (by combining median income, education and home value into a single score). Assuming that Claritas Corporation’s research is sound, then it’s safe to say that there are about 62 class cultures in the United States.
But 62 is an unwieldy number for class analysis. It’s an impractical number for the purposes of having discussions about the group dynamics of a mixed group, or of organizing solidarity among people of a particular class to press for social change. Two to five would be a much more practical number. But dividing up 280 million Americans into just two to five clumps means that there’s going to be a lot of diversity in each clump.
So if class cultures aren’t intuitively recognized by the people involved, then it makes sense to step cautiously into generalizing about them. It’s easy to fall into stereotypes of people with a particular amount of money or a type of occupation or neighborhood — easy and dangerous. Working class and poor people in particular don’t need any more stereotypes of them, given how negatively they are usually portrayed in the media. Rich people are also usually villains in Hollywood portrayals. Sometimes stereotypes are based on a grain of truth unfairly generalized, but I take it for granted that smart versus stupid is not a culture difference but a stereotype.
The romanticization of working-class people I sometimes hear on the left — they’re earthy, warm-hearted people with a natural resistance to oppression — is not universal truth either. Even positive stereotypes are harmful for strategic efforts for social change, because our efforts to persuade people will be based on inaccurate understandings of what motivates them. I’ve heard leftists celebrate economic downturns because they assume that harsher conditions will inevitably cause poor people to rise up in rebellion. That romantic stereotype leads to flawed strategy. The romanticized demonization of all privileged people as cold-hearted, uptight betrayers who collude with oppression is also untrue. Every class includes people whose relationship to injustice is passive acceptance, enthusiastic collusion, individual gut resistance, and collective organizing.
To avoid stereotypes, an experience-based approach is appropriately cautious. I’ll attempt to stick to generalizations based in shared experience that socializes people into a class culture. The clearest examples of a class culture will be families with three or more generations in the same class in the United States. Recent class mobility, recent immigration, and living in the “gray area” between two classes all muddy the waters. Many, perhaps most, people’s experience is of a mixed class culture. We will see culture contrasts most clearly if we compare people with long periods in the same class in the same country.
Given all these caveats, are there shared experiences that would define a number of class culture distinctions sufficiently less than 62 to be useful?
Yes, in my experience, I think there are differences of experience that do in fact socialize most American people into one of four distinct cultural groups:
- chronic poverty,
- working-class/lower-middle-class,
- professional middle-class and
- owning class.
This set of four class culture categories seems to me defensible on materialist grounds. And each one rings true to me from my own experience. My experience is, of course, limited (primarily to progressive activists and to three northeast states), so I put the following class culture generalizations forward humbly, generalizing primarily about activists, and expecting contradictory evidence from others’ experience to enrich them. My goal in risking generalizations is to make visible some class-culture-based coalition behaviors and dynamics that are too often invisible.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ACTIVISTS STEADILY EMPLOYED AND NOT
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LOW-INCOME AND OWNING CLASS ACTIVISTS
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN WORKING-CLASS/LOWER-MIDDLE-CLASS AND PROFESSIONAL MIDDLE-CLASS ACTIVISTS
COMBINING THE GIFTS OF ALL CLASS CULTURES
IS TALKING ABOUT CLASS CULTURES TABOO ON THE LEFT? – BOOK TOUR REFLECTIONS
Class Cultures Comparison
Hand-out by Barbara Jensen and Jack Metzgar at workshop on class cultures at 2003 conference of Working Class Studies Program at Youngstown State University
| Professional Middle Class | Working Class |
| Doing and Becoming —achievement-oriented —future-oriented —life as transformative —status concerns —individualistic | Being and Belonging —character-oriented —present-oriented —life as tangled web of relationships —anti-status —solidaristic |
| Unintended Homogeneity —more cosmopolitan —weaker loyalties to persons, places, groups, institutional affiliations | Unavoidable Diversity —more parochial —stronger loyalties to persons, places, groups, institutional affiliations |
| Best result: Individual achievement has positive human impact. | Best result: secure community |
| Worst result: the lonely individual | Worst result: unachieved potential |