7
LEVELED ASPIRATIONS Social Reproduction Takes Its To
With the ethnographic description from the preceding chapters at our disposal, we now can attempt to analyze the forces that influence the aspirations of these two groups of boys from Clarendon Heights. That many boys in both groups do not even aspire to middle-class jobs is a powerful indication of how class inequality is reproduced in American society. These youths’ prospects for socioeconomic advancement are doomed before they even get started; most of the boys do not even get a foothold on the ladder of social mobility. In this chapter, the task before us is to illuminate in as much detail and depth as possible the process of social reproduction as it is lived by the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers.
The regulation of aspirations is perhaps the most significant of all the mechanisms contributing to social reproduction; however, aspirations themselves are largely a function of structural mechanisms that should be considered when possible. Mention already has been made of the effects of tracking and the school’s valuation of the cultural capital of the upper classes, both of which influence aspirations but also have independent effects on reproducing class structure. An additional and essential component of social reproduction is the process by which individuals in a stratified social order come to accept their own position and the inequalities of the social order as legitimate.
Whereas force and coercion often have ensured the cohesion of societies and the maintenance of oppressive relationships, ideology is more important in fulfilling this function in contemporary America. In particular, the achievement ideology is a powerful force in the legitimation of inequality and, ultimately, in social reproduction. In short, this ideology maintains that individual merit and achievement are the fair and equitable sources of inequality in American society. If merit is the basis for the distribution of rewards, then members of the lower classes attribute their subordinate position in the social order to personal deficiencies. In this way, inequality is legitimated.
1In their theoretical formulations, both Weber and Marx touch on the role of ideology in the maintenance of social cohesion. In Weber’s terms, ideology is the “myth” by which the powerful ensure belief in the validity of their domination. “Every highly privileged group develops the myth of its natural superiority. Under conditions of stable distribution of power . . . that myth is accepted by the negatively privileged strata.”
2 Although Marx considered economics the major determinant in the perpetuation of class relations, he discusses the function of ideology in preserving exploitative relations in capitalist societies. Ideology, which is proffered to the subordinate classes as an accurate depiction of the social order, is actually a “false consciousness,” an apparently true but essentially illusory set of views that disguises and distorts the true workings of the capitalist system. The ruling class, in order to justify its dominance, “is compelled . . . to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society. . . . It has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”
3 Thus, by obscuring the truth of conflictual relations and exploitation, ideology serves to make capitalist societies appear legitimate.
4In contemporary America, the educational system, by sorting students according to ostensibly meritocratic criteria, plays a crucial role in the legitimation of inequality. Because the school deals in the currency of academic credentials, its role in the reproduction of inequality is obscured. Students believe that they succeed or fail in school on the basis of merit. By internalizing the blame for failure, students lose their self-esteem and then accept their eventual placement in low-status jobs as the natural outcome of their own shortcomings. If individuals are convinced that they are responsible for their low position in society, then criticism of the social order by the subordinate classes is deflected. The process of social reproduction goes on, unscrutinized and unchallenged.
If this legitimation function is working, then members of the lower classes will suffer from low self-esteem, which originally was developed in the school and then carried into later life to reconcile them to their position. In gauging the degree to which lower-class individuals accept the social order and their position in it as legitimate, we must determine whether they attribute their inferior social position to personal inadequacy or to external forces as well.
THE HALLWAY HANGERS: INTERNALIZING PROBABILITIES, RESCUING SELF-ESTEEM
According to Bourdieu, the aspirations of the Hallway Hangers should reflect their objective probabilities for upward mobility. Immersed as they are in their social universe at the bottom of the class structure, their subjective hopes should be as modest as their objective chances are slim. Indeed, this is the case. The Hallway Hangers view their prospects for substantial upward mobility as very remote, which accounts for their low occupational aspirations. Drawing on the experiences of their families, and on their own encounters with the job market, the boys’ appraisals of the possibility for social upgrading often preclude the formation of any aspirations at all. Moreover, the available evidence indicates that the boys’ parents do not intercede significantly in their children’s aspiration formation. In general, the parents of the Hallway Hangers have little influence in their sons’ lives. Like most parents, they want the best for their children, but if Stoney’s mother is any indication, they also are hesitant to encourage excessively high aspirations in their sons for fear of setting them up for disappointment.
Although the families of the Hallway Hangers have a pervasive influence on their aspirations, so have their own work experiences. All the Hallway Hangers have held summertime employment since they have been of working age. Apart from Steve, they are searching for full-time work. In their struggles to find meaningful, stable employment, all have been thwarted. Invariably, once they think they finally have found a decent job, the opportunity falls through. This type of firsthand experience on the job market further deflates any illusions they might have had about the openness of the opportunity structure. When a boy searches in vain for work that pays seventy-five cents more than minimum wage, his estimation of the prospects for significant upward mobility is bound to be low.
In addition to family and work, school has an important, if less direct, influence on aspirations. Because the school devalues the cultural capital of the Hallway Hangers, their chances for academic success are diminished substantially. Although the Hallway Hangers do not see the intricacies of this process taking place, half have remarked that students from “higher” social backgrounds have a better chance to do well in school. The Hallway Hangers have seen their older siblings fail in school; they see their friends fail as well. Even their Clarendon Heights peers who try to succeed in school meet with only modest success; for verification of this the Hallway Hangers need only look to the Brothers. Thus, the Hallway Hangers question their own capacity to perform well in school, a view that informs their assessment of the chances for social mobility.
Of more importance is the Hallway Hangers’ belief that performance in school is of only tangential importance in securing a job. They challenge the widely held notion that success in school translates into success on the job market. But if they feel that schooling will not boost them up the ladder of social mobility, what will? In essence, the Hallway Hangers see a ladder with no rungs on it, or at least none they can reach. They believe that the educational system cannot deliver on its promise of upward social mobility for those who perform well in school. Thus, in part, their leveled aspirations reflect their feeling that schooling is incapable of doing much for them.
In concentrating on this point, however, it is easy to miss some of the intra-school processes that affect the aspirations of the Hallway Hangers. The school is distinctive not for what it does but for what it fails to do.
Lincoln School officials are aware of the process of social reproduction (although they would not conceptualize it in these terms). Bruce Davis, a young, enthusiastic, and dedicated guidance counselor in the Occupational Education Program, acknowledges social reproduction as a simple fact of life.
BD: These kids [those enrolled in the Oc. Ed. Program] go directly into hard jobs. They’re generally from homes where people are laborers. I mean, kids who go to college are from families whose parents went to college. That’s how it works, it seems to me. That’s where these kids are coming from; they’re geared to manual labor jobs, like their brothers, sisters, fathers, uncles, whatever—mothers, like the jobs they have.
Rather than attempting to use the resources of the school to mitigate this process, school officials seem content to let it unfold unhindered. The Oc. Ed. Program, for example, is designed to prepare its students for the rigors of manual work.
BD: We constantly stress to the kids that they have to be responsible, reliable, and dependable, that they can’t be a screw-off. Really, we’re just trying to make the kids accountable for themselves. Y’know, most of these kids won’t go to college. When they leave here, they can’t sleep ’til eleven and then get up and go to three classes. They’ve really got to be disciplined. They’re going to be right out there working. In Oc. Ed., that’s really what we’re all about. We’re trying to simulate a work experience, make class just like a job. It’s not just their competency that matters; to be a good worker, your willingness to cooperate, your attitude, is so important.
Bowles and Gintis’s argument that working-class students are socialized for working-class jobs and that the social relations of school mirror those of the workplace hardly could be better substantiated.
My point here is not that the school, consciously or unconsciously, levels the aspirations of some students but that it accepts and exacerbates already existing differences in aspirations. By requiring the Hallway Hangers, as eighth-graders, to choose their educational program, the school solidifies what is often a vaguely felt and ill-defined preference for manual work or a desire simply to be with one’s friends into a definite commitment to a future in manual work. The decision is essentially their own, and it makes a good deal of sense considering that experience in a trade ostensibly will be of some advantage in a difficult job market. Slick’s decision to enter the Oc. Ed. Program, despite his high level of achievement in grammar school, typifies the quandary of these boys. Very few middle-class students with decent grades would select a vocational program, but Slick felt the need to do so in order to improve his chances of getting work after graduation.
Although the boys chose their various programs, there are grounds for skepticism about the degree to which this was a completely uncoerced choice. James Rosenbaum, in his 1976 study of a working-class high school, found that guidance counselors and teachers applied subtle and not-so-subtle techniques to channel students into particular tracks and keep them there, sometimes against the students’ wishes. But the school officials did this in such a manner that both the youngsters and their parents believed it was a free choice.
5Lincoln High School boasts a more liberal educational philosophy than that of Rosenbaum’s school, so we hardly can extrapolate his findings to Lincoln High. Nevertheless, in response to a question concerning the process by which students choose their program, Wallace responded, “Oh, that’s done for them in grammar school.” Sensing that I had picked up on the “for them,” she hastily went on to say that it is a process that initially involves a conference between the eighth-grade counselor and the student as well as parents. “According to however they performed in grammar school, the counselor will come up with a suggested schedule and send it home for approval. Of course, the parent can disagree and pick other courses.”
Resolution of the extent to which this is a decision of self-selection requires detailed ethnographic data on the transition from grammar school to Lincoln High, without which we must stop short of Rosenbaum’s conclusion that the school exacerbates and actually creates inequality by its discriminatory tracking procedures. There is no doubt, however, that the school, by requiring that such choices be made at a young age, reinforces existing differences in aspirations.
In trying to understand the impact of family, work, and schooling on the aspirations of the Hallway Hangers, Bourdieu’s theory that the habitus engenders aspirations that reflect objective probabilities seems accurate. According to Bourdieu and Passeron:
The structure of the objective chances of social upgrading according to class of origin and, more precisely, the structure of the chances of upgrading through education, conditions agents’ dispositions towards education and towards upgrading through education—dispositions which in turn play a determining role in defining the likelihood of entering education, adhering to its norms and succeeding in it, hence the likelihood of social upgrading.
6
But the concept of the internalization of objective probabilities, because it limits the scope for human agency and creativity, has little explanatory value when we consider the influence of the peer group on the Hallway Hangers. This is a serious deficiency because according to our ethnographic sketch the peer group, especially for the Hallway Hangers, is of primary importance in these boys’ lives.
In a country in which success is largely measured by income and occupational status, the Hallway Hangers have a problem. Unemployed, living in public housing, at the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, they are regarded as failures, both by others and, at least to some extent, by themselves, a phenomenon Sennett and Cobb document for working-class people in general in
The Hidden Injuries of Class.7 The Hallway Hangers have been enrolled in programs that are designed for “fuckups” (as Mike of the Brothers put it), have been placed in the lowest educational tracks, and have received failing grades; all these constitute part of the emotional attack the boys suffer in school. The Hallway Hangers may have little of their self-esteem tied up in school, but, as Scully argues, they cannot help but feel “a judgment of academic inferiority cast upon them, be it by teachers, classmates, or their seemingly objective computerized report card.”
8 The subculture of the Hallway Hangers must be understood as an attempt by its members to insulate themselves from these negative judgments and to provide a context in which some semblance of self-respect and dignity can be maintained.
To characterize the subculture of the Hallway Hangers as a defense mechanism against these onslaughts to their self-esteem, however, would be incomplete. Scully argues that most student countercultures have both defensive and independent features;
9 studies by Sennett and Cobb, Stinchcombe, and Willis verify this duality. The Hallway Hangers, like Willis’s lads, have their own distinct set of values. These values are indigenous to the working class; they do not arise simply in opposition to the school. The Hallway Hangers’ valuation of physical toughness, emotional resiliency, quick-wittedness, masculinity, loyalty, and group solidarity points to a subculture with its own norms, which are passed on from the older to the younger boys. Frankie describes how the subculture of the Hallway Hangers is learned and passed on.
(in a group interview)
FRANKIE: We were all brought up, all we seen is our older brothers and that gettin’ into trouble and goin’ to jail and all that shit. Y’know, seeing people—brothers and friends and shit—dying right in front of your face. You seen all the drugs, Jay. Well, this place used to be a thousand times worse than it is now. We grew up, it was all our older brothers doing this. We seen many fucking drugs, all the drinking. They fucking go; that group’s gone. The next group came. It’s our brothers that are a little older, y’know, twenty-something years old. They started doing crime. And when you’re young, you look up to people. You have a person, everybody has a person they look up to. And he’s doing this, he’s drinking, he’s doing that, he’s doing drugs, he’s ripping off people. Y’know, he’s making good fucking money, and it looks like he’s doing good, y’know? So, bang. Now it’s our turn. We’re here. What we gonna do when all we seen is fuckin’ drugs, alcohol, fighting, this and that, no one going to school?
By providing a realm in which to be bad and tough are the main criteria for respect, the peer group of the Hallway Hangers reverses conventional cultural norms. Like almost all subcultures, however, the Hallway Hangers cannot escape the dominant culture’s definitions of success. No matter how strong and insular the group, contact with the dominant culture, especially through school and work, is inevitable. Listening to the Hallway Hangers describe their descent through the school’s programs, one detects a sense of shame, despite all their bravado. For Frankie to report that he finally found work, but as a temporary employee with the city’s sanitation department as a garbage collector, clearly involved quite a swallowing of pride.
This inability on the part of a subculture to shelter itself completely from the dominant culture’s values and norms has been documented widely: Willis’s lads are pained by teachers’ insults; the children Sennett and Cobb describe as having developed their own “badges of dignity” still have much of their sense of self-worth tied up in academic performance and teacher approval; and the inside world of black street-corner men who congregate at Tally’s Corner in Elliot Liebow’s study “is no more impervious to the values, sentiments and beliefs of the larger society than it is to the blue welfare checks or to the agents of the larger society, such as the policeman, the police informer, the case worker, and the landlord.”
10Despite the fact that the Hallway Hangers’ subculture affords its members only partial protection from the negative judgments of the dominant culture, it does provide a setting wherein a person can salvage some self-respect. The Hallway Hangers, who have developed alternative criteria for success, understand their situation in a way that defends their status; they manage to see themselves differently from the way the rest of society sees them. This is not entirely a self-protective psychological inversion; their ways of understanding their situation also are real. The Hallway Hangers are not living a fantasy. The world of the street exists—it is the unfortunate underside of the American economic system, the inevitable shadow accompanying a society that is not as open as it advertises. Moreover, the Hallway Hangers are physically hard, emotionally durable, and boldly enterprising. Those of us who are supposed to be succeeding by conventional standards need only venture into their world for the briefest moment to feel as though our badges of success are about as substantive and “real” in that environment as the emperor’s new clothes.
The subculture of the Hallway Hangers is at odds with the dominant culture. The path to conventional success leads in one direction; the path to a redefined success lies in another. A boy cannot tread both paths simultaneously; orthodox success demands achievement in school, a feat that can be accomplished only by respecting the authority of teachers, which is inconsistent with the Hallway Hangers’ alternative value scheme. All the current members of the Hallway Hangers have chosen, more or less definitively, to tread the path to a redefined success. (It should be remembered, however, that this choice is not an altogether free one; the Hallway Hangers see the path to conventional success as blocked by numerous obstacles.) Nevertheless, some do choose the path to conventional achievement; Billy, who expects to attend college next year, is being studied carefully by the Hallway Hangers as a testament to what they may have passed up.
The decision to break away from the group and pursue conventional success is not just a matter of individual calculation, however. More complicated forces are at work, forces that strain the individualistic orientation of American society. The solidarity of the Hallway Hangers is very strong. We have seen, for example, that the sense of cohesion and bonds of loyalty are such that Slick would not leave Shorty at the scene of a crime, preferring to be arrested himself. These communitarian values act to restrain individual Hallway Hangers from breaking away from the group and trying to “make it” conventionally. Slick, for example, scores very well on standardized tests, attended Latin Academy for a year, and is very articulate. Despite class-based barriers to success, he had a relatively good chance of “making it.” But Slick also demonstrates the strongest sense of loyalty to the group. In a group interview, for example, he commented, as the rest of the group nodded their heads in agreement, that “money is secondary to friendship; I think friendship is more important than money.” Jinx realizes that this loyalty can constrain individuals from striving for upward social mobility.
(in an individual interview)
JM: Do you have anything else to add about kids’ attitudes down here?
JINX: I’d say everyone more or less has the same attitudes towards school: fuck it. Except the bookworms—people who just don’t hang around outside and drink, get high, who sit at home—they’re the ones who get the education.
JM: And they just decided for themselves?
JINX: Yup.
JM: So why don’t more people decide that way?
JINX: Y’know what it is, Jay? We all don’t break away because we’re too tight. Our friends are important to us. Fuck it. If we can’t make it together, fuck it. Fuck it all.
One of the forces operating to keep the Hallway Hangers from striking out on their own is the realization that there is little chance of their making it as a group, and to leave the others behind is to violate the code of loyalty. Recall how Slick contrasts the Hallway Hangers and the “rich little boys from the suburbs.” “How do you think they got rich? By fucking people over. We don’t do that to each other. We’re too fucking tight. We’re a group. We don’t think like them. We think for all of us.” This group loyalty rests on some very strong communitarian values and vaguely parallels an affirmation of class solidarity over individual interests, a point to which I shall return.
With respect to the influence of the peer group on social reproduction, there are some complicated processes at work that Bourdieu’s theory fails to capture. Conceptually “flat,” the model Bourdieu develops with Passeron struggles to account for the resistance and nonconformity characteristic of the Hallway Hangers’ subculture. To some extent, membership in the subculture of the Hallway Hangers tends to level one’s aspirations. Although influenced by the definitions of the dominant culture, the value scheme of the peer group devalues conventional success; the norm among the Hallway Hangers is low aspirations. This ethos, passed down from older to younger boys, is a powerful force on the individual. In addition to the general climate of the peer group, there is a tendency among the Hallway Hangers to resist raised aspirations because to act on them would involve breaking one’s ties and leaving the group, a transgression of the code of loyalty.
It is possible to examine the workings of the process of legitimation as it applies to the Hallway Hangers. We have seen that their self-esteem is relatively resilient to poor academic performance, for little of each boy’s sense of self is invested in the school. In addition, the peer group subculture affords the Hallway Hangers additional protection for their self-esteem and alternative ways of generating self-esteem through the value system of the group. Although failure in school is psychologically debilitating for the Hallway Hangers in some ways, their self-esteem is partially buttressed from the assaults of the educational system.
If legitimation were functioning smoothly, the Hallway Hangers, in addition to low self-esteem, would internalize their failure and point only to personal inadequacy as the cause of their plight. But such is not the case; the Hallway Hangers realize that internal and external factors contribute to their low social position. Although they do blame themselves to some degree for their failure, they also recognize external barriers to success.
When the Hallway Hangers talk, one almost can feel the struggle being waged in their minds between the tenets of the achievement ideology and the lessons distilled from their own experiences. This tension produces a deep-seated ambivalence. At times the boys are prone to take full responsibility for their dismal social status, but on other occasions they blame external obstacles to their social advancement. Boo-Boo reproaches himself at the beginning of an interview (“I just screwed up”) but later maintains that boys from a middle-class neighborhood have an advantage when it comes to achieving social and economic prosperity. Other boys hold a similarly dichotomous outlook.
CHRIS: I guess I just don’t have what it takes.
(in a separate interview)
CHRIS: We don’t get a fair shake and shit.
FRANKIE: We’re all just fucking burnouts. . . . We never did good anyways. . . . We’ve just fucked up.
(in the same interview)
FRANKIE: If I had the fucking money to start out with, like some of these fucking rich kids, I’d be a millionaire. Fucking right, I would be.
SHORTY: I’d go in there, and I’d try my hardest to do the work, right? I’d get a lot of problems wrong cuz I never had the brains much, really, right? That’s what’s keepin’ me back.
(in a different interview)
SHORTY: Hey, you can’t get no education around here unless if you’re fucking rich, y’know? You can’t get no education. . . . And you can’t get a job once they find out where you come from. “You come from Clarendon Heights? Oh, shit. It’s them kids again.”
The Hallway Hangers see through parts of the achievement ideology, but at some level they accept the aspersions it casts on lower-class individuals, including themselves. However, although the Hallway Hangers do not escape emotional injury, neither does the social order emerge unscathed. In the eyes of the Hallway Hangers the opportunity structure is not open, a view that prevents them from accepting their position and the inequalities of the social order as completely legitimate.
Although the legitimation of inequality could be working more efficiently with respect to the Hallway Hangers, the whole process is not ready to collapse. Like those of the lads in Willis’s study, these boys’ insights into the true workings of the system are only partial, and often vague and ill-defined at that. Moreover, although they are cognizant of external barriers to success, the Hallway Hangers raise no fundamental challenge to the fairness or efficacy of the system as a whole. For the most part, in the absence of any systematic critique of capitalism, the Hallway Hangers simply are plagued by a sense of unfairness and the uneasy conviction that the rules of the contest are biased against them. Thus, there is a discrepancy between their strongly felt conviction that they are getting “the short end of the stick” and their inability to understand fully how this is so.
They conveniently fill this gap with racism. The Hallway Hangers seem to believe that if they are stuck with the short end of the stick, it must be because the “niggers” have the long end. Their feelings of impotence, frustration, and anger are subsumed in their hatred of blacks and in their conviction that their own plight somehow has been exacerbated, if not caused, by the alleged economic and social advancement of black Americans. Recall how Shorty attributed his brother’s unemployment to the “spics and niggers.” Frankie and Smitty account for their predicament with one reason.
SMITTY: All the fuckin’ niggers are getting the jobs.
FRANKIE: Fuckin’ right. That’s why we’re hanging here now with empty pockets.
Affirmative action affords the Hallway Hangers a handy explanation for their own demise. Slick, despite his perceptiveness, succumbs to the same misunderstanding. Although his decision to quit school was undoubtedly the result of many factors, Slick insists that he dropped out of school solely because of supposed favoritism toward black students at Lincoln High. In a different interview, Slick begins by accusing the school of class-based prejudice but muddles the issue by suddenly bringing blacks into the discussion: “They favor all them fucking rich kids at that school. All the rich people. They fucking baby ’em. They baby all the fucking niggers up there.”
This confusion between class bias and alleged reverse racial discrimination is symptomatic of the Hallway Hangers’ outlook. By directing their resentment at affirmative action and those who benefit from it, the Hallway Hangers can spare themselves blame, but then the social order also is spared any serious scrutiny. In Willis’s terms, racism is a serious “limitation” on the cultural outlook of the Hallway Hangers. Just as the lads’ reversal of the usual valuation of mental versus manual labor prevents them from seeing their placement into dead-end, low-paying jobs as a form of class domination, so does the Hallway Hangers’ racism obscure reality.
Thus, the Hallway Hangers harbor contradictory and ambivalent beliefs about the legitimacy of their social position. Their identification of class-based barriers to success and their impression that the deck is unfairly stacked against them, insights that could catalyze the development of a radical political consciousness, are derailed by their racism. On the one hand, the Hallway Hangers puncture the individualistic orientation of American society by their adoption of communitarian values to the point where a realization that the entire group cannot “make it” prevents individuals from striving for conventional success—a point of view that runs in the same direction as a class logic. But on the other hand, the Hallway Hangers support some politically conservative values and leaders. The prevalence of this type of dual, contradictory consciousness, embodying both progressive, counterhegemonic insights and reactionary, distorting beliefs, is discussed at length by Antonio Gramsci.
11 More recently, Michael Mann has argued convincingly that ambivalence about social beliefs leads to “pragmatic acceptance” of the social order rather than complete acceptance of it as legitimate.
12It is instructive to compare in detail this analysis of the Hallway Hangers with Willis’s depiction of how social reproduction takes place for the lads in his study. The Hallway Hangers, as residents of public housing, are from a lower social stratum than the lads, who are from stable working-class families. Moreover, the British working class, with its long history, organized trade unions, and progressive political party, has developed an identity, pride, and class consciousness that are lacking in the United States. Despite these differences, substantial similarities in the way each peer group experiences the process of social reproduction warrant a comparison.
Willis argues that the lads’ rejection of the achievement ideology and of the values and norms of the educational system is based on some key insights into the situation of their class under capitalism. However, the crucial element in the process of social reproduction—placement into manual labor jobs—is experienced by the lads as an act of independence and self-election, not a form of oppression. Because of the value placed on machismo in the wider working-class culture, which the lads appropriate for their own, they choose to enter the bottom of the occupational structure. At the root of social reproduction for the lads is the cultural inversion by which manual labor, equated with the social superiority of masculinity, is valued over white-collar work, which is associated with the inferior status of femininity.
Whereas the lads reject school because it has no bearing on the manual labor jobs they intend to pursue, the Hallway Hangers reject school for different reasons. For the lads, the seeds of leveled aspirations, and hence social reproduction, lie in their cultural affirmation of manual labor. Like the lads, the Hallway Hangers place a heavy premium on masculinity; their emphasis on being cool, tough, streetwise—in a word, bad—indicates the prevalence of machismo in their cultural outlook. Nevertheless, this emphasis on masculinity seldom is linked with distaste for white-collar work. The subculture of the Hallway Hangers contains no systematic bias toward manual work; their depressed aspirations result from a look into the future that sees stagnation at the bottom of the occupational structure as almost inevitable. The Hallway Hangers’ outlook is more pessimistic than that held by the lads; there is no room on the job market for independence, election, or even choice. Thus, the Hallway Hangers reconcile themselves to taking whatever job they can get. Given this resignation, their belief that education can do little for them, and their assessment of the costs of educational success, the Hallway Hangers reject the institution of school. Although they do not experience unemployment or entry into low-level jobs as acts of triumph but rather as depressing facts of lower-class life, neither do the Hallway Hangers incriminate the social order as entirely unjust. In both cases the structure of class relations is reproduced, largely through the regulation of aspirations, but the processes through which it happens for the lads and the Hallway Hangers vary. The lads’ sexism keeps them from decrying class domination; the racism of the Hallway Hangers serves the same purpose.
It is difficult to conceptualize the process of social reproduction when it is depicted in general terms. To facilitate our understanding of how the aspirations of the Hallway Hangers are leveled, I now describe the mechanisms associated with social reproduction as they affect Jinx. By looking at his experiences, the processes we have been discussing can be rendered concrete.
According to one of his friends, Jinx was an A student in his freshman year. At first, he worked hard and conformed to the rules of the school, but during his sophomore year, he started to weigh the costs and benefits of attendance and hard work. Every morning, he would socialize with the rest of the boys at Pop’s for about fifteen minutes, maybe smoke a joint, and then head to class. “Hey, man, what the fuck? Sit down and smoke another bone. Whaddya wanna go to school for? You like them teachers better than us?” After leaving the group to comments like this, in class his mind would wander back to his friends sitting in Pop’s, getting high, relaxing. He would think about his brother who dropped out of school at the age of sixteen and had a union job at the shipyards. He would think about another brother who had graduated the year before and joined the navy, and about his oldest brother, who was dead. He would think about the older boys at the Heights, some graduates of high school, some dropouts—all unemployed or in lousy jobs. Gradually, Jinx’s attitude toward school started to change.
JINX: I started hanging around, getting high, just not bother going to school . . . started hanging down Pop’s. Cutting, getting high.
JM: What were the reasons behind that? Why’d you start going down to Pop’s?
JINX: Friends, friends. . . . I’d go to my classes and meet them at lunch, but when I was with ’em, I’d say, “The hell with it. I ain’t even going.” Besides, I didn’t really care to try in school. . . . You ain’t got a chance of getting a good job, even with a high school diploma. You gotta go on to college, get your master’s and shit like that to get a good-paying job that you can live comfortably on. So if you’re not planning on going to college, I think it’s a waste of time.
By his junior year, Jinx attended school only sporadically, and when he did go to class, he was often drunk or high, a necessity if he was to “listen to the teachers talk their shit.”
Faced with the need for income to pay for, among other things, his weekly ounce of marijuana, Jinx began to deal drugs on a small scale, stopping only after a close call with the police. After four months of searching and waiting, Jinx landed a job and began working in the afternoons, attending school for a few hours each day. Convinced that school was doing him little good and faced with the opportunity to work full-time, Jinx quit school, only to be laid off shortly thereafter. Although his parents wanted him to finish school, Jinx downplays their influence on him: “They want me to graduate from high school, but I ain’t gonna. They’ll be mad at me for a week or two, but that’s life.”
Now that he is out of school, out of work, and out of money, Jinx does not have much to which he can look forward. Nevertheless, he is not as “down and out” as we might think. He has plenty of time for his friends and accepts his predicament placidly, with thorough disrespect neither for the system nor for himself. The situation is, after all, not much different than he had expected.
THE BROTHERS: INTERNALIZING FAILURE, SHORN OF SELF-ESTEEM
If the mechanisms by which the Hallway Hangers and lads end up in dead-end jobs are somewhat different, the process of social reproduction as it operates with respect to the Brothers presents an even sharper contrast. Applied to the Brothers, Bourdieu’s concept of the internalization of objective probabilities does not ring true. Undoubtedly, the Brothers do internalize their chances of “making it,” and this calculation certainly moderates their aspirations. Yet, their view of the probabilities for social advancement is informed not only by the objective opportunity structure but also by their parents’ hopes for their future and the achievement ideology of the school. In this sense, there is no such thing as the internalization of objective probabilities, for all perceptions of the opportunity structure necessarily are subjective and influenced by a host of intervening factors. The actual habitus of the Brothers is much more complex than Bourdieu and Passeron would have us believe. A theory stressing a correspondence between aspirations and opportunity cannot explain the excessive ambitions of the Brothers because it underestimates the achievement ideology’s capacity to mystify structural constraints and encourage high aspirations. The Hallway Hangers reject the achievement ideology, but the situation for the Brothers is quite different.
Like the Hallway Hangers, the Brothers come from families in which their parents either hold jobs that are at the bottom of the occupational structure or are unable to find work at all. An important difference, however, is that, with the exception of Derek, all the Brothers are either the oldest male sibling in the family or have older brothers and sisters who attend college. Thus, the Brothers are not faced with a picture of nearly uniform failure in school. In addition, the parents of the Brothers actually encourage high aspirations in their children, as a tool to motivate them to achieve in school and perhaps as a projection of thwarted ambitions. Thus, from their families, the Brothers take away a contradictory outlook. On the one hand, they see that hard work on the part of their parents has not gotten them very far, an implicit indictment of the openness of the opportunity structure, but on the other hand, they are encouraged by these same people to have high hopes for the future.
For the Brothers, work is an exclusively summertime affair; only Juan is on the job market full-time. Thus, their experience on the labor market is very limited, and that experience has been sheltered from the rigors and uncertainties of finding work. Most of these boys have been enrolled almost exclusively in federal summer youth employment programs and only have had to fill out an application form to be placed in a summer job. Whereas the more extensive contact of the Hallway Hangers with the world of work tends to level their aspirations, a comparable process has not taken place for the Brothers—at least not yet.
The Brothers’ peer group does not tend to level their hopes for the future. Because the Brothers do not comprise a distinctive subculture but rather accept the norms and values of the dominant culture and strive to embody them, their peer group does not provide them with a redefinition of success. The Brothers are achievement oriented, prize accomplishments in school and obedience to the law, and measure success as does the rest of society. The ethos of their group encourages high aspirations and reinforces behavior that contributes to the realization of their goals.
The Brothers unconditionally accept the school’s achievement ideology, a step that requires a belief in equality of opportunity and the efficacy of schooling. But at the same time that their aspirations tend to rise because of their faith in these precepts, the Brothers are being prepared psychologically for jobs at the bottom of the occupational structure. In low educational tracks and the recipients of poor grades, the Brothers struggle in school. They blame themselves for their mediocre academic performances because they are unaware of the discriminatory influences of tracking, the school’s partiality toward the cultural capital of the upper classes, the self-fulfilling consequences of teachers’ expectations, and other forms of class-based educational selection. Conditioned by the achievement ideology to think that good jobs require high academic attainment, the Brothers may temper their high aspirations, believing not that the institution of school and the job market have failed them, but that they have failed themselves.
For most of the Brothers, this “cooling-out” process, documented by Burton Clark in his study of a community college,
13 will not be completed until they actually graduate from high school and are face-to-face with the job market. Armed with a high school diploma and a good disciplinary record, the Brothers will have a better chance to land suitable jobs than the Hallway Hangers do, but the Brothers’ opportunities still will be quite limited. Juan, the only Brother to have graduated, already has begun to “cool out.”
Juan, who left high school with a diploma and a skill (he spent 1,500 hours in school learning culinary arts), has lowered his aspirations significantly after six months of unemployment. Although he previously expressed distaste for a job in auto mechanics because of its association with dirty manual work, Juan now hopes to find work in precisely that area. We can expect many of the Brothers to undergo a similar reorientation after graduation.
From the description of the Brothers’ experiences in school it seems clear that the legitimation of inequality is working smoothly for them. In general, the Brothers, without the protection of a peer group with a distinctive subculture, suffer from low self-esteem as a result of their academic performances. In addition, they do not acknowledge the existence of external barriers to their success in school and instead blame themselves for their mediocre performance. We can expect that the same will be true for what may turn out to be their low occupational status.
Whereas the Hallway Hangers are analogous to Willis’s lads, the Brothers are closer to the ear’oles. Although our picture is complicated by the variable of ethnicity, the Brothers’ experiences illuminate the process of social reproduction as it is undergone by conformist lower-class youth, a subject into which Willis does not delve. Reflecting their acceptance of the achievement ideology and the concomitant notion that all those who are capable can get ahead on their own merits, the Brothers have developed significant ambitions. Relative to the depressed aspirations of the Hallway Hangers, the middle-class aspirations of the Brothers attest to their belief that they are involved in a fair competition. If they fail to get ahead, they will probably attribute their social and economic fate to their own incapabilities, to their own lack of merit.
But we cannot be sure. Will the Brothers and the ear’oles become disillusioned with themselves when they are “cooled out,” or will their disillusion encompass the social order as well? This issue demands a longitudinal study spanning a number of years, without which no definite pronouncements are possible. I suspect that although some cynicism about the openness of American society will result, the achievement ideology has been internalized so deeply by the Brothers that their subsequent “careers” will be interpreted in its light. Moreover, if one of the Brothers should be lucky enough to “make it,” those who do not will be all the more likely to blame themselves. Far from contradicting the social reproduction perspective, the limited social mobility that does take place in liberal democracies plays a crucial role in the legitimation of inequality. (“If Billy can make it, why can’t I? The problem must reside in me.”) This “controlled mobility” encourages working-class self-reproach and goes a long way toward explaining why in the United States working-class students with Super’s outlook far outnumber those with Jinx’s perspective and why in Britain there are more ear’oles than lads.
When Super switched from the Occupational Education Program to House C in the regular academic program, he was placed in the lowest educational tracks for nearly all his subjects because of his low academic performance in grammar school and the fact that switching into the classes in the middle of the semester would have been difficult for him academically. Now in his sophomore year, Super still is enrolled in the “basic” tracks and maintains a high D average.
Super aspires to professional or middle-class work, which reflects his parents’ insistence that Super aim for a white-collar job, the premium his peer group places on conventional success, his minimal contact with the job market, and the achievement ideology of the school. Within the course of a year he variously expressed hopes of becoming a doctor, a businessman, or a computer specialist. Reconciling these aspirations with his academic performance is a difficult exercise for Super. At the same time that he affirms the achievement ideology (“It’s easy to do anything as long as you set your mind to it”) and his own effort (“I swear, I’ll be tryin’ real hard in school”), Super admits that his performance is lacking (“I just can’t seem to do it”). The only explanation left for him is that his own abilities are not up to par, a conclusion that Super accepts, despite its implications for his sense of self-worth. Every lower-class student who internalizes the achievement ideology but struggles in school finds himself or herself in this dilemma. Moreover, the way is clear for lower-class students again to attribute their failure to personal inadequacies when they find themselves in a low-status job. The feeling is a harsh one, but the American school system and the structure of class relations demand that it be borne by many. That Super and the other Brothers feel it strongly is evidence that the legitimation function of the school and the larger process of social reproduction are at work.
If schooling is the training ground at which students are prepared to participate in the race for the jobs of wealth and prestige, the Brothers are being cheated. Told over and over again that the race is a fair one and led to believe that they are given as much attention during the training as anyone, the Brothers step to the starting line for what they see as an equitable race. When the starter’s gun goes off and they stumble over the first few hurdles while others streak ahead, they will in all likelihood blame only themselves and struggle to keep going.
The Hallway Hangers see that the race is unfair. They reject official declarations of equity and drop out of the training sessions, convinced that their results will be unsatisfactory no matter how hard they train. They expect to do poorly, and even those who might stand a chance stay back with their friends when the race starts. Instead of banding together, however, and demanding that a fair race be held, the Hallway Hangers never really question the race’s rules and simply accept their plight.
This leaves us with an important question: How can the same race be viewed so differently? Why is it that the entrants who have racial as well as class-based hurdles to overcome are the ones who see no hurdles at all?
THE SOURCES OF VARIATION
Although the distinctive processes of social reproduction that have been detailed previously make internal sense, what accounts for the variance between them? What factors contribute to the fundamental incongruity between the two peer groups in the first place? Why is the influence of the family so different for the two peer groups? Why are their experiences in school so dissimilar?
To answer these questions, we must move to a deeper level of analysis that is centered on the role of the achievement ideology. The Hallway Hangers reject this ideology; the Brothers accept it. It is at this point that their paths diverge and the groups experience the process of social reproduction in different ways.
The achievement ideology runs counter to the grain of all these boys’ experiences. Neither the residents of their neighborhood nor the members of their families have “made it.” In a housing project plagued by unemployment and crime, we might expect both groups of boys to question the existence of equality of opportunity, yet only the Hallway Hangers do so. Of course, they have their own experiences on the job market to which they can point, but this explanation is only of limited value because in most instances they have dismissed the ideology even before experiencing the job market firsthand. The question remains: Why do the Hallway Hangers dismiss the achievement ideology while the Brothers accept it?
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, for the Hallway Hangers to accept the achievement ideology is to admit that their parents are lazy or stupid or both. Thus, the achievement ideology not only runs counter to the experiences of the Hallway Hangers, but is also a more serious assault on their self-esteem. Acceptance of the ideology on the part of the Brothers does not necessarily involve such harsh implications, for they can point to racial prejudice to explain their parents’ defeats. The severe emotional toll that belief in the achievement ideology exacts on poor whites relative to poor blacks explains why the Hallway Hangers dismiss the ideology while the Brothers validate it.
14The Brothers believe the achievement ideology to be an accurate depiction of the opportunity structure as it exists in the United States today because they perceive the racial situation to be substantially different for them than it was for their parents. Whereas their parents were barred from lunch counters and disqualified from the competition before it began, the Brothers see themselves in entirely different circumstances. Mokey’s mother, for example, in commenting on Mokey’s chances of “making it,” says, “I feel Mokey has a equal chance to [be successful], regardless of money or color. That’s a chance I never had.” We saw in Chapter 5 that of all the Brothers only Juan believes that young blacks face any racial barriers to success. Indeed, it is amazing how often the Brothers affirm the openness of the opportunity structure. Presumably encouraged by perceived gains made in the past two decades, the Brothers seem to believe that equality of opportunity exists today as it did not in their parents’ time. This view allows them to accept the achievement ideology without simultaneously indicting their parents. Because the Brothers fully expect to “make it” themselves, embracing the achievement ideology involves little assault on their self-esteem.
This belief that the situation for blacks has improved in the United States also explains why the parents of the Brothers encourage high aspirations in their children while the Hallway Hangers’ parents do not. Believing the situation that contributed to their own condition to have changed, the Brothers’ parents are convinced that their children have a better chance of “making it” and see no danger in encouraging lofty aspirations. The Hallway Hangers’ parents, in contrast, believe that the deck is stacked against their children as it was against them and are wary of supporting unrealistically high aspirations.
Quantitative studies on the generation of ambition have produced equivocal results about whether blacks have higher aspirations than whites from the same socioeconomic background. In general, more recent studies indicate higher aspiration levels for blacks, while those utilizing data from the 1960s and early 1970s find that whites maintain higher aspirations than blacks. The only issue on which there is a consensus among quantitative practitioners is that the aspiration levels of blacks seem to have risen during the past ten to fifteen years,
15 a finding consistent with the attitudes of the Brothers and their families.
A number of factors can account for the increased aspirations of blacks. Because black youths perceive a change in the opportunity structure their parents faced (a change that may or may not have occurred to the degree perceived), they may feel that affirmative action has reduced the occupational handicap of color and that discrimination in employment has abated. Or it may be that the incontrovertible gains of the civil rights movement (e.g., affirmation of basic political and civil rights for blacks, an end to legal Jim Crow segregation, the emergence of black leaders on the national stage) have imbued many blacks with a general sense of progress and improvement that has affected their occupational aspirations. Or political mobilization itself may have created feelings of efficacy and resistance to being “cooled out” that have led to the higher aspirations. To the extent that the civil rights movement was about aspirations and dreams and a refusal to be reduced to hopelessness, blacks may feel that diminutive aspirations are somehow a form of surrender and a betrayal of past gains.
The divergence between how the Brothers and Hallway Hangers react to the achievement ideology is not entirely racial. As I noted in Chapter 4, many of the Hallway Hangers and their families have lived in low-income housing projects for a long period of time, and some have been on public assistance for as many as three generations. This extended duration of tenancy in public housing cannot help but contribute to a feeling of hopelessness and stagnation on the part of the Hallway Hangers. With family histories dominated by failure, the Hallway Hangers’ cynicism about the openness of the opportunity structure and their rejection of the achievement ideology are understandable.
The Brothers’ situation is quite different. Their families have lived in public housing, on average, for less than half the time the Hallway Hangers’ families have. The Brothers’ families also have resided in the Clarendon Heights neighborhood for a substantially shorter period of time. Many of the families see their move to the neighborhood as a step up in social status; some families came from worse projects in the area, others from tenement flats in the black ghetto. Moreover, some of the Brothers’ parents (Super’s, James’s, Mokey’s) have moved up from the South, bringing with them a sense of optimism and hope about making a fresh start, feelings that have not yet turned into bitterness. For those families that have come to the United States from the West Indies in the past twelve years (Craig’s, Juan’s), this buoyancy is even stronger. Like the optimism felt by turn-of-the-century immigrants despite their wretched living conditions and the massive barriers to success that they faced, the Brothers’ outlook encompasses a sense of improved life chances. Although at the bottom of the social ladder, the Brothers feel that they are part of a collective upward social trajectory, a belief that is conducive to acceptance of the achievement ideology.
Another factor that bears on the Hallway Hangers’ rejection of the achievement ideology and the Brothers’ acceptance of it is the way in which these peer groups define themselves in relation to one another. The character of the Brothers’ peer group is in some measure a reaction to distinctive attributes of the Hallway Hangers. Thus, we can understand, in part, the Brothers’ aversion to drugs and alcohol and their general orientation toward achievement as a response to the Hallway Hangers’ excessive drinking, use of drugs, and general rejection of the standards and values of the dominant culture. As Super remarks pointing at a group of the Hallway Hangers loitering in doorway #13, “As long as I don’t end up like that.” Having moved into a predominantly white neighborhood that is generally unfriendly toward blacks and having been taunted and abused by a group of disaffected, mostly white boys, the Brothers react by disassociating themselves completely from the Hallway Hangers and by pursuing a distinctly different path—one that leads to success as it is conventionally defined.
For these and other reasons, the Brothers are not representative of poor black teenagers generally. One might discover black peer groups with a similar ethos in other lower-class, predominantly white communities, but if one ventures into any black ghetto, one finds an abundance of black youths hanging in doorways who are pessimistic about the future and cynical about the openness of American society. These youths have formed subcultures with values similar to those of the Hallway Hangers and present a marked contrast to the Brothers in outlook and behavior. The sources of these differences are explored in Chapter 8.
To view the general orientation of the Brothers’ peer group as a mere reaction to that of the Hallway Hangers would be a vast oversimplification that fails to account for both the complexity of their reaction to the situation in which they find themselves and their powers of social discernment. We have seen that the Hallway Hangers see through the achievement ideology, not so much because of greater insight into the workings of the system but because of the assault this ideology makes on their self-esteem. The Brothers’ acceptance of the ideology and their own individualistic orientations toward achievement are not entirely uncritical. The Brothers are not ideological dupes. They make their own partial “penetrations”
16 into their economic condition, and these insights inform their actions.
The Brothers’ decision to “go for it,” to work hard in school in pursuit of a decent job, makes a good deal of sense in view of the Hallway Hangers’ decision to opt out of the competition. With the number of “good” jobs fixed, one’s objective chances increase as individuals remove themselves from contention. Thus, the bipolarity between the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers should not surprise us. In deciding whether to purchase a raffle ticket, the wily individual takes note of how many others are buying them, conscious that the fewer sold, the more sense it makes to purchase one. Lower-class individuals generally do not have a good chance of “making it,” but as one social group eschews the contest, others see it in their interest to vie seriously. Where we have a group like the Hallway Hangers, it is only natural that we have a group with the outlook of the Brothers. Willis notes a similar logic in
Learning to Labor: “The ear’oles’ conformism . . . takes on a more rational appearance when judged against the self-disqualification of the lads.”
17The Brothers’ orientation toward individual achievement is even more understandable when we consider affirmative action measures. Although a far cry from what is needed to ameliorate racial injustice in the United States, affirmative action for minorities does increase the Brothers’ objective chances of securing stable employment. There is, of course, no analogous measure offered to the lower classes as a whole to mitigate class injustice in the United States, so the anger of the white working class about affirmative action should not surprise us. The perception among whites in Clarendon Heights is that blacks now have an advantage on the job market. There may even be a measure of support for this view among blacks. Chris, for example, believes that although the white boys will face unemployment, his fate could be different: “Watch when I go for a job for the city or something: I’ll get it. They’ll say, ‘Minority—you got the job.’” The Brothers’ decision to “buy into” the system also seems to be based on the understanding that, all other things being equal, affirmative action can give them an advantage over their white lower-class peers on the labor market. The sharpening of racial division in the lower classes about affirmative action policies, alluded to throughout this study, also has important political ramifications that are taken up in the final chapter.
There are, then, a number of factors that contribute to the dissimilarity between the Brothers and the Hallway Hangers. The Brothers, who have moved to the northeastern United States within the last generation and recently have moved into public housing, see themselves on a social upswing. This ambiance of ascension is intensified by their impression that racial injustice has been curtailed in the past two decades, thereby making the opportunity structure they face more pliant than the one their parents encountered. The Hallway Hangers have no such grounds for optimism, having been left behind when much of the white working class moved to the suburbs. Whereas Clarendon Heights seems a step up for the Brothers’ families, the Hallway Hangers believe they cannot slide much lower. Hailing from families who have resided in the projects for many years, some in Clarendon Heights for three generations, the Hallway Hangers feel that little has changed and consequently are despondent about their own futures. We also might point to variances in the families of the two groups as a source of their divergent outlooks. The Brothers’ family members, especially their older siblings, have achieved a slightly higher status in terms of educational and occupational achievement than have the Hallway Hangers’ family members.
Although all these factors contribute to the optimism of the Brothers and the pessimism of the Hallway Hangers, they do not in themselves account for the wide disparity between the two groups, nor do they explain the distinctive subculture of the Hallway Hangers. This oppositional culture partially shelters the Hallway Hangers from the abnegations of the dominant society, the negative judgments they sustain as poor members of an ostensibly open society. The Brothers are pained by these appraisals, too, of course, but the achievement ideology represents 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. Finally, the differences between the two groups seem to be amplified by their tendencies to define themselves in relation (i.e., in opposition) to one another.
Where are these two paths likely to lead? In all probability, the Brothers will be better off than the Hallway Hangers. With a high school diploma, a positive attitude, and a disciplined readiness for the rigors of the workplace, the Brothers should be capable of landing steady jobs. An individual or two may work his way into a professional or managerial occupation, and a few might slide into a state of chronic unemployment, but the odds are that most of the Brothers will end up members of the stable working class, generally employed in jobs that are toward the bottom of the occupational ladder but that afford some security.
The Hallway Hangers probably will end up quite differently. Dependent on alcohol or drugs or both, disaffected and rebellious, and without qualifications in a credential-based job market, the Hallway Hangers generally will end up as Slick predicts: “They’re not gonna be more than janitors or, y’know, goin’ by every day tryin’ to get a buck.” An alcoholic himself, who becomes more despondent every day that he remains unemployed, Slick may well meet the same fate, despite his exceptional intelligence and articulate nature.
Of course, the Hallway Hangers do not deny that upward social mobility is possible. Their rejection of school was based not on the premise that they could not succeed but on the premise that the prospects for limited social mobility did not warrant the attempt, given the costs involved in the try. This is a calculation they all now have come to question. Having experienced life on the streets without a job, the Hallway Hangers generally indicate that if they had it to do over again, they would apply themselves in school.
JM: Would you do anything different if you could do it over again?
(all in separate interviews)
BOO-BOO: Yeah, lots. Wouldn’t screw up in school as bad as I did, wouldn’t get high with my friends as much.
CHRIS: I dunno, man, wouldn’t fuck up in school. I guess I shoulda learned to live with their shit. It’s just the way I am. Like, if I decide, if I say I’m not going to do something, I don’t give a fuck what they do to me. I’m not going to do it. That’s just the way I am. I guess that’s what’s gonna fuck me over in the long run.
FRANKIE: Yeah, definitely. I wouldn’t have fucked up as much. I coulda been a—I fucked it up for myself, maybe. Maybe I woulda tried going to school more. But still, I don’t think I woulda come out much better. So, y’know, just fuckin’ bein’ less rude to people, truthfully.
STEVE: Yeah, I’d make sure I got more credits my freshman year. I only got five fucking credits, man. That’s rough to fuckin’ jump back on and shit. It’s a bitch.
JINX: I’d probably get more interested in school, but it’s too late now.
Almost any price would be worth paying to avoid the pain and misery of hopelessness at such a young age.
NOTES 1 Maureen Anne Scully, “Coping with Meritocracy” (Thesis, Harvard College, 1982), p. 6.
2 Max Weber,
Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 953.
3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1947), pp. 65-66.
4 Scully, “Coping with Meritocracy,” p. 3.
5 James Rosenbaum,
Making Inequality (New York: Wylie and Sons, 1976).
6 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron,
Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (London: Sage, 1977), p. 156.
7 Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb,
The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).
8 Scully, “Coping with Meritocracy,” p. 83.
10 Elliot Liebow,
Talley’s Corner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 209.
11 Antonio Gramsci,
Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).
12 Michael Mann, “The Social Cohesion of Liberal Democracy,”
American Sociological Review 35 (June 1970): 423-439.
13 Burton Clark, “The ‘Cooling Out’ Function in Higher Education,”
American Journal of Sociology 65 (1960): 576-596.
14 I am not arguing that blacks living in poverty are psychologically better off than their white counterparts. Given the internalized effects of racism on blacks, such is clearly not the case. It is only in considering the effect of the achievement ideology alone that I am making a comparative statement about the emotional suffering of poor blacks and poor whites.
15 Kenneth I. Spenner and David L. Featherman, “Achievement Ambitions,”
Annual Review of Sociology 4 (1978): 388.
16 The term, of course, is borrowed from Willis, who first directed my attention to the penetrations of the Brothers after reading a draft of the book.
17 Paul Willis,
Learning to Labor (Aldershot: Gower, 1977), p. 148.