The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege 9780812200652

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The Color of Class

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The Color of Class Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege

Kirby Moss

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2003 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United Stales of America on acid-free paper 10

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Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-401 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moss, Kirby. The color of class: poor whites and the paradox of privilege / Kirby Moss. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8122-3733-1 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8122-1851-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Poor—United States. 2. Social classes—United States. I. Title. HV4045.M67 2003 305.5'69'0973—dc21 2003044764

For my mother. I miss you.

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Contents

Introduction

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1. Setting: Midway, U.S.A., an Unassuming City? 2. School: Learning to Live Up to the Paragon 3. Encounters: Intersections and Collisions

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4. Income and Work: Making Ends Meet, Barely

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5. Encounters: Changing Contexts, Changing Characters 6. Home: Sheltered by Whiteness

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7. Encounters: Uncommon Class Commonalities 8. Deconstructing the Color of Class Conclusion Notes

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References Index

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

As a child, I watched with a curious fascination the few White children and families who lived on the edge of our neighborhood of Black families. In elementary school, I watched (and participated, I admit) my Black classmates point, whisper, and laugh at the tattered clothes, hair, and lives of the two White kids—a boy and a girl—who sat in the back of the class. Since social difference has distinct ways of dividing people, all I and the few White families in the neighborhood did for the most part was watch each other from a distance in wonder and scorn. Ironically, even though we lived a few blocks away in our neighborhood or sat a seat or two away in elementary school, a vast chasm of class and racial difference separated us from them. Over the years, 1 have often wondered who these people actually were. Why were they so poor compared to us? They no doubt existed, at least in our neighborhood and city, but why were people like them seldom represented in the newspapers and on television shows? And why were they assumed to be better than we were even though we seemed better off than they—hygienically, socially, and even economically? We, solidly working class. They, a teetering lower class, or as we called them, never really knowing any different: poor White trash.l

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"You know, it's like weird when you think about it. I mean, no one's ever asked me before 'What does it feel like to be White?' You know what I mean? It's like you just are. Your friends in school are. The people you live around are. It's not something you think about," said a senior at Northtown High School in Midway, a pseudonym of the Midwest city where this ethnography was conducted. Certainly, as he and other students would later reveal, no one ever inquired quite so intimately as to what it felt like for them to also be poor and marginal against the idyllic backdrop of White privilege. The exploration of this question along with the assumptions and contradictions it contains is what this book is about. In particular, The Color of Class empirically explores the seldom considered experience of poverty and social class difference through the lives of urban, impoverished, sporadically employed White women, men, and high school students who in defining their experience help deconstruct immutable assumptions of normative Whiteness and class privilege in general.2 I interrogate this paradox of social, cultural and historical experience from somewhat of a juxtaposed position myself since seldom, if ever, do we read about or see Black scholars ethnogmphically enter and do deep interactive interpretations of White cultural spaces. While I illustrate the paradoxical experience of class dynamics within Whiteness, I also write reffexively about my own paradoxical experience in physically (rather than intellectually) crossing such tenuous class and race boundaries. Where many scholars draw an unconscious or unquestioned racial line between poverty and working class—with non-Whites poor and Whites working class (or blue collar, a term many use interchangeably)—my research disrupts by showing that poor Whites exist as a discursive anomaly. A group who, rather than identify or be identified with forms of poverty, identifies instead with forms of privilege because they see themselves in Whiteness and all of its promise.3 Yet, within that privileged category there are distinct cultural and class differences between poor, working-class, and middle-class White folk that are often glossed over in representations we commonly see linked to poverty and privilege. Overall, however, my research aim is not so much to explore and quantify stereotypes or class categories of low-income Whites. Rather I am more interested in understanding how poor Whites carve out

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their experience within the cultural and social category of Whiteness and why poor White folks (PWF, instead of PWT) are ideologically and discursively presented as nearly nonexistent outside the popularized hinterlands of the rural South.4 In one sense, I am interested in exploring the cultural silences and ambiguities Constance Perin (1988: 6) writes about: What we take entirely for granted we are likely to speak least about: a culture's silences are the most familiar to its members. . . . Only by putting words to those meanings that go without saying do they stand a chance of being explicitly considered and reconsidered. What is left unsaid remains undiscussible and non-negotiable; thus does culture coerce. Putting words to them allows us to hear their meanings more clearly, to recognize the ambiguities they cannot contain and sometimes create, and to observe what we do with our discomfort.

Whiteness and Poverty: A Paradox Poor Whites are the silences we speak least of in political and academic debates about poverty, illiteracy, and many other common social ills. Instead, two "minority" groups are usually presented: Blacks and Latinos. Yet, with about 24.4 million people living below poverty level in the United States classified as W'hite (11 percent of the total U.S. W T hite population, and about 68 percent of the total 35.5 million poor), a question far in the background that begs asking is who are these impoverished Whites and why might they be called America's truly, truly invisible citizens? 5 Certainly, how discourse on poverty in the United States has been constructed over time offers beginning clues to this question. Michel Foucault (1972: 49) writes that discourses are "practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. . . . Discourses are not about objects; they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in the practice of doing so conceal their own invention." I argue that while mainstream society loosely embraces its lowerclass members, at the same time it locks poor Whites discursively away and out of sight for a number of ideological reasons explored throughout the book. Narratives and prevailing images of poor Whites are conveniently missing from the middle-class ideological portrait of itself because to acknowledge poverty and banality within its own ranks erodes the eminent, constructed image of Whiteness.

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In this ethnography, Whiteness is mined to one of its seldom considered representations—poor Whites—and largely defined through them. Their experience within and on the margins of Whiteness presents a unique challenge to normalized notions of Whiteness existing as an "unmarked category against which difference is constructed" (Lipsitz 1995: 369). White folks in The Color of Class come from many backgrounds and share a variety of experiences. To look at their lives from within Whiteness is to look at Whiteness itself, although through a different perspective from the polished one we are accustomed to. Women like Denise (Chapter 6), a mother of three who has relied on welfare programs most of her life, exposes many of the hidden layers of mainstream social class assumptions and silences. Lowincome White high school students (Chapter 2), some of whom could not even afford to buy their own school lunch each week, see little conflict in the overwhelming answer they gave when I asked them what, economic class they felt they belonged to. "Middle class," they said emphatically, seemingly without a second thought as to why. As this ethnography reveals, even many of these students are seduced by idealized images of mainstream Whiteness despite their obvious marginal existence. Other people in the book take class assimilation a bit further. Marianne, in her thirties and near finishing college when I met her, said she grew up in a low-income White neighborhood. Her insights into the layered experience of class identity are revealing.6 I have a brother who to this day refuses to admit that lie grew up poor. He's very successful, nice family and job. But when people ask him where he's from or anything about his past he invents a middle-class story and doesn't mention what part of town, ft bothers me when he does that, because he's in a way saying that who we arc and where we grew up is something to be ashamed of. I have a hard time with this. When I'm around [middle-class White] people at a party or something 1 feel a little uncomfortable because they just, assume I'm like them. People say things like, "What do you think of those people in [her childhood neighborhood]?" Or, "I hear that's a bad part of town." You know! That's where I'm from. That's where my mother and relatives still live. So I stand there wondering what to say. Sometimes I just walk away and sometimes 1 say, "I grew up there. My family still lives there. I think they're wonderful people. What do you think of them?" Then they get really uncomfortable.

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The paradox of privilege sweeps me into its vortex as well through assumptions of race (usually negative), making me a subject of my own field experience. In struggling with the elusive question of class in this society, 1 find that I must also deal with the nature of my own fragile and contested class status. 7 How do I react, for example, when White folks who meet me for the first time soon afterward tell me, "Oh, I thought you were White?" An impression they must have garnered from talking to me beforehand on the phone about my research. Or even more troubling but true were the times when disillusioned and disenfranchised White men, in particular, strategically hurled racial slurs all around me (but not at me, curiously) as a subtle but searing way to remind me that no matter how many letters 1 have behind my name, in their eyes they are still White (and proud) and I am still Black, and there is a difference. Despite the racial overtones of the above paragraph, however, social class nuances are still the focal point I cling to in this book because it is precisely this elusive marker that reveals how uncomfortable it is to deal with class in the United States without smearing in color. Still I do not ignore race in my field experience. Besides, how can I when so many people are so quick to remind me that I am Black (as if I forgot?) and oddly out of character in my unassumed privileged position? Keep in mind, however, that poor Whites are also oddly out of character in the ethnography and therein lies the dual paradox that is central to its tone. Theoretical Framework Two questions propel the narratives and interpretations in The Color of Class. First, when most general images of Whiteness we see are presented as privileged and affluent, how do marginalized Whites define that presentation and themselves within the collective assumption? Second, how do poor Whites, or Whites in general, respond to unassumed forms of privilege (e.g., Black privilege) that grate against ingrained racial stereotypes and resituate many poor and working-class Whites in an unsettling position on the socioeconomic ladder? To account for this de-essentialized cultural view of society and

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groups, I employ a more methodological and critical deconstructive aspect of the postmodern moment within cultural anthropology instead of what I consider the unexamined and dichotomized, critical perspective of the postmodern. As I will explain in more detail in Chapter 8, a deconstructive interpretation, based largely on the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, allows me to move past the essentializations and polemics of critical cultural theory and unbounded poetic postmodern relativism (Derrida 1976, 1978, 1982; Norris 1991). I do this primarily by invoking a method of what Joel Handler (1992) calls ironic juxtaposition to not only overturn power and authority assumptions (discursively and in actual field encounters) but at the same time show within those inversions the limits and possibilities of fragmented, contradictory selves and experiences. In calling my research a decoiistructionist effort, I point to primary ironies utilized in the field to recast positions and politics of social class and race. While poor Whites are the focus of my lieldwork, for example, actually they are merely character actors at best on a larger social stage that deals with larger cultural issues. Through their experience I sought an ironic understanding of subjective and group social class and racial construction. Therefore, choosing to do ethnographic research among Whites was as much a deconstructive methodological move as it was a theoretical one. By choosing to work among Whites, in particular poor Whites, I was attempting to make my field experience an empirical test site for some of the theoretical ideas championed by postmodern and critical thinkers, particularly as these ideas relate to antiessentialism. So in one sense this is an ethnography about poor Whites and Whiteness. At the same time this ethnography is about Blackness, as I attempt to interpret my own perceptions and the perceptions of White folks (both lower and middle class) of the category in its common, stereotypical form and in its uncommon, paradoxical form. A key theoretical element of my research therefore is reflexive, in the spirit of the experimental moment in the discipline of cultural anthropology. By strategically casting myself as a social actor in this field experience, I gather insights into racial and class notions that spill over rigid categorical boundaries. Also, even though my work is not overtly about race, but more focused on social class and privilege, I nonetheless inject race into the held experience and the text

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simply by being there and being Black. In other words, much of the field experience, again depending on the context, becomes racialized and there is no denying that. As some chapters will illustrate, this happens not because I intentionally broach the topic of race, but because just my presence turned many of my field encounters into an issue of race. While I situate my work within the paradigm of a postmodern critique of totalizing cultural metanarratives, I also argue for an expanded critique of the recent proliferation of Whiteness studies and discuss (Chapter 8) how they are problematically situated in the postmodern take on critical race theory. In acknowledging the progressive intent of many of these works—and even the overarching progressive paradigm of postmodernism—I suggest that it is precisely the undertapped deconstructive nature of both critiques (i.e., the Whiteness critique of racial privilege and the postmodern critique of cultural privilege) that is too easily glossed over often in favor of a critical, Marxist paradigm that continues to present oversimplified views of asymmetrical social relationships. Ultimately, beyond theory and overloaded concepts like race and class that occupy much thought in this text, the more subtle reflection flowing through this ethnography explores our embedded subjective constructions of difference—that is, people and experiences that do not fit tamely into boxes of essentialized assumptions.8

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Chapter 1

Setting: Midway, U.S.A., an Unassuming City?

Midway is a medium-sized city tucked away in the midwestern belt of the United States.1 A common assumption of Midway is that it still exists as an immutable frontier town blanketed with acres and acres of farmland and cows. On the contrary, Midway is undeniably urban and within that urban space there certainly exists a readily identifiable White lower and working class, many of them descendants of European immigrants. The history and future of Midway and the people who came to populate the city is closely linked with two early economic developments on the nineteenth-century frontier. The first was the building of the U.S. railroad system in the 1860s and the other was the establishment of meat-packing plants in the late 1880s (Larsen and Cottrell 1982). The railroad attracted many financiers to the small frontier town to help capitalize the venture along with hundreds of European immigrants to help build it. The Irish, in particular, were an early influential group of immigrant railroad workers who eventually filtered throughout the city to become powerful in local politics and city government as well as at other levels within the city's political and economic structure. The Irish, unlike some of the other immigrant groups to be mentioned momentarily, intermarried and adopted U.S. customs to the extent that they virtually lost their identity as a separate European ethnic group. This process of ethnic blending, especially among northern, southern, and eastern

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European Americans, is an underlying theme within the scope of this book (Roosens 1989; Earth 1969). Midway's other cornerstone of growth was the stockyards or packinghouse industry that by 1890 transformed the city into one of the major packing centers in the nation. Well-paying jobs in the laborious industry were filled initially by European immigrants and later by Black men and women who streamed to Midway and other northern cities from the tenant farmer sharecropping system in the southern United States (Halpern 1997; Halpern and Horowitz 1996; Lemann 1991). Although the immigrant population of Midway during the 1920s was not comparable in sheer size to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee, in concentration and percentages Midway certainly qualified as an "immigrant city" with almost 50 percent of its population (then hovering around 195,000) composed of immigrants and their U.S.-born children (Larsen and Cottrell 1982). While Black folks were relegated to certain parts of the city, Whites seemingly dispersed all over. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes more obvious that many Whites did not have unlimited mobility within the social and economic structure of this booming city. One of the areas with the largest concentration of White European immigrants during this time was a later to be annexed part of Midway called Northtown. The packinghouses were centered here and Northtown drew newcomers by the thousands to work in their stench-filled bowels. The industry headquarters towered over the neighborhoods, dominating the landscape and the lives of many of the people in its shadow.2 For European immigrants, the process of assimilation into the mainstream (in Midway and throughout the United States) offers a vivid context of some of the key issues concerning social class and belonging that I argue in this work. During the heydays of the packinghouses, Midway represented this tumultuous "melting pot." Among White European immigrants in the city, some groups like Germans and northern Europeans moved into the mainstream and throughout the city without much trouble. On the other hand, another neighborhood near the stockyards was the dumping ground lor poor immigrants from eastern Europe. Ethnic groups like the Czechs and Poles seldom advanced job-wise beyond the packinghouses but did secure a solid working-class socioeconomic position

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and even owned several neighborhood businesses. A primary reason some immigrant groups were hampered and others were not can be traced to their efforts to retain vestiges of their European cultures. In other words, acceptance and success in Midway and many other cities in the United States depended on how well immigrant groups settled into the "normal" way of existing in and thinking about U.S. culture. Italian immigrants in Midway, for example, had a rough time and slower ascent up the social and economic ladder largely because they showed less interest in many U.S. customs. They, instead, clung tightly to their own customs from the Old World. Such ways brought recriminations from older, earlier Italian immigrant residents who commonly called the newcomers pejorative names like "Dagos," or "Wops." Much oi the strife between the old assimilated and the new nonassimilated Italians, and Midway citizens in general, was related to the newer groups holding on to ties that were deemed "un-American," which created questions of loyalty and belonging. And although in time most European groups blended deep into the U.S. fabric, some would forever stand for not (whether by choice or by rejection) blending in as well as others. In researching the history of Midway, especially in the context of the social and economic world that evolved around the North town section of the city and the packinghouse culture, I developed a keen understanding of how the process of belonging and assimilation into privilege comes to be and sustains itself. For more than seventy years, or three generations, people depended on the packinghouses as their economic lifeline, but in time the jobs in Northtown began drying up. Faced with streamlined competition from newer and smaller plants, in the late 1960s three of the four monolithic stockyard companies abruptly scaled down their operations and moved out of Midway. The moves cost the city thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in annual wages. While such a huge loss sent shock waves across the entire city of Midway, most of the economic devastation was heaped upon the people who lived and worked in Northtown. Some families in Northtown who could afford it began their flight to more prosperous communities and neighborhoods in Midway. However, the majority of Northtown residents were stuck there arid sank into a social and economic stagnation that still has a deep and lasting imprint on the area.

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North town, in particular, serves as a telling context in this ethnography because of its history of White European ethnic and social class evolution. While I was not limited to only this part of town in my research, it still serves as the broad backdrop for the information I gathered while doing my fieldwork. To see that part of town today is to glimpse the past I speak of above. To Midway residents, Northtown is considered a gritty (and still stenchy) bluecollar, low-income part of town. 3 Students, families, and individuals I interviewed often mentioned some elements of their lived or imagined past as it related to the prosperous days of the packinghouses. For those who lived it, the packinghouse culture loomed positive in their memories and across the board proved to be one of the most solid historical identifiers among many of the residents. Their imagery of themselves was that of proud, hardworking folk who were paid well for the labor they performed. To others, not of that part of town, imagining the packinghouse and the people working there conjured thoughts of filth and lowliness. As for recollections of the immigrant experience during the packinghouse heydays, most of the people I met had very few. Many could recall their parents or grandparents cooking cultural dishes or speaking only Italian or Polish, for example. Some vaguely recalled the ethnic lineage their parents branched from. Overall, however, few people had any strong ties to Old World culture (Alba 1990). On occasion I heard students at Northtown High call fellow students "dumb Polacks" or "drug-dealing Dagos." But for the most part these contemporaries were thoroughly blended into the American melting pot and yet, after so many years and all of the vaulted assumptions of Whiteness, still denied a place at the central table of social class privilege. A Few Notes on Fieldwork I spent just more than a year in the city of Midway and in Laketown, a small town within Midway, researching this book.4 Combining informal and formal interviews, deep participant observation, arid ironic field encounters, I interviewed and interacted with about 125 people throughout the city during my fieldwork. Ironic field encounters refer partly to the paradoxical nature of this proj-

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ect and also to the ways I attempted to solicit these paradoxes from certain field experiences. Examples abound throughout the work, but to clarify my point I offer an example here. To explore subtle notions of social class among poor Whites and Whites in general, I found it much more revealing to not just simply interview them to find out what they thought of social class privilege in society and their place in relation, but instead to challenge their assumptions of these constructions by presenting them with ironic actualities of their assumptions. In other words, privilege in many of my field encounters took on confused and contested meanings when presented, as I have already touched upon, in the form of Blackness; an irony of the perception that privilege is exclusive to Whiteness. Or when poor Wrhites were confronted with their own deconstructed social class status within the assumption of Whiteness, void of ethnic or racial scapegoats, and found their position a bit unfamiliar and unsettling. Therefore, my goal was to record how people responded not only to my presence but also to the uncomfortable exposure of their own fragmented and contradictory selves within Whiteness. For five years, before returning to graduate school, I worked fulltime as a professional journalist at two metropolitan daily newspapers. Although I certainly did not know it then, the myriad of skills I acquired during that tenure were of tremendous value during my fieldwork in the areas of research, interviewing techniques, copious note taking, and primarily the rapport and penetration into the lives of many of the people I encountered. My technique of information gathering in the field was similar to the "investigative research paradigm" Jack Douglas (1976: 45-56) writes about. He argues against the classic paradigm of society and field research methodology that assumes society is largely homogeneous, nonconflictual, and above all truthful. He believes that such ideas in turn have infiltrated theoretical frameworks (e.g., positivism, political Marxism, postmodernism). Furthermore, Douglas suggests, under these tame circumstances researchers often rely too heavily upon the cooperation of subjects and assume that they will act naturally while studying them. He notes, in contrast and in line with my methods here, an "investigative paradigm is based on the assumption that profound conflicts of interest, values, feelings and actions pervade social life. It is taken for granted that many people one

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deals with . . . have good reason to hide from others what they are doing and even lie to them. . . . Conflict is the reality of" life; suspicion is the guiding principle" (55). Ambiguous Class Categories How I learned to interpret arid employ dynamic concepts like class and poverty while in the field needs some elaboration. During fieldwork, colleagues and friends often incredulously asked me a simple but profound question: "Where do you find poor White people?" Profound because such a question only confirms my premise, noting how low-income Whites blend in almost seamlessly with the majority group assumption. I respond to my inquisitors: "Where do you find poor Blacks or Latinos?" Suddenly they are experts, full of answers! Stereotypical paths to White urban poverty, specifically, often lead to trailer parks and red-light districts. In contrast, one of the most intriguing narratives in this book (Chapter 6) focuses on a welfare-dependent family living in the tranquil suburbs. Similarly, when conducting studies on Blacks and Latinos, researchers often "logically" head straight to the 'hood, the barrio, or federal housing projects.5 In other words, to the very places their assumptions and pervasive discourses lead them. My methodological point here is that in finding poor Whites in Midway I did not always rely on obvious markers. For one, in the field they do not always exist; and in the deconstructive context I employ they do not always appear the same. Still, thinking they were sincerely helpful, people I met often suggested that to find elusive poor Whites I should look for particular symbols: oily hair, overweight women who smoke, babies running around in diapers, rusted cars parked on front lawns, clothes hanging on outside lines to dry, black velvet paintings, and drawling southern accents. Essentialized markers like these, however, are precisely part of the problem I sought to move beyond and deconstruct. As mentioned, my research takes place in an urban, Midwest city, not the emblematic rural South. If my sonar was tuned for southern accents, for example, I would not have gotten very far. Not to deny that some of the markers ring true for some people, but in the field I realized I could not (and should not!) focus exclusively on such cursory cues to identify sample groups. So,

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to answer the initial question: I met White people who struggled in poverty by simply talking to people, who in turn introduced me to other people, and by listening and observing their different experiences unfold—which leads me to another methodological point. Such an approach may not seem as rigorous as utilizing a quantitative, more "objective" analysis of class groups based on rigid contemporary and traditional Marx and Weber frameworks. 6 During research, however, I realized people defined class difference in a variety of ways: based on money, education, race, gender, material possessions, geography, nationality, politics, even eating habits. This variety underscores my view that class dynamics are difficult to pin down and are much more porous than economic models based primarily on orderly income and education levels. Such prevailing attempts at hierarchical ordering certainly influenced why people in the field seemed to have little difficulty distinguishing the middle class from the working class, for example, or the elite upper class from the middle class. How and why they made such clear (even though flawed) distinctions seemed far more important to me than imposing some external analysis of class difference on them and trying to box them into it. Perhaps, in general, we feel more comfortable discussing working-, middle-, and upper-class groups because we either actually live these lifestyles or are often exposed to such lifestyles (especially upper class) in the media. However, when social class definitions—on subjective or discursive scales—fall below the mythical White working class, the picture gets murky and confusing to most. To eliminate the ha/.e, many people simply racialize or ethnicize poverty. According to Mary Jackman and Robert Jackman (1983: 85-86), "The class distinction blacks make is between the poor and the non-poor. In comparison, whites tend to avoid an identification with the poor and to orient themselves primarily around three classes: the working, middle, and uppermiddle classes." I use the terms poor, low-income, and underclass interchangeably throughout the text. However, I do not apply these same terms across the board to include all groups that fall below the discursive middle class, as is done too often. Whites I met who exist in that lower gray area of the class spectrum are aware of minute distinctions between the poor and nonpoor. Working-class Whites (some high school graduates, some not) held out their tenured work

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records as a beacon of pride. With secure manufacturing or service jobs, ownership of a modest home, and meager savings stashed away they were able to live relatively independent lives. These are things they believed separated them from poor White folk who, based on numerous comments and observations, mysteriously fell somewhere just above the raciali/ed poverty class and just below the proud White working class? Amid all of this ambiguity, my observation is that poor White families and individuals in this ethnography exist at the margins of society because of the sum of their contradictory experiences in having little or no income, sporadic or no employment, limited education, opportunity, and aspirations, and in general very dependent arid unstable lives. What distinguishes this group, adults in particular, from the working class is that in some way or another— through welfare programs, friends, relatives—they had to rely on some other primary economic means of support other than themselves.7 Without such assistance from some outside entity or access to money through family, marriage, or savings, for example, these adults (and families) could have easily landed at the extreme lower end of the U.S. class scale—among the homeless. Of course, common sense suggests that there are many obvious exceptions to the above observation, but this is the loose distinction I employ throughout the book. Douglas is one example I introduce in Chapter 4. He earned some money through sporadic day-labor jobs and lived rent-free off and on with "girlfriends" and his parents. Yet, he said if he had to pay his own rent he would not be able to afford it and would probably have to sleep at a homeless shelter. Lowincome high school students in Chapter 2 are another example. Even though many of them worked and earned their own income at the time, they still told vivid stories of growing up poor and embarrassed by their experience of welfare dependency. 8 In sum, class inclusion and exclusion at its core is about experience. Such a tidy summation may still seem too nebulous, too noncommittal for some, but the issue of who fits neatly into what economic class slot is not as important to me. My focus instead concerns the inventive ways people define themselves and others based on their own experiential interpretations and how these definitions disrupt normalized perceptions of social and economic class categories and difference.

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Structure of the Book Before moving into the ethnographic chapters, a brief explanation about the overall structure of this book is warranted. The main chapters present the central ethnographic experiences arid narratives. Between the main chapters are shorter chapters titled "Encounters" where I retrace instances in my fieldwork, reflexively injecting myself and my own narrative into some of the field experiences. Chapter 2 begins the ethnographic stories and opens with a series of participant-observation interviews in a high school with lowincome White students. The insights of this chapter focus on how Whiteness is seen and employed as a symbol for educational and subsequent economic success and how poor White students, in particular, view themselves and their futures in relation to that symbol. Welfare and the creative struggle to survive economically is the focus of Chapter 4. Here I look at women and men and also follow the lives of some of the students I met at the high school, observing them move through the paradox of privilege in search of a modicum of economic security. Welfare and Whiteness in the popular imagination is an anomalous pair, however poor Whites who exist within the ranks of poverty and unemployment present a more congruous actuality. For example, I explore how proud, idealistic White men, who are reduced to day laborers and shade-tree mechanics, lash out at gainfully employed Mexican-Americans and Blacks, their most tangible threats, as a way to shore up their eroded subjective and class identity within Whiteness. Chapter 6 explores how the concept of home often becomes an identifier of self by examining typical and not-so-typical stereotypes of poor Whites and the places they live. White folks who live in trailer parks are a well-honed stereotype, for example, and in this chapter trailer park residents ponder why this stereotype about them persists. Moreover, suburbia hides secrets of marginal Whiteness as well within its manicured lawns and gated communities as evidenced through the narrative of an unemployed, divorced mother of three. Finally, f end the ethnography in Chapter 8 with a general discussion of the underlying theoretical and methodological framework of The Color of Class, f show how I use this framework in an ethnographic sense to expose (and expand) ideal and essentialized

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notions of racial and social class difference in postmodern discourse and society. In these main chapters, which focus almost exclusively on the lived experience of poor Whites, I try to remain as empirically and refiexively hidden as possible, occasionally adding only subtle interpretation and analysis. However, the focus of the narratives in the "Encounters" chapters (3, 5, 7) shifts and pivots on my intersections and collisions with Whiteness as experienced through multidimensional and fluid positions of race and social class. Specifically, in these chapters I reflect more informally on how 1 react to stepping into poor White spaces (or White spaces in general) and how the people in those spaces perceive and react to me—as a Black researcher, as a class privileged person, as a depraved assumption. Overall, while trying to background race throughout the data and ethnography chapters as a way to tease out elusive rules of social class, in the "Encounters" chapters I foreground race and ambiguous, fragmented identities. I do this primarily as a way to come to terms with my initial questions and de-essentialized notions concerning the general construction of difference as explored through confused and paradoxical situations of social class. Ultimately what the "Encounters" chapters reveal is that even though the central characters in The Color of Class are poor Whites, 1 am also a central deconstructive (and deconstructed) character in the ethnography willingly and reluctantly because I too am a paradox of privilege. So although the shorter chapters 3, 5, and 7 may appear as disparate pieces of the ethnography, they are not. They are a necessary part of the story in their own fragmented way, just as the lives and narratives of the people I met (myself included) are at times fragmented, confused, and conflicting yet still an integral part of the meaning of the whole.

Chapter 2 School: Learning to Live Up to the Paragon

Northtown High: "White Trash" High Northtown High School is widely thought of as a blue-collar, working-class school by many residents of Midway.' Although in the late 1980s the school was completely refurbished and chosen as one of the city's two inner-city science and high-tech magnet high schools, its murky reputation still precedes such physical improvements. The school's history dates back to the late 1880s but traces its beginnings to the early 1900s, the glory days of the meat-packing industry in the Midwest. Northtown High stood at the heart of the city's mythical White working-class, immigrant community and almost all of the students in this ethnography who lived in that community went to school there. Over the years, its reputation and historical link to the laborious, dirty work of cattle and hog slaughter (the school's mascot name is even Packers!) and social or cultural lag has been hard to thwart as evidenced by the following "isolated incident," according to school officials, that occurred during my fieldwork. During an away basketball game I attended in late fall 1995 students for the home team, an affluent suburban school in Midway, began spontaneously chanting across the gymnasium: "Go home, White trash! do home, White trash!" over and over. Regardless that Northtown's basketball team was composed of all Black players, except for one White player, the suburban students appeared to be shouting out their gathered perceptions of the school itself and that "other" part of town in general. What made the chant so virulent was that the offending "stuck-up" Eastown students took a conscious

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private thought and vocalized it in public. The ordeal lurried into a short-lived disaster for the suburban school after local news outlets picked up the story and ran with it. A few days later, apologies from school officials and student representatives were exchanged back and forth and after about a month public discussions about the incident dissolved. Through all of this, I was curious to know how Northtown students felt about being called "poor White trash" and how that description fit or clashed with their experience as low-income Whites. I asked several students the following question: What does poor White trash mean to you, and why do you think they called Northtown students that'?

Rick, junior: That's like, it they want to call somebody a Nigger, you know, that's like calling a White person the same thing. That's the way I look at it. It's putting them [low-income Whites] from being a person to being below a person. Joe, junior: When I think of White trash, I think of hillbillies. You think of people that live on farms and stuff arid date their cousins. I don't take no offense to it, though, I can care less. But then we turn around and call them rich fags because they don't have to do nothing . . . you know, little preppy punks, it's the same thing we're saying about them, but White trash sounds worse than preppy. I don't see the difference between them and us besides the money. They live out there in their own part of town and think that all we are a bunch of little kids running around school shooting each other. . . . They don't sec that most of the kids here have to work and stuff. They think everybody who lives in [Northtown] stinks [more hog and cattle slaughter imagery]. Stuff like that. Cheryl, senior: To me that means they think we're the poor class, the low class. It makes me feel like they think they're so much above us just because they have money or whatever . . . they're living way out there in nice houses, they think we're poor White trash. But they don't really know it. They just judge us by where we live.

In formal group and individual interviews, I asked all forty-five students this same question about the "White trash" jeer and they all responded similarly.2 Interestingly, White trash status, they believed, was linked not subjectively or personally to them but to their social, economic, and even geographical environment. In other

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words, Northtown students did not see themselves as downtrodden people, rather they just happened to exist in a downtrodden situation, one many believed they had little control over. Moreover, the students revealed that, in essence, what actually separated them from the students in the suburbs was simply money or economics— money to buy a better house, nicer clothes, a new car. Essentially, the common belief then of the students was that the jeer was not actually directed at them, but at their school or some other amorphous identifier like their community or "their part of town." Consequently, at the individual-subjective level at least, some Northtown students believed they were even better or "more complete" individuals than their affluent peers as revealed in some of the following comments. Andy, senior: Even though they got. all those fancy cars and shit, ain't none of them theirs [the affluent students']. Their mommas and daddies buy them everything. They can't do shit for themselves. That's why f think I'm better off, even though we ain't got a lot of money, I know how to take care of myself. I work for what I want. They're la/y. They're spoiled. They fucking just need to grow up ... stop living off their parents! Tina, senior: Sometimes, I'm like, I wish I was like them. Like I have friends who live in [Eastown]. It seems like their parents just buy them anything. I have a friend whose grandmother buys her everything. She bitches that she doesn't have this and that. They [well-off students] take things for granted. They don't appreciate what they have because it comes so easy to them. My parents make me go out and work for what I want. I can't even remember the last time my dad bought me something. But . . . it doesn't bother me, though, that they get everything from their parents because I'll get more experience in life. I know that I can take care of myself and most times they can't. Ruth, senior: I think the ones that work for it should get it. My parents raised me to work for what I want. Make me responsible. 1 like the way my parents raised me. I've been working since fourteen [years old].

In these conversations with the three students above, as a general insight, a bewildered frustration and irony seeped from their comments and those of other students as well. While Andy, for example, may actually believe he is better off in his independence and autonomy, he remains naive to the experience and goals of the

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middle-class students he resents. Independence is not necessarily the goal for his more affluent peers, at least not in their teenage years. Rather, they intentionally seek support from their parents and family (Sewell and Shah 1967; Cookson and Persell 1985; Lam 1997). Their privileged experience teaches them that it is in their best interest to stick close to the sanctioned behavior and beliefs of society (which high school also espouses) and for most of their adolescent and even young adult lives opportunities and material possessions will be provided for them. Literature on schooling and social class is replete with studies that suggest schooling is a primary social institution that tacitly helps create and maintain social inequality. A prominent theme running through many of the works is that schools are tailored to mainstream norms and therefore promote students who either aspire to these norms or already possess them (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Students who resist or do not possess the "cultural capital" described by Bourdieu are deemed personally or culturally unfit for college-level learning or subsequent white-collar careers.3 During fieldwork I found myself becoming more intrigued not with how students arc tracked through the curriculum, for instance, and then reproduced in an unequal society, but with how students from vastly different social class backgrounds who are obligated to come together each day under the social rubric of schooling manage to interpret this daily process and their place in it.4 More specifically, in this chapter I search for answers from poor White students on what school represents to them. How does their experience within poverty, along with their paradoxical status within privilege, clash or coalesce with ideals schooling presents as the norm (which is often construed as middle-class Whiteness) to which good students, in particular White students, should aspire?3 Furthermore, do low-income White students believe that skin color alone can move them up the school's meritocracy ladder, therefore making them less aware of society's class maze? Categories in School: Fitting People in Their Places

School offers a unique vantage point in the observation of sociocultural roles and behavior primarily because it is one of the rare social

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spaces in which adolescents from different social-cultural experiences and backgrounds come together on a daily basis for an extended period of time. In such a setting patterns begin to develop and renew themselves with each passing semester, school year, and even generation of the schooling experience. Rather than concentrating on which category groups exist in the high school, my focus here is on where and how many of the poor White students 1 encountered carved out their own individual and group identities within this myriad of social networks. Before classes began each day at Northtown High students spilled throughout the four-story building, congregating in their daily places with their daily group of alikes. Eddie, a low-income senior, explained the morning ritual. "See, on the fourth floor on the south end you have the stoners. On the other end [fourth floor] is where all the freaks hang out. Then on the third floor is where all the Blacks and Mexicans are. The preppies and jocks kind of hang on the second floor and the first floor."6 What about the students who don't fit into those groups?

Eddie: You got some people who just hang wherever, but mostly people split up into their own little groups according to floors pretty much. Where do you hang?

Eddie: Mostly all over I guess. I mean I got friends all over, except for the freaks. Man, they're just too weird!

Penelope Eckert (1989) and others (Varenne 1988; Kinney 1993; Brown 1993; Foley 1990) describe similar cliques in their work on social class categories and identity among high school students. Students make an effort to seek out other students who are like them, Eckert suggests, primarily because the high school setting and peer group dynamics scorn those who do not belong, such as nerds and loners. 7 In describing the nature of student groups, Herve Varenne (1988) writes that a clique, while ambiguous, is a bounded and interacting group whereas a status category is not: "A clique was never an immediately apprehensible reality. Cliques never walked down corridors like phalanxes. . . . All the diacritic marks which students did use to differentiate between cliques (the length of hair,

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dress, bodily stance, speech style, expressed attitudes, etc.) could be used by people who did not belong to the clique which was normally symbolized by a particular pattern of these markers" (222). From my observations, it became apparent that group affiliations developed just as much out of default as out of choice since the stigma of not belonging carried heavy personal, emotional, and social consequences (Gofiman 1959; Murphy 1987; Wexler 1992).8 Students at Northtown High spoke candidly and eloquently about the peer differences and defined each other and themselves based heavily on audio and visual symbols such as hairstyles, speech styles, cars, and especially clothes. One of the most telling contexts in which to observe this kind of social sorting was during lunchtime in the cafeteria. For aside from the beginning of school and after school, lunchtime was the lone extended time students came together daily during school hours. And when they did, they branched off like tributaries of a river into their own social and cultural comfort zones. Robert, 18, was a member of one group. He was an older-thanaverage junior the year 1 met him. "I had to repeat a year because I missed too many classes," he explained. Robert received a reducedrate lunch at the school (to many students a subtle, but powerful sign that he and his family were linked to penury). He and three friends—Dave, Rick, and Lance—ate at the same table during school lunches. Robert and Rick, both deep-voiced and broad-chested juniors, sort of ruled the table. Dave, a junior of Italian descent, did not talk much. Rick and the other boys frequently derided Dave because of his heritage, calling him a mobster and thief. Rick often told Lance, a short, scrawny junior who talked constantly, to "shut the hell up!" Of the four students, Rick, Robert, and Lance all had families that lived below the poverty line. At lunch this group talked about how much they hated their "shitty" jobs and whether or not they were coming to school the rest of the week (it was Tuesday, then). They talked about girls they wanted to go out with, but would never get a date with because "those bitches are all so stuck-up"; about the money Lance still owed Robert for paying for his lunch a few weeks earlier; the new styles of basketball shoes they coveted but could not afford to buy; and about the (suspiciously) shiny, new gold ring Dave wore to school that day. "You fucking drug dealer. That's how you got that,

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didn't you," Robert said. In general they talked about their lives and their daily experiences. Most students I talked to called this group "a bunch of losers and lowlifes" which is synonymous with the burnout/stoner clique. Each day, groups of students sat in the same spots with the same people or group of friends for the most part. The lunchroom scene was highly ritualized. Not belonging to some clique for many students signified not being wanted rather than an autonomous decision of not wanting to belong. However, one student who described himself as a "me," meaning he chose not to hang any particular group label on himself, explained: "It's cra/y. I mean people around here try so hard to fit in with people they don't even really like in the first place. It's like it's better to be part of some group of jerks rather than be who they are. Especially in the lunchroom. If you see somebody sitting by themselves at lunch, people look at them like they're some kind of circus freak or something." There is anonymity in numbers, exemplified by the intriguing intersection of social groups and behavior. I often noticed the ways that students frequently, in minute and obvious ways, sought to be noticed, to be distinctive, even individualistic. Yet they were limited in their inventiveness and autonomy by the stereotypical dictates of their peer group. For example, one student I met often talked about how frustrated he was because he could not find a style of basketball shoes (in Midway, at least) that somebody else did not already have. But, at the same time the shoes had to be a certain brand name (e.g., Nike, Fila), which automatically limited his choice to the dictates of his group of peers. Wearing shoes that had no brand name cast him out of the loop. This happened often with clothes, speech styles, and hairstyles, leading me to conclude that many of the students are constantly traversing back and forth between inclusion and exclusion, between autonomy and assimilation in an attempt to fit in and at the same time present themselves as different and unique. Poor Whites and Ambiguous Categories

Unlike the literature on rigid adolescent social class networks linked to class, race, and gender, poor White students tended to have a more varied and wider network of social contacts in school. For

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example, Darlene, a White low-income senior, ate lunch with a group of about twelve students, all White, except for two who were Mexican American. Her boyfriend, however, as were many of her other "hanging" buddies in arid outside of school, was Black. She was president of the student marketing organization, DECA. She did not live with her parents (she lived with her sister and her sister's two children who were dependent on welfare programs). Darlene missed a lot of days of school, yet she maintained a 3.5 grade point average. Darlene: I don't really think about color. I'm not around too many White people, though. I live in [Southtown, predominately Black] and I feel more comfortable around Black people than I do around White people. Why is that?

Darlene: Sometimes I just want to smack them [middle-class White kids]. They judge people by where they come from, not who they really are. I don't really hang in [Eastown, suburbia]. All my friends live around me. If I do go out there, they look at me weird because I wear baggy clothes and stuff. They give me dirty looks and stuff. If I go out there wearing little girly clothes, they don't care. Even though I'm White, they look at me and see something different. I don't know what it is. They can see it, I can't, 1 guess.

Because of her expanded reality, Darlene was very aware of her marginal status within the frame of Whiteness, but she did not quite understand why that was so. Again, as with most of the other students I interviewed, she pointed to money (in the form of place, position, and possessions) as being the common divider among Whites. She elaborated on how Northtown High's reputation followed her in her workplace: "The people I work with would ask stupid stuff like: 'Was I in a gang or do I carry guns to school?' See, they don't know nothing about us down here. Only what they see on TV. They're stupid!"

Interestingly, White students like Darlene are associated with nonWhite images of the part of town they live in primarily because their experience lands them there or simply because other people

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imagine and locate them there. Students like Darlene and others I met in Midway are class-ifted, even though White, because they do not participate in the same experience from similar locations as the Whites who look down on them. Still, Darlene and other low-income White students believe that the mainstream White experience is also their experience because of its association with skin color. In their own imaginations they belong and they do not belong, but wonder why they are questioned for being comfortable in two worlds. Eddie is another example. He, like Darlene, graduated in 1996, an average student. In describing himself earlier by saying, "I got friends all over," he reiterated the pattern I noticed among many of the lower-class White students I met. Eddie's girlfriend was Mexican American ("Man, those stuck-up girls from [Eastown, or at the high school] wouldn't go out with me," he said. "I ain't got enough money"). One of his best friends from childhood through high school was Black. The list goes on, with my observation being that in the social context of school, poor White students existed in their own paradoxical categories that recast common images of Whiteness and cross-cultural polarization. Eddie: I look at some of the other [White students] students around here and they don't have a clue, really. Some of them look at me funny when I'm with my girlfriend or when I'm with my Black friends, but those are the people I grew up around, you know. I mean I've got White friends, too. So, what am you saying? Eddie: I guess, I don't know. You know I'm White and stuff, but when you really think about it, I don't feel like I'm like those other students around here. You mean other White students? Eddie: Yeah! You know, like everything they do is White, kind of. The only time they're around other people [non-White, different social classes] is like here in school or probably when they go to a movie or the mall or something. But even here, they stay in their own little groups, kind of.

In trying to place himself within the frame of Whiteness and at the same time realizing that his experience made his appropriation of Whiteness somehow different or tenuous, Eddie struggled to

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define his own paradox of position. Within the integrated social world of school, to group himself as a White student was problematic. To group himself as non-White proved troubling as well. His acknowledged lower-class status allowed him to move within a wider circle of difference, but at the same time locked him out of centers of privilege afforded many of his other "White-skinned" schoolmates. One other example is Joe, a friend of Eddie's. Joe, a junior, is the only White player on Northtown's basketball team. Some weekends he spends time out in the "suburbs getting harassed by my cousins' punk ass friends because I live in the 'hood [predominately Black inner-city neighborhood]." Other weekends he is playing basketball and "getting harassed by some [Black kids] because I live in the 'hood." Most White youths we read about in the research are not exposed to such varied social and cultural environments. Although Joe forgot to mention or even consider it, he is not harassed simply because he lives in the " 'hood." He is chided because he is assumed not to belong in the very place life has landed him. His social sin is that he is White and living in a part of town where he is thought not to belong, by both Blacks and Whites. Further interviews and observations confirmed the actuality that like Eddie, Darlene, and Joe, low-income White students flowed in and out of social categories at school much more seamlessly than rigidly defined student class and status categories would have us believe. In doing so, in school at least, these students became anomalies of the school's social scene. Poor White students, I found, were often in search of themselves and their place within the myriad of social settings in the school. Even though they were assumed to belong in the dominant group, their own sentiments of that group along with their experience separate from it guided them more into a paradoxical social world where they sought to be accepted. Yet, at the same time, they were screened or scrutinized by Black friends, for example, because of their assumed option of access to Whiteness. Let me further elaborate on this point of fluid categories and identities. Students like Darlene seemed to experience school life on so many levels primarily because they were able to transpose assumptions of identity and categories. They were able to elude assumptions of negative identity because they basked in the positive

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presentation of Whiteness, if even from a distance. Furthermore, unlike the working-class White students who are presented as constructing their identity primarily through "othering" by negating non-Whites and elite Whites (see Willis 1977; Weis 1990; Fine, Weis, Addelston, arid Marusza 1997), poor White students in a diverse setting such as Northtown High blend in and move out oi categories rather imperceptively. This is not to say that they make a conscious effort to do so or that they are by default the "true" embodiment of multiculturalism. No. Rather, they are guided down these varied paths by their experience in poverty. And while this experience may make them aware of the stifling dynamics of race and class inequality, they carry the assumptive baggage of neither. White-on-White Petty Crimes of Class

The observations in the above section reveal in a broader context how the position of poor White students changes, continually flowing in and out of categories especially when they are gathered in mixed social company, such as in school. Here and in general the students are not really cognizant of their fragile affiliation with the dominant culture and feel rather comfortable within it until the subject is broached and their position or color and class position is objectified. Surprisingly, many of the students said they never really talk or think about being White. For them being White is an obvious default of not being Black or Latino. This alliance with Whiteness, however, begins to crumble in detailed discussions of social class and privilege. The following narratives are responses to questions that attempt to explore the way students deal with their poverty and Whiteness in the exclusive presence of other Whites, particularly well-off Whites. Becky, senior: Like kids who go to [suburban schools] and stuff? Like I have cousins who go to those schools and they live way out, and when their friends come around I feel uncomfortable. 1 feel like they look at me differently. One time, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, 1 went to a [Catholic] confirmation class at a church out in [Eastown]. 1 was sitting there and there were these girls sitting there talking about me. Saying stuff like, "That girl looks like a poor slut." f didn't say anything back. It. just hurt me. And 1 can honestly say that ever since then I've looked at people who live out there differently, f felt so stupid. They said, "She lives in

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[Northtown, with obvious condescension]." They feel like they are above me. It bothers me. Makes me feel like I am poor. Like I'm White trash. I do feel like they are better than me sometimes. I'm uncomfortable being around them. Another student talked about a similar experience: Tim, senior: People out there think we're dirty . . . we're, I don't know. We went out there last weekend, me and a bunch of friends went [to Eastown] and the people were just looking at us like "Ugh!, they're from [Northtown]." As soon as they sec where we're from or when we tell them we're from [Northtown] they're just, like, "Yuck!" They don't want nothing to do with us. Does that make you feel uncomfortable?

Tim: I do in a sort of way because I know they're talking about me behind my back. I don't like that much. Why do you think the}' talk about you like that?

Tim: I guess they just don't like us. I mean we talk about them like . . . "look at that rich punk . . . look at them rich . . . fags . . ." because they walk around all stuck-up. We'll call them rich, snobby, stuck-up bastards. And they'll call us lowhfes, idiots, trash. To find out if some of the things Northtown students said about Eastown students were at all plausible, I spent time with Eastown students doing a series of informal interviews. Whether in group settings or individually, the views of suburban students tended to conform to the image Northtown students projected onto them. Of the eighteen suburban school students I talked to over a one-month period, one of them said he had been to Northtown "once or twice." The rest said they had never even passed through "that part of town." Yet, the students conjured vivid images of people they did not know—like Robert, Eddie, and Becky—who lived in that part of town. Following are some comments from Eastown students on visiting Northtown. Female, junior: I just really have no reason to go [to Northtown], really. Why should I? Like I hear stories all the time about stuff going on [in Northtown]. Like shootings and gang stuff. I don't, want to go [to Northtown] and have them messing up my car or trying to steal my clothes and stuff!

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Male, senior: All of my friends live out here. I mean if they lived [in Northtown], 1 guess I would go, but they don't. Male, junior: It's just a place you don't go to. I don't know. I never really thought about it until you asked.

Eastown students offered the following comments on their image of Northtown and people who live there. Male, junior: I know this may sound bad, but it's what 1 honestly think. You know, you think ol [Northtown] and you think of packinghouses [foul smells] and grimy kind of people. [He laughs] That's not funny, maybe, but you asked me. Female, junior: The girls [in Northtown] are not with the times really. Like they wear their hair different and wear different clothes. Clothes that are too revealing, kind of, in a—I don't mean this in a bad way, but I just can't think of another way to say it—trampy way. Male, senior: Yeah, I think of White trash. 1 do. But White trash to me doesn't have anything to do with money. It has to do with education and stuff. You know, like the way they talk and act. They just act different than we do. They're not as ... I don't know, they just don't have the same kind of social skills we do. Female, senior: It just think it's dirty for some reason. I don't know, from what I've seen and heard about it, it just seems kind of dirty.

The assumptions of middle-class, suburban students interviewed about Northtown High students and the part of town they live in were negative for the most part. Certainly not all Eastown students shared these negative views, but in general most of their images of Northtown were gloomy. Middle-class students saw White Northtown students as being more criminal minded, slower learners, tacky dressers, and just general misfits in the social realm of everyday relations. When asked why they thought, this was so, the common theme within their answers pointed to Northtown students themselves (and their families) rather than the more encompassing social conditions in which these students constructed their lives daily. Interestingly, this is opposite the view of poor White students who saw the social and cultural divide being money or economics. Eastown students thought Northtown students lived in squalid

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conditions because they were "too lazy" or "too dumb" to try to find a way to journey out of that way of life. An Eastown student made the following comments. Female, senior: We work hard in school to make it to college. I just don't see why those [Northtown] students don't make the effort knowing that, if they don't, they won't have much of a future. Particularly the White kids [in Northtown]. I mean I'm not saying that they are smarter or better than the other kids [Black and Latino], but. to me it seems like they have more opportunities because they are not discriminated against, because of race. Well, what about class, they say it's class and money? Female, senior: That's an excuse, I think. How? Female, senior: It's more of an issue you know like when you talk about Blacks or Mexicans living in one part, of town and Whites living in another. Or Whites going to better schools than Blacks. Stuff like that. That's how I see class.

What evolved for me from this and other conversations in relating them back to earlier ones I had with poor White students, was that Eastown students overwhelmingly perceived class positions as nearly nonexistent within White culture. The distinction they made between experience of Blacks due to racial or social barriers and those of poor Whites simply due to "personal excuses" suggests that Eastown students make a conscious or unconscious effort not to implicate themselves (personally or in the social rules they abide by which marginalize others) in the less privileged lives of either group. Although differences are acknowledged to exist ("They just act different than we do"), Eastown students commonly linked those differences or personal and economic inequalities to individual ability. That they are better off in school, in living conditions, or just in the general social scheme of things is due, they believe, to their individual effort and ability to follow the social rules along the pathway to success. They were born into an experience and the main way to maintain or enhance that experience is to adopt the ability to know and follow the rules. Joseph Kahl (1964), writing about class structure in the United States, discusses how many affluent

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or mainstream middle-class groups see individual effort and "hard work" as key ingredients in the recipe for success or privilege: "The man who has emerged successfully from competition wants to feel that the competitive rules were fair and that he won through superior ability and energy. . . . Consequently, belief in the existence of free competition and the Tightness of individualistic effort are essential" (197-98). Discussions of Poverty in the Classroom In general, classroom discussions and settings did not offer much in the way of observation, at least within the scope of this project. During class, as with any formal segment of the school day, class differences were muted in favor of the ideology of the institution. 9 Students either attended classes or did not. They participated in class or lor the most part just blew it off. However, on occasion, a lively discussion erupted, usually on topics that explored the symbols and meanings of popular culture—music, fashion, movies, video games. One day, however, a teacher began a discussion on poverty and welfare in her history class. "Well, what do some of you think about the current debate on welfare reform," the teacher asked. One student said, "I think they should get rid of it. People abuse it." Another student added, "Yeah. I mean a lot of people on welfare can work. They just don't want to because they know they'll be taken care of anyway." Eight students in my sample were in her class and I sat in during their periods to observe. While in class none of the eight students in my sample asked questions or offered any views in the class discussions. Afterward, I caught them and sought to find out what they thought of the topic and their place in it. In individual interviews, I asked all eight the following question. What are some of the first images (people, places they live, etc.) that pop into your head when you think of welfare or poor people or poverty in this country, and in those images do you ever think about race or color? Cara, senior: When you think of the word poverty, I just think of, like, dirty people. I think of poverty as more like a bum or something. Someone on welfare is not really poverty to me. These people are more like poor. I don't know if there's really a difference between poverty and poor. But this is how I see it. . . . 1 guess you would mostly think of Black people and Mexican people. But there's just as many White people who are poor too.

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But the way society is, the first thing you think about is Black people or Mexican people. Donna, senior: What do you mean, like the hovises or clothes they wear? . . . I think, like, dirty. Yeah. Probably Black or Mexican. That's what I think. Laura, senior: When I hear about stories [about poverty] and stuff, I think of a Black family. I do! Eddie: I mean . . . you know my family's been really poor and we're not so well off now really, but anybody can be poor, man. But I'd be a liar if I said I didn't think about color. What about color?

Eddie: I think of Black or Mexicans. Robert: People who work at packinghouses and stuff like that. People who work as garbagemcn. The majority of people around here are like that. Other than that, I don't really [classify] poor people. Joe, junior: I don't think being poor, to a point has to do with race. I think it's basically equaled out. There's a lot of poor White people too. Doug, junior: The first thing . . . I guess I think of [Southtown, a predominately Black neighborhood]. Like we have poverty over here [Northtown], but you think of [Southtown] first. Michelle, senior: There are a lot of people who are White and poor, but a lot of times people only think of Black or Mexican people as being poor. Because of unemployment, divorce, or family custom ("That's what my mother's mother did," said one student), the families of six of these eight students are somehow linked to welfare. Two come from semistable, borderline working-class households. And although these two students—Eddie and Donna—no longer rely on welfareprograms, they have all too vivid and bitter memories of the experience as children. In asking the question, initially, my search was for an understanding of how poor White students perceived poverty and, if at all, would or could they represent themselves or see themselves as a part of that perception. As noted above, these students—as did many others I met—overwhelmingly linked

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poverty to race. Of the eight from the class, six immediately thought of Black or Mexican American families. Later, in individual interviews, 1 asked the rest of my student sample at Northtown High the same question about poverty and associated images. Of the fortyfive (including the eight highlighted here) forty students associated race with poverty first, even though all of the students themselves share a similar socioeconomic class experience in poverty as the Black and Mexican American families they invent. Why do White students erase themselves from the association? "I don't know really," Greg, a senior, said. "I guess maybe because every time you see something on TV about being poor and stuff, they always show Black people or somebody else, you know, like Mexicans. So people start believing that's how it really is." But you said your family is poor, didn't you?

Greg: Yeah! We are, I guess, compared to most people. But still, it. just seems like Blacks and Mexicans are worse off.

To expand on this student's point, people do riot necessarily simply believe what they see in their real-life experiences; they also believe and actualize many of the images that are reinforced through mass media (Fiske 1990; Kellner 1989) and instructional institutions. Greg: You know, like in classes and stuff, we read about American history and most of the time it's about how Americans built this country. You know, they talk about George Washington and [Abraham] Lincoln and all those Civil War generals and stuff. Like we learn that they were the leaders and stuff. They are always White. But when you heard about Indians on reservations or slaves they were poor. What about poor Whiles in your history classes'?

Greg: I don't know. I mean, you had your pioneers and stuff, but that was different. "1'hcy were farmers and stuff. But poor Whites in the cities and stuff, like the poor Blacks . . . I don't know. You just don't hear about them. Joe, junior: Even though I grew up poor and stuff and most of my friends are Black because 1 grew up in a Black neighborhood, I still don't think of White people when f think of poverty. Because you always see on TV all the rich people are White. Then they show all the bad neighborhoods and

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they are either Black or Mexican. And that's what everybody's perception is. If they do show poor White people it's a few bums and they're in an alley somewhere. Views on Education and Success in Life Low-income White students expressed little hope in the "realworld" benefits of school. This attitude has been documented extensively, but I add here more subjective views from a slightly different perspective, that of poor Whites, on the whys of this phenomenon..10 These students, as did others, saw school as something they had to do. Since their parents and peers did not hold schooling and education in high esteem, many of them similarly did not. "My mother just says I need this education, 1 need my diploma," said one female senior. "That's all she says, because she didn't get hers when she was in high school. Sometimes I think she's trying to live that part of her life through me kind of." Other students I interviewed expressed the following views. Michelle: School's no big help for the real world, so I ain't planning to go to college. You don't really need it to be a cop [her career choice] anyway. My mom leaves it up to me. High school or college. No pressure to do either one. Joe: 1 don't think school has done much for me. I need the piece ol paper, but 1 don't think it's gonna help me. I mean, OK, I'm educated and I know when the Revolutionary War and all that crap was. Lisa, senior: School ain't really important to me. I mean I like to go and see my friends, but I'm not learning much that'll help me in the real world. I'm not going to college. I'm not sure what I'll do. Eddie: Like math and some of the other stuff I learned I don't think I'll ever need in the outside world [school: a subtle metaphor of prison]. Like the diploma, I don't know what that's going to do for me. I don't think I'm going to college. So 1 don't know. I mean, what is it, just a piece of paper really. I don't know . . . it's kind of frustrating now because I put in all this time for it. Laura: I used to hate school. I used to just party and come to see everybody. To see what was going on. Now I'm more into it. I think school will help in some cases, maybe. But 1 don't really think I'm going to college. I don't want to go, but maybe 1 should. My dad never went. He doesn't pres-

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sure me. My mother wants me to, but she's not. forcing rnc. It's up to me really. I have to get a full-time job if I don't go, though. It's hard because, like, my boyfriend he's twenty and he just went to work right away fulltime. And that does have a lot of affect on me. And I have cousins that go to [college]. One of them likes it, the other two hate it. So they say college sucks, don't do it. My boyfriend says do what you want. The ambivalence of Laura's goals offered a broader insight into the goals and aspirations of low-income students in general. To assume from the above comments that low-income students have no educational goals is simply an essentialization. Other students I interviewed worked hard in school and desired to continue their educations after high school. However, they too, spoke in uncertain terms about college, money for college, and parental and peer support for the endeavor. For some of these students, doing well in school and going to college represented a way to transcend or escape their situation. Some of them thought it shockingly "unfair" that well-off students "who aren't even that smart" go to college because their parents pay for them. Carla, senior: I learn a lot here. I'm here to learn. I pay attention everyday and I plan on going to college after here. My parents don't have college educations, but we [she and her siblings] were just brought up that way, after high school you go to college. How will you go ? How will you pay for it ?

Carla: I'll get loans, 1 guess. Maybe I'll get a scholarship. I've got good grades. But it really upsets me when I see some of these girls around here who are dumb as rocks graduate and go to college and don't have to worryabout nothing because their parents just pay for everything. They're so stupid, I don't even see how they get into college in the first place. Maybe their parents pay for that, too! Does that discourage you at all, thai they seem to have it so easy compared to you ?

Carla: I mean, yeah! Sometimes I just want to say forget it, you know? Why work hard here [in high school]? Why try go to college? But I'm smart, I'm a good student. A better student than they are, but it's not all about grades. It's about who you are and how much money you have. That's what bugs me. You know around here [Northtown High] they always talk about work hard and get good grades and that'll get you into college, get you a good job. But that's all bull. Who's gonna pay for college? You know, a lot of my

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friends don't give a crap about school. One of my friends has missed half the school year. She doesn't go to school, but she goes to work everyday. Passes her classes with the minimum and that's good for her. Why does that bother you ?

Carla: I don't know. Because she's my friend, she's smart, and because sometimes I just feel like I'm out here by myself trying to do this [get good grades and go to college]. My friends who are into things they shouldn't be are always telling me to just do it [drugs, drinking, partying]. I say no and they call me a chicken. They say I'm missing out on this and that. Do you feel like you are ?

Carla: Not really. I just wish they were more supportive of me and my goals. Because I want to do good in school and go to college doesn't make me any better than them, but they probably think so. So they are always trying to tear me down, you know?

Wanting to Be Like Those They Resemble Within the school context in particular, Carla has a nascent consciousness of social class difference and how it works in her life and the lives of other students. She notices how teachers and staff treat some of the more "popular" students. Carla, like many of the friends she talks about, finds herself wanting many of the things (amenities, material items) her more affluent peers have or will have, like a college education, nice clothes, a nice house, but she finds it hard to compromise too much of her cultural and class self to have these things. For example, she enjoys school, but she loathes other students who appear to enjoy school the most—the preppies, she calls them. At the same time, she finds herself reluctantly but necessarily drifting away from her cultural lower-class peers, who compromise very little at best. Carla is another marginal White student suspended in the gray area of categories. She wrestles with wanting what the "haves" have, yet wanting those privileges on her own cultural and class terms, a miscuc many of the low-income students in this ethnography make. Rules of success are etched by the mainstream, therefore they are easier for them to follow. However, even if students and families

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from that lot fall from grace and fail to live up to the very rules they cultivate, they too are shunned (Newman 1988). So the paradox of privilege and Whiteness once again presents itself through Carla, and the following student. Ellen, senior: Sometimes, you know, it's hard. I mean these kids have everything because their parents have money. I would love to have those things, but I can't have that. See, I have to work for it. I want to be like that, but I can't picture me living a life like that. It's just part of who I am. I guess I wish I had the things they have, but I don't want to be like them. But do you think, just by association, by being White, that many people think you are like them'? Ellen: Maybe so. I don't know. T just know that even though I'm White, I'm not like them and they're not like me. What separates you, how are you different? Ellen: Money! They have more money.

Conversely, some students make an effort to escape into the middle-class image of Whiteness, presenting themselves as different from their own cultural and social class peers. Ellen further explained how a friend who lived on the same block in the same Northtown neighborhood has a hard time accepting who she is. Ellen: There are a lot of kids who try to be like [Eastownj kids. They buy the name brands [clothing], try to drive nice cars, hang out with people out there, but they're not really from there. People like that are phony, stupid. My friend thinks she has to have the name brands. She doesn't want to shop at K-Mart or Target [discount stores], but yet she lives right up the street from me. She's really materialistic, like she's trying to buy class or something.

This chapter in general has sought to move away from portraying the dynamics of social class as unreflexive by examining withinclass variations and within-subject complexities among adolescents in a school setting. Volumes of literature examine the plight of Black

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and Latino students in U.S. schools, from elementary school tracking (Rist 1970) to eventual dropout (Fine 1991). Ironically, however, what such studies suggest about these "other" groups is also prevalent among White students in U.S. high schools. Michelle Fine (1991) found that, in aggregate, Native American youth are more likely to drop out of school than Latino youth, followed by Blacks, then Whites. However, controlling for social class, Fine (1991: 26) found that among low-income students White students were more likely to drop out of high school than Latinos and Blacks. Discourse on schooling and social class categories highlights the polari/ation of adolescent groups based on race and class. While I recorded that teens certainly do attach and detach themselves from particular groups, such groups are not nearly as static as they are portrayed. Poor White students revealed this quite plainly largely because they are linked to two seeming opposites, poverty and Whiteness. This position on the category or identity spectrum is rather unique and not shared by non-White groups discussed within the discourse of race and class. Jay MacLeod (1987) shows in his research that low-income White youths in many ways have grown to believe that they deserve a "break" in life or that they deserve better than what they have been dealt primarily because they are White. The Hallway Hangers reject, the achievement, ideology because most of them are white. Whereas poor blacks have racial discrimination to which they can point as a cause of their family's poverty, ("or the Hallway Hangers to accept the achievement ideology is to admit that, their parents arc lazy or stupid or both. Thus, the achievement ideology not only runs counter to the experience of the Hallway Hangers, but is also a more serious assault on their self-esteem . . . the achievement ideology is a more potent assault, on the Hallway Hangers because as white youths they can point, to no extenuating circumstances to account for their poverty. The subculture of the Hallway Hangers is in part, a response to the stigma they feel as poor, white Americans. (MacLeod 1987: 130, 133-34)

Many of the low-income White students I interviewed spoke of a similar motif in their experiences in school. To them, the trappings of Whiteness (really of social class privilege) were reserved for Whites, no matter their class background. For example, a few White

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students who were contemplating going to college frequently mentioned that they were unlikely to get scholarship money "because the Black and Mexican students are the ones that get all the scholarship money!" through affirmative action and quota programs— another opportunity unfairly usurped through race, they believed, seldom considering instead that maybe those who "have" already have too much or those who achieve, regardless of race, are actually deserving. Schooling for me, and for the poor White students I encountered, reveals distinctly how (not why) they are marginalized and— even though they may not want to see it—how poverty is not limited to racial and ethnic groups. Perhaps then for the students I met. it is not a question of whether they want to see themselves in poverty or not. Rather they tend to see and describe what they have been exposed to, which ironically is a media and school representation that rhetorically includes and at the same time blots out their very lived experience. School, therefore, is a primary institution (particularly along with television) where marginal White students indirectly learn who they are not and probably never will be. Many of the student narratives in this chapter reveal that they believe in fairness but at the same time desire and seek privilege based not on meritocracy but on skin color—which seems obvious to them and something they seem to think they understand. Consequently, the unique position of poor White students in the schooling process presents an expanded scene of the irony of school ideology because through these students we see the intricate dynamics of social class construction at work. Their journey through school differs from those of the working-class lads in Paul Willis's work or the burnouts in Penelope Eckert's, both of which show working-class kids spurning middle-class achievement ideology because they can find comfort and belonging in their proud position (within Whiteness) as productive, grassroots working-class folk. But those who have never had many of the fruits of success or even the stable comforts of the working class also desire a modicum of the middle-class comfort they are taught to believe that school will provide them. In moving beyond thinking of schools as simply institutions of learning to thinking of them also as institutions of social interaction, the dynamics of students within the schooling process becomes

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much more complex and often ambiguous. During my fieldwork, school came to represent not only academic success, but privilege and success, suggesting that poor Whites experience "schooling" in a paradoxical way. School vaguely represents them and their chances of representing school ideals are nil even though their skin is White. The irony of social class I witnessed bears this out in poor White students' (and marginal students' in general) reactions to the institution of education and the ideology of achievement. This in-depth exposure to the process of schooling and learning from an alternative, marginal perspective has allowed me to perceive school differently from how it is often presented. For a large segment of the school population schooling is not quite as strong a determinant of success as it is of failure, unintentionally perhaps, presenting itself as a cruel, unforgiving environment in one sense. As Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972) wrote, to understand how the struggle for freedom and dignity has become destructive, it is important to note the value people place on knowledge through formal education, in particular, as a key to success and greater access to privilege. "Certified knowledge" for the workingclass individual is not dignifying but really a sham, they write. So "what needs to be understood is how the class structure in America is organized so that the tools of freedom became sources of indignity (Sennett and Cobb 1972: 30, emphasis added). To conclude, my addition here to general literature on schooling and culture is the paradoxical poor White experience and how it simultaneously differs and synthesizes with the dominant White experience, perpetuating the promise that school equals social and economic success. Poor White students navigate through categories of assumption differently from other stereotypical marginal groups, believing and disbelieving in the ideals of achievement ideology. In going to school each day, these students experience firsthand patterned ways of social class construction and the meaning of their paradox moreso perhaps than in any other place. It is in school that they are bombarded in a more direct and distinct way—mainly because they are White—with discourses and images to succeed and do well. Student narratives in this chapter expose many of the ways they meet this challenge and the labyrinth of contradictions schooling contains.

Chapter 3 Encounters: Intersections and Collisions

In my frequent tunnel-vision pursuits to gather data, I sometimes forgot the cultural and racial package I carried forth with me into people's lived spaces. In truth, most often I was not as conscious of my Blackness as I was of my status as a researcher on a quest for information and experiences. Throughout my fieldwork White people I encountered were frequently surprised (to put it mildly in describing some situations) to see or learn that I am Black, or not White. Black people were just as perplexed, nearly as often first because many of them had never imagined a Black anthropologistresearcher-academic-writer and assumed before meeting me that anyone who held such titles was certainly White. Kven after meeting me many Black folks were still surprised to learn that I was studying White folks. As a result, I learned more about the dynamics of cultural, social, and racial boundary assumptions throughout the process of fieldwork by crossing in and out of assumed categorical and identity positions. I emphasis in to note my entry into White experiential spaces, while out relates to my own experience in stepping outside of some of my own unchallenged notions about myself, that is, my historical and cultural race space in particular, in relation to others. Consequently, I traveled through my field experience carrying on the one hand the obvious sullied shield of Blackness and on the other hand the not-so-obvious yet potent parcel of privilege and power. Such racial ambiguity is the highlight of the following narratives

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as I reflect on the reactions and responses White folk revealed when they encountered privilege (or social class status) in the form of Blackness in three different contexts, each no doubt a paradox going against their assumptions, and my own at times as well. Black Surprise

Students at Northtown High found my presence curious. Without my solicitation, one White student made the following comment. Student: We heard that there was this an-thro-po-lo-gist here doing some kind of study, but I was surprised when 1 found out it was you. Why'?

Student: Because you don't, look like one, you know? What does an anthropologist look like'?

Student: You know, like some White, geeky guy with a beard and glasses or something. Oh?

Perhaps a better question lor the student would have been: What color or class is an anthropologist supposed to he? But even that was not necessary to elicit the color reference from the student. Several other White students at Northtown frankly said they did not expect me to be Black. Even some Black students at the high school, who knew I was there doing some kind of research, noticed that each day I ventured into the lunchroom I mingled with White students. One Black student commented: Student: Hey, aren't you doing some kind of study about students here [at the high school]? Yes, I am.

Student: Then how come we [he and his friends standing next to him] never see you talking to any Black students? Why don't you ask us some stuff about this place?

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Because I'm doing a study about White students. Student: White students! What about them? Why are you [a Black researcher?] studying White people? That's a good question. That's what I'm here trying to find out.

Another time not so much my presence but my intention is what surprised the Black male principal at Northtown. In his office one day I explained that part of my research focused on social class dynamics among high school students and that was what led me to Northtown High. "Oh," he replied assuredly, "so you're here to study Black students?" 1 told him, no, I was at his school to interview and interact with low-income White students. He stared at me incredulously for a moment and repeated, "White students?" I went on to explain my research in more detail. He shook his head, said that this approach was certainly "different," and wished me good luck.

Linda walked to the door and peered outside. A half hour earlier I had called her and told her 1 wanted to come to her house and meet with her and her family and possibly include them in my research. Prior to meeting that day, our only conversation was via the telephone. I stood outside. She opened the door. Linda: Hi ... ?|looking somewhat curious or surprised], Uh, yes, Linda, I just called you. . . . I'm . . . the. researcher doing work on . . . Linda: Oh? Well . . . Oh, corne in. Come in!

Once Linda got over her initial confusion and discomfort, she told me soon afterward that she "thought I was White" based on our phone conversation. She was twenty-seven, a single mother of two boys. For most of her adult life she relied on welfare programs to house and feed arid her family. Why did you think that [J was white]?

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Linda: You know, being a researcher and all that, I mean, I really didn't think about, it, I just assumed you were White.

Linda was actually surprised not that I was not White, but that I was Black and moving, thinking, and speaking within an assumed and imagined White space. Her assumption of me before our meeting was similar to others that occurred throughout my fieldwork; more than one person told me: "You sound White on the phone." Black Rejection

Linda told me she had a friend who would be interested in talking to me about her experience growing up within the clutches of poverty, Linda's friend, Sarah, lived in Laketown, which was often referred to by outsiders as the place where all the "White trash" lived. Sarah added that Laketown's residents in the past and on occasion still were referred to as "river rats" because the small town is located in an industrial area near a diverted river channel, now a lake. Sarah worked in the cafeteria at a nearby middle school. Shewas a bit anxious when I met her because her husband was temperamental and often caustic; for the past six months he had been unable to find a steady job. For my research I also wanted to talk to White males mired in the paradox of privilege, so 1 asked her if she thought her husband would talk to me. Sarah: I don't know. Probably not. Why?

Sarah: He's . . . I just don't think he would. You think he's ashamed of not being employed?

Sarah: Of course he's that. He's more like pissed off! But that's not the reason he wouldn't talk to you. Then why not?

Sarah: He, I know this may sound bad, but he just doesn't like Black people too much.

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What does thai mean?

Sarah: He just says things about Black people all the time, so I don't think he'd be too happy talking to you. Oh! So ij"I were a While researcher he'd probably talk to me?

Sarah: I don't know, probably. Will you ask him anyway ? You never know.

Sarah: I'll ask, but I know what he's gonna say.

I gave her my phone number and waited a few days, a few weeks. I never heard from Sarah or her husband. Did she ask him? Did he say what she thought he would say and then forbid her from talking to me anymore? I do not know. But based on our short meeting, I cannot help but wonder if my skin color had something to do with the outcome of that encounter. Or was it my privilege? With Sarah's husband, I do not think privilege or class was an issue. For some people and in some situations, like the following I encountered in the field, an attempt was never made to penetrate past my skin color to my social class or privileged self.

While in the field I made purposeful attempts to go and meet people in places most of the assumptions about Black and White and about social class difference warned against going. I reasoned that one of the best ways to come to understand nuanced subjective and objective responses to the intersecting currents of race and social class was to somehow find ways to force the two conceptual realities to make contact. The following experience is one of those anxious close encounters. People in Midway told me about a bar on the outskirts of the city where many "disenfranchised" White males often hung out. Some people called it a biker bar. Others called it a roughneck or redneck joint, conjuring images of wild, reckless men hanging around all day and night wallowing in angry bliss. Certainly a place I, a Black

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male, had no business whatsoever walking into, let alone trying to strike up a conversation about poor Whites and Black privilege. I drove out there one night during the middle of the week. I reasoned that a weeknight crowd would not be as volatile as a weekend crowd, of course, all the time a bit cautious. All the time full of assumptions myself—despite my veneer as a polysituational, cleessentiali/ed social scientist. It was late summer, so there were a few motorcycles in the parking lot along with some cars and pickup trucks. I parked and sat there in my car for a few minutes. I heard faint music and voices seeping out from the building. 1 took a deep breath and walked in the door. Immediately I began to question my own power and position, a prime example of the paradox of privilege, and fixed my conscious gaze on my race, my elemental, essentialized, vulnerable self. The self I had worked so hard to expand and complexify, yet the same self I reverted to almost naturally for security, understanding, and rootedness in a confused and hostile social and cultural world. I stood there in the doorway of the bar as a methodological tool of sorts, a reaction test. Wondering, with trepidation and hope, if my privilege, which had seduced others so well so far during my ficldwork, would again shelter me and lure some of the people in the bar into conversations with me. I walked to the bar first, seeking out the bartender as a buffer, before I ventured into their world of oral constructions and stories. Since I was so unsure, so unstable, I felt like I needed an insider to get me closer to the people I wanted to talk to and farther away from my own rapidly surfacing fears and insecurities. Someone near the bar muttered to himself it seemed, "Can you fucking believe it?" The truth was that, no, I could not believe it. But there I was hearing these hot verbal assaults; there, seemingly naked and Black, suddenly questioning all of my lofty credentials. The people in the bar probably thought I was lost and I sort of felt that way too. I looked at the bartender, ready to say something to him, but he beat me to it. "Can I help you, buddy?" I told him who I was arid what 1 was there to do. I asked him if he could just point out one or two people who he thought would not mind talking to me, would not mind me asking a few questions, and from there I would be on my own. If no one would talk to me, I had already decided that I

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would just leave. He motioned two men over to the bar. I introduced myself, and we sat there at the bar and began talking. Now that 1 had tentatively crossed a boundary of assumption into limited acceptance, my presence with others in the bar was not quite as unsettling. I learned from this encounter at the bar that night (and subsequent nights) that I never would really penetrate this particular White space. The people 1 met at the bar were welcoming, but in a very deliberate way. During some of our conversations men would effortlessly hurl racial remarks into the discussion (e.g., "Those Niggers in Southtown need to get off their lazy asses and get jobs" or "The fucking Mexicans got all the jobs and are having babies all over the damn place. We need to send all those wets [short for wetbacks, referring to people of Mexican descent who enter the United States illegally or legally] back to where they came from!"). Often while sitting there listening to many of these narratives from marginalized White folk, I began to realize that I was somewhat of a nonentity in their space. Not that they were indifferent to my presence, but rather, it seemed, they were aware of their space and if I wanted to be a part of it, at least as an observer, they were riot going to stifle their sensibilities for me. "As is," is what 1 witnessed. Perhaps because "as is" is what they wanted me to see. Just as they were to me, I became to them a curiosity. A joke of sorts. I was tolerated, but never really welcomed largely because I was not White and marginalized like them. Wre really had no connection, as far as they could see. They let me into their world for a few nights during that summer, but for each meeting they always reserved subtle and not-so-subtle ways of reminding me arid themselves that I was first and foremost not like them in skin color or class. My experience at this bar revealed how privilege can become shadowed by race, or in my case, Blackness. Depending on the situation, as I have suggested throughout this work, privilege carries clout but it does not always transcend race. Many of the patrons in the bar situated themselves dead center in the victim circle and therefore had little sympathy for me, my race, or my fragile privilege in this sphere. Male patron: You're an anthropologist, huh? How'dyou get. a job like that?

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It's not a job really, yet. I'm studying to be an anthropologist. I'm still really a student.

Male patron: Whatever! You still get to travel and shit like that and get paid for it, don't you? Sort of, yeah.

Male patron: Well how'dyou land something like that? / studied for it. I worked for it.

Male patron: Oh, so you're working now, I guess. Sitting here asking us all these dumb-ass questions. Why did you decide to study us [Whites] anyway? Why didn't you study them people in [Southtown, Blacks] and find out why they're draining the government [on welfare programs] and driving the crime rate sky high [gang/crack-cocaine-related crimes]?" The man said this all the time aware that many of the White women and many of his friends who frequented the bar were currently or had been welfare program recipients, a fact that had come up in earlier discussions with other people. Because I wanted to study another group, a different group.

Male patron: Oh, so we're different, huh? You know what? I bet this makes you feel good, don't it? Being able to sit around a bunch of White people and listen to them talk about how poor they are. . . . Because you got all these degrees and shit and money coming in, you look at us like we ain't shit, huh? No, I don't.

Male patron [abruptly, leaping up from the table]: Fuck this shit, man. I don't want to talk about this shit no more. It's fucking pissing me off. His buddies in the bar had to restrain the man from getting too upset and possibly attempting to turn our verbal debate into a physical debate. This was certainly a precarious situation, I thought, first because of the threat of violence, and second, because I was outnumbered many to one. Two guys took him outside and they left for the night. Some of the other people at the table said he was "just drunk and hot-tempered in general" and that my being in the bar did not help any.

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What was that all about'?

Another male patron: Nothing really. I guess you just pushed the wrong buttons. How?

Patron: C'mon, man! Black people just don't come in here. You walk in here and on top of that want to talk to people, and on top of that talk to us about being poor? No matter what people in here are [unemployed or welfare program recipients] they still got some pride. And most folks in here ain't, about to believe that they are down so low that a Black person can just walk in here and think he's better than them. You know I don't think that!

Patron: I know that, but it still don't matter. The only reason you've even been able to come here these few nights so far and not get your ass kicked was because we were sort of curious about what you were doing. Maybe you was a cop or something? Didn't none of us want to mess around and kick the shit out of a cop. You seemed all right, so some of us talked to you and spread the word not to fuck with you. But since you ain't a cop, you best be getting done pretty quick and stay the hell away from here because we always got hotheads coming in here looking for trouble. You know what I mean? Now you can think what you want. We ain't no damn Klan members and all that. It's just the way things are. I think you'd be chancing it if you show up out here too many more times. Now that ain't no threat. I'm just telling you like it is.

After three visits (that night with the near confrontation being the last), I left the bar and some of the people who frequented there. I realized that despite what they thought of me arid my racial self, it was the very ironic element of my identity that we both relegated or denied—privilege based on social class position—that perhaps allowed me to walk out of that smoky tavern unscathed, away from a small collective life of unemployment, self-doubt, and misdirected anger that this group of marginalized Whites was unsure how to escape. No doubt privilege in the fragile form of Blackness once again sustained me. Perhaps people think they know what and who Black folks in the United States are because they know the way they are commonly presented and represented in the popular consciousness. But it is precisely when an assumption such as Blackness steps outside of its

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narrow definition that it becomes an anomaly of sorts, ambiguous even. Not really Black. Certainly not White. But possessing many of the characteristics of both—Black skin and experience, White privilege and authority. Black Neutrality

In this last context, the question of privilege and the definition of identity take on a different meaning with the difference here resting on the position of neutrality and avoidance. My fieldwork experience led me across the spectrum of Whiteness in search of its constructions and each time my Blackness took on a new form, a different meaning to myself arid others. During an interview at a suburban restaurant, several middle- to upper-class employees commented on the hopelessness of lowincome residents in Midway—primarily Whites. I had the following exchange with Kim, a nineteen-year-old waitress from an upper middle-class family. Kim: You know its funny, but you can tell, you can just tell when a poor White family comes in here. How? Kim: Just by the way they're dressed, by the way they act. People [servers] here will say, "I'm not going to wait on that table!" Is that right? Why, what's so different about them? Kirn: I don't know, you know? I mean, they don't tip well. They're kind of rude and stuff like that. They're just different.

Not only Kim, but five of the six people sitting around talking to me that night did not hold lower-income Whites in any kind of esteem. To them, poverty was a ploy, an individual's excuse to not contribute to the progress of society—largely through work and school. During the conversation, another waitress asked me about my background, where 1 grew up, and how I attained my college education. I told them how I grew up in a working-class family in Southtown. Suddenly f became the topic of discussion as a shining example of diligence.

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Audi, another waitress: See, we all know Blacks are treated pretty bad here [in the United States], but they still have the will to do something with themselves. What do you mean by that? Andi: I mean look atyoul Look at all the stuff you're doing. You didn't let your race hold you back.

Actually, I wanted to tell this waitress that of course I never let my race hold me back, at least not consciously. Rather, it was others throughout history and even sporadically in the present who arbitrarily used my race to attempt to hold me (or Black folk in general) back. So. . .? Andi: So, for White people there is really no excuse [echoing the comment made by a suburban teen during my interviews with Eastown students] because they are not treated differently because of their race. What about discrimination based on class? Andi: Class and race aren't the same thing.

While this group seemed socially indifferent and sheltered in their privileged positions, other affluent Whites who called themselves "very liberal" approached the subjects of poverty, race, and class more sympathetically, albeit from a somewhat naive perspective. Below is a conversation 1 had with Carol, a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate; she and a roommate were moving into a duplex in a not-so-tranquil neighborhood and were preparing it when I talked to them. Carol: You know it's pretty cool these days to be poor. 1 mean it's like a political statement. Like living down here. 1 feel like I'm hip, part of a larger thing. Really, I don't know if this neighborhood is rough or not, but I can handle myself. I'm a big girl. I don't need mommy and daddy hanging around, you know?

Carol, more so than her roommate, was particularly excited about the aspect of her move that landed her "in the city," toting her

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struggling-college-grad status. However, in the same breath she talked sympathetically about how she could not imagine how many of the poor White students I talked to had no plans to go to college, as she had. Carol: How can they not go to college . . . what arc they going to do? Get jobs, they say.

Carol: Doing what? With no education, what can they do . . . ? If I lived in that situation I think I'd just try harder to go to school and stuff. . . . But maybe not going to school is their situation. I don't know. With us, all of my friends, we all went [to college]. That's just the way we saw it. We never imagined any one of us not going. Look at you. I'm sure you had it hard [an assumption because of my skin color perhaps, because I never told her about my background], but you got your education and are still getting it. That's what. I mean. But what about race and class barriers? Do you think everyone has the same opportunities'?

Carol: Of course they do! If they work hard at it and are good at what they do, people don't look at race and stuff.

Carol seemed comfortably oblivious to the options her privilege in society's racial and class structure afforded her based on a number of conversations and observations I made. The very next day, when Carol's father and brother came to help her move in, her father noticed dead bugs, garbage throughout the basement, and some old exposed wiring. He told her that she could not move into the dilapidated apartment. To get out of their lease, Carol's lather, a prominent local businessman, told her to stop payment on the rent check, demand their deposit back ($450), and if these demands were not met he would sue the landlord. A day or two later Carol and her roommate moved into a much nicer, more acceptable duplex in a buffer neighborhood, not quite near the "inner city" where most of my family still lived, but also not too far away from the comfortable reaches of affluence, stately brick homes, and manicured lawns.

Chapter 4 Income and Work: Making Ends Meet, Barely

Surviving on Welfare

A "Pretty" White Girl Caught in a Safety Net of Shame

Sharon, thirty-one, and her two daughters live in a federally subsidized apartment in a racially mixed central part of town. Her daughters are ages twelve and four. For the last two years, Sharon has attended a work-education program for unemployed mothers. Her hope is that the program will teach her some basic business skills (interviewing, punctuality, typing, filing) and open a door in her future to a good-paying job. "You know, being on welfare is not as easy as people think," she said. "If I didn't have to be on it, I wouldn't." Sharon is serious about the program. She is on time to each class, prepared for the lessons, on target to graduate the following spring. But her prospects, even though she is full of hope, are few. That is largely because while in class she is a model student, but when she leaves class her world caves in to occasional nights of heroin highs and liquor drinking. "I'm more of an alcoholic than I am a drug addict," she said. "But, it's strange, because I still function pretty much. By looking at me you really couldn't tell. Bu, that's how my life is—pretty confused for the most part." A fundamental question that lingers about poor people like Sharon is how do people who have no jobs, savings, or access to steady sources of adequate income survive day to day in a capitalist society? 1 For women, in particular, government welfare programs are a primary answer arid the safety net that keeps them from falling into the homeless ranks in the United States (F.din 1991). In the state in which I conducted my research, about 90 percent of welfare aid

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recipients were female, and Whites made up about 56 percent of all recipients. 2 My aim here is not to embark on a long discussion about the politics of welfare. More than anything these few statistics serve as a contextual frame for the following discussion. My interest in this chapter is to explore how poor Whites acquire money at the expense of their assumption, which is that White folks are not recipients of certain kinds of economic aid. Specifically, I am interested in how White families who arc part of "the system" are viewed and view themselves in relation to their assumed privileged status as Whites. By looking at Sharon, she is right. People probably would not decipher or negatively assume a lot of things about her person or her life. She is White, petite, blue-eyed, blonde, very gracious, cordial, and articulate. In a crowd of Whites, the crowd becomes her. She becomes the crowd, carrying along with her all of the glorified assumptions of privilege. Sharon: When people find out. I'm on welfare, they can't, believe it. I mean look at me. I'm blonde, blue-eyed, pretty good looking. "You can have the world," they tell me that all the time. I suppose because I'm White, people feel I have a better chance or something. And that I haven't already stumbled onto that path just amazes them. As though there's no reason on earth why I should be struggling on welfare and drugs like I do. After all, I am White, right? [She smiles and takes a big puff of her cigarette.]

Throughout my conversations with Sharon the issue of looks or beauty often floated to the top of our discussions and interactions with other people. This led me to consider her experience, in particular, in poverty from another angle as well that tied into perceptions of Whiteness. Murray Webster and James Driskill Jr. (1983), for example, found that attractiveness is often linked to many other positive elements of a person's character. In general beauty confers status, based on perceptions at least. From my observations of Sharon, it became obvious that people perceived her to be emotionally and financially well-off mainly because oi the way she looked. However, I realized that beauty alone was not the qualifying factor. That Sharon was White and "beautiful" (i.e., fitting the common image of media representations of symmetrically correct women with

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misty blue eyes and silky hair) garnered her extra privilege from people around her. But once people observed or realized how she failed to live up to their perceptions of her looks and color, they scorned her for squandering her natural gift in poverty.3 As I spent time with Sharon, I began to see how in some ways she was mocking the whole imagery and metaphor of Whiteness as pure and unsullied. She laughed at the naiveness of her acquaintances who assumed simply because she had "the look" that that alone would propel her carefree through life. Sharon: You know, when I think about it, I'm going to these classes and meetings all the time lor what? I'm trying to plan for the future when often 1 have a hard time planning the next, few hours of my life. Of course, my girls [daughters] are my biggest motivation. But, that doesn't motivate me to the point where I can just walk into some place and start a career tomorrow. You know, I have a past. A pretty rough past and it's hard to just walk away from that. People who've never really had problems or setbacks in life just don't understand. For me, for a lot of White people I know, life just isn't like it is on TV. What's that mean, "not like on TV"?

Sharon: You know. Life is perfect for them. Their only hassles are that they can't make $2 million dollars instead of a million. Or the women, who are gorgeous already, worry about whether or not men will look at them and want them. Stuff like that. All the stuff they do is petty stuff. A lot of people think most White people live like that. You really think so ?

Sharon: Sure! Until they discover otherwise, that's the initial impression. Sharon considers herself only an "initial impression." She is determined to at least try to move as far away from her rough past as she can—a past, she revealed, that created her from a short weekend affair her alcoholic mother had with a married, traveling businessman. Sharon: He denied it for a long time. I didn't meet, him until I was fourteen or fifteen. I even lived with him for a while [almost a year], but his wife didn't like me and didn't want to have anything to do with me. We tried that father-daughter-reunitcs-and-lives-happily-ever-after thing. But

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that didn't work out well at all. He's one of those six-figure, executive types [in California]. But I don't sec any of the money. I don't hold anything against him, really.

Sharon, like many of the people I encountered during my fieldwork among poor Whites, shattered many of the common images of a racialized welfare experience. Are there limes when being White works against you, I mean like when people discover that you're also on welfare'? Sharon: Oh! Then it's certainly a different story. How? Sharon: People are pretty accepting of me and my kids. That's at least until they dig further, f'll go someplace and be talking with people, and then someone will ask me what I do and when I tell them, my stock goes down to zero. [She tells people the truth, that she's unemployed.] Because I don't work and don't have a man supporting me they naturally assume I'm on welfare. And then they want nothing to do with me. I notice it too mostly when I'm in the [grocery] store and I pull out my booklet of food stamps, you should see the way people look at me. Even the checkout girls.4 How do they ? Sharon: Like I'm some kind of criminal. Really! Like they're surprised to see me pull out a book of [food] stamps. It used to make me mad as hell but now f just ignore them. People are ignorant. Why do you think they're surprised? Sharon: Probably because I'm White, mostly. I mean, if a Black woman were in the store and did the same thing, 1 think people would expect that of her. Like it's normal for Black people to be on welfare, it's kind of expected. But a White person, Oh no! Something's really wrong with me.

The scene of a White person (or any person for that matter) using food stamps, one of the most vivid symbols of poverty and lower-class status in the United States, was a recurring narrative in my research. White students at Northtown High mentioned similar situations. They talked about trying to hide from friends, as chil-

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dren, when they went to the store with their mothers to avoid being discovered. "It was always embarrassing," one student said. "Some of my friends would eall me and my sister White trash because we used food stamps." For Sharon, however, it has become a way of life. Being on welfare is no longer embarrassing and because of that, she said, she finds a veneer of dignity in her struggle and the possibility that one day she will be independent of welfare aid and her vices. 1 interviewed several other White women on public welfare programs, some of whom will be introduced in Chapter 6. While I attempt to avoid the inherent analytical problems involved in generalizing about the individual experiences of these women, I did, however, note some similarities. For one, women I interviewed overwhelmingly felt as though they had no right or reason to subsist on welfare because they were White.5 Even though lor them, the actuality of their economic and social lives lands them at the near bottom of the social class ladder, some women (arid men as we will see in a later section of this chapter) still cling to the dominant image of another element of themselves, that of privileged Whiteness, to buoy their self-esteem and identity. And this seems to work from a social distance, since most people are not aware of what or who other people are. At a grocery store, for example, Sharon is not really assumed to be anything or anyone, just normal. While most people would not care either way, the point is that she is seldom judged by her experience which is assumed because she is White, to be a positive one, a representative one, until she exposes symbols of her actual experience such as food stamps. Our discussion of privilege and prestige elicited these comments. Sharon: Maybe some people would call it a privilege that I'm not stereotyped, like say you [the Black researcher] probably are. But, then again, like we talked about I am stereotyped, but in a positive way. Still, neither way does much to change my life. Because I'm White and "pretty" has not landed me a good job yet. It hasn't landed me one of those rich executive husbands. It hasn't even paid for a reliable car I can drive. 1 mean I try, you know, but I can't change who I am. I can't just be one of those suburban soccer moms who spend all day carting their kids around, shopping and cooking dinner for their families. I'm on welfare, struggling to get through my life and raise my two girls. This whole idea that all While

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people are living a carefree life is ridiculous. Like I told you before, it's television. People believe what they see on television and most of the White people you see on television are doing OK. No worries, no trouble. Ha! Excuse my French, but it's all bullshit!

Darlene: Working Where the Money Is In this section, I look at a situation in which a White woman has to leave her paradoxical social class comfort zone arid travel into privileged Whiteness to make a living. Darlene was introduced earlier in Chapter 2 ("School"). When I met her, she was a senior at Northtown High on track to graduate in May 1996. She lived with her sister who has two children and relies on welfare aid. "I feel sorry for her and the kids sometimes," Darlene said. "But it bothers me how she uses the [welfare] system. Like, I hear this all the time from my sister that it doesn't bother her if she quits her job because she'll just get more food stamps."6 Darlene moved out of her parents' house while still in high school because she said she did not get along with her father. She and her mother are close, "but my mother just goes along with whatever he [her father] says most of the time." While Darlene is linked to poverty and welfare through her sister— unlike Sharon, who directly relies on welfare assistance—the significance here of Darlene's experience is the window it provides into a common situation in which people have to leave their cultural and class space to find work. In Midway, most of the betterpaying service jobs are located in the booming suburbs. Darlene lived "on the Black side" of town (Southtown), but she worked in Eastown at a pizza restaurant. What is revealing about her job and her position among a different group of privileged coworkers is the way they come to understand her and try to fit her into their own zone of social comfort. Where she works (in a strange social class atmosphere) and with whom she works often disturb her. Darlene: When I first started out there I really felt out of place because all of the other kids there had money and stuff. They'd ask me stupid shit like was I in a gang, did 1 have a gun, because they had heard that students at Northtown carry guns to school. Do you like working lliere now'?

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Darlene: Not really, but. I need the money. What bothers you about working there? Darlene: It's not the job. The job is cool. It's the people. They're just so snobby. They look down on everybody. Like I've worked there now for about one and a half years and they still look at me different. How'? Darlene: They have all kinds of [images of Southtown and Northtown], Like [SouthtownJ is a ghetto compared to their big houses in the suburbs. They just think the school [Northtown High] and the whole area is trashy. Do they think you're "trashy," too ? Darlene: I know they do, even though they don't say it to my face.

She told a story of how once a girl from her job borrowed one of her purses and said she would bring it to her house when she was done with it. "I told her she could bring it to work because I live far, far away," hoping the suburban girl would do that because Darlene was a bit worried and a bit embarrassed about the possibility of the girl driving through "the 'hood" to her house. The girl insisted, Darlene said, because "I guess she wanted to see where I lived or something. She came over and everything and I could see she was scared as hell. It was kind of funny. She was this little preppy girl and she came over to the 'hood for the first time in her life." Darlene laughed and said she thought the whole episode was ridiculous because the girl was so sheltered. Were you embarrassed to invite her to your house? Darlene: No, not really . . . well, maybe. She was more uncomfortable than I was though. She probably felt like I do when I'm around her friends out there [in Eastown].

Darlene noted that she catches herself defending her school and invariably herself quite often in the company of her suburban coworkers. She said they often toss around pejorative remarks about Blacks, Mexican Americans, and poor White folks, ignoring that her world is intimately connected to all of these people. As

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mentioned, she lives in a predominately Black neighborhood with her sister who relies on welfare assistance. Her boyfriend is Black. Many of her closest friends at Northtown High are of different races. When she considers her life, she said she actually appears odd to herself and understands somewhat how she may appear odd to others. Darlene: When I'm at school talking to some of my White friends, my Black friends will come over to me and say "Girl, don't be talking to those White girls." My boyfriend does the same thing sometimes, like when 1 say something, he'll say "Don't talk like that." I say, "why, like what?" He says, "Because you sound White." I'm like . . . I am White! A lot of Black people are like "[Darlene's] confused, she don't know who she is." People out in [Eastown] wouldn't like me or my friends.

Darlene's experience may seem unusual and paradoxical to many (but at the same time very familiar to many low-income Whites in Southtown or Northtown) primarily because her circumstances and environment force her to cross so many class, cultural, and racial boundaries. She admits that the burden of being White for her does not hinge on the assumptions people make of her: "I can care less what people think," she said. Yet her Whiteness makes her a constant target of suspicion in the multicolored world she journeys through. While many of her Black friends, she says, "like me a lot," other Blacks, "especially some Black girls and some White girls, think I'm a slut who just likes to sleep with Black men." So her position and purpose, as a White teenager, is questioned from all sides, it seems. Scorned and adored by Blacks, marginalized yet assumed to be part of the White idyllic, Darlene lives up to no tangible ideal. In the eyes ol many people, and even her own, she is enigmatic, an anomaly within the fragile categories of race and class. Work, then, for Darlene is a must, partly, she said, as a way to avoid ending up like her sister and also as a way to cultivate pride in herself. "I work for what I want," she said. "I ain't like those kids I work with . . . their parents buy them everything!" That this work takes her out of her cultural and social element into a sphere of condescending attitudes is the price she must pay for that independence.

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Proud Marginalized White Men

Douglas: Work Today, Paid Today

Douglas hangs out at a labor employment agency about three days a week, waiting for work, which he sometimes gets and sometimes does not. He is a day laborer, one of growing number of mostly men who are hired through temporary labor agencies that act as brokers between employers and needed workers. "Today I'm going out on this construction job," he said. That day, he would work for about eight hours, mainly helping clean up debris at a construction site. Most of the jobs advertised by the labor businesses involve low-skill tasks. At the end of the day, Douglas received a check for $48 (before taxes). About, ten other men sat waiting either outside on the steps of the building, where they could smoke, or inside quietly reading magazines and perusing job listings in the local newspaper, waiting for work to call on them. Of the men there, two were Black, five were Latino, and three were White, Douglas included. On that morning, I went to work with him, telling the agency that I was a college student in the city for the summer looking to make some spending money. A foreman from a construction company arrived at the labor agency, picked up Douglas and me and drove us out to the work site. It was a place full of dusty debris from a large apartment complex being gutted and eventually renovated. Our job that day was to haul all of the smashed plasterboard arid splintered wooden pieces to nearby dumpsters. Equipped with hard hats, safety eyewear, boots, and gloves, we began our workday. Douglas, twenty-nine years old, lives with his parents sometimes and different women at other times. He is his own man, but a fail ure in his own eyes. Douglas: Look at. me, man! Here working doing this shit a couple of days a week. Why don't you try to find a full-time job doing something belter?

Douglas: Something like what? I don't have a high school degree [he dropped out of high school his senior year]. I've gone into all kinds of

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places and filled out applications all the way from factory work, which is mostly computers [high-tech] these days, to dishwashing jobs. Never heard back from none of them. So I do this to at least make something. I mean, 1 look. It seems like I'm always looking for work, but work ain't looking for me.

Douglas snugly fits into the category of what many politicians and scholars call the working poor (Swartz and Weigert 1995), defined by Jennifer Gardner and Diane Herz (1992) as people who have devoted at least half of the year to working or looking for work and who live in families with incomes below the official poverty level.7 Douglas gets frustrated often because he feels that since he at least makes an effort ("Rather than sitting back on my ass [referring to collecting welfare assistance, which two of the women he occasionally stays with actually do] or just hanging out on the street all day"), he should reap more sustainable rewards, not realizing that effort does not always equal outcome. Well, if you make the effort you say you do, why don't people hire you?

Douglas: Shit, I don't know . . . seems like these days the only people getting jobs are Mexicans. What do you mean ?

Douglas: They have all the good beef packing [company] jobs. You're starting to see them at almost every construction site around here or in maintenance jobs. Man, they arc just taking over a lot of the [low-skilled] labortype jobs that I do. So why do you think they're hired and you aren't?

Douglas: Because jobs don't have to pay them as much as they would me, because I'm a citi/.en. Citizen?

Douglas: Yeah, man! Most of the workers at these meat plants and that are illegals. They come here [to the United States] to work for almost nothing by our standards. Compared to what they would make in their own country, working up here they make a killing. How do you know they aren't citizens?

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Douglas: Man, I see them getting rounded up all the time on the news. Busloads of them. OH?

Douglas: Hell, look at this place [the site we worked that day]. I counted about ten Mexicans so far. A few years ago, you wouldn't sec any. And most of them are full-time or seasonal [employees]. I can barely get on here as a temporary [worker].

Douglas, low-skilled and full of high expectations, looked outside of himself to find reasons why he could not secure steady work at a well-paying job and found a scapegoat in people of Mexican descent in the United States either as legal citizens or not. Michelle Fine and her co-authors argue that White working- and lower-class males, like Douglas, "are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the 'other' as a means of framing identities" (Fine, Weis, Addelston, and Marusza 1997: 52). I will elaborate on this later, but for now I broach the blended topics of identity, race, and privilege just to highlight insights into Douglas's bewilderment and frustration with his marginality. This theme of the usurping other is recorded in other notable works that focus on the rise of nativism and nationalism among White working- and lower-class groups (MacLeod 1987) and even among White middle-class groups (Newman 1993). In writing about the disgruntled residents of a solidly middle-class suburb, Katherine Newman presents a telling portrait of a privileged family displaced by what she calls "illegitimate elites." The arrival of well-to-do immigrants and sojourners from Asia, in combination with other forces that have boosted real estate prices around the country, has brought that much more affluence to Fleasanton. But because the Oran and Katherine MacDowells were displaced in the process, their parents were left feeling that their own identities as members of the middle class were under assault. Oran is upset, because he feels robbed of his birthright [middle-class status], and his parents are angry as well, for they see their new Asian neighbors as the proximate cause of Oran's displacement. (Newman 1993: 157)

As I spent more time with Douglas, I came to realize that effort alone was not his most tangible ticket to a more stable job and

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lifestyle. As seen above, Douglas often specifically referred to Latino workers as his nemeses in the workplace, without even questioning (at least out loud or to me) the role employers (all White) had in the hiring of workers. His belief that "jobs don't have to pay them as much" suggests that he believes employers themselves are trying to enhance their profit margins, but Douglas still could not seem to see past the darker laces of Latino workers, on whom he squarely placed all blame. So back to my point: effort was not Douglas's key to open a door to stability. In fact, he made minimum effort at finding work or accepting his role as a father of two children by two different women. During the three weeks I spent time on and off with him, he worked on average about two days a week through the day labor agency or sometimes cutting lawns in his parents' neighborhood. He dressed up and went out to look for what he called a "regular" job two times in those three weeks. As with the family in the excerpt from the Newman quote above, Douglas somehow thought life would (and should) be easier for him. He grew up in a stable working-class household along with a brother and a sister, both siblings older by a few years, both now married with children, working at stable jobs and careers, and living in other states. In scattered conversations we talked about why he thought he should be more successful like his siblings, both ol whom have high school diplomas (his brother attended college as well). Douglas: You know, where I grew up most people worked somewhere. Had their own house and a nice car and that. I mean that's how I grew up. I mean, I know I wasn't loaded [rich] like some of the kids who went to our school or like those kids [in Eastown], but we wasn't struggling either, you know? Yeah.

Douglas: Things were just different for my mom and pop. How"? What do you mean, different?

Douglas: I mean they just had stuff, you know. It's like they knew when they were younger and that that, they could get a job, a good-paying job. They didn't need to be rocket, scientists! These days things are different?

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Douglas: Hell yeah! Way different!

Douglas never overtly mentioned it, other than discussing the odyssey of workers of Mexican descent, but race helped formulate his thoughts on his hapless existence. His life was supposed to be easier, he implied, not because he made much effort, but mainly because he was White and even more so because he was male. In relation to illegal immigrants and welfare recipients, he viewed himself as somehow being better off morally, socially, and ostensibly economically. Yet, his life was intimately tied to the shaming benevolence of welfare and unemployment, while the ten full-time/ seasonal Mexican American workers he pointed out at the work site and assumed to be noncitizens, for example, were U.S.-born residents (I later checked with the employer) with sound, consistent work histories in the construction field. Nevertheless, Douglas never assumed himself to be much less than the positive image of Whiteness in which he has been constructed, despite many of his social and personal shortcomings. Me wants to believe that low-income Whites are getting the squeeze. He vividly reveals through his narratives why he is bewildered and frustrated as to why—even with few work skills, no high school diploma, and scant motivation—he cannot make it on Whiteness alone especially since images of success and privilege mirror him, at least in skin color, at least on the surface. Jack: Self-Employed and Struggling Jack is the proud owner of an outdoor auto repair and hauling shop: "I don't work for nobody and I ain't unemployed." He has a point, in some ways. By fixing cars and trucks, hauling junk, and selling old engine and vehicle parts Jack makes less than $10,000 a year. An OK chunk of change some might think, but for a family of seven it is a monthly struggle to make economic ends meet. As mentioned earlier, the ethnographic data in this chapter is not wholly about working but more an exploration of the meaning of work and how people come to acquire money to survive in a capitalist society. Jack's experience fits well here because since he owns his own business he is showered by many of his friends with the standard accolades, images, and assumptions of "entreprerieurship"

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(autonomy, power, skill, self-sufficiency, wealth). At the same time, Jack is also, by the federal government's standards, living in poverty, even though his wife sometimes works as a convenience store clerk or at different restaurants as a waitress. Her stay at these jobs usually lasts for a few paychecks. Jack's story is added here to contrast other images of White ownership and business success. While Jack does own his job, he often laments that he is no better off financially or socially because of it. During my fieldwork stay in Midway, I visited Jack on average about two or three days a week, f sat around his auto garage or drove around town with him for a total of about two weeks during which I gathered information through interviews and observations His shop was located on the central east end of Midway's predominately Black neighborhood, Southtown. He, his wife, and five children (ages six months to seven years) lived in a rented house a few blocks from the shop. Jack, who had married at nineteen, was twenty-five years old. His wife, Lori, was twenty-four. Jack had owned the auto repair shop now for about two years. Before that he worked "here and there fixing up cars, f had a job at a car parts store for a while. . . . f was driving around one day and saw this building here had a For Sale sign on it. I got to thinking, that would be a good place to start a shop . . . because f had wanted to do that anyway for a while already." The building and the lot it sat on had basically been abandoned by its previous owner, so Jack bought the property from the city for "practically nothing" and started his business. On a four-foot-by-six-loot board he painted, with what seemed like a shaky hand, in big red letters: "Jack's Auto Repair and Hauling." He opened and closed his shop at irregular times. If someone wanted work done on a car, they would stop by and ask him when would be a good time to bring in their car for service. A day was agreed upon, but often Jack did not honor that date. Either he would not show up or just forgot about it. Most of his work was done on an impromptu or drop-in basis for people who just happened to stop by and drop off a car or truck and leave it with him that day. Depending on the job, he would look it over on the spot and either get to work on it or let it sit for a day or two or three before starting. He did most of the work himself. Although some days

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if one of his friends was sitting in the lot drinking beer and talking the friend would duck under the hood or crawl under a vehicle to lend a hand for free or for the price of a pack of cigarettes and a few beers. For example, one day a woman drove in and said her carneeded an oil change. Jack asked her if she had any oil with her. She told him no, thinking he would have some at his shop. Jack told her to go buy some oil and an oil filter, bring the car back and he would change it for her—which she did! He charged her five dollars, while the going rate at other places in town ranged from fifteen to thirty dollars. He kept no accounting books. Many days his wife and the not-yct-school-age children (three of them) stopped by and sat around the lot. The kids played around the shop while their mother watched them, reprimanding them constantly for playing too near the edge of the busy commercial street in front of the shop or getting grease and grime all over their clothes from playing with all of the automobile parts lying around the area. Jack said he started his business partly because he had a hard time keeping a job working for someone else and also because he believed in the economic fruits of business ownership. By owning a business he thought he could make a handsome living, take care of his family, and ultimately climb out of poverty and dependency. However, Jack learned soon that to simply own a business does not make a person a success. Rather, business ownership for him was more of a struggle. During many of our conversations, Jack talked about how big business undercut the "little guy" like him and how unfair the entrepreneurial market was for those who did not have a lot of capital to jump-start their businesses and expand. His customers were of all races, but most of his inner social crowd were White men he grew up with and hung out with in high school. Of the six friends I met, five were unemployed at the time and another worked in the service department at a large car dealership in the city. Jack presents the image of a portly, oil-splattered man, with long hair, beard, and a cigarette precariously dangling from his lips as he peeks under the hood of a car. But that is just the surface, a construction limited by our own judgments and popular assumptions. In actuality, Jack is someone who really believed when he started his venture that he had a chance to make a good living and gain

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some solid self-respect. In somewhat of a false and defeating sense he already had that. While his friends shower him with compliments ("Man, this is a nice little set up you got here. Lots of potential for some big money" or "Look at ol'Jack here, big businessman!"), Jack just smiles, perhaps not sure what to say or whether to believe the accolades, wondering if he has already lived up to them or ever will. Identity and Work

The very incongruous relationships people in this chapter have with the concept and experience of work reveal much about how they see themselves and how they are seen by others. Herbert Applebaum (1992), in a voluminous historical text exploring the meaning of the concept work, writes that a person's identity is so dependent on "what they do" that who they are has little relevance in our contemporary society. Ultimately, work equals worth. Nonwork, as we saw with Sharon and Douglas, equates almost to worthlessness. The focus of this discussion, however, is not so much about work as it is about perceptions about who does and does not do what kind of work and how these perceptions are associated with color and assumed privilege. Katherinc Newman (f988) documents how perceptions of self and others are distinctly tied to economics and work. In her ethnography on the fallout of corporate downsizing on middleclass families, she shows how people who lived socially and economically sheltered, mainstream lives for the most part were suddenly devastated to find out that they had little self-identity or social worth in their communities outside of their job titles. She quotes a person who lost his job as an executive at a computer hardware firm saying: "All of a sudden everybody stops talking to you. It's like a disease. . . . Friends, associates, best friends . . . start calling you less or stop calling altogether. People don't know what to say. They think they're going to upset you, they don't know how to talk to you. This is when you need friends; people you can associate with" (Newman 1988: 59). Certainly the experience of an unemployed computer company executive is not synonymous with Douglas's or Sharon's situation.

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Yet the way work—or the lack of it—negates or tarnishes all of their respective identities is in many ways similar. Moreover, work alone is not the primary polarizer of the haves and have-nots from what my data reveals. Within the course of my research, it became apparent that Whites suffered a separate stigma from nonwork or marginal work different from that borne by lowincome people of color. When Whiteness is added to the context of nonwork, identities are interrogated in a different manner. Work becomes a secondary identifier after Whiteness. In other words, Sharon and Douglas often alluded to the way they were treated by mainstream society as less than kind once they were "discovered" to be unemployed or on welfare assistance. But the deeper meaning in this, and they noticed it, was that to be unemployed in itself was not so bad, actually. The stigma surfaced from the social fact of being White (and "pretty") and assumed privileged (White and male) and being unemployable. Consequently, not living up to the assumptions about Whiteness in the workplace weighed heavily on the lives of the people in this chapter. Michelle Fine and her coauthors write about White working-class masculinity, noting that out-of-work White males assume they have a manifest edge on "others" (Blacks, Latinos, women) by buying into the White privilege myth (Fine, Weis, Addelston, and Marus/a 1997). As we saw with Douglas, in one sense, he creates and constructs his hapless work identity by blaming and setting up other groups. Fine and her coauthors focus on understanding ways disfranchised White males maintain a sense of self amid rising feminism, turbulent affirmative action debates, arid gay and lesbian rights. What my data suggests, along with that of Fine and her colleagues and others such as David Roediger (1991), is that many lower- and working-class White men search desperately for an outside reason for their own personal stagnation and economic failure, refraining from looking inside at themselves and their lack of education, skills, and cultural "capital" (see Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Fine and her coauthors argue that the preference for marginali/ed White males to see themselves inside a privileged history category but displaced by non-Whites in contemporary society is a key way personal and collective identities are formed among many White males (Fine, Weis, Addelston, and Marusza 1997).

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Work, then, or the process of earning money for labor, becomes a fundamental identifier in all of this. Aligned with work are certain social and cultural assumptions that follow racial lines. As Katherine Newman (1988) suggests about middle-class predominately White managers who suddenly lost their jobs and careers, along with the loss of their own understanding of themselves as it is intimately linked to work came a loss of acceptance and position within the main flow of community and society. Downward mobility is a situation dreaded not just because of the economic consequences but also because of the loss of self-esteem and self-identity, which often goes hand in glove with the work we do (Gamst 1995). To conclude, I have tried to explore work and economics through more of a microcultural and subjective than a macro Marxist/political economy lens, adopting the idea from Sandra Wallman (1979) that "while preoccupations of work are directly concerned with the work of making a living, they are indirectly but equally concerned with the work of personal and social identity" (vi). Expanding on this idea in a later text, John Calagione, Doris Francis, and Daniel Nugent (1992) argue that positivistic discourses on work and labor single these concepts out as the nexus of economy, represented through struggle between dominance and human agency. The meaning of work, they write, has long been represented as merely an economic endeavor linked to class formation. Work, however, along with leisure, popular culture, arid other domains of everyday life will always overlap, they argue. And while people do make sense of themselves through their work, this analysis is helpful because it attempts to present more complex versions of the process of work by folding it into the lived experience and the subjective self. A key question they ask is: "what are the boundaries of or separations between work and non-work and how do these distinctions help create historical representations and self-representations of subjects?" (Calagione, Francis, and Nugent 1992: 4).

Chapter 5 Encounters: Changing Contexts, Changing Characters

Looking back over the earlier set of reflections in Chapter 3 ("Encounters: Intersections and Collisions"), I now want to briefly reflect on some of the ways I have come to interpret paradoxical multiple positions of privilege and social class status. This information is culled from the interviews and interactions I had with people from each of the three previous contexts in Chapter 3, where the narratives recount more specifically how people reacted to my contradictory racial self, albeit wrapped in a de-essentialized package of privilege. In particular many people, Black and White, were unsettled in negative and positive ways because I did not fit their stereotype. Their general definitions of me, and maybe for a moment their narrow racial assumptions, were dislodged. My own definitions of self, especially my privileged self, were also tossed about in this identity storm, forcing me to frankly ask myself: What is the value of my paradoxical privilege, how is it defined from within and without, and how and why does that change in different empirical contexts? Privilege Transcends Race

Linda, to begin, was certainly surprised to see me when I met her, because, as she stated, she did not expect me to be Black. But, as was the case with a number of low-income Whites I met, she was quick to hand me an clement of power that I did not seek but was

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bestowed on me because of my credentials and position as the intellectual interloper. With Linda, this issue was born and died quite soon after we had met a few more times or talked on the phone. While the topic of race did surface, it was directed at other Black people and not at me as though I had somehow, in her mind, transcended that vile category and fallen squarely into the role of researcher/scholar/authority figure. My thoughts on why this happened during my fieldwork can simply be summed up by saying that in many instances when assumptions and actuality collide, the assumptions dissipate. The more I talked to some low-income Whites the more I realized how aware they were of their actual position within the glow of Whiteness and privilege, realizing that it was not reserved for them simply because of their skin color. Rather the material fruits and symbols of privilege could be acquired, it seemed, even by those who did not historically inherit it. For poor Whites, this reality became even more evident in the presence of a Black researcher posing questions about the role of social class and marginality in their lives. Simultaneously, I also questioned the fragile and potent power of my privilege contcxtuali/cd in my Black experience. Such questions surfaced through the meta-assumption of Whiteness and privilege, which glosses over social class positions and seldom even takes into account racial acquisitions of privilege. Race Transcends Privilege

In this next set of encounters privilege metamorphosed yet again. While in the previously discussed encounters, 1 was often just as surprised arid uncomfortable as some of the people I met at the unquestioned authority I wielded, during what 1 call socially hostile encounters that authority came under direct question—not only by others, but by myself as well. As I mentioned before, I was very reluctant to venture into the "roughneck" bar 1 described in Chapter 3. I felt this way mainly because I carried with me certain etched perceptions about hard-core poor White folks, most of them negative and unfounded but nonetheless real and necessary, at least to me, especially since I was entering their space. At the same time I wondered what kind of assumptions they would make about me entering their cultural and racial space. Now, in this situation, privilege was not an asset for me. Through

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my own thinking and I assumed through theirs too, I was reduced, essentialized to the very element of myself that I seemed to transcend a few days before. At the bar, privilege was pushed far into the background, but ironically it was through whatever small remnants of its associated power that remained that dragged me into this social space rife with racial hostility. Through some of the conversations in the bar during those few days, I gained a deeper understanding that for the most part 1 wa first and foremost a Black person in the eyes of many folks. Following is an example of one of those dialogues. While talking about a theft from someone's car, committed a few days earlier, a male patron spoke, looking at me somewhat uncomfortable, almost apologetically, but still defiant. Patron: They said it was sonic Niggers who did it. Don't hold your tongue because I'm here!

Patron: So us saying "Nigger" and shit don't bother you? Is this how you talk in general, when I'm not here ?

Patron: Pretty much. Well, no, it doesn't bother me. [I lied, of course.] I'm not here to judge you. Be yourself. If it gels too hot for me, I'll just leave.

During this time, however, I wondered if I was allowing myself to be ridiculed, insulted, compromised by such exchanges, my silence condoning them. What are the limits of research? Exposure? Many of the words those nights at the bar stung. Until then, I had never heard the word Nigger spoken before with such frequency and virulence in real time (not on television or records) at me, through me. The word and its meaning took on a whole new nebulous character, suddenly looming foreign and distant, yet at the same time very penetrating and personal. It did not even sound familiar to me fired from mouths of people in the bar: NI-GGER! rather than the way many Black folks commonly intoned it, NIGG-AH! Yet throughout this night and many other nights and days I would spend with "poor Whites," in a way 1 grew impervious to the volatile "N" word because, after all, I did carry privilege, a crcderitialed shield that

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somehow seemed to soften the blow. Niggers were not privileged, were they? Then what did that make my Black self, relative to their marginal White selves? It was in this setting that the paradox of privilege most clearly unfolded; through the narratives of marginalized Whites, who upon encountering privilege in the form of Blackness, sought to deny its existence. While for me, my social status really did not empower me or authorize me in any magnanimous fashion. Rather it merely sustained me, though barely, amid this contest of color and class. Ironically, I began to understand that it was the bar folk who considered themselves the privileged ones because the prevailing cultural arid historical message of White America has always told them so. Ultimately, we all found solace and discomfort in paradoxical positions and experiences of privilege. Ground Zero

In this final context, privilege garnered standing but in an even more peculiar way. As I have shown in Chapter 3 during my interview with Carol and some of the other middle-class Whites I met in the field, I was thrust up as an example of success, diligence, and hope. Against all the cultural arid historical odds, I had arrived at a social-cultural place where they already stood, arid have stood since birth. Often in my presence, middle-class Whites spoke of "our" (making a point to include me) uncornpromised work ethic or intellectual pursuits and the rewards of such efforts. Fresh out of college, Carol often spoke of her independence. Carol: I fed alive, you know? It's like I'm searching and thinking and feeling things . . . working my butt off [at her job as an editor-reporter at a local magazine], f enjoy my job. It's fulfilling. I like working for what f have, for what I want. You know what I mean!

Carol either consciously or unconsciously assessed our social productivity and tenacity against that of some of the groups of presumably nonproductive low-income Whites we had talked about and "others" who relied on welfare assistance lor their livelihood. Others, like Kim, introduced in Chapter 3, echoed this discourse.

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Kim: I don't know much about [NorthtownJ. Some of my friends think people who live there are kind of trashy. What do you think? Kim: Nothing really. Like I said, I don't know much about the place.

Perhaps her friends need to classify people from Northtown as "trashy" because it makes them feel normal and accepted. Kim, a waitress at a local suburban restaurant, and some of her coworkers mirror in a very distant way Northtown residents because they represent each other as Whites, as Americans, and they try to deny that association with othering discourses. And while she often feigned a rhetoric of oneness and equality for all people during our conversations, Kim also detached herself from the flow of the lives of classes of people not like us. Kim: You know, you just never think of it [class difference]. You hang out with people you go to school with from your own neighborhood. People who are doing things and are pretty successful. People like}>ow!

Like me? Again I became the pivotal go-between representation— obviously oppressed because I am Black, but no doubt diligent and intriguingly different because I appear so unlike, in her mind, many of the Black images she harbors. My encounters with many middle-class participants in this research revealed the way my privilege coupled with my Blackness served the unintended purpose of empowering the very middle-class Whites I met. By this I mean that in their contact with me, they in a way expanded their own representation of themselves (in particular, self-described liberals or radicals like Carol) as being open and accepting. They (the dominant culture) were the ideal and I was the product of their ideals, a product, in their eyes, of the meta-ideology of productivity and success in the rhetorical land of opportunity. With different groups of middle-class folk, I felt as though I had arrived at ground zero again, where neither of my selves (racial or privileged) carried much social clout or contestation. In this situation, my Blackness made privileged Whites more complete, and privilege was not really a commodity for me because they already possessed it.

Chapter 6 Home: Sheltered by Whiteness

Where and in what type of home we live reveal much about who we are and who others perceive us to be. During fieldwork, when I said that my research was in part about poor White families, the first general association people made with impoverished Whites was trailer parks. 1 Some asked, "Do you do a lot of your research in trailer parks?" Another common response was, "I know of a trailer park where you could get some really good information about poor Whites!" I thought about how many of these same people, regardless of race, never mentioned Whiteness arid low-income, inner-city neighborhoods in Midway in the same breath. From the outset of my research I realized that my inquiry into low-income White culture would eventually lead me to trailer parks. But, as I tried to do throughout my field experience and even with my thoughts as f planned to go to the field, 1 did not want to focus on trailer parks exclusively or even primarily as a site where poor White culture is lived and constructed. At the same time, I acknowledged how embedded this perception is in the discourse on White poverty. Images of dilapidated shacks and rusty tin-can trailers of the rural South are as common as many of the familiar negative images of Blacks. A telling difference, however, is that the primary way Whites are deemed marginal is through an odd fact of geography and isolation (Batteau 1990). In trying to distance myself physically and intellectually from such essentializations about poor Whites, I set out to explore Whiteness

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through elements of poverty and place or home within a broader spectrum. Therefore, this chapter does not focus entirely on life in trailer homes in hidden pockets of Midway, since my research revealed that poor Whites are not fenced solely into these areas. They live in a variety of places, including the unsuspecting suburbs (Haar and latridis 1974). The lived experience of suburban poverty, like that of White families in the inner city, reveals the paradoxes of race and class that are at the center of this book. This chapter examines the experience of living in expected (trailer parks) and unexpected (suburbs) places in the paradox of White poverty as told by two women, Martha arid Denise. One woman takes the shallow stereotype of her circumstance in a trailer park and adds dimension and meaning, unfolding its layers to show how estranged and disconnected this seemingly homogeneous group is when seen from within. The other woman disrupts many perceptions of social class status and leaves those who encounter her narrative somewhat baffled and unsure of how to describe her or the very nature of the meaning of such concepts as poverty and middle class. Finally, later in the chapter, I even find myself reflexively reaching deeper inside for assurances of my own social class privilege because of some enlightening encounters with poverty and wealth in unconventional guises. "Trailer Trash!"

Martha is thirty-five. She lives in Clearview mobile home park with her husband Raridy, who works construction on sporadic, short-term contracts. They have two daughters, aged six and eight. Martha is a "big woman," very comical, jovial, and definitely outspoken. She explained why she chose to live in a mobile home rather than an apartment or in federally subsidized housing. Martha: See, a trailer is a poor man's castle. Something in between an apartment and a house or between the ghetto and the [federal housing] projects. And for me, it's cheaper to live here than it would be anywhere in the world with two kids. People who live in trailers pay less for what they get, so people think that people who live there [in trailer parks] are lower class. But most people don't plan to live their whole lives in a trailer because even they want to move into a nice house eventually.

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Before moving into Clearview, Martha had lived in one of the city's federal housing projects for about a year and in several other rental properties in Midway. Their Home Martha and Randy's mobile home is described in mobile home manufacturer parlance as a single-wide, about fourteen feet wide and sixty feet long. The inside of Martha's home looks like a long hall. The television in the living room is visible from the bedroom at the other end, straight past the bathroom and through the kitchen. The daughters' room is seventy-eight inches wide, Martha said, as a way to help me visualize the cramped space of their home. Outside, the trailer is "a sort of pink and mauve color" fashioned from tin siding material. "It was built in 1979 and has never been redone," she said. "After seventeen years or so it tends to get a little icky. But inside it's decent." The mobile home sits unanchored on a cement patch atop eight pillars of cinder blocks (five high), partially covered by rusting metal skirting. Sewage is expelled through plumbing that feeds into the trailer park's sewage system. "Those pipes are about the only thing that are anchored in the ground. Other than that," Martha said, "this trailer is totally mobile and boy don't we know it when a big wind blows." Their home has a small front deck and a little patch of grass in front facing the road.

The term trailer park (though not the image) is slowly becoming an anachronism in current housing parlance. While some literature traces the history and development of the mobile home industry and its indelible image on the social psyche (Cowgill 1941; Drury 1972; Nutt-Powell 1982; Thornburg 1991; Wallis 1991), contemporary mobile home manufacturers are trying to shed all past associations about mobile home living, to the point of dispensing with red-flag names such as trailer parks or mobile homes in favor of more sanitized names such as manufactured home neighborhoods or manufactured housing communities? What do you think of that name [manufactured home neighborhood]"?

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Martha: Nobody around here calls it that. It's a trailer park! Changing the name, making it sound all ... won't change the way people see us.

Clearview, like many of the older mobile home parks in the United States, is located in a hamlet barely visible from the road; neither on the outskirts nor in a bustling part of the city. Aside from the residents' homes, Clearview is composed of a park office building, a day care, a laundry building, and a playground with a rusted slide and broken chains on the swings. The narrow roads weaving through the community have such names as Forest Glen, Lake Street, and Mountain View, beckoning images of the majestic and serene outdoors. Clearview has about 110 numbered mobile home spaces. Martha's family lives in number 53, along Spring Street. They bought the trailer, but not the small plot of land it sits on. Martha: Some people own their lots, but that's very few. The way it works usually is some big corporation buys a lot of acres and then sells a few, but mostly rents out the rest. We pay $250 [a month] for the lot and $235 [loan/mortgage] for the trailer. Some prices are higher depending on a lot of things, and the double-wides are double the price. I know a lady across the street who is a certified nursing assistant and her husband works too. They could live in other places, like houses or apartments, but they said they would probably be sleazy compared to the price they pay for their doublewide trailer and what they get.

As with site-built homes, in mobile home parks size is symbolic of prestige. "Double-wides are the fashion now," Martha said. "But you have to pay almost $35,000 for one of those. That's cra/y! If you have that much money . . . go buy a house." At any given time, hundreds of people live in the park alongside Martha and her family. Most women are single or divorced mothers. Many of the men are also single or divorced. Many women, like Martha, receive welfare assistance. Other people have stable jobs and solid incomes and for their own personal reasons prefer mobile home living. Several Clearview residents are elderly or retired couples. Martha: I used to be a snob and couldn't understand why people wanted to live in trailers. But now I see it's because they can own something, I think. A lot of people are buying their trailers and don't feel like they're just throwing

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money away every month by renting some house or apartment. People take pride in that. I tell you, people get pretty territorial around here. They think, "the only thing I have is this trailer and you better not fuck with it!' " A Not-So-Diverse Community

A glaring incongruity of low-income housing and its association with poverty is that while most images of poverty in the United States feature Blacks and Latinos, poor Whites are generally associated with mobile home housing. Low-income housing, like housing in general, is often still segregated by race as well as social class (historically by law and currently by unsaid social rules such as redlining). For example, in While Trash: Race and Class in America (Wray and Newit/ 1997), Allan Berube, whose family (his mother, Florence Berube, coauthored the chapter) lived in a mobile home park when he was a child, recounts how in the 1950s the owner of "Sunset Trailer Park" did not rent to Black families. "So we were granted the status of having our Whiteness protected on his private property" (Berube with Berube 1997: 20). Housing covenants discriminated against Black families because they were deemed a lower class of poor people. Allan Wallis (1991: 22) raises an important question about affordable housing in general that asks, if mobile homes are seen as a viable form of low-income housing, why are minority groups with a high percentage of low-income households so significantly underrepresented among owners? Clearview is an empirical example of such lower-class color separation. Of the more than one hundred homes at Clearview only one young Black couple lived there, along with a few families of Mexican descent. Martha offered her own theory on the separation. Martha: You don't see many White people in [federal housing] projects or living in the ghetto even though there are a lot of poor White people in the city. 1 think Whites are just proud enough—not better or anything, don't get me wrong \apologetifitilly], because I know a lot of mcsscd-up White people—to work just enough to stay out of the projects. And you see more Whites in more of these nicer Section 8 [federally subsidized] apartments and houses because landlords would rather rent to Whites than Blacks no matter that they both [Blacks and Whiles] are on welfare. WHY IS THAT?

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Martha: You know why, silly! People are prejudiced. They're jerks. I lived in the projects for about seven months a few years back. I hated it. I didn't feel like I belonged there. I didn't have any more money than anybodyelse, but I just didn't fit in—me and my two little White babies. Why not?

Martha: It was just because we were different, I guess. People do what makes them feel more comfortable. Poor White people tend to live in trailer homes. I'm on welfare, I'm White, so that's where I moved to. I would rather live here and put up with the stigma here than live in the ghetto or projects and put up with the stigma there. What K the stigma here in the trailer park?

Martha: Really it don't matter if you live in the projects or a trailer park, when you're poor, you're poor. When that orange envelope [monthly AFDC check] comes to your house, the first thing people see is that you're on welfare. Even in the trailer park, you have some people who think they're better than others. The double-wides are better off than the singlewides. People who own their trailers—not to mention their land, too—are real high society in the trailer park versus people who rent. So ... but, in general no matter what they have in here, people who don't live here think we're all low-class scum. "You don't plan to live your whole life in a trailer, do you?" That's what people ask us.3 Martha said she could "care less" what people think of her and her choice of housing, yet, it bothers her when her children are subjected to taunts such as "trailer trash kids" from students at their school who live in traditional houses (Johnson 1992). Martha: The kids come home with tidbits. [Her oldest daughter] used to cry when people put her down because she lives in a trailer park. Put her down . . . ?

Martha: Yeah! Kids would call her trailer trash all the time. Even some of the kids [of all races] whose families I knew were poorer than us, but lived in Section 8 [housing] or the projects, look down on my girls. Now ain't that somethin'! Why is that, you think ?

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Martha: Because trailers and trailer parks have a bad reputation. All people hear and see are the bad things about this place. And those arc the things they remember, I guess.

Martha commented about how she often reminds her daughter that living in a "trailer park is not dirty" and furthermore that her daughter is not "dirty" herself "because f can tell that she starts to kind of believe those things kids say about her and where we live. Besides, if they [other kids at school] think my kids are so lowclass," Martha said, "why don't they just leave them alone!" fn an article on the construction of trailer park identity among suburban high school students, Steven Miller and Beverly Evko (1985) argue that trailer park students arc "not even ignored . . . but are invisible" and their presence is only acknowledged when "site-built home classmates" wish to remind them of their debased status (689).4

Regardless of the social cost to the family's image, at a most basic level Martha and her husband see their purchase of a mobile homeas a sound economic move, considering their lack of income and housing choices. Through Martha and other mobile home residents I met during my (ieldwork, the phrase trailer park loses most of its essentialized, homogeni/ed meaning under their interpretation. Most notably, in mobile home parks, low-income Whiteness finds a thin shelter from the harsh wind of assumptions often directed at low-income, non-White groups. But while the park may separate poor Whites from poor Blacks and Latinos, the location does not necessarily shield them from the pervasive stereotypes outsiders hold about living there, as is apparent in the insults directed at Martha's children. The key deconstructive insight here is that scathing stereotypes about mobile home living still exist, but through Martha's narrative contrasting dimensions are added to those stereotypes and they become expanded from within. She shows us, in particular, that mobile home residents practice the same type of classism that site-built home people do. Even at what many "outsiders" consider a lower rung of the social ladder, many trailer park residents need to differentiate themselves from those living next door or on the next

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street. In the park, for example, part of one's identity is based on who has the bigger and better mobile home and on who owns their mobile home or the mobile home and the land it sits on. The list of minor criteria seems endless as residents recount them. Outside the park, however, the criteria ignores social class and differentiates primarily on the basis of race and ethnicity. Such micro-othering is a never-ending process. Allan Bcrube and Florence Berube (1997) describe how in the mobile home park where they lived there were obvious personal divisions. Other divisions wrere engineered by park owners, who segregated the mobile home park into two sides, one for families with children, the other more wellkept, well-thought-of side for adults. 5 Still, the authors note, they were all "trailer park people" to outsiders: We defended ourselves from outsiders' stereotypes of us as low-life and weird by increasing our own investment in respectability. Trashy White people lived somewhere else. . . . We could criticize and look down on them, yet without them we would have been the White people at the bottom. Respectable meant identifying not. with them, but with people just like us ... or better than us, especially families who owned real houses in the suburbs. (Berube and Berube 1997: 20-21)

Martha and I met several times. The more we talked, the more 1 sensed that she and some of her trailer park neighbors rationali/.ed that poverty was, at least, a bit more bearable under the assumption of Whiteness. She never said this overtly, but it was apparent often in our conversations that Martha and other Clearview residents know the racialized image of poverty. The irony, however, is that Martha probably is not aware of the invisibility of White poverty as much as she is aware of the hypcrvisiblity of racialized poverty, because in the latter she seldom sees herself. An Eyesore in Suburbia

Denise and her family live in a solidly middle-class, predominately White suburb several miles away from Martha and her family.6 Though separated by distance, they are closely linked through poverty and friendship. Denise, thirty-seven, is a portly woman weighing more than

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three hundred pounds. Her weight is a constant burden to her, she says. When I met her, she was employed as a temporary clerical worker at a small medical office, a job she got through a job-training program. "I like working, but when I work I get less [welfare aid] from the state and we end up worse off than if I didn't work," Denise said. "Because when I work they cut back my aid. What kind of sense does that make?" She echoed a familiar irony of many welfare recipients with whom I talked during my fieldwork.7 Denise said she had been "on welfare on and off for about seven or eight years. It's embarrassing to me still. I don't like it, but I need it." Is that why you work?

Denise: Yeah. Because I don't want to depend on the state all my life. I want better things for my kids. Besides, most of the welfare benefits are being cut out anyway. It's just getting tougher and tougher, so it almost forces you to go out to find work. I just wish I could get a better paying job.

She made about $5.75 an hour at her job, a dollar an hour above minimum wage at the time. "That still is not nearly enough to takecare of four people." She lives with her two daughters, aged seven and three, and her seventeen-year-old son, who dropped out of high school earlier that year. Their Home

The paradox of Denise's experience is that she and her family live in a three-bedroom, site-built home with a two-car garage in a wellmanicured subdivision in the southwest section of the city. When I called her and she gave me directions to her house, 1 found her situation puzzling and was curious to know how she came to settle there.8 My first assumption was that she lived in a federally subsidized house as part of Midway's ongoing effort at implementing open housing programs. But that was not the case. The house, I discovered, was owned by her father-in-law, a wealthy real estate developer. Denise's story deepens from here. When I met her she had been separated from her husband for a few years and divorced for about a year and a half. Denise had lived in this house with her husband, and she and the children stayed on after his departure.

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Denise: When he left, I didn't know where me and my kids would live. But his father said we could stay here, rent free [she pays utilities, however], mainly because of the kids. lie really don't care too much for me or my son [who is not the son of her former husband]. It's for the girls, his granddaughters. But I appreciate it. So, we really still don't have any money, really because the state cuts back on what they give us because we don't have to pay rent. We have a free place to live basically, but it's like we still have to pay for it by getting less from the state. The more you have, the less you get. Even though it may look like I have a lot here with this house and stuff, it's just barely enough. I mean when you sometimes get down to $25 a week to eat on for four people, you're pretty bad off.

Belonging, But Out of Place

Denise reiterates throughout our conversations that she "appreciates" her father-in-law's generosity, but being in the suburbs and not of the suburbs presents challenges for her and her family. Denise: People look at you, you know? What do you mean ? Denise: Like you're one of those . . . on welfare. That whole stereotype of being lazy, ignorant, sitting around collecting money from the government. I know people out. here look down on us. A single mother, three kids . . . it's the first thing they think. How do you know? What kinds of things do they do to make you think that'? Denise: You just know! And really, it's not what they do, it's what they don't do. Some of these people—not all of them though, there are sonic nice people out here—who live around here, they kind of ignore us. Act like we're not really even here . . . maybe they wish we would just go away. Do you want to be accepted out here? Denise: Yes and no, I guess. It's not bad living out here and all. But I just don't feel like 1 belong out here. I have the same kind of house and yard they have, but that's probably about it. My life and family is so different otherwise.

She often talks at length about the silences and isolation she feels (see Perin 1988). If she could afford it, she said, she would prefer to

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live in another part of town where people were more "accepting, not so snobby and stuck-up!" She sees the way it affects her children, too. In subtle ways, Denise's younger children learn from other children in the neighborhood who they are not based on money and social class ideals. From most outside appearances, Denise and her children are part of the subdivision's social, cultural, and racial fabric. But when hints seep out about her financial dependency and link to poverty, her share of the collective identity of the suburbs is severed by others. There are some telltale signs. Denise: People watch everything you do around here. Like they don't have anything better to do. What do you mean?

Denise: Like one time, Martha came over and she parked her van on the street in front of these people's house. [Martha drives a rusty circa 1970 Chevy van.] They got pissed oil", came over, and asked her to move it. Why?

Denise: That's what. I asked. They said because they were expecting company and needed the space in front of their house. What a crock! So what happened?

Denise: Martha just left, she was so upset. And so she got on me about living out here "with those rude-ass, stuck-up [more expletives]." Oooooo! I was angry. I was embarrassed for her, for me, my kids. 1 wanted to move that day. What upset you? Why do you think they asked you to move the van?

Denise: Not because they needed space for people to park! 1 looked over there later that night and there were no cars parked out there. They just wanted Martha to move her van because they thought it was raggedy and made their nice, neat property look bad. That's all people out here think about is property and money!

Denise's experience is all the more ironic precisely because of the way she is excluded but at the same time buffered by all that surrounds her in her neighborhood—namely Whiteness and middleclass sensibilities. She talks at length about how her neighbors strive

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to attain status and material wealth while "people like us are barely making it." She laments about how poor her family is and how hopeless her future appears to her each day. Yet, in other instances, she fails to delineate or articulate how her impoverished existence and marginalization are at the same time so intricately tied to access and privilege, fn some paradoxical ways she appears to have even more privilege than her "snobby" middle-class neighbors, as I saw in the following held experience. As I pulled up in front of Denise's house one day, I saw a sleek, black Mercedes-Ben/—a paramount symbol of privilege—parked in her driveway. I walked in. She and her two girls sat. in the living room watching a cartoon video. You've got company?

Denisc: No? Whose Mercedes is that parked in your driveway?

Denisc: Oh! [She laughs.]. That's my father-in-law's. My car won't, start, so he let me use his because I have to go pick up my [federal welfare] check today, go to the store, and run some other errands.

Denise's car often needed mechanical work. When it was not running her father-in-law sometimes dropped off the Mercedes— a new (at the time) S500 series model, which according to the Mercedes-Benz web site, cost $50,765 for a lour-door sedan base nrodel. She usually drove it until her car was fixed. She realized the car's powerful symbolism, though she regards it inatter-of-factly: "I'd drive anything that ran. I don't care. But that's what he drops oil to let me drive. For him, it's like a spare car." Driving the car made her uncomfortable, she often said. Especially when she took it to pick up her "monthly check" at the Department of Social Services office further in the city. She recounted how when she drove into the parking lot, people stared, in hushed amazement, at her and that long, black, shiny car. With her disheveled hair and casual clothes, she did not look official, and somehow privileged, like the car; she looked like she belonged there, like she was actually going inside to pick up her welfare check just like many of the other people walking in the building. After picking up

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her meager check and food stamps, her "routine" was to drive with her daughters directly to the grocery store. Denise: I tell you, everything is all right until I pull out my food stamps. People don't say anything or anything. But I know they want to. It's just the way they look at you. Like me and my kids don't even deserve to eat! Then I look at all these women in the store in their nice little outfits—them and their kids—and think they don't work either, most of them. They'd be right where I am if they didn't rely on some man to take care of them. And they look their noses up at me!

Denise failed to consider that many of these women out grocery shopping in the middle of a weekday were living the dream of marriage and motherhood, and the suburbs provide the ideal setting for this dream. Their "work" is to raise their children and take care of the home. This is important and necessary work by their and many of society's standards. Ironically, Denise saw many mothers in suburbia as shallow, dependent women. She and I often talked about "how it works" in the suburbs. The entire setting—the house, new car, manicured lawn, perfect nuclear family—carries with it an assumption that Denise and her family blatantly contradicted. Part of the value of the women she so easily dismisses is in their ability to meld into middle-class status and find comfort in helping maintain that status. Access by Association

Denise's narrative exposed some of the fundamental questions I sought to explore in my research. In particular, how are low-income or marginalized Whites associated with Whiteness and its paragon image? Here I want to focus on how poverty is associated with privilege or Whiteness through Denise's experience. Her experience is full of paradoxes that disrupt common notions of social class and reveal their internal contradictions. Denise had married into an affluent family; she did not grow up in one. Before she met her husband, she had one child by another man and was unemployed, a situation she blames quite frankly and frequently on her "dysfunctional family." Martha visits Denise often and joined many of our conversations. She called Denise's exhusband a "retard," explaining that "he just don't have much

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sense." Denise said her former husband was simply "spoiled rotten," a man-boy in his early thirties who relies on his wealthy father for almost everything. He generates some income from managing some of his father's properties, "but he's so irresponsible really it's just something his father does for him to make them both feel good. Instead of just giving him money," Denise said, "they pretend he works for it basically." She said that when his parents found out they were dating and met Denise, they told him to stop seeing her immediately. When I asked why, she replied: "Because they thought their son deserved better, you know? Hell, he wasn't shit himself without his father." She said his parents thought she was "low class" and threatened to "cut him off"—disown him—if he did not come to his senses. But he did not stop seeing her. They married against his parents' wishes, knowing "they [his parents] would get over it arid let him do anything he wanted to anyway," Denise said. "They always do." Initially, the couple lived in a small apartment near downtown, determined to make it on their own. But when they had their first baby girl, Denise's in-laws bought the couple an ample house in the suburbs. By association, Denise stumbled upon privileges she said she had never imagined. Yet, in many ways she is still marginalized within that association. She still lives in her sparsely furnished suburban home and on occasion drives a $51,000 Mercedes to run errands. Yet she is still poor. Furthermore, her best friend Martha lives in a mobile home park, and when she comes to visit they sometimes drive to a nearby restaurant to have coffee and cake, keenly aware of how much they can and cannot spend on what they describe as a "small luxury." Denise finds her situation as confusing, sometimes, as it sounds to others. She feels trapped in a social and economic world she is not comfortable in, largely because it is a world she has not lived up to. Suburban affluence is a world she would like to attain, but "probably never will." Yet Denise acts out part of the script each day with the help of a not-so-invisible hand of privilege—her affluen in-laws. Denise: I tell Martha all the time . . . I don't feel comfortable out here. I don't, like driving that car . . . the way people stare at us. But at the same time I understand why he does it. Why he makes sure I'm at least kind of

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comfortable. lie does it for his grandchildren. They would probably rather take them and have nothing to do with me, really. But they know they can't do that. And they know their worthless son can't raise these girls!

For Dcnisc, living in the suburbs does not soothe her sensibilities about the state of her family or image in others' eyes. The suburb does not hide her poverty. Indeed, living there highlights it. At the same time her location in the suburbs accents her affiliation with Whiteness and her allotment to privilege based on a collective history she finds herself embedded in. "People can think what they want to about this house and that car I drive," she said about people who assume she is well-off. "But I know the difference. People who live out here know the difference, too." She is almost ashamed of having the opportunity, the privilege of living in suburbia not on her own accord.9 However, Martha thinks Denise should be happy with her situation, which contrasts sharply with her own trailer park home. "Man, you've got it made!" Martha told Denise during a visit. Instead of joy, however, Denise feels trapped between a modicum of comfort and a desire for independence and self-respect. The alluring myth of the suburbs does not entice her. She never experienced that lifestyle as a child, and as an adult she did not make the journey there on her own; she now has no way of sustaining a suburban lifestyle even though she has arrived.

As I learned more about Denise's dependent relationship with her in-laws, I began pondering my own association with privilege and the paradox it presented. My initial thoughts surfaced while driving to her house to meet her for the first time. Even though I have driven through countless suburban, upscale neighborhoods across the country, something seemed amiss about driving past the tidy homes and manicured lawns to meet Denise. No one in my family, in-laws or otherwise, could afford to buy me a suburban home to live in—rent free! My feelings that, day of being out of place in the serenity of the suburbs reinforced paradoxical similarities Denise and I shared. When gauged against all of my proud potential, the neighborhoods I drove through to meet this woman "on welfare" beckoned to me that I belonged—at least on a

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class scale. But, like Denise, albeit tor different reasons, in reality I was out of place because of what I call my obviousness and because my sense of home was elsewhere, far away from this idyllic setting. In retrospect, I also thought how odd but true that, despite all of these credentials I carry, I have never driven a Mercedes-Benz. Not that driving a new Mercedes is the lone marker of achievement, but to have the choice or access to drive one "to run errands" makes a strong statement to self and others, even if that statement is overflowing with contradictions. I remember my mother once saying, "there's a difference in having to ride the bus and choosing to ride the bus," referring to the option proud Black working-class parents had over nonworking parents. Perhaps it is the privilege of choice, that sense of autonomy and access that makes the difference. Denise's home situation and affiliation with privilege unsettled me because it often indirectly reminded me of the seemingly immutable history and legacy of Whiteness and its reserved status. It was initially through my experience with Denise that the term itself— privilege, especially as it related to me—began to unravel through the lens of deconstruction. Along with Denise, and Martha to an extent, I myself became a paradox of privilege: a Black, middle-class Ph.D., researcher suspended in doubt about what all of these lofty affiliations mean and suddenly reah/ing their fragile nature under very close scrutiny. Seemingly more than anything, however, my interrogation of the concept privilege—reflexively and through Denise's experience—served as a reminder of a past that still touched both of our seemingly separate lives in unsettling ways. Denise is not quite complete in the assumed comfort of her home setting. And neither am I quite complete in the assumed achievement of my social class setting. In many ways, we are both shortchanged in favor of more purer forms of privilege.

Chapter 7 Encounters: Uncommon

Class Commonalities

This final "Encounters" chapter focuses on some of the many common experiences low-income Whites and I seemed to share in our paradoxical connection to privilege. It became apparent while in the field that during many of" our conversations we talked as if we were childhood schoolmates or neighbors existing in parallel worlds: finishing each others sentences and recalling minute details of places and experiences that many of my middle-class peers and colleagues have little experiential conception of. Our narratives to and about each other floated outside of mainstream, middle-class boundaries as we recounted the pain, pleasure, and irony of lives lived in the margins. Police: To Serve and Protect One day while I was eating with two couples in their mid-twenties, Thomas and Anne and Mark and Joan, at a popular restaurant in Northtown, when one of the men broached the topic of police enforcement, probably because two police officers had just left the restaurant after eating lunch. Thomas: Man, 1 hate the cops around here! Why?

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Thomas: They just harass the shit out of you. Either your car is too raggedy and they pull you over for something like a broken taillighl or your car is too new for this part of town and they pull you over because you didn't use your blinker or something. Either way, they just want to fuck with you. They don't do that kind ol stuff out. [in Eastown, the more affluent part of town]. So you think they slop people around here just because . . . what?

Anne: Because we ain't got money like those people out there. If people around here do have a nice car or something, they [police] probably wonder how they got it? Mark: On the side of their cars they got [a painted slogan] "To serve and protect." Hell, to serve and protect who, people with money?

As Black working-class teenagers growing up in Midway (and even occasionally still as adults), my friends and I were certainly leery of police officers. From our purview, White police officers, in particular, patrolled through our Black neighborhood looking for trouble and often mysteriously found it. To us, they were the one constant tangible reminder of social control and inequity in our lives. Of course we knew a few cool and humane police officers in the area, but it was the brutes who seemed to always command our attention. When we saw a police car drive by or stop another person for anything our blood boiled. "Why are they always stopping people around here and handcuffing them?" we would say, in anger, echoing Thomas's comments. Because of police officers' often condescending interactions with most of the people around our part of town, we assumed their job was to keep Black folks in check and suppressed. And if there was any serving and protecting to be done, it was to serve White folks and protect them from people like us. That these people I sat in the restaurant with and many of their White friends of a similar class status had similar images of law enforcement never crossed my mind until such revelations in the field began unfolding. To Thomas, for example, police officers were not merely a nuisance (as they seem to appear to many rowdy middleclass youths) but a genuine threat since some of his friends and even some of his family had ended up in jail on what he felt were

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trumped-up charges meted out by police officers and the courts. According to many low-income Whites I met, they felt they were prey lor law enforcement simply because of the assumptions police made based on their social class location and way of life. 1 intimately understood what they were saying and why they were saying it, as if we shared the very same nemesis—privileged Whiteness. Packinghouse Parents Quite often during my conversations with low-income Whites, strange but familiar commonalities surfaced. For example, some people, as I mentioned earlier in the book, talked at length about the infamous jobs their parents and grandparents worked at the packinghouses in Northtown during the 1940s and 1950s. Following are excerpts from brief conversations I had with a few Northtown residents. Northtown man: My father told me that that, was some hard-ass work. But. back then the pay was real good. Those [packinghouse jobs] were some of the best jobs in town. My father and all of his brothers worked there too. So did my grandfather and even my grandmother!

Northtown man: You're lying! Your family didn't work there? Really, they all did, for years. Why do you think I'm lying? (1 asked this knowing that it was because in my present privileged form I did not seem like the offspring of a packinghouse, worker. Again, false, assumptions ahout privilege.)

Northtown man: Because. How did you end tip going to school and all that?

Growing up, I heard many of the same stories from my father and uncles that several Northtown residents had heard from their families about the packinghouses. How sharp the knives were that they had used to slice up thousands of hog and cattle carcasses that raced by on a seemingly never-ending production line. How deep and urgent the cut was that carved the jagged scar on my father's left hand. How great the paychecks were in that day and time compared to those for other jobs in Midway and the menial jobs they had fled from clown South. How unfairly and corruptly the White

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middle-class management consistently treated all workers, both Black and White, because they knew men like our lathers were lowskilled, poorly educated, with few employment options at such good steady pay outside of the plant's stench-filled bowels. We all heard the stories and vicariously lived the experience, a reality many of our affluent contemporary peers only read about in history books. How did 1 end up acquiring so much education considering that my father quit elementary school in the small Oklahoma town he grew up in because he had to work to help support his family? Part of my motivation, no doubt, was the horrid packinghouse stories my lather, uncles, and brothers told me over the years. 1 But the story of why many of the White people f met in Northtown instead aspired to respectable, secure working-class jobs is part of the paradox of my field experience. As a youth f imagined that they, because of their Whiteness, not I, ironically, would turn out to be what I have become. Secondhand Clothes, Second-Class Citizens My mother grew up in Northtown and attended Northtown High School. Not surprisingly then, it was in Northtown that she would go shopping for clothes and home items at the secondhand thrift stores that flanked both sides of the main street. (This was long before it became vogue to shop at thrift stores.) When f was young, most of my wardrobe consisted of nice, secondhand clothes. Southtown man: I remember going to those stores. My mother would have to drag me in there, man! I would hide behind the racks of clothes just so none of my friends would see me in there. What's funny though is that I know all of my friends got their clothes from there, too, hut no one ever said so, you know? They were nice clothes, practically brand new, and, if nobody knew, you would just think that they were new clothes bought at the store. Why -mere you embarrassed?

Southtown man: Because people thought you were poor and would talk about you if you got clothes from the [thrift storej. So we never said where our clothes came from or we'd lie and say we got them at [one of the local department stores].

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"I don't want to go to the Goodwill again," I remember pleading to my mother countless times. The thought of wearing someone else's donated and tainted clothes repelled me even at a young age for many of the same reasons Whites in Northtown recalled. Why couldn't we buy our clothes new at discount stores like K-Mart like other families? Shopping at the thrift store made me feel poor as a kid and those feelings mushroomed into embarrassment. It was not the act of shopping at the secondhand stores, but the assumption (by me and others) that we were poor that was the core of the embarrassment. I remember hiding in musty racks of dresses if I thought I saw someone I knew or who knew me. When my mother and I left the store to walk to the car, with armloads full of bags, my eyes darted around the area in every direction, hoping never to catch a glimpse of anyone who looked even remotely familiar and would be privy to my dirty little secret of second-class status. Many of the people I met in the field were very surprised when I told them that when I was a kid my mother always shopped at the thrift store (she called it "junkin' ") and still did. Whenever I was in town, without argument, I still tagged right along with her as I had done all those years before. Traversing the busy street until we canvassed most of the stores on both sides. "See, son, this is good exercise and it doesn't cost a lot," she often said.

Amid all the commonalities with marginal Whites I met, I still felt a sense of bewilderment in my fragmented identity position as Black and privileged. Many of the poor Whites and I have an awkward affinity because we share a familiar marginal existence, but under vastly different assumptions. While we, as strained comrades, express our contempt for the center, we also gravitate toward it on radically different paths. The same class connections that draw the Whites mentioned above and me near also pull us apart. I cannot delve into the perplexing joy of my intellectual journey through school because many of them do not share rny vision on the importance of general knowledge. Neither can 1 encourage them to leave the stagnant cultural and economic environment of Midway and travel the world just to enjoy the experience of difference; many of them are content with

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their lives and assumptive class status as Whites in relation to other racial and ethnic groups. It is within this fragile status, at least in Midway, that they are also aware that, other groups suffer just a bit more than they do at the hands of biased police officers. Some of them are aware that even though our parents and relatives possibly worked side by side at. the packinghouses in their heyday, my lather was treated differently from their fathers because of the legacy of the color of his skin. Lastly, they are aware that even though we all most likely grew up in a teetering and exploited lower to working class, second-class citizenship carried a much broader definition in their lives than it did in mine. But most of that was a long time ago. Now here we are, face-toface, transcending and dismantling illusions and stereotypes. Because of this, I realize that I am who they were indirectly taught they could one day be. But the slippery subtleties of U.S. class hurdles in their normative lives thwarted them. I, on the other hand, sailed (and stumbled) over those same hurdles, motivated (not stopped) by the obvious hurdle of racism, only to end up somewhere in the middle. I am in an ambiguous place where I share a social class experience and connection with my privileged White peers as well as with my marginal low-income ones, yet am strategically removed from them both through the arbitrary experience of racial difference.

Chapter 8 Deconstructing the Color of Class

Coming to See Whiteness as an Anthropological "Other" Looking back, when I initially embarked on my research idea, people commonly asked me (and still do, actually) why I was interested in studying White folk in general and poor White folk in particular. I interpreted the deeper meaning of such questions as: Why would a Black researcher (or even a marginally defined person) want to study Whiteness? While in the field, 1 found that for many people, both Black and White, it just did not register. Surely there were enough strife and familiar againsl-the-odds stories in the Black community on which to concentrate my intellectual efforts.1 Moreover, delving into White culture, writing and talking about it, some argue, simply helped to feature a group that already overrepresents itself. Early in graduate school, I began asking myself similar questions about my interest in the culture and symbols of Whiteness, while simultaneously questioning why I was leaning toward making choices to venture off to study Native Americans in North Carolina and Oklahoma, Afro-Mexicans in Veracruz, Mexico, or Afro-Ecuadorian culture in northwestern Ecuador—all in many ways examples of anthropology's "timeless others" (Fabian 1983). While the discipline of anthropology still tacitly dictates that its disciples roam the hinterlands of the globe, studying "exotic" cultural others, I was beginning to re-contextualize my place within anthropology, realizing that my cultural and historical experience in relation to the disci-

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pline and its history was a somewhat incongruous, ironic, even paradoxical lit. So my ideas and interests slowly shifted from explorations of culture to explorations of constructions of culture. Instead of examining, for instance, how a cultural group behaved and reacted to itself and its surrounding social space, I was becoming more interested in understanding how cultural groups came to be defined (or not defined, as in the case of with poor Whites) and locked in static contexts and categories—both positive and negative. In this recontextualization of my lived experience as a Black, racialized American and as a privileged class American, in a cross-cultural and historical context the group that floated to the top of my research interests—the most familiar and at the same time unfamiliar other—was a paradoxical, de-essentialized image of White Americans.2 Almost immediately, my intellectual leanings were somewhat problematic to peers within anthropology in particular because in studying in the United States or studying the familiar, one finds oneself moving into what Kath Weston (1997) calls the career or intellectual track of a virtual anthropologist, which is a well-studied even credentialed scholar of the discipline who walks like one, talks like one, but does not think like one, primarily because she picks her own backyard, so to speak, as a field site. Yet in conversations and readings, I have come across two contrasting views on studying the familiar. I he following quotations sum up the two perspectives: "The more you know about a situation as an ordinary participant, the more difficult it is to study it as an ethnographer. It. is no accident that ethnography was developed in the study of non-Western cultures. The less familiar you are with social situations, the more you are able to see the tacit cultural rules at work" (Spradley 1980: 60-61). And in contrast, "modern ethnographic work has taught us that human beings know little about cultures right around them, and that at least in substantive cultural knowledge . . . great discrepancies may exist between next-door neighbors" (Werner and Schopfle 1987: 68). The context of my experience then as a socially constructed "other" and the thoughts I have developed through that experience guided my research interests back to issues of race, class, and, in a broader sense, the cultural politics of difference in the United

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States, with Whiteness and poor Whites as the central focus. And while I did not know it back then, my work was an evolving critique of the flourishing discourse and literature on Whiteness that began to establish itself in academic circles in the early 1990s.3 Unveiling the Obvious Shortcomings of Whiteness Literature

By representing Whiteness through the lived experience of poor Whites and notions of privilege through a reflexive Black interpretation, I have tried to expose one of the fundamental failings and contradictions of the literature on Whiteness as a social/cultural category suspended in discourses about race and class construction. Namely, White scholars writing about Whiteness perceive it as an "unmarked," "un-named," and "neutral" entity suspended in the historical and social dynamic (Dyer f997; Frankenberg 1997; Fine, Weis, Powell, and Wong 1997; Lipsit/ 1995). To them, Whiteness occupies a sort of immutable space because it has found ways throughout history to perform the enviable task of controlling not only the representation of others, but also the presentation of itself. Richard Dyer (1997) writes that White identity is founded on compelling paradoxes. Whiteness has "a need always to be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent. . . . Paradoxes are fascinating, endlessly drawing us back to them, either in awe at their unfathomability or else out of a wish to fathom them. . . . Thus it is that the paradoxes and instabilities of whiteness also contribute to its flexibility and productivity, in short, its representational power" (Dyer 1997: 39-40). In a sense, the definition of \Vhiteness has emerged not through denning its varied aspects but rather through narrowly defining other categories outside and in relation to it. Hence the "critical" work on Whiteness by White authors (and scholars of color as well) stumbles carelessly into this same epistemological trap (Nakayama and Krizek f 995).1 Discourse and reflections on Whites in society must move beyond the assumption that the dominant culture is exclusively seen as it is constructed by privileged thinkers (be they critical of White dominance or neutral toward it). In particular, much of the Whitenes literature sails past the fact that thinkers of color have been writing,

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interpreting, and deconstructing this "newfound" racial category of Whiteness and constructing their own identities in relation to assumptions of Whiteness for decades.5 For example, bell hooks (1992) writes that "Critically examining the association of whiteness as terror in the black imagination, deconstructing it, we both nameracism's impact and help to break its hold. We decolonize our minds and our imaginations" (178). Moreover, hooks points out how Whites are "amazed" that Blacks critically assess Whiteness and come to actually see it and define it differently than it is often presented. In talking about a discussion she had with a grotip of White students, she notes that "Even though the majority of these students politically consider themselves liberals and anti-racist, they too unwittingly invest in the sense of whiteness as mystery" (hooks 1992: 168). Thus, it would appear almost obvious that Black folk, as described by hooks, have a different interpretation of Whiteness. But as my work reveals, marginalized Whites also locate themselves differently in relation to the "unmarked" space commonly referred to in the Whiteness literature. Chapter 2 ("School"), for example, shows the way low-income White students construct ambiguous identities outside and inside the category of Whiteness. In general, even though some low-income students defiantly classified themselves as middle class, I found that students were just as likely to disassociate themselves with the privileged underpinnings ol Whiteness, which they saw as elitist and unfair, because these symbols conjured negative images in their imaginations. They saw the privileged aspect of Whiteness riot as unmarked or innocent, but as shrewd, indifferent, and clannish offering negative takes on a positive stereotype. One student commented: "When I think of White trash, I think of rich fucking people who don't give a shit about nobody or nothing but themselves and their fancy-ass cars and shit. It's all about who has the most money!" White folks who have climbed the ladder of privilege from loweror working-class beginnings claim to harbor a disdain for the normative way in which the dominant culture comes to define itself and others in its aura. In "Stupid Rich Bastards," Laurel Johnson Black (1997) recalls how she was raised in a "working poor" White family amid colorful language full of immediacy and feeling. Now as a professor of English, she struggles to maintain her sense of that

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language with which she grew up, a language and experience she is still drawn to in spite of the erudite environment she inhabits as an academic. Black writes: When I work with my colleagues, with "real" faculty, I say little . . . waiting for the opening in which I will speak like them long enough to fool them into thinking I "am" one of them. 1 am and I am not. My father's dream of how 1 would live and move between two worlds, two ways of speaking and knowing, haunts me. . . . I cannot move among the rich, the condescending, the ones who can turn me into an object of study with a glance or word, cannot speak like them, live in a house like them, learn their ways, and share them with my family without being disloyal to someone. . . . I am seeking a way to keep the language of the working class in academia, not just in my office with my working-class office mate, to nurture its own kind of vitality and rawness and directness, its tendency to ask "Why?" even as it says "Ah', what the fuck." (Black 1997: 394)

Current writings on Whiteness—with a few exceptions (see, for example Hartigan 1999; Wray and Newitz 1997; and Stewart 1996)— neglect to consider narratives like the one above.6 Such narratives and representations like those in this ethnography disrupt and deconstruct the expanding striving-to-be rnetanarrative of White identity being offered by privileged White scholars. As I have noted, mainstream Whiteness as a totali/ing and terrorizing entity has had a very visible presence in the experience of those locked outside of its aura—be it through the dynamics of social class, race, or ethnicity. The proliferation of writings and discourse about the undercurrents of Whiteness simply point to a recurrence of the dominant culture appropriating marginal narratives and expressions, thus deeming them as legitimate and salient. Another seldom discussed critique of the proliferation of Whiteness literature suggests that the discourse is quickly becoming a reification of dominant culture because, even though it names Whiteness in a "critical" tone, its privileged presence, voice, arid representation still dominate the discourse. As a result, some scholars feel that Whiteness studies should dry up and disappear as quickly as they exploded onto the academic scene and into its canon, leaving space for the presentation of "truly" marginalized voices (Fine, Weis, Powell, and Wong 1997). Ironically, in the White mainstream's attempt to renounce its own hegemonic position in society and the social imagination, post-

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modern Whiteness simply becomes yet another esseritialized marker largely because it is assumed in the current critique to be homogeneous and all-powerful. My assumptions going into my research for this book were just the opposite, primarily because of my lived experience as an African American in the United States in relation to the racialized ideal of Whiteness and my paradoxical privileged status amid that same ideal. Still, regardless of the criticisms, just to name Whiteness and its strategies is an important move in the postmodern critique and it is this move toward or into a deconstructive analysis that lends a measure of credibility to many of these works. Again, however, privileged White scholars must consider that as they are naming centers of power and privilege—to some extent strategically deconstructing themselves—they, too, are being named through different interpretations from their own. Naming Whiteness: A Postmodern Trope

Ironically, the very groups with whom postmodernists often ally— marginal populations, scholars of color, and feminists—have produced some of the most powerful and insightful critiques of the postmodern paradigm." Within anthropology, some of the key feminists (di Leonardo 199f; Behar and Gordon 1995; Mascia-Lces, Sharp, and Ballerino 1989; Weston 1997) and scholars of color (Harrison 1991; Rosaldo 1989) argue that postmodernism perpetu ates entrenched academic standards while reproducing traditional logocentric arid Eurocentric conclusions about non-European cultures. Micaela di Leonardo (1989), in an article titled "Malinowski's Nephews," calls many notions of postmodernism "high elitism"—a new guise that still ignores insights and contributions of marginalized anthropologists and cultural groups. Renato Rosaldo (1989) takes di Leonardo's critique even further by arguing for conscious subjectivity in social science research. He contends that social and cultural analysts—including relativistic postmodern thinkers—can rarely, if ever, become detached, value-free observers. Two main arguments against the postmodern critique center on politics and aesthetics. A number of scholars denounce postmodernism as a simple, commodified view of culture, void of any liberatory praxis (Jameson 1984; Ulin 1991; Fox 1991; Smith and Wexler

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1995). With its style and emphasis on the text and how culture is produced and presented through these texts, the analytical nature of the paradigm is dismissed as frivolous and void of any relevant political and historical context. In opposing the textual turn in social criticism Edward Said (1983) writes: My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted. . . . The realities of power and authority—as well as the resistances offered by men, women, and social movements to institutions, authorities, and orthodoxies—are the realities that make texts possible, that deliver them to their readers, that solicit the attention of critics. I propose that these realities are what should be taken account of by criticism and the critical consciousness. (4-5)

Another biting criticism lodged at the "experimental moment" in the social sciences focuses on the intentional obscurity of postmodern texts themselves (Palmer 1990; Campbell 1996; Pool 1991; Katz 1995). Alan Campbell writes a particularly straightforward piece attacking what he calls the "Po-Mo brigade," suggesting that the poetic language and presentation of postmodernism is but a "tricky trope" that tries to pass off lofty language as rigorous science and erudition. Even in its claim to speak to and for a "heteroglossia" of voices—especially the marginalized—the new social criticism strangles and nulls its listeners and readers with turgid turns of phrases replete with elitist equivocations. In his analysis of the presentation of ideas, Campbell also notes the debated difference in "popular" writing (which postmodernism is often accused of being) and "scholarly" writing: The background idea is that scholarly prose is obscure and inaccessible because it's dealing with complex ideas and requires intricate contortions of idiom while struggling with these ideas. Popular prose is just so because it leaves something out—it simplifies; it lacks subtlety and depth; it's superficial. . . . At the back of all the bombast are such pedestrian, old-fashioned ideas. It's the same stuff, put in a whiz-bang language. (Campbell 1996: 58, 66)

Much Whiteness literature gets trapped in the very esoteric metalanguage that postmodernism's relativism claims to disrupt. As a

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result, neither the theory nor the novel topic of" Whiteness delves deep enough into its own deconstructive element.8 As we will see in the next section, many similar criticisms are hurled at Dcrrida's analytical and interpretive method of deconstruction arid its deeper penetration into the (con)text of social dynamics. But I argue that each epistemological path of" approaching a textual reading is in its broader application a reading of the social, cultural, political, and subjective as texts. Therefore, depending on how they (postmodernism and deconstruction) are applied and who is applying them, both paradigms have the potential to serve as very powerful analytical and interpretive tools of culture and self in the social-cultural world. Deconstruction: Theory, Method, or Both Critiques

Derrida's works can be highly controversial and have been bombarded from many perspectives from feminists (Feder, Rawlinson, and Zakin 1997) to critical theorists. Cursory, unfavorable readings of Derrida, which arc often the most common interpretations presented, cast Derrida's thinking (and, similarly, postmodernism) as a sort of myopic and obscure textual analysis purporting to delve into philosophical meanings of existentialism and metaphysics. According to some arguments, his work is little more than a transcendental philosophical free play with words that, despite its large influence, has little utility of praxis or understanding outside of the text itself and offers little in the way ol liberatory or political vision (Rorty 1996; Handler 1992). Critics charge that his writing style is inaccessible by design and scoff at Derrida's work as a refined, aesthetic version of a social critique that already existed before his work was even known (Ellis 1989). Such opposition, however, often conflates the thought and practice of postmodernism with the work of Derrida's deconstruction, whereas I understand deconstruction as a more nuanced arid critically imaginative reading of the postmodern.

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Interpretations In tracing the definition of a deconstructive analysis as well as the deconstructive imagination, it is imperative that we turn to the works of Derrida. His ideas have been a major influence in American literary criticism following his close deconstructive reading of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to critique and expose the assumptions of structuralism in the mid-1960s. In the next few pages, I will be working from my own readings of Derrida as well as borrowing from two particularly applicable and accessible interpretations of his work (Linstead 1993: 110-15; Norris 1985, 1990, 1991) that helped crystallize my ideas about the theoretical nature of Derrida's deconstructive argument. To begin, Derrida's ideas, developed initially in literary theory and later applied in art and philosophy, seek to destabilize dominant or privileged interpretations. More specifically, as applied to literature and discursive presentations, there can be no one authentic or homogeneous reading or meaning of a given text; as applied to philosophy, claims of pure reason are likewise subject to rhetorical question, that is to deconstruction (Norris 1991). A second idea, perhaps a foundation of the concept of deconstruction, is Derrida's critique of identity: that every identity necessarily suppresses an alternative identity. When we define something (most things) we are necessarily, consciously or unconsciously, excluding or repressing something else. Thus, all meaning has a surplus that is repressed along with that which is presented or articulated. All meaning, then, is commonly deferred; there is never a conceptual closure because language can never offer a "total and immediate access to the thoughts that occasioned its utterance" (Norris 1991: 46, 64). Deconstruction is described here as "taking a repressed or subjugated theme. . . , pursuing its various textual ramifications and showing how these subvert the very order that strives to hold them in check" (Norris 1991: 39). Through ironic juxtaposition (Handler 1992: 700), deconstruction attempts to clarify simultaneously the meaning and the suppressed meaning of modernist form, privileged ideas, images, and so on. Within the scope of my work for example, the irony within the ideology of Whiteness is poverty; within Blackness, it is privilege. Relocating the status (i.e., privileged and impoverished) without displacing or moving

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the subject (i.e., Whiteness and Blackness) results in an ironic juxtaposition of ideals, representation, and definition. Also central to Derrida's thought is the recognition that language embodies a power relationship between terms. Specifically, language is structured in this "oppositional logic of identity" (Linstead 1993: 110), each term depending on and being supported by the other in order to establish meaning. And although these terms interpenetrate each other, they exist, or are treated as though they exist, in a hierarchy and relationship of power, with one term at any moment dominant over the other. Accounts become persuasive by virtue of not presenting alternative formulations, hence the act of representation also becomes an act of repression of alternatives. Specifically, for Derrida, language is structured in terms of such oppositions (Linstead 1993: 110). Derrida (1976: 27-73), as interpreted by Robert Cooper (1989), is concerned with reconccptualizing this oppositional either/or as a duality or cohabitation of terms: the division between them is not a partitioning of the dissimilar but a joining, a mutually supportive pivotal point around which meaning turns. The one term needs the other, a supplementary of both/and. Where modernism pursues the opposition of terms, actively placing the one over the other, deconstruction resists the closure of terms, actively exploring the supplementary of the one within the other. This subtle relationship of structure/play (or process), rather than play banishing structure, is little appreciated or utilized iri postmodern anthropology or the general postmodern critique of culture (Derrida 1976: 141-57; 1978: 289-93; 1982: 175-206). Based on the above cursory understanding of supplementary logic, deconstruction is the means by which Derrida operates on texts—and the world itself can be viewed as texts (Cooper 1989: 481; Eco 1990: 23; Lucy 1995: 8; Mouffe 1996: 2) or, as I prefer to call them, (con)texts. Upon a close reading of his works and ideas, it becomes apparent that Derrida indulges in little literary criticism in the conventional sense. Deconstruction, instead, is a means of revealing the contradictions inherent within texts, a means of exposing their logocentrism, their reliance on the metaphysics of presence, and their inescapable qualities of difference (Derrida 1982: 1-28) and supplementary despite repressive textual strategies. However, although deconstruction seeks to avoid the mystification of other texts, it is nevertheless trapped within language and is bound to

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share some blind spots, thereby falling into some of the traps which it exposes in other writing. There is therefore no solid independent ground on which the deconstrnctionist can stand and the method can and must be turned back upon itself. In attempting to open up the closures of the texts he studies, entering into them and using their own terms against them, Derrida seeks to avoid merely setting up a metalevel of critical terms and thus becoming incorporated in the logocentrism he critiques. Cooper (1989: 483) refers to the two primary movements of deconstruction as overturning and metaphoriza lion. In the first movement, Derrida focuses on the binary oppositions of terms, which we have already noted, existing in a hierarchy in which one term is suppressed. Of course, simply overturning the hierarchy at any moment, centering the marginal and marginalizing the central, remains an oppositional strategy and itself creates another hierarchy, which in turn requires overturning. Much socalled postmodern criticism gets no further than this. The second movement, metaphorization, is necessary to keep the process in motion, to resist its degradation and reduction into structure and essentialism. Metaphorization entails the recognition that the positively valued term at any moment is defined only by contrast to the negatively valued term and that they interpenetrate and inhibit each other. In Derrida's writing this emerges as a ceaseless moving between terms, giving his work an elusive quality, which nevertheless is an essential feature of his project (Lucy 1995). Deconstructive Ethnography If fragmentation and relativism as concepts are to be at all useful in analysis, then they must be constantly brought to bear on conditions and structures of integration at textual, conceptual, and analytical levels, while these integrating structures are simultaneously brought to bear on conditions of fragmentation (Linstead 1993: 112). Postmodern ethnography sets itself specifically against holism and the attempt to produce totalizing narratives. Postmodern ethnography, for example, asks of every representation "is this fact or truth?" and refuses to come to any universal conclusions (Birth 1990: 555). It throws into question its own authority as an account and whether it introduces the device of coauthorship or multiple

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voices or not, it nevertheless points to the possibility of an infinitude of interpretations arid accounts. But with no claim to factual superiority, how can postmodernism contest the accuracy of other accounts? How can it avoid charges of nihilism if it recognizes no absolute authority and sees all facts, values, and assumptions as undecidable? How can it deal with nonepistemological issues like ide ology, politics, class, or race? In short, given its vulnerability to challenges from the perspective of political economy (Ulin 1991; Handler 1992), how can conventional postmodernism contribute to praxis (Mouffe 1996)? Deconstructive ethnography, conversely, takes as its starting point not the frame "is this fact?" but the consideration of "how could this come to be considered fact?" and "what are the consequences of treating this as fact?" Its grounding in philosophy is important for, as Paul De Mann argues, "philosophies that succumb to ideology lose their epistemological sense, where philosophies that try to bypass or repress ideology lose all critical thrust and risk being repossessed by what they foreclose" (De Mann 1984: 24; cited in Norris 1985: 15). This latter condition is ironically one of the consequences of, and a risk which is being run by, much of the postmodern turn in anthropological theory (Linstead 1993: 115). Deconstructive ethnography gives attention to the historical and social context of epistemology as well as its textuality and attempts to demystify both traditional theoretical concepts, including those which it applies itself, and the workings of commonsense or naturalized perception (Norris 1985: 8-9). Deconstructive ethnography works on the forms taken by authority through its representations and discourses to demystify them through revealing their own internal contradictions rather than the application of an external theoretical, political, or moral standard (Linstead 1993: 115). In sum, deconstructive ethnography approaches cultural life as a text, entering into its terms and assumptions and using them to dis rupt our common notions of their significance. In deconstructive ethnography, the use of theory is a device to resuscitate the subordinate terms, elevate them, and amplify the silenced voices in order to problematize the dominant understanding; and rather than to create a new hierarchy, the goal of deconstructive ethnography is to reconstruct a plurality of awareness within conventional consciousness.

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However, this device is not merely the pursuit of theoretical novelty for its own sake and must arise from a close and relevant reading of the "text" in its own terms (Norris 1990). It is in the rigor of the analysis which proceeds out from the text that the value of this analysis lies, rather than in its imaginative departure from the stimulus of the text into unlimited semiosis and unbounded interpretative relativism. Derrida approaches the tension between the whole and fragments of that whole through deconstruction. It is a way of thinking that works closely with the texts presented, using the terms and contradictions within them first to overturn, then to metamorphose or keep them in motion, not allowing them to rest in a final meaning. In situating deconstruction within the social, Derrida (1996) writes about such politics of hegemony and ideology saying that: All that a deconstructive point of view tries to show, is that since convention, institutions and consensus are stabilizations. . . . this means that they are stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic. Thus, it becomes necessary to stabilize precisely because stability is not natural; it is because there is instability that stabilization becomes necessary; it is because there is chaos that there is a need for stability. . . . Chaos is at. once a risk and a chance . . . and it is here that the possible and the impossible cross each other. (83-84)

My Work in a Deconstructive Framework Within a broader theoretical framework, my research is a recontextualized ethnographic exploration of social class privilege cautiously framed in the postmodern critique in cultural anthropology. I emphasize recontextualized to note my ethnographic attempt to lure cultural experience and group identity out of their common presentations by moving deeper into postmodern and critical explorations of authority and representation. My attempt is to show how people in their lived experiences are continually overflowing essentialized boundaries of assumptions. People do this not necessarily as a form of collective resistance or under the clarion call of some grand political motive, but out of the basic necessity to define themselves and their experience in relation and in contrast to the way they are perceived to be defined. Ultimately, I am suggesting that the lived actuality, as opposed to a static ideal perception of living,

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is a perpetually contested, fragmented, and contradictory one, one in which individuals and groups are constantly searching and constructing novel ways to discover the meaning of their own and others' lives. So, while I cautiously employ some of the more encompassing postmodern ideas, when postmodernist ironically speak of relativism arid fragmentation, I question such a discourse. In my thinking and in this work, I resist from the outset seeing the stereotypical whole from which these relative fragmented pieces have splintered. Instead, I perceive that there are multiple selves and collectives, varied and complex dimensions of the totalizing entities we call race, class, and self. A key point in this book, then, is that if we strive to understand people as they experience their race, class, and subjective identities in general, we will see contradictions and paradoxes to ingrained discourses and constructions, not splinterings from some mythical whole, but people constantly searching through their actuality for some type of whole. Whiteness, Blackness, and Privilege in the Field

On one level, my heldwork experience and data convince me that identity unfolds in subjective and objective forms and in that unfolding is a constant dialectic. Moving away from the central argument in Whiteness literature (that Whiteness and its position is unnamed, neutral, even invisible, and that part of the mission of a postmodern critique is to reveal it), the narratives here, and the way I positioned myself in relation to the dislocated images of Whiteness, reveal that ideas about social class and race are largely assumptive and situational, and one should only attempt to define them through a complex reading of contexts as well as content. Postmodernism calls for a multiplicity of voices in its discourse of representation, yet seldom are the voices of the less privileged allowed to enter the academic debate or given the leverage to define the defincrs or the center. The relegated voices of low-income Whites I encountered offered a different definition of Whiteness than the ones that crowd current academic debates. White high school students in Midway who had to travel across town to find work in the suburbs witnessed W7hiteness as an overtly insular social class of folks. Whiteness appeared visible (even obvious) to them, perhaps,

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and to many others outside its central circle of definition, primarily because it utilized them in order to cast its own reified reflection— the timeless anthropological habit of "othering." However, the other (i.e., poor Whites, privileged Blacks) exercises the ability to other as well and in doing so unsettles the very foundation that a discourse of invisibility and neutrality needs to keep images and ideologies of privilege secluded and protected. This is in contrast to examining Whiteness and privilege from a critical (racist, oppressive, hegemonic) theory perspective which suspends our ideas about race and social class positions in a myopic either/or discourse that ends up working against the dogmatic attacks hurled at it. To simply cry "White is evil!" or "wealth is bad!" does little to expose the layers of racial and social class inequality. Furthermore, to see Whiteness in an abstract postmodernism does little more than solidify its aloofness by never acknowledging where it lands and how it affects and is affected by those who encounter and inhabit it. However, through a deconstructive lens, as I have employed in this study, White privilege is and is not all of the above: good, bad, invisible, ubiquitous, depending on who is appropriating the object or the construction. If anything, Whiteness is simply a space that carries with it powerful, nearly universal symbols; a space that can be occupied by a multitude of people and categories that then give Whiteness a revised meaning. For example, to deconstruct what I deemed an essentialized, totalizing space of White privilege, I simply journeyed into its space, carrying its very own assumed symbol of privilege and defining that symbol as my own, as me. This juxtaposition of identity forced others to see me (and, ostensibly, Blackness) in a decontextualized light and to also question themselves and their assumptive identities in that same light. Privilege, in this context becomes an ironic and paradoxical blend of race and class, as can be deduced from comments about me, such as: "What are you doing studying White people?" (Blacks do not usually study Whites?) or "I thought you were White?" (Blacks do not usually do scholarly research?). These were the assumptions. A deconstructive interpretation, alternatively, situates me within the unsaid, unmarked assumptions of privilege and power, albeit in a contrasting skin color wherein rests the paradox. However, I use the same interpretation to deconstruct what Derrida calls transcendental positioning

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and question my conflicting role in the reification of those same symbols of privilege and power.9 Carrying the privilege of social class with me in the field, f questioned the purity and power of Whiteness and its foundation of symbols and assumptions. Yet in doing so, my position in the field and in people's lives also came to be questioned (by White folks in the "redneck" bar, for example) because 1 carried and wielded the scorned and envied badge commonly associated with Whiteness: privilege. As a result, through a deconstructive questioning, I become a subject ofReconstruction, a self-deconstruction that tries to explain privilege in a decontextualized experience, asking if the fallout of privilege is similar regardless of the racial experience it embodies. Am f now a part of the problem—social class inequality— because of my privileged status relative to low-income Whites and Blacks? Can I (or even should f) attempt to represent the downtrodden and marginalized simply because 1 was once one of them? Or ultimately, am I still one of them who is slowly coming to realize that legitimate privilege is reserved for leveraged Whites and not social and economic climbing others? Poor Whites, Privileged Blacks: Deconstructive Tools of Whiteness

A common argument against deconstruction claims that it is simply a method of inversion between opposite categories or images. Presenting poor Whites in my work as a representation of Whiteness or privilege as Black could very well fall prey to such an argument. However, what f have tried to show is that a deconstructive move, upon closer reading or even a surface reading with an open mind, is much more complex and interwoven. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, much of the current "critical" and "postmodern" work relies on overturning the hierarchy with the intent of centering the marginal and marginalizing the center. Such a move is considered political and liberatory because it seeks to empower the disempowered and apparently destabilizes hegemonic structures of dominance and inequality. Thus is born another hierarchy, false and fragile, which in turn requires overturning, and so it goes. Through invoking a poor White experience as Whiteness, 1 relied on still another movement Derrida employs in his deconstructive reading of

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texts, that of metaphorization. Therein lies the paradox of privilege 1 refer to throughout this book. Poor Whites are not the opposite of the meta-middle-class image of Whites. Rather, poor Whites interpenetrate and inhabit the same assumptions and definitions of Whiteness to give it meaning and therefore give their experience meaning. Denise, in particular (although there were numerous other examples from my field experience), personified the complex way the muldlayered White experience and identity unfold in a deconstructive context. While discursive assumptions and ascriptive cues placed her where Whiteness is thought to belong (in the suburbs), she was positioned there in penury. She survived in that setting primarily through the benevolence (or as she would call it, scorn) of her father-in-law, a wealthy White realtor. Denise's neighbors ignored her for the most part because, as she once said, "They think we're just poor White trash bringing down their property values." She said some neighbors did not think it was fair that her family was able to live in "such a nice neighborhood," receiving welfare assistance, while "they worked every day." Denise's neighbors and many White people I met who did not know her but thought they knew people like her, tried very hard to cast her as some kind of cultural, even racial anomaly, very unlike themselves. Even the literature, as I have mentioned, commonly situates poor Whites in distant locations and discourses far away from assumptive ideas of Whiteness. But doing so or attempting to do so often reveals the codependency of the experiences. And what a deconstructive analysis seeks to mine even deeper is the fragile nature of both the opposing and the opposed of this woven experience. While Whiteness continually tries to escape from its negatively valued supplementary selves (e.g., poverty, avarice, instability, fragmentation) in favor of more stable, positively valued constructions, a deconstructive exploration seeks to interpret the tension between the whole and the negatively valued parts of that whole. This is done to understand why, if the negative selves arid categories are valued so little, they are acknowledged so often, albeit outside of the paragon. So rather than going outside the parameters of Whiteness (whatever they may be), I chose a deconstructive analysis to use Whiteness's discourse and contradictions within its own assump-

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tions. I do this not necessarily to overturn the hierarchy but more to extend its representation into its negatively valued realm. With deconstruction, how it is utilized (or not) depends of course on its own argument of who is reading a text, how they are reading it, and why they are reading it. The whole language of deconstruction, abstract and even obscure to some, can be an integral part of an epistemology that centers on the way phrases are written and spoken to avoid closing out any meaning or reference. So deconstruction, particularly in certain hands, can become an endless play of words and symbols in search of infinite meanings and contradictions. But it can also be read, since it is wide open to interpretation, as asking what Derrida calls transcendental questions that flutter above and beyond assumptions into a more "what if" realm of thought. The very nature of this method of questioning is inherently critical (Surber 1998) and even political (Mouffe 1996). Paul Surber writes: The deconstruction of texts has a necessarily critical, ethical, and political dimension, in that the identification, reconfiguration, and reversal of significational hierarchies operating in texts is, at the same time, a critique of the cultural systems which underwrite them. Whereas the conception of a text as possessing unitary and more or less obvious meaning has the effect of making this meaning appear to be natural and unassailable, the destabilization of this notion opens the dual possibility of revealing the arbitrary and ideological bases of textual constructions and of initiating an internal critique based on their own self-undermining operations. (Surber 1998: 207)

In this vein, my work is a deconstruction of (con)texts and experiences in several ways. From the beginning, the questions I asked of the topic of privilege and class were transcendental, relating to some of the assumptions about Whiteness. Primarily I questioned why symbols and experiences of poverty (versus working-class culture) are seldom located in discourses on Whiteness and why poor Whites are seldom presented as representative of Whiteness. Another important transcendental question asked why privilege is a White allotment in our assumptions of Whiteness and how those assumptions would be affected if relocated and actualized in the form of Blackness or "otherness." Next, to move beyond an either/or critical theory perspective and

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a postmodern notion of difference (which is often simply a separate but equal liberal relativism), I employed the second step of Derrida's method of deconstruction as a way to avoid limiting my ideas arid field encounters. For example, a key move with Whiteness discourse is taking its own construction of privilege and dislodging it, relocating arid reconstructing it in a Black form, and using this form to challenge and deconstruct common contextualizations of Whiteness. With poor Whites a similar recontextualization takes place. To destabilize Whiteness this time is to present it in its own image by exploring how Whites who are poor appropriate Whiteness, shun it, reify it, and so on. Indeed the process is continued even after the hierarchical inversion takes place, opening up the juxtaposed marginal to another set of deconstructive questions and imaginations. Poor Whites, for example, are decontextualized and dislocated by moving their experience and locating them outside of what I call their geography of assumption (the South) to the northern United States, from a timeless, romanticized rural hinterland (Batteau 1990) to a contemporary, evolving urban city. Dcnise is a specific ethnographic deconstruction who was relocated from the imagined squalid contexts of inner cities and trailer parks to the manicured and serene suburbs. And lastly, my identity and positlonality within the field became a part of the text as well. While I mentioned the process of reflexivity in earlier parts of the book, I have actually come to prefer to use the term self-deconstruction rather than self-reflexivity, since pondering whether the power of privilege changes in changed contexts. As a Black researcher, I made many efforts to step outside and into guarded cultural and social territories (and assumptions and discourses), largely by imagining myself as part of these contexts and then simply following my imagination. I came to realize that there is a legitimate privilege and then there is an elusive acquired privilege that raises the ire of folks. Furthermore, the question of how a marginally defined person can become legitimated as a privileged person, if at all, raises still other questions of authority and voice. I make this point because often in the field I was accused oi", from th perspective of hostile Whites, for example, overstepping my bounds by utilizing my acquired (not really legitimate) authority to interpret and define White folks. Moreover, from another perspective I

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was chastised, by Blacks, for example, for seemingly wasting my privilege by interacting with White folks instead of Black folks. In essence, both sets of groups granted me a certain privilege that even I was not comfortable with, primarily because to carry such a privilege, which I constantly questioned, aligned me with a cultural hegemony. However, such an alignment was only partly true since even in that context I was still assumed to be marginal, a virtual privileged person; and throughout my field experience I sought to inhabit the contradictions of such assumptions in order to deconstruct certain presumptions of privilege.

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Conclusion

My attempt in this ethnography has been to move further into constructionist perspectives because of my resistance to recluctionisms and image presentations that characterize essentialist notions. 1 In my intellectual questioning I try to approach grand conceptual formulations like culture, class, and race through different points of knowing. I am not rejecting these concepts, since I do not yet have the cpistemological tools to do so. But by focusing my thinking and empirical journey beyond the presupposed horizon of these concepts, I feel less confined to their central definitions of social actualities. 2 In attempting to explore complexity and difference, I have become more aware of why we perhaps are often drawn to study neatly bounded entities such as racial, gender, and ethnic groups. It is very difficult to see outside of our own mctaconstructions (not to mention trying to understand the varied facets of them) since this would blur our comfortable vision of our relative perceptions of reality. Anthropologist Katherine Newman writes: It is always tempting to seek coherence in culture. Anthropologists are confused by contradictions and devote many hours and countless pages to the task of reconciling mutually incompatible beliefs, usually by demonstrating that they are not as contradictory as they appear. . . . But it is in the nature of our culture, and no doubt most cultures, to live with incoherence and contradiction. This is not a particularly troublesome feature of social life; it. bothers social scientists much more than it bothers people. (Newman f 993: f 69-70)

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Even some of the most well-intentioned recent research in cultural anthropology, for example, on White images suspended in a problematized postmodern representation falls into the very trap it attempts to circumvent perhaps because it sets out pursuing discursive essentializations and not difference in its many, many forms. To see over and over again the assumed obvious segment of an entire social or cultural category and analyze it soothes our sense of authority over social presentations and sustains our own image and authoritative position (i.e., discursively powerful over the discursively powerless). Still, I believe it is necessary for critically imaginative and progressive researchers to search beyond essentializations into sometimes messy and often confusing actualities of social group complexity. Of course, few, if any of us, has the capacity to fully capture the complexity that makes up many of the categories we rely on so heavily to make sense of our worlds. Yet, we do have the capacity to seek out, record, and present the ambiguities and anomalies that are an integral part of so many of the "known" metacategories like race and ethnicity, class, gender, and nationalism. These facets, when revealed, enlighten us with information that helps demystify and expand the discursive presentation of people within their varied social experiences. The goal of theory must be to delve more deeply into complexity as a way to discover similarities. In seeking difference, we stumble upon sameness. That has been the overarching goal of this ethnography. To sum up, I tried to move my intellectual thoughts as far away from prevailing essentializations and as far into deconstruction as possible as I approached this research project. Since my social class interests involved poor Whites, I searched for them outside of where our assumptions tell us they are geographically located, which is often in depressed rural areas or the hinterlands of the southern United States (places like Appalachia, in particular). To disrupt this assumption, I chose an urban setting in a northern city and once there I looked for poverty linked to Whiteness in places it is not commonly thought to exist: I looked not in federal housing projects, but in the suburbs, as in the case with Denise; not exclusively in trailer parks (although

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I did do fieldwork there), but also in predominately Black and Latino neighborhoods. I also looked for poverty among White males to disrupt prevailing notions of single mother poverty and White male invincibility. I defined Whiteness (and carved a space for Whiteness to be defined) not through middle-class definitions and values, but through the narratives of poor, marginalized Whites. And, by applying some of the deconstructive ideas of Derrida, I presented privilege not only through its assumed, even obvious racialized imagery of" Whiteness, but also through the lived experience of Blackness—that is, through myself, a contradictory, complex, privileged, marginal construct. In the field, this overall approach yielded incredible insights arid allowed me to come to better understand multidimensional constructions and discourses of social class and race. A clearer understanding of the dynamics of culture unfolds when we take critical, yet imaginative intellectual steps to look beyond assumptions and stereotypes. The fundamental problem with much scholarly research is that we set out theoretically to discover our own narrow ideals rather than making the attempt to discover and come to understand the necessary fluidity of actualities and how we ourselves are paradoxically implicated in those actualities. II my ideas in this book are to be categorized, I would call them an exploration oi cross-cultural difference and contact in the margins. Considering that most cross-cultural comparisons in research are reflections of a normalized category such as Whiteness, where marginal and minority groups become dichotomized as the opposite, I am curious to know more about wilhin-group or within-category difference, which 1 argue offers more nuanced portraits of society, cultural groups and, individuals. With the slow, creaky opening of society's doors (laws, attitudes, beliefs) the cultural and political-economy arenas are all the time becoming much more complex, not because the here and now is necessarily more complex or difficult than it was before, but because more and more difference in the form of thoughts, looks, and experiences is shoving its way into the social arena and even being allowed at times to define and represent that arena. Therein

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lie the fragments, contradictions, and hybridities of the postmodern moment that deconstruction attempts to ferret out and understand.

Notes

Introduction 1. Throughout my lieldwork experience, I had mixed feelings about, the ease with which the label poor White trash rolled off the tongues of numerous White and Black folks I met. Perhaps they assumed that because I am Black I somehow condone the pejorative nature of the label. I also noticed that many Whites were very careful to search for the "politically correct" terms when referring to Blacks or folks of Mexican descent, but within their own category that reticence was not the case. 2. Much of my thinking on the topic of privilege is borrowed from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1984). Loosely indebted to Weber, Bourdieu approaches the topic of privilege via social class analysis coupled with interpretations of the role of culture in the dynamic process of individual and group identity construction and cultural reproduction. It is through his concepts of "cultural capital" and "habitus" that in one way privilege manifests itself. Bourdieu's interpretation of privilege based on culture and class takes us beyond imagining privilege linked simply to material accumulation and social status. He is in particular keen to the strategies of cultural power that advance through denying their attachment to immediate political ends and thereby accumulate both symbolic capital and high structural position. In the lield, it became exceedingly clear that privilege carries its most clout in assumed and familiar packages and took on a myriad of meanings when utilized by the self (me in this case) and presented to others (poor Whites, in particular) out of its assumed context. 3. Inventing the image of the respectable working class or "silent majority" was especially ripe in the 1960s and 1970s: "the working class, as discovered, was . . . white. In reality, the American working class was becoming increasingly female, black, and Hispanic. But middle class

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expectations dictated that workers were white, just as poor people who were not Appalachians were commonly envisioned as black" (Ehrenreich 1989: 109). Essays in Howe (1970) about working-class culture offer several propositions concerning the middle-class fear of equality. For example: "The greater the emphasis in a society upon the availability of 'equal opportunity for all,' the greater the need for members of that society to develop an acceptable rationalization for their own social status" (Lane 1970: 144). Within White-on-White relations, such a rationali/ation is tricky since it is in the best interest of the privileged class to maintain a chasm between those who are most similar to them in skin color and heritage, but an obvious contradiction to them in economic or social standing. See Morrell (1992) for an interesting South African example of how poor citizens are rhetorically divided along racial lines to prevent class conflict. Michael Katz (1990: 5) argues that the language of poverty is a vocabulary of distinction: "poverty discourse highlights the social construction of difference. Some ways of classifying people, such as undeserving—or even poor—are so old we use them unrcflexively. . . . The problem with this language of difference is both philosophical and practical. We assume that verbal distinctions reflect natural or inherent qualities of people." One way, in particular, this has been and still is done is through representations of non-Whites in the popular media (Gray 1992; Bogle 1989). Berkhofer (1979) similarly reconstructs the White imagination's creation of the "Indian" in the New World, showing that Whites in Europe and colonial America sought a negative native imagery to reflect off of in order to positively define themselves and justify their march to imperialism. 4. Cook (1976: 3) writes, that as early as 1728 explorer William Byrd described "groups of'indolent wretches' in the backwoods of North Carolina and Virginia with 'custard complexions' who practiced their vices publicly and their virtues in intense privacy; who lived in a 'dirty state of nature' and were alternatively subject to 'gross humors' and 'a lazy, creeping habit' that kept them squatting on a frontier." See also see Flynt (1979) about poor Whites and class difference among Whites in colonial and nineteenth-century America. "Since slaves were an important part of the economic system and enjoyed greater material security," according to Flynt, "poor whites could take pride only in color" (11). Class conflict would then seem to be apparent, but it was not. Even though there were rigid class divisions, poor Whites shared in the oppressive racial and political views of the aristocracy, especially toward southern Blacks. Writes Flynt: "exploitation is a major source ol class conflict . . . poor whites generally were neither exploited or mistreated by the ruling class; they were simply ignored" (11). See also Dood (1937). Poor Whites were also discriminated against based on genetics. In White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919, Nicole Rafter (1988) traces the perceived social and economic worth among White families through eleven family studies conducted during the eugenics movement of the early 1900s. Empowered with scientific argu-

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merits linking poverty to haywire genes, politicians and researchers used data generated through this untenable eugenics research to set national policy and concentrate wealth. Indirectly, Rafter's research lends important insight on middle class views on society's haves and have-nots. It also shows rather soundly that White-on-White discrimination founded on middle-class values was (and is) rife in the United States. Some of the most enduring images of White poverty surfaced during the Great Depression era. An intimate picture emerges in letters people wrote to President Roosevelt pleading for jobs and any kind of relief. One woman wrote from Georgia in the summer of 1935: "dear Sur as you are the president of our State it look like you could do Something to help out the poor white people the negroes can get work where the poor white man cannot and his family are on Starvation. . . . Such as that and negroes being worked ever where instead of white men it dont look like that is rite and is not rite and lay off white men" (McElvaine 1983: 94). During this time, even the thick illusion of the progressive North being void of social ills like deep poverty versus the backward South was shattered for most people. Cities like Chicago with its large poor immigrant population also harbored large pockets of homegrown poor Whites. Historians tend to skip over the fact that just as southern Black folk streamed north after the turn of the century in search of America's promises, so did throngs of poor southern White families. Known to social workers as "southern white Appalachian migrants," these families settled in large northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit (Bruno 1966; Gitlin and Hollander 1970; Hartigan 1999). 5. Poverty level figures are from 1998 (U.S. Census Bureau, 1999 Statistical Abstract, Table 763). Of the 35.5 million poor, Blacks numbered 9.1 million (25 percent), and Hispanics numbered 8.3 million (23 percent). The phrase "truly, truly invisible citizens" is a play on words of the titles of books by William fulius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantage^ (1987), and Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952), which both explore Black marginality in U.S. society. 6. Along with myself and others throughout the book, Marianne is very aware of how even innocent questions, comments, and recollections begin to chip away apparent similarities and divide people by class. As she says in her comment, in certain settings people appear to be very similar until certain questions surface: Where did you grow up? What school did your parents attend? What do your parents do? Where did you go to school/college? Trips abroad? Summer homes and vacations? Winter ski trips? Through questions (and answers) such as these people quickly begin to realize the differences—not based on the present, but journeys to the present. 7. Ellis Cose explores the elusive nature of Black privilege in his book, Rage of a Privileged Class (1993). He argues that while Black people have climbed a long way up the economic ladder of success in the United States, they are still presented and imagined to be second-class citizens in a social class setting. The attainment of money, education, even power, Cose writes,

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does not guarantee the attainment of privilege void of the negative stereotypes associated with Black skin and Black culture. Such arguments along with my work here suggest that privilege is reserved, at least in perception, for Whites. See also Pattillo-McCoy (2000) for more on the Black middle class. 8. For cultural theorists the expanded language and practice of seeing or even assuming difference raises important questions of why and how the categories of race, class and culture are formed. According to McLaren (see McLaren and Giarelli 1995: 6), "I he politics of difference that undergirds this critical perspective examines how differences rearticulate and reshape identity such that identities arc transformed and in some instances broken down, but are never lost." Other scholars elaborate on this point of difference and identity which is especially well articulated in feminist literature (Gunew and Ycatman 1993) and among scholars of color (West 1990; Hall 1992). For example, West writes that "Demystification is the most illuminating mode of theoretical inquiry for those who promote the new cultural politics of difference. . . . Demystification tries to keep track of the complex dynamics of institutional and other related power structures in order to disclose options and alternatives for transformative praxis; it also attempts to grasp the way in which representational strategies are creative responses to novel circumstances and conditions. In this way, the central role of human agency . . . is accented" (1990: 29). Chapter 1

1. In 1997, U.S. census estimated the city's population at 428,203 while the estimate of the metropolitan area was 658,867. The name of the city— Midway—and sections (Northtown, Southtown, and so on) I conducted research in as well as the names of the people profiled in the study are pseudonyms to protect their privacy. 2. Upton Sinclair wrote about the sordid experience of eastern European immigrants working in Chicago meat-packing plants in his classic novel The Jungle (1906). 3. Cattle and hogs are still trucked and slaughtered in a few small-scale packing plants in Northtown, yet these days the heart of Northtown commerce is predominately an enclave for Mexican and Mexican Americans. Census figures show that just more than 3 percent of Midway's population is Hispanic with more than 90 percent of that population living in the Northtown area. The Mexican history in Midway extends back to shortly after World War I when Mexican workers were brought in by the packinghouses as strikebreakers. Throughout this study 1 frequently refer to four sections of the city of Midway that each have their own distinct histories and residential makeups. Northtown, as noted, is where most of the bluecollar, working-, and lower-class Whites in Midway settled and still call

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home. However, another section of Midway I call Laketown is also home to a predominately working- and lower-class White population. The other two sections of the city I spent a lot of time in were Southtown, the predominately Black part of the city where I grew up and Eastown, considered "suburbia" and middle to upper class by residents of Midway. 4. Laketown is located near a diverted river on the far east edge of Midway, adjacent to one of the largest lakes in the area. The population, about 1,300, is composed predominately of White working- and lower-class residents. Recently, a new housing development sprang up a few blocks away from a tattered trailer home park and many small, modest homes. Some of the new homes range in price from $250,000 and up. Some people in Midway referred to Laketown residents as "river rats" largely because in the imaginations of those who did not live there (including those who only drove through on their way to the airport) Laketown was a seedy part of town populated by rough-and-tumble people, who happened to be White. 5. Almost by default, I found that such "warehousing" of poor Whites is unusual in Midway and other cities around the country. I met very few White families living in public housing projects. How many lived in federally subsidi/ed "scattered-site housing," on the other hand, I do not really know because part of the effort of scattered sites is to help erase or hide the stigma of poverty by providing families with homes throughout the city not just in low-income areas. I also recall that years ago as a reporter I met. many low-income White families living in subsidized, scattered-site homes. I wanted to revisit such families in this research but because of time constraints was not able to. 6. Literature on social and economic class is vast, but can be filtered down to two main arguments: Marx's class fractions in capitalist society are a social reality produced by economic determinants linked to production; and Weber's class distinctions in society arc not so determined by economics but. arc manifold based on culture, politics, ideology, subjective representations, and other social dynamics, economy being just one of them. The intellectual debate surrounding class has been one that has tried to wrest class analysis from its penchant toward economism and reductionisrn under the ideas of orthodox Marxism. Below I highlight the trail of literature I utilized to help me form my own ideas on class. On ideology and hegemony, sec Gramsci (1971), Althusser (1966), and Poulantzas (1978). For critiques that questioned the connection between politics and class, see Hindess and Hirst. (1977) and Thompson (1968). Even more radical critiques (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) make discourse central over economy and politics. Gorz (1982) suggests that the mythical labor movement is being supplanted by other ideological and social movements, not of Marx's time. All the w'hile, fundamental Marxist, proponent Wright (1985) continued to argue for the ccntrality of economy in class divisions and exploitation. Weber's class analysis has directly influenced the work of many researchers in

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contemporary social theory. Some good examples include, Centers (1949), Lipsct and Bendix (1957), Coleman and Rainwater (1978), Sennett and Cobb (1972), and Giddens (1973). Fussell (1983), and Jackman and Jackman (1983), similar to Bourdieu, see social class as being identified through subjective symbols. Other notable works on class and race include Frazier (1957), Cox (1948), Wilson (1987), and Gilroy (1987). Within anthropology (and there are only a few) on class and culture, see Ortncr (1991) and Sider (1986). 7. Of course there are exceptions that may appear to fit this category but fail to hold up under closer examination. For example, some argue that many college students could be deemed poor because they do not work, rely on federal loans, and so on. But. such an argument misses the point since most of these students delay work to attain their education, and loans are simply assisting them in paying for tuition and living expenses while in school. The fundamental difference here is choice. The same goes for some street kids from affluent families (prevalent near the college campus in Austin, Texas, where 1 attended graduate school) who make a choice to affect a life of poverty. 8. Many of the students I met at Northtown High worked part- or fulltime while attending school. They made pretty good money and some even lived on their own, sharing an apartment or house with roommates. Some students said that working was the only way they could afford to do anything, because they did not get money from their parents. Chapter 2 1. In the fall of 1995, the school year before L began my research at Northtown High, 1,336 students attended Northtown, according to school district statistics. Of this total, almost 41 percent were classified as students of color. Following is the racial composition breakdown at Northtown High: 306 students, or nearly 23 percent, were Black; 206, or about 15 percent, were Hispanic; 18, or just more than 1 percent, were Native American; 15 (again just over 1 percent) were Asian American, and 791, or just more than 59 percent, were White. Northtown High enrolled the second largest number of students of color in the school district, while at the same time it enrolled the smallest number of White students. 2. For this chapter, I interviewed forty-five students at Northtown High School. Initial interviews were informal in place and tone as a way to introduce myself to the students and hopefully allow them to feel more comfortable in my presence. Through those initial encounters, I chose the above-mentioned sample based primarily on their year or grade in school (all juniors and seniors) and their lived experience in poverty. By this I mean that all of the students I interviewed were then or at some time in their lives a member of a family that received welfare program dollars or

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lived in federally subsidi/ed low-income housing. These two categories were used as economic barometers of experience. To find what personal and cultural mores (lowed from these experiences and how they related to schooling was the primary aim of this part of the research. For the formal part of this context of the research, I interviewed males and females. Each interview lasted from forty-five minutes to an hour. Once students were identified for the formal interview sessions, 1 sent out interview consent forms to parents and guardians. Of the seventy sent out, forty-five students returned their forms with an OK to grant the interviews. The consent forms were required by the school district. All of the formal interviews wit students were recorded and later transcribed as a way to better focus in on patterns of thought. Of the forty-five students interviewed, twenty-five were females, twenty were males. All formal interviews took place in school during regular school hours. By formal interviews, I mean I asked each student a series of twenty-seven questions that focused specifically on their perceptions of class, Whiteness, poverty, and the role of school in their lives then, now, and in the future. In addition to the formal interviews, field notes were routinely recorded on observed and overheard interactions between students as well as informal conversations I had with students. Pseudonyms are used here and throughout the study to maintain the promised anonymity of subjects. Since many of the students were interviewed more than once, and some much more frequently, these subsequent interviews helped form richly textured narratives of students' lives. Later, I followed and incorporated some of these same students' experiences into some of my later research outside of the school setting. In all I spent five months at North town High, on average three days during the school week, conducting research. 3. For a classic examination of education reproduction theory and student resistance from a British perspective, sec Willis (1977); also see Everhart (1983), who explores reproduction theory in education. Other important studies on the war of wills between institutional mandates and student agency are Giroux (1983) and McLaren and Giarelli (1995). 4. See Oakes (1995) on tracking students; Bernstein (1977) as well as Eckert (1989), Wcxler (1992), and Brantlinger (1993) on race and class reproduction in education. 5. Equating the norms of school and society with Whiteness is culled from conversations I have had over the years with Black and Latino students and also from the work of Fordham and Ogbu (1987) on the delicate act of Black students accused of "acting White" as the way to achieve success in school and Fordham (1996), which is a more involved ethnographic look at the issue. 6. The descriptions and definitions of these groups were corroborated by several Northtown students: stoners, students who smoke marijuana and cigarettes, take drugs, and have a defiant, character to authority; freaks, students who arc part of the alternative, socially conscious scene,

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deemed freaks primarily because of the way they dress (tattered elothing), groom, and adorn themselves (green and blue hair, pierced noses, and so on); jocks and preppies, the mainstream students, many of them middle to upper middle class. The Jocks are into sports while the Preppies are highly supportive of school sports and the dominant school culture in general (academics, student government, school organizations, for example). 7. A relevant body of literature from sociology and anthropology on the study of schools has documented adolescents' use of social-type labels among peer groups. These studies have consistently found that students form their identities to a large extent based on peer approval and disapproval. For more examples, see Brown and Lohr (1987), Cohen (1979), Coleman (1961), Cusick (1973), lanni (1989), Lesko (1988), Lightfoot (1983), and Snyder (1972). 8. Murphy's book is an eloquent work on the stigma of being disabled in an "abled" society. Murphy is an anthropologist who became wheelchairbound in midlife due to a disease of the spinal cord. lie writes his "social history of a paralytic illness" as a reflexive inquiry into human behavior and thought and the liminality of partial bodies and of somehow not being whole. 9. In some classes, I was very aware and intrigued at many of the "making out games" (Foley 1990) students employed to undermine, sabotage, and manipulate classroom lectures. This was also a way for students to objectify or highlight themselves among their peers or just as a way to liven up a relatively ho-hum class setting. The games are also used as a way to usurp a little power from the daunting institution and its functionaries. 10. In particular, see MacLeod (1987) and Willis (1977) for a perspective on low-income Whites. Chapter 4 1. Poverty presents itself in many forms throughout U.S. society. In relating economic poverty with people with little or no money who live with few material and capital possessions, I must qualify this with the understanding that their condition is often not their choice. I do this to delineate, for example, the number of low-income, disfranchised poor White students I met during my research from ever-increasing groups of White middle-class kids who "decided" for personal and political reasons to drop out of their economic and social class setting and roam the streets near college campuses (as is the case on the "Drag" in Austin, Texas) or trendy, nostalgic districts like Haight-Ashhury in San Francisco, begging for food and money while searching for meaning in their lives. However, even many Generation X'ers (as they are called by some; see Foster 1994) skip poverty and choose to adopt suffering as a way to valorize homelcssncss, perhaps believing that people at the extreme lower ends of the economic spectrum

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only sutler based on their affected notions of what poverty is and how it is experienced. 2. Based on 1996 figures from the Department ol Social Services in the state in which I conducted this research, a family of two had to earn less than $1,123 per month to be eligible for welfare assistance. Once eligible, the two main forms of state assistance were Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), which primarily paid for living expenses (rent, utilities, clothes), and the federal food stamp program. A mother and one child were eligible for $293 a month in ADC funds and $220 a month in food coupons. In general, 1998 state ADC data showed that about 33,700 people (out of a general population of 1.6 million) in the state received welfare assistance. Whites numbered about 18,800 (56 percent) of that total, Blacks 9,000 (27 percent), Hispanics 3,000 (9 percent), and Native Americans 2,200 (6.5 percent). 3. Actually, quite a few men and women I interviewed during my fieldwork talked about, "physical" perceptions of poor Whites, as well. Some of them suggested that most people think of White women who are poor as being "fat" and "sloppy" looking. When asked what that meant, some of the females in my sample described "greasy hair, pimply face, rotten teeth." And although five of the six women 1 interviewed for various parts of the research in this chapter described themselves as overweight, Sharon was a complete contrast to the perception, making her experience and identity even more paradoxical. 4. I went to the grocery store with Sharon twice and watched surrounding reactions on my own. People glared at her and mumbled things about her, not suspecting that I was with her. One time, as the checkout person counted out her food stamps and tore them from the booklet, people in line were getting impatient, apparently because it took longer than usual and they did not feel "food stamps" were worth the delay. "There go your taxes," one woman in line whispered to her companion, with a sneer. Sharon paid, picked up her bag, anti as she walked off out of hearing range, another woman in line said to a man next to her, "Why do they shop out here, anyway?" (at a suburban store, where the prices, Sharon said, ironically were much lower). 5. Demographic characteristics of the working poor indicate a problem spread across population groups. However, the vast majority of working poor are White and of prime working age (Levitan and Shapiro f 987:17). The numbers are important, but they rarely supplant the more powerful and enduring images of poverty—those of Blacks and Latinos. Such images confused the reality of the experience ol many White women I interviewed. 6. 'font, a seventeen-year-old junior at Northtown High, recounted a story of how her sister and her sister's three children are welfare recipients, a reality that seemed to embarrass her more than Darlene in her similar situation. "When we go places, you know, sometimes my sister doesn't care

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how she dresses or how the kids are dressed," Toni said. "I tell her it's important to look nice and clean. I mean, even if people are poor, they don't have to look like it. But even then, people can tell that you're trying to be something you're not." 7. In 1994 the official poverty level for one person was $7,547; for two people, $9,661; for a family of lour, $15,141, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 1996 Statistical Abstract, Table 732. Also Kasarda (1995) notes that of an estimated 3.8 million working poor in 1990, about 2.3 million (61 percent) were White. White males comprised about 32 percent of the total working poor, and about 34 percent were White women. Chapter 6 1. Drury (1972) made the following provocative observation about our social contradictions of mobile homes and "real" homes: "The basic conflict that mobility causes in housing is related to the American concept of 'home.' This conflict is the product of the image of'home' or any architectural form as having time-honored roots; thus, the image of 'home' is one of stability and rootedness. This 'home' is so sacred an American ideal that 'stability' has come to be looked upon as virtue. Conversely, lack of stability has been looked down upon as less than virtuous" (82). On housing studies in general, Kerneny (1992) argues, "A central problem o f . . . housing studies is that it retains a myopic and narrow focus on housing policy and housing markets, and neglects broader issues. . . . I argue that housing comprises such a fundamental and major dimension of social structure that the study of residence can and perhaps should be the central contribution of housing studies to our understanding of society" (xv, xviii). Building on the work of Rex and Moore (1967), who introduced to housing studies the concept of "housing classes," Kemcny suggests expanding the definition of housing by contextuali/ing the inner home (occupants) and outer home (the structure and its locality) within larger cultural and social questions. 2. One of every three single-family homes sold in the country in 1997 was factory-made; the average cost of a mobile home during my research period was $36,300 compared to the average $119,000 cost of a site-built home; sales of prefabricated houses have risen 112 percent since 1991; and 60 percent of mobile home owners have annual incomes of less than $30,000 (Manufactured Housing Institute, Washington, B.C.). 3. Wallis (1991) contextualizcs the mobile home in time to show how people have come to see this form of housing on wheels as a lower form living: "the paradoxical place of the mobile home in American housing—as both necessity and pariah—may be found in conflicts within our most fundamental beliefs about home and community, conflicts between conformity and individuality, between place-community and the expectation that individual freedom means freedom to move. . . . In light of these conflicting

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beliefs, the mobile home may be shunned not because it fails to satisfy American housing ideals, but because it makes these contradictions between ideals apparent" (23). 4. Miller and Evko, borrowing from Duncan (1968), explore how many of the negative historical symbols of trailer parks transfers through time and through culture. Trailer park adolescents in their study (as was apparent with Martha's older daughter), in comparison with their suburban sitebuilt house peers, were faced with a problem of lack of place which magnifies student marginalization. This lack of belonging, Miller and Evko argue, is directly linked to living in a trailer home and more than anything else is an obstacle to the self-image of the park adolescent. To paraphrase Duncan in trying to think through the process of identity construction among trailer park youth and groups in general, the self is born in dialogue with others. When those who are necessary for our definition of self arc indifferent, disorganization of self occurs, because we, as human beings, discover our social existence in relationship with others (Duncan 1968:100-107). 5. Martha often talked about how Clearview was becoming more segregated with the double-wides in one section near the front entrance of the trailer park away from the single's and older model trailers. She called the double-wide area the "suburbs of the trailer park!" 6. The suburbs have been written about extensively, yet have received little attention from the social sciences where urban areas have long been the focus of anthropological and sociological studies. Some notable exceptions are Cans (1967), Balladassare (1986), Perin (1988), Jackson (1985), and Newman (1988, 1993). 7. As mentioned earlier, in the state in which I did my research, a mother and one child were eligible, at the time, for $293 a month in welfare aid to pay mainly for rent and clothing, along with $220 a month in federal food stamp vouchers. The aid increased $71 per additional child per month. Recipients received additional aid allowances for things like gas to drive work, for day care for their children, and for bus or occasional taxi fares to work. 8. Haar and latridis (1974) and McCormick and McKillop (1989) offer a glimpse of the experience of poor people living in suburban areas. McCormick and McKillop note that "Whites still constitute a majority of poor suburbanites" (22), but the focus of their article is the migration of Blacks and Latinos into contemporary suburban ghettos on the periphery of many U.S. cities. 9. A student at Northtown High often scolded her lower-income cousins "because they think they're better than we are because they live in the suburbs. They drive an old raggedy car and ain't got no furniture. My mom's house is nice and she has a newer car than theirs. But they're still better, they think, because they don't live [in Northtown]. They live in the suburbs."

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Chapter 7 1. Even my older brothers worked in the dying industry for a very short period, just enough time to imprint upon them that grueling labor was not the employment route they would choose in life if they could help it. Chapter 8 1. Within anthropology and sociology alone, studies peering into the cultural and economic plight of Black people in North America are countless: See, for example, Ogbu (1987), Drake and Cayton (1945), Hannerz (1969), Liebow (1967), Whitten and Szwed (1970), Stack (1974), Weis (1985), Rose (1987), and Solomon (1992) in anthropology; and Rist (1970), Wilson (1987), Anderson (1990) in sociology. A problem with such overplayed presentations is that poverty and social class inequality, in actuality, is colorblind. It is our own cultural constructions that are not blind to color. Ignoring this simply etches static, dichotomous comparisons of Whites and others more deeply into our collective mindsets. 2. My work and thinking about anthropology shifted after reading some early progressive works in anthropology, such as Hymes (1969) and Jones (1970), and I have been influenced, as I mentioned at the beginning of this ethnography, by the more recent social philosophy work of West (1990) and the cultural critiques of Hall (1996) on the complex and fluid nature of difference based on culture, race, and discourse. Hall, in particular, appears to have recently begun to reconsider or recast the position of rnarginality within Blackness more outside of the framework of Grarnscian Marxism. His work is intriguing because as a Black scholar he makes the intellectual move of distancing himself from essentialized images and definitions ol Blackness, at the possible expense of appearing as not identifying with many of its traditional constructions. But Hall's argument is a cogent one that suggests that as Black people encounter discourses of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and feminism, these more encompassing and ambiguous discourses mark the end of innocence or the "end of the essential Black subject" (Hall 1996: 443). Painstakingly, this de-essentiali/ation opens Blackness up to a myriad of representations and broader definitions that reveal subjective and collective identities that place Blackness and Black culture in problematic contexts of positive stereotypes as well. In the case of my work, for example, this means coming to terms with the actuality that a Black person can wield the power of privilege to dominate and subordinate others. And as I argue, with this understanding, with this paradox of positioning, the subject (rather than the object.) of privilege is better exposed. Therefore, in considering Blackness and marginal Whiteness as interpenetrating forms of the same entity, Hall suggests that we interrogate the concept of difference more imaginatively. "Difference, like

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representation, is ... a contested concept. There is the 'difference' which makes a radical and unbridgeable separation: and there is a 'difference' which is positional, conditional, and conjunctural, closer to Derrida's notion of difference" (Hall 1996: 446-47). 3. Mainly with the publication oi David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991); Toni Morrison's work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992); and Ruth Frankenberg's White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (1993). Simultaneously, it seems during the 1990s, mainstream media stumbled upon a newfound interest in White underclass topics and images. "White Hot Trash!" reads the headline of an essay in New York magazine exploring this surge of interest in poor White culture in the popular media (Friend 1994). Satirical in tone, Friend's essay notes that affluent Americans tied to the strict culture of business and success are intoxicated with the image of the "guilt-free" freedom of "white trash" cultural tokens. That poor Whites are able to forget their troubles, throw up their hands, and say the "hell with it," seemingly without worry, lures middle-class folk away from their uptight lives into a cultural fantasy land of poor Whites. And since many Americans are so into form without content, the affluent, slumming well-to-do, suggests Friend, believe that by affecting White trash poses they are tapping into authentic despair and alienation, "just as if they wore a leather jacket in the 1950s" (24). In line with this argument is Foster's (1994) column "Cult of Despair" in the New York Times: "The ethic of failure slides up and down the social scale. At the high end, there is the familiar phenomenon of Generation X—the brand name for yuppies in a post-yuppie age, for well-to-do kids who delight in a cushioned free fall into the social underworld. . . . Obviously, kids in slums cannot slum in this way, and in old working class neighborhoods resignation is hardly a pose. To be down and out in these places is not an affection" (A31). To find clues into White trash backgrounds and lifeways, Friend further writes that people must look for stereotypical symbols like artificial grass, velvet paintings, double-wide trailer homes, Spam, thick sideburns, Southern drawls, anything with Elvis on it, and John Deere caps. With the proliferation of daytime tabloid talk shows (e.g., Ricki Lake, Jerry Springer, Montel Williams, Jenny Jones), images of the White underclass have appeared without much precedent, sensationalizing problems and images that were once repressed, remote, or subjects of private conversation. Comedians tour the country mocking poor White customs and sensibilities. A rock band named itself W'hite Trash. There is even a popular cookbook called White Trash Cooking that serves up not only recipes, but also anecdotes and interpretations of White trash culture. The list goes on. Within popular culture, from talk shows to the short stories of Bobbie Ann Mason (Shiloh), the White middle class seem to be embracing while at the same time keeping a definable safe distance from White trash stereotypes. 4. The trap 1 speak of is one where scholars of color, in what is thought

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to be a liberatory intellectual effort, construct narrow non-White images and overly positive White images. Through such constructs, we come to see non-Whites as nonprivileged, for instance, and all Whites as privileged. Such assumptive interrogations of identity reify discourses of difference and static positions of power and powcrlessness. One example of this in anthropology that comes to mind is Solomon's (1992) "no-way-out" crosscultural depiction of Black youths in a Canadian high school. 5. African Americans (Jones 1970, Gwaltney 1980, Harrison 1991, Drake and Cayton 1945, within anthropology for instance; Du Bois 1903; Christian 1987; Gates 1986; Collins 1990; West 1989, 1993; hooks 1992; Austin 1992; Baldwin 1955, 1961), Arab Americans (Said 1979; Shaheen 1984), Asian Americans (Omi 1989; Takaki 1989; Trinh 1991), Latinos (Anzaldua )987; Noriega 1992; Chabram and Frcgoso 1990), and Native Americans (Vizenor 1989; Deloria 1995) have all interrogated the complex and contested relations (social, cultural, historical, political, economic) various groups have to the center. Also see Roediger (1998). Writers and thinkers of color outside of the United States have also explored their relationships to Whiteness from a variety of perspectives as well (Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom; Fanon 1967; Gilroy 1987; Hall 1986; Spivak 1988). 6. Hartigan's work in particular is revealing and similar to my ethnography here in that he not only argues for a disruption of the common Whiteness discourse of neutrality but empirically shows in his ethnography (in Detroit) the way Whiteness is and can be racialized. He argues that Whites are susceptible to "racial situations" similar to non-Whites if we expand our definition of how and when race and class are negotiated in actuality. Therefore, as I argue throughout, if we look at the way poor White folk are caught up in the normative discourse of Whiteness, we can see its contradiction arid silences. Ilartigan does this, looking past this discourse into an expanded image of Whiteness to disrupt essentialized ideas about race. 7. Within the social sciences, anthropology, perhaps has been particularly influenced by the trend of postmodern thought primarily because the discipline for so long has defined itself by how it has come to define others (Fabian 1983; McGrane 1989; Said 1979), based on positivist notions of cultural difference and superiority. Anthropologists working within the postmodernist paradigm are generally more skeptical about science, rationality, and metanarratives and consequently have initiated a more sustained attack, particularly against positivistic, scientific foundations of ethnographic description. Postmodernists have also raised new issues about the production of cultural texts and cultural representations. Within anthropology some notable precursors to postmodern ethnography bear mentioning because their writings may have helped set the stage for recent postmodern ethnographic practices. Writing against the structuralist paradigm of Claude Levi-Strauss, Clifford Geertx (1973, 1980) called for a new form of cultural analysis. Among other things, he argued that culture is not a way

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of life imprinted in people's psyches, but rather is embodied in public symbols and rituals through which members of a society or group communicate their ideas, values, and emotions. Geertz advocated a more semiotic concept of culture to give his notion of public culture a fixed locus and a degree of objectivity. His emphasis on interpreting "cultural texts" helped set the stage for the postmodern emphasis on studying the process and politics of textual production and representation. The most cited and wellknown accounts of the general confluence of Geert/.'s interpretivisrn, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism into anthropology's "experimental moment" are Marcus and Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986) and Clifford and Marcus's Writing Culture (1986). What was novel and influential about Marcus and Fischer's approach—influenced by textual analysis, discourse theory and numerous variants of literary criticism— was their "self-conscious" effort to utilize writing as a critical theory of representation. They argued that the process of scholarly ethnographic writing is not, as positivists had long contended, a means of reproducing one's experience of the world. Rather, writing (as well as other methods of representation such as film and photography) as a form of social action is a powerful medium through which the "other," ethnographically speaking, is represented or presented. So writing, critically charged or not, becomes a form of social praxis and positioning. According to Marcus and Fischer, the new ethnographies of the late 1960s and early 1970s challenged the authority of ethnographers to speak for and represent their cosubjects of knowledge production. They argued that the ethnographer's rhetorical use of scientilic realist narrative style often masked the ideological or theoretical interests of the author. They called (or a style of ethnography that dccenters the authority of "scientific anthropologists" to render detached, objective portraits of whole cultures. Having eschewed grand universal theories that produce totalizing cultural accounts, postmodern ethnographers strive to evoke a multiplicity of different perspectives and narratives. By complicating rather than resolving the issues of authorial authority and ethnographic holism, these new heterogeneous, multi-vocal ethnographic texts may lead to less monolithic, objectifying portraits of cultural others. James Clifford (1986: 109) suggests: "Much of our knowledge about other cultures must now be seen as contingent, the problematic outcome of intersubjective dialogue, translation, and projection." With such pronouncements, the intellectual landscape would appear to be wide open; however, the interpretive and postmodern critique within anthropology as commonly conducted presents major problems. Consequently, many researchers want to move beyond static anthropological debates about authority and representation, which they feel are but esoteric squabbles in the so-called radical postmodern moment. Researchers like Rosaldo (1989), Watson (1991), Abu-Lughod (1991), and Fox (1991) argue that anthropology in whatever form it now claims to represent is still limited by its relation to the immutable culture concept. These researchers believe that the culture

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concept, similar to the Marxist class concept, as well as conceptual theories of race and ethnicity, is too deterministic and reductionist to serve as the central epistemological tool of anthropology in the present. Abu-Lughod (1991) writes: "Most American anthropologists believe or act as if 'culture,' notoriously resistant to definition and ambiguous of referent, is nevertheless the true object of anthropological inquiry. . . . [Rather] culture is the essential tool for making the other" (143). Considering this, it is no surprise that culture has remained at the center of anthropological discourse through the discipline's frequent theoretical fluctuations. Anthropology's most radical departure in relation to the culture concept has been to present all cultures as relative. However, to move beyond anthropological inquiry as we have known it calls for a more earnest reflexivity that exposes how our subjectivities are embedded in conceptual representations. McGrane (1989) offers a revealing point when he writes about the discursive practices of anthropology: "with the non-European Other as with the aliens-from-other-planets, what is significant is not whether such beings exist or not, but, rather, the fact that they are conceivable. I'm not interested in the fact and nature of their existence, but. I'm very much interested in the fact and nature of their conceivability" (3). What I garner from this statement and others like it is that certainly cultures, as they are conceived in the subjective consciousness, exist. But the overriding question shifts and becomes not so much how do cultures exist, but why do they exist (i.e., as discursively constructed cultural entities) and how are they enacted and acted upon? 8. More broadly I argue that while postmodern critiques of rclativistic actualities and experience bring much to the current global and national debate on race, ethnicity, and social difference by "exposing," for instance, the hegemony of Whiteness, the re-presentation of the privileged by the privileged themselves still remains one of the critiques' primary pitfalls. For many thinkers centered in privilege, in their vision to resist the structures of modernism fundamental questions of who really speaks, who can speak, and who has access (Roof and Wiegman 1995; Spivak 1988) are often glossed over in favor of a Utopian aesthetic of culture and politics. This is all part of the postmodern moment in the social sciences, in particular, anthropology—the "heteroglossia" of discourse and identity construction that brings matters of Whiteness, privilege, and "otherness" out in the open. However, amid the seemingly open politics and poetics of the antipositivistic postmodern paradigm, a central elusive question that remains is: from where does one speak and to whom? (Rosaldo 1989). 9. Lakrit/ (1995) writes about tenuous subject positioning and uses the work of Hannah Arendt, James Agee, and 7ora Neale Hurston as examples. He bases his thoughts in Spivak's (1988) analysis of the problem of speaking to and for the subaltern. Hurston's example is especially relevant here. Lakritz explains how Hurston, while generally applauded, has been criticized by other Black writers (Richard Wright, in particular) for roman-

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ticizing or finding a nostalgic pleasure in the oppressive experience of the subjects of her fieldwork. Noting how Hurston was locked in a double bind of learning to see Black culture and interpret it through the eyes of elite academics, her privileged position empowered her to define Black culture of the South largely void of the pain of politics and mind-bending prejudice. Lakritz's reading of Hurston is similar to how I attempt to read myself in my work here. This point: about discursive representations and silences is better described by Bourdieu (1991). He argues that the power to name (or not name) people and things is the power to define and give meaning to experience. Moreover, all linguistic exchange, and therefore all interaction, entails a form of symbolic domination in that prenaming shapes cognition and discourse. This especially includes the authority of scholars who proceed from preclassified realities while simultaneously naming and classifying new meanings (Bourdieu 1991: 72, 105-6). Conclusion

1. On the nature of essentialism, Stuart Hall writes: "the essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic. The moment the signifier 'black' is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constructed racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct" (1992: 30). For perspectives on construclioiiist ideas, see West (1990), Awkward (1995), and Gunew and Yeatman (1993). 2. By forcing myself to think outside of the boundaries of the culture concept—along with many of its supplementary identifiers such as race, class, ethnicity—I began to form research questions, based in a destabilizing deconstructive method, that allow me to sec nuanccd components of metaconcepts such as culture and discover that such concepts are not simply an assortment of totalizing dualisms (Black/White; working class/middle class; European/Native American). Rather, cultural concepts fall from their lofty perch to become components of a larger social dynamic, an ironic blend of complexity, which actually illicits similarities, contradictions, and expanded presentations. Groups, cultures (e.g., Blacks, the working class) cease to be unidimensional and discursively bounded. Within the Black underclass, for example, we can find critical thought (Gwaltney 1980). Italian American culture, as another example, is no longer reduced to images of ruthless gangsters amid a hapless working class (di Leonardo 1984). The research of di Leonardo, in particular, serves as a key reference in my research because she makes a point of stepping outside discursively bounded concepts like culture and class and into a realm of difference, contradiction, and ambiguity. In discussing another metaconcept, ethnicity,

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she explores how research is limited by ethnic labels. As a result, ethnic groups are often presented as particular decontextualized populations which arc somehow different from the majority. "This labeling, the mutual process of identity-construction, happens at ethnic boundaries, and both affects and is affected by the economic and political positions of groups. Ethnic groups, however, may cither coincide with or crosscut class divisions. Ethnicity is thus always both cognitive and economic, and as economies alter, so do ethnic boundaries and ideologies" (di Leonardo 1984: 23). In di Leonardo's ethnography—and an approach I attempt in my research—rather than assuming a homogeneous ethnic culture or group in studying Italian Americans (the Italian family, the Italian working class, the Italian mob), she assumes and seeks out "ethnic variety" among Italian Americans and attempts to understand it. The same can be applied to class analyses and the class concept. As an epistemological tool, I employ notions of social class in my research that flow from the Marx and Weber debate. Although I lean more toward Weber's model of social class and status groups along with later works by Bourdieu (1984), Fusscll (1983), and Jackman and Jackman (1983), who see social class categories as fluid, subjective positions in which people place themselves and others, I also pull from scholars who work in a post-Marxist tradition and question the centrality of class in social group formation (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Gorz 1982; Gilroy 1987). Ortner (1.991) also sharply criticizes anthropology for its lack of studies that place class interpretation at their center. Instead, she notes, groups that could very well pass as social class categories are usually "cthnicizcd" and essentialized to their skin color or gender.

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Index

achievement ideology, 41 affirmative action: college scholarships, 41; unemployment and, 71 Aid to Dependent Children, 133 n.2 alcoholism, 55 anthropologist: stereotype of, 44; studies by (see research); virtual, 101, 119 apartments, 79 Asians, 65 attractiveness: character and, 56; privilege from, 57, 71; status from, 56 bar (barroom): racial divisions in, 51; research in, 47-51, 74-75 barrio, 14 beauty: character and, 56; privilege from, 57, 71; status from, 56 Berubf, Allan and Florence, 82, 85 Black, Laurel Johnson, 104 blue collar, 1, 12 Bourdieu, Pierre, 125 n.2 Calagione, John, 72 Campbell, Alan, 106 cars: attractiveness reward, 59; group affiliation marker, 24, 39, 93,' 135 n.9; privilege from, 89, 93, 135 n.9; welfare assistance for, 135 n.7 certified knowledge, 42 child care: at home, 90; in trailer parks, 81; welfare assistance for, 133 n.2, 135 n.7

class: assignment to, by race, 2, 15, 67, 85, 99, 104, 126 n.4; deconstructive analysis of, 113-18, 138 n.6, 138 n.7, 142 n.2; definition of, 15-16, 32, 113; discrimination by, 53, 77; identification of (see identity); literature on, 102-3, 116, 129 n.6; of researcher, impact of (see research); structure of, 32-33. See also ethnicity; race clothing: group affiliation marker, 24-26, 31, 39, 52, 133 n.6; in poverty image, 34; shopping for, 97-98 Cobb, Jonathan, 42 college: benefits of, 36-37; preparation for, 22, 32, 37-38; scholarships for, 41; students, income level of, 130 n.7. See also education; school; students color. See ethnicity; race Cooper, Robert, 109 criminal behavior: class association with, 20, 26, 30-31, 60; race association with, 50. See also specific types of cultural capital, 22, 71, 125 n.2 culture: defining of, 101, 141 n.2; retention of ancestral, 11; symbols of, 33 Czech immigrants, 10 de-construction: analysis of, 112; critiques of, 107, 115; of an ethnography, 101, 110-18, 136 n.2, 138 n.7;

156

Index

decoiistruction (continued) interpretation of, 108; oflanguage, 109, 126 n.3; limitations on, 117-18; movements of, 110; politics in, 112, 115, 117; of texts, 109-10, 117 DeMann, Paul, 111 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 107-12 di Leonardo, Micaela, 105 disability, 132 n.8 divorce, 34 Douglas, Jack, 13 Driskill, James, 56 drug abuse, 55 Dyer, Richard, 102 Eckert, Penelope, 41 education: class status from, 15, 39-40, 63, 93; for employment, 54, 66-67, 71; privilege from, 42, 71, 76, 93, 97-98; reproduction theory, 131 n.3. See also college; school; students employment: reasons for, 62; of students, 130 n.8. See also work epithets: class slurs, 19-20, 30, 61, 83, 125 n.l; ethnic slurs, 11-12, 49, 61; racial slurs, 5, 20, 49, 61, 75; on sexual preference, 20, 30 essentialism: nature of, 141 n.l; in postmodern theory, 6—7; in stereotypes, 14 ethnicity: dassisrn by, 15; deconstructive analysis of, 141 n.2; education level, 39-40; housing choice by, 135 n.8; of immigrants, 9-10; in poverty image, 15, 33-35, 82; poverty-level statistics, 3, 127 n.5; privilege from, 41; second-generation impact of, 12; student statistics, 130 n.l; terms for, 125 n.l; welfare receipt by, 133 n.2. See also class; race; specijic ethnic groups Evko, Beverly, 84 feminism, 71 Fine, Michelle, 40, 65, 71 food stamps: eligibility for, 133 n.2, 135 n.7; privilege loss from use of, 59; race association with, 58; stigma of, 58-59,90, 133 n.4 Foucault, Michel, 3 fragmentation, 110 Francis, Doris, 72

gangs: class association with, 26, 60; Italian, 141 n.2 Gardner, Jennifer, 64 Geert/, Clifford, 138 n.7 gender. See sex geography of assumption, 118 German immigrants, 10 ghetto: acceptance of, by race, 82; lowincome housing in, 14; in poverty image, 61; stigma of, 83; suburban, 135 n.8; vs. trailer parks, 79 Goodwill, 98 hair style, 24-25, 31 Handler, Joel, 6 Herz, Diane, 64 homeless shelter, 16 homosexual rights, 71 hooks, bell, 103 housing: acceptance of, by class, 54, 91; acceptance of, by ethnicity, 135 n.8; acceptance of, by race, 14, 82, 93, 129 n.5, 135 n.8; characteristics of low-income, 14, 137 n.3; covenants on, 82; location of, 14, 129 n.5; in poverty image, 34, 78, 82; privilege from, 92-93; redlining, 82; segregation in, 10, 82; studies of, 134 n.l. See. also specific types of housing projects, federal: acceptance of, by race, 82, 129 n.5; low-income housing, 14, 122; vs. mobile homes, 79; poor living in, 55; stigma of, 83 identity: construction of, 19-20, 29-32, 38-39,84, 103-4, 116-17, 131 n.5, 132 n.7, 135 n.4, 140 n.8, 142 n.2; critiques of, 108; deconstructive analysis of, 112-13; forms of, 113; foundation of, 102, 113, 128 n.8; racial, 52, 102, 104; of researcher, impact of, 43-48, 50-51, 74, 101-2, 118-19; search for, 112; from work, 70-72 illegitimate children, 57-58, 87, 91 illiteracy, 3 immigrants: antagonism toward, 11-12, 49, 64-66; assimilation of, 9-11; employment of, 66, 128 nn.l, 3; identification of, 65; in poverty image,

Index 33-36; in privilege image, 65; as scapegoats, 65-66; as strikebreakers, 128 n.3; wages paid to, 64 immigration: from Europe, 10; from Mexico, 49 income level: class basis, 4, 15, 103, 129 n.6; of mobile home buyers, 134 n.2; of poor, 134 n.7; segregation by, 21, 26, 39; for welfare, 133 n.2 Indians, American: education level, 40; in poverty image, 35, 126 n.3 investigative paradigm, 13-14. See also research Irish immigrants, 9 ironic juxtaposition, 6, 108-9 Italian immigrants, 11, 141 n.2 Jackman, Mary and Robert, 15 jobs: impact of, on welfare payments, 86; priority for, 127 n.4 Kahl, Joseph, 32-33 language: deconstructive analysis of, 109, 126 n.3; immigrant use of foreign, 11-12 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 108 MacLeod, Jay, 40 manufactured home neighborhoods. See trailer parks marriage, 59, 90 meat-packing plants: closure of, 1 1; employment from, 9-10, 64, 96, 128 n.3; neighborhoods surrounding, 12, 19-20, 31-32, 77; treatment of workers, 97, 136 n.l(Chapter 7) media: attractiveness defined by, 56-57; coverage, of poor, 1, 26, 35-36, 137 n.3; life depicted on, 57, 60; poverty images on, 35, 41; racial impressions from, 57 men: achievement ideology of, 67; bigotry in, 46-47; economic failure of, reasons for, 71; epithets used by, 5; nationalism in, 65-66; nativism in, 65-66; poor, 123; poverty-level statistics, 134 n.7; poverty response, 17, 46, 67, 71; privilege, assumption of, 5, 49, 51-52, 67, 71-76; self-image

157

of, 67; social interaction between, 24-25; upbringing of, 67; work by, day labor, 63-64 metaphorization, 110, 115-16 Mexican immigrants: employment of, 49, 64, 66-67, 128 n.3; in poverty image, 33-36; as scapegoats, 65-67 micro-olhering, 85 middle class: achievement ideology of, 52, 76-77; behavior of, 22, 31-32; on class distinctions, 32-33, 125 n.3; classisrn by, 88-89; dependence of, 21-22, 62; epithets from, 19-20, 30; goals of, 22; image of, 3; nationalism in, 65; nativism in, 65; vs. poor, 116; unemployment impact on, 70, 72; values, discrimination based on, 127 n.4 migration, 10, 32, 96, 127 n.4 Miller, Steven, 84 minority groups: assessment of, 3; racial barriers, 32; social barriers, 32 mobile home: cost of, 81, 134 n.2; description of, 80; ownership vs. renting, 81-82, 85; vs. permanent home, 79, 134 n.l; size of, 81, 83, 85; stigma of, 134 n.3. See also trailer parks modernism, 109, 140 n.8 money. See income level motherhood: as goal of women, 90; modern ideal of, 59; single, poverty link, 123 nationalism, 65 nationality. See ethnicity Native Americans. See Indians, American nativism, 65 neighborhood: definition of, 28; group affiliation in, 28; low-income housing in, 14, 78; travel to, by nonresidents, 31,61 Newman, Katherine, 65, 70, 72, 121 Nugent, Daniel, 72 othering, 85, 114, 138 n.7, 140 n.8 overturning, 110 packinghouse. See meat-packing plants Perin, Constance, 3

158

Index

police, 94-96 Polish immigrants, 10 politics: class basis, 15; deconstruction as, 115, 117; identity and, 112; immigrant influence on, 9; liberalism, view on poverty, 53; Marxism, 14 poor: definition of, for research subjects, 130 n.2; demographics of, 133 n.5; discrimination against, 52; food stamps, use by (see food stamps); genetic discrimination of, 126 n.4; as homeless bums, 33, 36; hopelessness in, 52; location of, 3, 14, 17, 20, 46, 79,81,83-93, 116, 118, 122-23, 126 n.4; nationalism by, 65; nativism by, 65; physical description of, 133 n.3; vs. rich, 103; symbols of, 1, 14, 137 n.3; as victims, 49; vs. working class, 15-16,41,64 poor White trash: characteristics of, 1, 14, 137 n.3; as epithet, 19-20, 31, 125 n.l; history in America, 126 n.4; self-description as, 29-30, 116 positivism, 14 possessions, material: class basis, 15, 21; group affiliation marker, i, 14, 24, 38, 137 n.3; provision of, by parents, 21-22. See also specific types of postmodernism: anthropology, influence on by, 138 n.7; critiques of, 105-6, 1 1 1 , 1 13-14, 140 n.8; difference in, 117-18, 139 n.7, 141 n . l ; group affiliation markers in, 104-5; vs. holism, 110, 139 n.7; limitations in, 110, 140 n.8; perspective of, 6; privilegewithin, 113; research methods (see research). See also deconstruction poverty: acceptance of, 2, 4, 98-99; attraction of, 53-54, 137 n.3; causes of, 40; deconstructive analysis of, 108-9, 117; education level, 40; eugenics of, 126 n.4; forms of, 132 n . l ; image of, 15, 33-36, 41, 52, 61, 78-79, 82, 84-85, 126 n.3, 133 n.5, 136 n.l(Chapter 8); language of, 126 n.3; location of, 3, 14, 17, 20, 46-48, 60, 79, 86-93, 116, 118; reasons for, 52; school discussion of, 33; sexual basis of, 123; statistics on, 3, 127 n.5, 134 n.7; symbols of, 1, 14, 137 n.3

prison, school as metaphor for, 36 privilege: acquired, 118; as asset, 74-75; basis of, 125 n.2; from beauly, 57; from car, 89, 93; of choice, 93; deconstructive analysis of, 93, 108-9, 112-18, 140 n.8; from education, 42, 71, 76, 103-4; from ethnicity, 41; from housing, 92-93; image of, 123; legitimate, 118; paradox of, 116; from race, 2, 5, 13, 40-41, 48-51, 54, 66-67, 71-77, 93, 98, 127 n.7, 136 n.2, 138 n.4; recognition of, 32, 44, 89; of researcher, impact of (see research); as research tool, 48; school as representation of, 42; from sex, 5, 49, 51-52, 67, 71; from work, 70-7f, 103-4. See also class; race property ownership: class basis, 15; desire for, 79; in trailer parks, 81, 83; value of, 116. See also possessions, material race: class assignment by, 2, 15, 67, 85, 99, 104, 126 n.4; deconstructive analysis of, 102-3, 113-18, 136 n.2, 138n.6, 138 n.7, 140 nn.8-9, 141 nn.1-2; definition of, 113, 123; discrimination by, 32, 40, 53, 82-83; education, access to by, 39-41; essentializing of, 141 n . l ; housing choice by, 82, 116, 135 n.8; job choice by, 44; literature on, 102-6, 113, 116; in poverty image, 15, 33-36, 85, 126 n.3, 133 n.5, 136 n.l (Chapter 8); poverty-level statistics, 3, 127 n.5, 134 n.7; privilege from, 2, 5, 13, 40-fl, 48-51, 54, 66-67, 71-77, 93, 98, 127 n.7, 138 n.4; of researcher, impact of (see research); segregation by, 10; society norms defined by, i3f n.5; statistics on, 3; student statistics, 130 n.l; terms for, 125 n.l; as unemployment stigma mediator, 71; welfare receipt by, 133 n.2. See also class; ethnicity railroad, 9 relativism, 110, 117-18 research: boundary assumptions, 43, 113; categorization of, 14,43, 123, 141 n.9; data-gathering techniques,

Index 13, 15,44, 122-23; deconslructive analysis of, 107-19, 136 n.2, 137 n.4, 138 n.7, 141 n.2; in the field, 12, 113; goals of, 121-22, 131 n.2; limitations on, 75, 102-6, 141 n.9; location choice, 47-48, 100-101; outsider vs. insider viewpoint, 49, 74, 100-104, 113-15; privilege from, 73-75; recontextuali/ed, 112; reification in, 104; researcher impact on, 43-48, 50-51, 74, 101-2, 118-19, 140 n.9; subject choice, 130 n.2; subjectivity in, 105-6, 140 n.7 Roediger, David, 71 Rosaldo, Renato, 105 Said, Edward, 106 school: achievement ideology of, 42; benefits of, 36-37; class differences in, 33, 41; composition of, 130 n.l; image of poverty taught in, 35, 41; as institutions of social interaction, 42; key to success in, 131 n.5; meals, 24; as prison metaphor, 36; social inequality in, 22; social interaction in, 41; staff, on research, 45; treatment of popular students in, 38. See also college; education; students segregation: by ethnicity, 10-11; by income, 10, 12; by occupation, 12; by race, 10 self-deconstruction, 118 Sennctt, Richard, 42 sex: class basis, 15; privilege from, 5, 49, 51-52, 67, 71-72; unemployment stigma mediator, 71. See also men; women shoes, 24-25 slavery, 126 n.4 small-business ownership, 67—69 speech, 24-25,62 sports: crowd epithets, 19-20; group affiliation in, 28 status category, 23 structuralism, 108 students: achievement ideology of, 31-33, 37-38, 40-42, 130 n.8; behavior of, 132 n.9; cliques, 23-24, 131 n.6; on data-gathering techniques, 44; drop-out level, 40; on education,

159

36-37; on food stamps, 59; goals of, 37-38; group affiliation by, 22-29; identity construction by, 19-20, 29-32, 38-39, 84, 103, 131 n.5, 132 n.7, 135 n.4; income level of, 130 n.7; lunch etiquette of, 24-25; popular, treatment of, 38; on poverty, 33-35; on race, 29, 33, 44; as representatives of school ideals, 42; social networks, 25-29; statistics on, 130 n.l; on trailer parks, 83-84, 135 n.4; on welfare, 33-34, 133 n.6. See also college; education; school suburbia: desire for, 91; isolation in, 87; poor living in, 14, 17, 79, 86-93, 116, 118, 122, 135 n.8; as privilege marker, 92, 116, 135 n.8; studies of, 135 n.6 Surbcr, Paul, 117 television. See media thrift stores, 97-98 trailer parks: classism in, 82-85, 135 n.5; description of, 81; low-income housing in, 14, 17; poor living in, 81, 83-85, 122-23; in poverty image, 78-79, 84; segregation in, 82, 85, 135 n.5; stigma of, 83-84, 135 n.4. See also mobile home transcendental positioning, 114-15 transcendental questions, 117 unemployment: privilege during, 58, 71; stigma of, 71; welfare reason, 34; worth estimate, basis of, 70. See also welfare; work-education programs unions, 128 n.3 upper class: attraction of poverty for, 53-54, 137 n.3; classism by, 91, 126 n.3; dependence of, 91 wages, 64 Wallis, Allan, 82 Wallman, Sandra, 72 Webster, Murray, 56 welfare: avoidance of, 62; benefit reduction, 86; dependency on, 16, 55-60; eligibility for, 133 n.2, 135 n.7; image of, 33-34, 55; race association with, 50, 58-59; reasons for, 34; school

160

Index

welfare (continued) discussion of, 33; stereotype of, 87; stigma of, 83. See also unemployment Weston, Rath, 101 white-collar careers, 22 Willis, Paul, 41 women: achievement ideology in, 54; beautiful, 56; dating of, boundaries on, 24, 27, 62, 91; poverty-level statistics, 134 n.7; in suburbia, 90; on welfare, 55-60, 78-93. See also feminism; motherhood work: class basis, 72; identity and,

70-72; location of, 60; meaning of, 72; motherhood as, 90; in poverty image, 34; privilege from, 70-71, 74; worth estimate, basis of, 70-71. See also employment work-education programs, 55 working class: achievement ideology of, 15-16; composition of, 125 n.3; independence of, 16, 21; nationalism in, 65; nativism in, 65; vs. poor, 15-16, 41, 116; privileges of, 66; racial divisions in, 2; sexual privilege in, 71; symbols of, 15-16 working poor, 64

Acknowledgments

Although the writing of this book was often a lonely journey, in many aspects, it certainly was not a solo journey. To begin, I would like to acknowledge how much I appreciate Doug Foley, specifically for all of his motivating basketball metaphors, continued transcendent encouragement, and friendship. Next I want to acknowledge all of the wonderful and enigmatic people 1 met during fieldwork in "Midway" who fill the pages of this book with their experiences and enlightenment. I would like to thank Martha Menchaca for her assistance particularly in helping me land funding during my years at the University of Texas at Austin and also for the early details I learned from her about the ins arid outs of academic publishing. Speaking of financial support, the project took a huge leap forward because of the time afforded me through a Carolina Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thanks to the fellowship program staff and, in particular, Dorothy Holland in UNC's anthropology department. An early motivator is John Sibley Butler, who was a major influence on my decision to enroll in graduate school in the first place. He has remained an academic beacon in many ways. Thanks to my former and first editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Patricia Smith, who initially saw promise in my book, and to my current editor, Peter Agree, for his optimism in seeing the book through to its finish. Much appreciation, also, to Erica

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Acknowledgments

Ginsburg and the copyediting staff at the press for spotting the small details and helping make the book better. Finally, I would like to express my deep appreciation to Andrea Juarez, my wife. During those times when I was so close to giving up on the book—and in the last few years those times were often— it was through her that I found the patience, love, and determination to continue on.