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

7. Encounters: Uncommon Class Commonalities

Chapter 7 Encounters: Uncommon Class Commonalities This final "Encounters" chapter focuses on some of the manycommon experiences low-incomeWhites 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 experientialconception 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 theirmid-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 eatinglunch. Thomas: Man, 1 hate the cops around here! Why? 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 mysteriouslyfound 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 revelationsin 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 Encounters: Uncommon Class Commonalities 95 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...