Overeducated Achievatrons Unite!

• Publication year: 2011
• Citation: Vol. 34 No. 03

UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND LAW REVIEWVolume 34, No. 3SPRING 2011

Overeducated Achievatrons Unite!

Joan C. Williams (fn*)

My chief sentiment when I read the pieces submitted for this Colloquy was, "Wow, they actually read my book!" We authors pour our souls into our texts, send them out into the world, and sometimes feel an unsettling silence descend. Let me say at once how grateful I am to Margaret Chon for inviting me to Seattle, to Kurt Kruckeberg for his indefatigable efforts in soliciting contributions, and to each of the authors for spending time reading and responding to my book. Somehow I am certain all had other demands on their time.

Most rewarding was that two of the ten authors-Laura Kessler and Lisa Pruitt-self-identified as class migrants and found my description of the class culture gap resonant.(fn1) "My experiences with my family reflect a near perfect account of the class culture gap described in Williams's book," notes Laura Kessler. "In sum, I found Williams's account of the way that class is manifested as cultural difference to ring completely true."(fn2) As Lisa Pruitt notes, I attempted to synthesize every major ethnography of the white working class in the late twentieth-century United States(fn3)-but I was also talking about my own life as part of a white working-class family for the last thirty-four years. I am glad I got it right.

And yet Kessler raises a question also raised by Robert Chang, Richard Delgado, and Jean Stefancic. Here's how Kessler puts it:I cannot help thinking that the most salient characteristics that separate me from my manicurist sister are not that she would prefer to eat in predictable chain restaurants or that she disapproves of my permissive parenting style or that she shops at Walmart and I at Costco. Rather, our greatest class differences are found in the fact that she earns approximately fifteen percent of my income in a good year, has no pension, has not consistently had access to employer-subsidized health insurance during her adult life, and has no college degree.(fn4)

Does a focus on how class is manifested as cultural difference entail overlooking the structuralist-materialist dimensions of class?

Not at all: I am a material girl. But here's the fascinating thing. Since 1970, Republicans have adopted policies that have radically increased inequality of incomes and eviscerated the economic stability of Americans who are neither rich nor poor with those very Americans' political support. Thus my description of how class is expressed as cultural difference is designed to answer this question: Why do people like Kess-ler's sister so often vote Republican?

They do, as my book documents extensively. Richard Delgado notes, "My suspicion is that the reasons why working-class people have not jumped on either Obama's or Professor Williams's bandwagon have little to do with style points. Rather, working-class people have interests that are genuinely adverse to those of upper-class people."(fn5) True. But the Americans whom intellectuals traditionally call "working class"-who call themselves "middle class"(fn6)-also have economic interests that are diametrically opposed to the interests of the business elite. Yet working-class Americans vote for Republicans, whose economic policies chiefly benefit the business elite, again and again. This message comes home to me with particular poignancy today: Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature just voted to gut public-sector unions.(fn7)

So the question is why the business elite (Republicans) have been able to appeal to working-class voters better than the progressive elite (Democrats). The answer I offer is "cultural voting"-that the business elite has connected by expressing respect for working-class cultural values. Given that neither the business elite nor the progressive elite really deliver for them, many in the working class go with Republicans, who at least express respect for their values (whereas Democrats' social justice agenda focuses on poverty, race, and women-not on class privilege).

This, for me, is an uncomfortable message. I have devoted my life to study, and activism, around gender. Equally awkward is the issue of race. My focus in Reshaping the Work-Family Debate on the white working class stems from Michèle Lamont's The Dignity of Working Men, which details the cultural differences between working-class whites and same-class blacks.(fn8) In describing working-class Americans, Lamont contrasts the "disciplined self" valued by white Americans with the "caring self" valued by black Americans. The disciplined self values responsibility and perseverance and seeks to preserve a world in moral order. White working-class men draw hard boundaries towards the poor, whose poverty they attribute to a lack of self-discipline. African-American working-class men, in contrast, place greater emphasis on solidarity and generosity. Lamont found American working-class blacks were more like the French than they were like their white counterparts. African-American workers, like the French, had a structural view of poverty and of class-more of a "there but for the grace of God go I" perspective than whites' assumption that "anyone who works hard can make it."

I took Lamont's analysis at face value, and I have little doubt that it is true as far as it goes. Yet while on book tour, I began to see things in a different light, given that many of the young people who responded most strongly as class migrants were people of color. They recounted the kinds of class affronts I picked up from the memoirs of class migrants. But mostly they expressed anxiety that their migration into the elite would leave them alienated from the values they grew up with and still hold dear. Asked a young woman of color at Harvard: "How can class migrants who were born into working-class families, and blessed with certain opportunities [that give them access to the elite] . . . but still have the same [working-class] values . . . ingrained in them, . . . how does this affect their ability to move up?"(fn9) I tried to reassure her, but another African-American audience member who often works with black professionals stated that, in her view, working-class values sometimes do impede people of color's ability to attain professional success.

These reactions have profound implications: they suggest that if Democrats reach out to working-class voters, Democrats stand to connect better not only with non-elite whites but also with non-elite people of color. Bridging the class culture gap can help remedy Democrats' tendency to take African-American and Latino voters for granted. All this only goes to prove what Jean Stefancic said so eloquently: "ignoring racial dynamics diminishes the whole picture."(fn10) Thanks to her, and to Richard Delgado and Robert Chang, for helping me think this through.

Chang, Delgado, and...