Going North Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction

2 Social Class

2 s o c i a L c L a s s Before taking up the question of the intersections among social class, critical thinking, and writing instruction, I will analyze some of the problems of referring to social class in the Unites States. The major issues are the un-naming of class, its empirical status, what markers we use to distinguish the different classes, and what we call them. In rhetoric and composition, we have the additional problem of abstracting class from the larger field of marginalizing status markers, the most common ones being race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation . To imagine that any of these status markers operate independent of the others is naïve. To debate which marginalizing status marker deserves primary status is equally naïve. It temps the verbal equivalent of what Freire ([1970] 1995) calls “lateral violence,” peasants fighting against each other instead of against the landowners (48). The social structure that feeds off marginalized social groups is our problem. But in order to study any phenomenon, we abstract it from a larger field—or, said another way: we focus on the baseball heading toward us if we want to hit it. This is what I will be doing in order to analyze the intersections between social class, critical thinking, and writing instruction. I do not, however, imagine that these intersections can be understood fully if one forgets that one has abstracted the issue of class from the larger field of social marginalization. In practice, the analysis of class has to be reintegrated with studies of other methods of marginalizing social groups. In my analysis, I will try not to repeat what may be common knowledge among scholars who have included in their study social class dynamics. However, I will carefully describe my own understanding of social class so that readers who may not have followed research on stratification theory will not misinterpret what I mean when I refer to different social groups. absence o f cLass Writers commonly note the aversion in the United States to confronting issues of social class (hooks 1995; Scott 2009; Shepard 1998; Stuckey Social Class 17 1991; Tate 1998; Tate, McMillan, & Woodworth 1997; Villanueva 1998). Alan Shepard compares this silence to the frankness with which class in British universities is not only discussed but objectified through academic practices such as marking degrees with class designations and allowing only certain “classes” of people to walk on lawns assigned to their social class. The mythology and historical development of the United States are usually cited as contributing factors to our disinclination to focus on social class. The capitalist mythology works best when people can imagine that everyone has a reasonably equal opportunity to achieve success, which is considered the just reward of diligence, industry , and intelligence. Wedded to this bootstrap mythology is our pioneer heritage sanctifying Daniel Boone individuality and belittling group behavior. Consequently, Americans are socialized into thinking that only in other countries (like England) are citizens pinned by class to the wall. This silence in our field on class issues has been reflected by the number of sessions in our CCCC and MLA conventions. MLA seems to have been particularly silent on the issue. Shor (personal communication ) reports that he co-chaired some sessions in 1971 and 1972 with people like Fredrick Jameson, Norman Rudich, Paul Lauter, Richard Ohmann, Louis Kampf, and Richard Wasson in which class was present as a subject but it wasn’t named in the session titles. Deborah Holdstein (personal communication) said she was in a session on the literature of the War in Vietnam in the late 70’s in which class became part of the discussion but wasn’t mentioned in the title. Renny Christopher (personal communication), who researched this issue in order to initiate a discussion on class at MLA, reports that from the years 1993 to 1996, only three sessions were devoted to class—one in 1993, one in 1995, and one in 1996. In her article, “Freshman Composition as a Middleclass Enterprise,” Lynn Bloom (1996) wrote that after issuing a call in 1993 for papers on race, class, and gender in composition studies, she received one proposal on class, compared to a dozen on race and 94 on gender. She noted that “the C-word” rarely was named in paper titles until 1994 (657). Lest we imagine that class as a subject has escaped the closet in the current century, Cindy Selfe in 2009 (personal communication ) told me that...