“Juggling Cultures: Keeping Class, Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Play in the Classroom”
Sherry Lee Linkon
The Arts, Culture, and Society: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender
Florida Atlantic University
February, 2006

Teaching and research that address cultural differences and issues of power too often leave class in the background.  We always mention it – you all probably know the race, class, and gender mantra -- but we rarely make class a primary topic of discussion or analysis.  Consider this:  around the US today, colleges and universities house approximately 450 undergraduate or graduate degree programs in African-American Studies; the National Association of Ethnic Studies website lists 23 programs; the National Women’s Studies Association reports that there are at least 725 women’s studies departments an programs; and 33 schools offer academic programs in LGBTQ studies.  But there are only 3 centers focusing on working-class studies, and students can complete a concentration at the undergraduate or graduate level at only 2 schools.  

In the past few years, a new trend has emerged of creating centers and programs that focus on the intersections among different categories of culture, but almost none includes class as one of the categories of study.  Nearly all would agree that class matters – indeed, many mention class when they describe their centers’ interests --  but they don’t identify class overtly as a primary category of study.  

This same pattern of mentioning class but leaving it in the background appears in public discourse as well.  This has been the case despite statements from prominent African-American activists advocating  greater attention to class.  For example, in commenting on former president Clinton’s initiative to have a national discussion of race in America, Jesse Jackson countered that “We don’t need a national discussion of race.  We need a national discussion about class.” Too often, progressive leaders acknowledge the working class only as a problem.  Some focus on working-class racism – a real issue, but not the whole story.  For others, the working class became important only when they began to abandon the Democrat Party, at which point many asked, “Who lost the Working Class?”  Or, to paraphrase Thomas Frank’s book title about Kansas, “What’s wrong with the working class?”

While progressives often emphasize race over class, conservatives have jumped on the opportunity to engage the working class and their resentments. The most obvious example is Bill O’Rielly.  In his book Who’s Looking Out for You, O’Reilly claims that he represents the interests of the WC as defined by progressive economist Michael Zwieg, people who don’t have power or authority in the workplace.   And the working class is, indeed, moving to the right.  Research from the Youngstown State and Chicago Centers for Working-Class Studies shows that the Ohio election was the result of working-class women and, Democrats are now worried that they can hold on to their narrow margins in other Midwestern blue states.As Minnesota’s Republican governor,  Tim Pawlenty, argues, the Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club." 

In both academic and public discourse, then, progressive scholars and activists should talk more about class.  Class should not be the backup singer in the multicultural band.  It plays a central role in shaping the history and position of cultural groups and individuals, and more careful analysis of class will improve our understanding of how sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and other categories function.  Why?  Most contemporary analysis of race, ethnicity, and gender emphasizes how these categories and the groups associated with them function within the power system.  Given this focus, we must consider two central complications of power and oppression.  First, within disempowered and oppressed groups, some people are relatively privileged, and their privileges can create important divisions that we must examine.  And second, people who are privileged in some ways are often themselves also oppressed in other ways, and if we want to fully understand how oppression works, then we must consider their conflicted subject positions.  Thus, no matter how racist, conservative, or relatively privileged a straight white working-class man might be, thinking about his social position can help us gain a more nuanced understanding of how power works.

Some class scholars have claimed that class should trump everything else, and I want to say clearly at the outset that this is not my claim.  I don’t think that we should study class instead of race, or any other social category.  Rather, I want to argue that class deserves more careful analysis and greater attention than it currently receives, especially in the classroom, and that it can enhance not only our research but also our students’ learning about difference and power.  

Why don’t we do a better job of teaching in the intersections, and especially of teaching about class?  Three reasons (with fuller explanations to follow): 
We assume that we’re already doing it
The politics of culture studies resists class analysis
Both class itself and the complex matrix of class, race, gender, etc. are very difficult to address 

First, the intersection among class, race, ethnicity, and other categories is both obvious and obscure.  Almost no one would support the idea of ignoring class – its significance seems obvious.  But few people feel comfortable emphasizing class, because it is so difficult to define.  This makes it easy to fall into the habit of gesturing toward intersectionality – of saying that we do race, class, and gender -- without really digging into the challenging problem of how these categories shape each other.  While scholars and teachers usually focus their work on just one of these categories, the idea that they influence and define each other is widely shared.  Most of us would not, at this point in intellectual history, claim that we were studying only race or only gender or only class.  It seems that we are always already talking about class when we talk about oppression based on race or gender.  Yet, as the history of the civil rights and women’s movements remind us, pretending that the members of group defined in terms of race or gender are all the same too often means ignoring class differences that matter immensely in people’s lives.  We have learned to do two things – to recite the three-part mantra, and to define the boundaries of the groups we study in specific ways – working-class African-American lesbians, for example.  While this specifying is honest, and I appreciate the intention of being so careful, this approach can also imply that people’s interests divide along these fine lines of difference, instead of inviting us to think about how our interests are shared across categories, despite differences.  But – as we all know – focusing on one group and considering interrelations with other groups at the same time is not an easy task.

Second, the politics of studying and teaching about oppression and difference makes talking about class difficult.  Race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and place are all easier to define than class, because they are seemingly more visible(though of course  these quick definitions don’t necessarily yield the most thoughtful analyses, and we are always questioning them).  Other categories also trump class, in part because economic disadvantage is rightly assumed to be only one part of the process of oppression.  In looking at race-based discrimination, for example, we have to consider not only economic issues but also politics, social boundaries, and so on.  

In addition, other forms of culture-group based scholarship and teaching have origins in a self-conscious experience of shared oppression of apparently well-defined groups.  They have emerged from social movements built around racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual identities.  A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education described the large protests on campuses around the country, as people of color and whites joined to demand new programs in ethnic studies.  But no similar social movement has developed around class (not since the 1930s), and in fact, working-class studies as a field is emerging during a period when the labor movement – the most visible working-class movement historically – is in decline.  The study of class is thus a more top-down project, in the sense that it is beginning in the academy and not on the streets, and so it is more rooted in intellectual analysis than in shared experience.  Without a social movement to promote the positive value of working-class culture, and in the midst of a national culture that denigrates the working class, studies of class seem less intense, less necessary, and less responsive to the world outside of the university.  

Let me explain by describing an experience that John and I have had many times, when we visit campuses around the country to talk about working-class studies.  While no one has ever said that they think that working-class studies is a bad idea, in almost every case, someone expresses fear about class taking over, about discussions of class gaining more visibility or more resources than AA studies or women’s studies.  Some of this simply reflects the precarious position that all such programs find themselves in.  Some of it also reflects the fear that talking about class will make race or other categories seem less central.  If we draw attention to class, we can seem to be ignoring the importance of other kinds of difference. 

At the same time, I believe, class can feel like a source of division within these other fields, not a source of commonality or solidarity.  Scholars or teachers who define their work as the study of a group defined by race or gender have good reason to resist or at least downplay an analysis that emphasizes divisions within the groups they study.  There is also resistance to analysis that would include white straight men who may be at once marginalized and oppressive.  No doubt, the white working class has bought into racial, ethnic, and gender divisions in ways that are very visible and problematic – think Archie Bunker (if you’re old enough to remember him).  At minimum, the example illustrates how class does not necessarily provide a source of productive commonality.  At worst, I’m afraid, that some people immediately assume that the phrase “working class” refers only to white conservatives, and they see no common ground with such people.  

Third, we don’t talk about class because it is simply so difficult to address.  A few years ago, I had the chance to interview two eminent scholars whose work focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender.  When I asked them why class was not included in their definition of intersectional studies, their response was that – and I quote – “class is just so difficult.” And while I think there’s more going on in their practice of setting class off to the side (consider the difficulty that addressing class might create for women of color teaching in elite universities, or the politics of naming class as an issue for students to grapple with as they study in these privileged places), they are also right that class is incredibly difficulty to talk about clearly.  Scholars in working-class studies, as well as those who focus on social stratification more generally, do not agree about how to define class, much less about how to study it.  Within working-class studies, we have argued for approaching class using multiple theoretical modes -- through economic structures and relations (a la Marx); through a variety of social patterns and status indicators (more like Weber); through discourse, viewing class as defined by language, images, and narratives (a modification of post-structuralism); and through a model of class as culture, which focuses on identifying the patterns of cultural difference between the working class and the middle class.  We argue that class involves all of these, and that it is neither essential nor especially useful to try to pin down one clear, specific definition of the working class.  Rather, we encourage multiple approaches and situated definitions, but this makes studying class quite complex.  

Combine those multiple theories with the complex intersections among class and other sociocultural categories, and the result is, on the one hand, the kind of rich analyses that scholars value (despite or perhaps because of the difficulty of achieving them), and, on the other hand, a real challenge in the classroom.  It’s hard enough for students to “get” the concept of the social construction of identity, much less for them to juggle multiple categories. For the sake of clarity, we often focus on one category.  And pedagogically, that makes a lot of sense.  Yet I also believe that these categories are deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive, and I don’t want to set that complexity aside when I enter the classroom.

Strategies for studying class:
Address the challenge of talking about class head-on ( spend class time defining it and raising questions about how class works
Start where students are – their class identities, their ideas about what class is and is not
Pat’s exercise – begin by asking who belongs to each class, and why ( note that this also generates discussion about intersections, about how race, ethnicity, and place, esp., influence where people fit
Explicitly consider how individual identity & social position are shaped and complicated by multiple factors 
positionality exercise asking students to reflect on how they are affected by race, gender, ethnicity, class, etc., as well as by life experience (and how their life experiences are shaped by these other factors)
analyze social position of characters & creators of texts you’re studying – be explicit and deliberate about including multiple categories (don’t just hope to get to this in discussion, and use the conversation to identify and unpack race and class, etc., as models – make your theoretical assumptions clear)