(from Jay MacLeod's _Ain't No Makin' It_, pp. 261-267)
... Better schools" has been the standard rallying cry for social reformers concerned about sustained economic inequality in the United States. If only poor children had access to quality education, opportunity for individual mobility would be equalized across social classes and the gap between rich and poor substantially reduced. But the problems with this approach are substantial. First, we have seen, schools actually maintain and legitimize social inequality. Second, educational reform leaves the underlying structure of economic inequality untouched. Still, though no substitute for fundamental structural change, improved schooling could help countless individuals like the Brothers and Hallway Hangers.
My first recommendation is that the achievement ideology must be replaced with ways of motivating students that acknowledge rather than deny their social condition. When used to cultivate discipline by highlighting the eventual reward of educational attainment, the achievement ideology is neither effective at drawing obedience and attentiveness out of students nor conducive to the development of a positive self-image among working-class pupils. The familiar refrain "Behave yourself, study hard, earn good grades, graduate with your class, go or college, get a good job, and make a lot of money" reinforces the feelings of personal failure and inadequacy that working-class students are likely to bear a matter of course. By this logic, those who have not made it have only themselves to blame. Because it shrouds class, race, and gender barriers to success, achievement ideology promulgates a lie, one that some students come to recognize as such. For those pupils whose own experiences contradict the ideology and in an urban public high school there are bound to be many--it is often rejected, and rightly so. Teachers are left with nothing to motivate their students and it is no wonder that "acting out," aggressive disobedience, and unruliness predominate. School officials can round up the offending students and label the "slow;' "learning impaired;' "unmotivated;' "troubled;' "high-risk' or "emotionally disturbed" and segregate them, but the problem is much more deeply rooted.
Teachers do not promote the achievement ideology because they want to make working-class students miserable. Nor are they intent on maintaining social or, and cohesion in the face of class inequality by contributing to the legitimate function of the school. In my experience, most teachers are well-intention hard-working men and women who are striving to do a difficult job as best they can. They parrot the achievement ideology because they think it will motivate students, because it probably does not contradict their own experiences, and because they believe it. Most middle-class Americans do. As Willis writes, "What kind of bourgeoisie is it that does not in some way believe its own legitimation. That would be the denial of themselves."...
If students like the Hallway Hangers are to be motivated to achieve in school must not be at the expense of their self-esteem but in support of it. Schools serving low-income neighborhoods must help students build positive identities working-class, black and white, young men and women. Rather than denying the odds and vow to overcome them instead of resigning themselves to the marginalized fate of the Hallway Hangers. When their passion and intellects are stimulated by indignation, youths are often moved to challenge the heretofore hidden social, political, and economic forces that weigh so heavily upon their lives. For some, this means an intensely personal drive and ambition. Others begin struggling to create a better world. In still others, these impulses coexist; such youths work for social, political, and economic reconstruction as well as personal transformation. For all of them, in contrast to the boys in this study, education has recovered its mission: It has become emancipatory.
Class Dismissed
The experiences of the Hallway Hangers and Brothers, properly mined, highlight failures in economic, social, and educational policy, and the preceding pages offer a rough sketch of the book's broad policy implications. But this study points an accusing finger at one dominant dogma, itself a major obstacle to political change: the persistent belief that poverty is caused by the personal vices and cultural pathologies of the poor. Distinctively American, this old notion was rejuvenated in the 196os by Oscar Lewis and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who argued that a "culture of poverty" characterized by fatalism, family instability, and social irresponsibility promoted persistent urban poverty. Yet both Lewis and Moynihan contended that this "tangle of pathology" was rooted in sustained social immobility and chronic unemployment.
Today, the link between economic opportunity and lower-class behavior has been completely cut in the popular press and the popular mind. Liberals such as Nicholas Lemann, keen to blame the poor for their plight, long to give ghettos an injection of bourgeois mores to cure the cultural malaise that black migrants allegedly brought up from the South, a theory he borrows from Edward Banfield,27 Meanwhile, Banfield's arch conservative heirs such as Charles Murray have set about convincing the public that welfare programs cause rather than contain poverty and that the social safety net should be scrapped altogether.28 Egged on by Republican and even Democratic rhetoric, more and more Americans bewail the waste of their tax money on "the mythical black welfare mother, complete with a prodigious reproductive capacity and a galling laziness, accompanied by the uncaring and equally lazy black man in her life who will not work, will not marry her and will not support his family:'29 The war on poverty has become the war on the poor.
This book confirms that structural inequality causes poverty. The presumed behavioral and cultural deficiencies of the lower class are the consequence rather than the cause of poverty. Culture of poverty theorists consistently cite lack of ambition as a barrier to lower-class advancement. But the leveled aspirations of the Hallway Hangers can be directly traced to the impermeability of the class structure. Moreover, the ample ambition of the Brothers has been drained away by the tilted playing field under their feet. Over and over we discover beneath be- havior cited as evidence of cultural pathology a social rationality that makes sense given the economic constraints these young men face. Born into the lowest reaches of the class structure, the Brothers and Hallway Hangers variously help and hinder the inertia of social reproduction. Their individual choices matter and make a difference, but the stage is largely set. Even the Hallway Hangers, far from authors of their own problems, are victims of a limited opportunity structure that strangles their initiative and channels them into lifestyles of marginality, and then allows the privileged to turn around and condemn them for doing so.
But it is not merely the man driving by in the BMW who blames the victim. The Hallway Hangers and Brothers largely blame themselves for their plight. Schooled in the rhetoric of equal opportunity, the young men themselves confuse the consequences with the causes of poverty. Their self-blame is not total; many of the men in this study feel the constraining forces of social reproduction. But structural insight usually collapses into a feeling of personal responsibility for their failure to get ahead. Both the Brothers and Hallway Hangers see themselves as basically undeserving.
Class is not in the vocabulary of the Hallway Hangers and Brothers any more than it is in the vocabulary of other Americans. And yet class determines the grammar and idiom of their existence, if not the precise syntax. Yes, Frankie and company chose to follow the example of their older brothers and to hang our in doorway #13; chose to smoke and sell marijuana and angel dust at age thirteen; chose to deny rather than defer to teacher authority; chose to apply themselves to stealing rather than studying; and chose to drink and fight and assert their masculinity in displays of street aggression. Just as Benjamin DeMott imagines, a boy on the other side of town chooses to follow the example of his father (an engineer) and develop a science hobby in junior high (taking over the basement lounge for a lab ); chooses to develop a research focus on robotics under the guidance of his brilliant young physics teacher (who already has two Young Scientist finalists); chooses at MIT to specialize in space robotics; chooses to take the NASA fellowship offer; and so on and on. In the American mind, life is about individual choices; social class matters not.31
The Brothers and Hallway Hangers live in a class society committed to the denial of class. Their lived experience attests to the power and pervasiveness of social class, but in the absence of any organizing and overarching ideology, their awareness of class is politically limp and inchoate. Where is such an ideology to be found? Democrats and Republicans fall over each other to please the mythically all-inclusive "middle class:' Apart from conspicuously failing to address poverty as an issue, politicians pepper their public speeches with references to the "decent;' "responsible;' "hard-working" families they are so keen to court. "Symbolically cast out of the civic community;' the poor, far from being a viable constituency, have become a political football to be kicked around in the debate about crime.32 Politicians of all stripes want simply to lock up the likes of the Hallway Hangers, as if criminality and economic opportunity were not inextricably linked. Once again, social problems are reduced to problems of individual morality and pathology. In contemporary American politics, there is no critique of the class structure; instead, the poor find themselves pushed beyond the political pale.
If the tide and toll of advanced marginality in the United States is to be checked, new organizational forms of popular mobilization need to be nurtured: grassroots organizations, women's groups, community organizing outfits, and coalitions campaigning on issues of health, housing, schooling, child care, crime, and local neighborhood concerns. Political parties and trade unions alone are ill- suited to stop the steady advance of new forms of social inequality.
In many countries, trade unions still carry the cause of workers and promote class consciousness. But the American labor movement has been crippled by red-baiting, right-to-work laws, racism, corporate power, and its own conservatism. In today's post industrial economy, unions are consumed by the fight for survival, , and a comprehensive critique of the class system is far from their agenda. Still, some unions serve their members and instill class solidarity. If it weren't for his progressive hotel and restaurant workers' union, Frankie might still be strung out on coke. Mike, the other union member, makes far more money than the other men in this study. And as much as he rants about welfare cheats and raves about oceans of opportunity, Mike quotes with approval the literature distributed by his postal union about how "the Republicans are fucking us over, selling the working class down the river." Alone among the subjects of this study, Mike speaks of the "working class." And yet he is also the most reactionary, variously characterizing the Hallway Hangers as "fuckin' rejects;' "fuckin' trash;' and "a bunch of lazy, loser, fuck-up bums." Mike has forged his working-class identity by distancing himself from the "lazy" subproletariat. The class solidarity he articulates is de- fined as much against those below as against those above. Unfortunately, Mike's attitude is symptomatic of a working class that is severely fragmented.
The top tenth of the population owns 86 percent of the nation's wealth. But the rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the bottom nine- tenths against each other. The working class is divided. White-collar workers vaunt themselves over manual laborers; skilled workers look down on the unskilled; those in low-status occupations belittle the unemployed. For the bulk of the workforce, there are always groups like the Hallway Hangers to whom they can feel superior. And the Hallway Hangers themselves, their peer group dissolved, seek solace and superiority in sexism and racism. They sense that the odds are stacked against them, but under the sway of New Right rhetoric and in the absence of any alternative political philosophy, the Hallway Hangers believe that they are victimized as white men. Victimized they are, but by a class system so clothed in the rhetoric of classlessness that the Hallway Hangers can be persuaded to pitch their tents with the powerful in a circle that excludes thr Brothers. That is their tragedy, and ours.
"We're in a fucking stagmire."
--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'