College English - Social Class and English Studies, Nov 2004

The essay argues that the homophobia that persists in some leftist thinking results in an impoverished and undialectical understanding of class and class consciousness. Through attention to works by John Rechy and James Baldwin, the author illustrate that categories of oppression such as class, gender, sexual orientation, and race cannot be used as analogies of one another but rather are mutually imbricated and mutually constitutive.

Challenging views of working-class white students that either displace all white racism onto them or, at best, see them as having exchanged class consciousness for race privilege, the author argues for a critical race pedagogy that includes a more complex image of poor and working-class whites. She argues for both deconstructive pedagogies that can expose the role of language in maintaining racist and classist structures and reconstructive pedagogies that can provide students with the rhetorical tools for employing language transformatively.

The essay considers how teachers might perform emotional engagements that students find authentic and valuable within scenes of literacy instruction, suggesting that instructors’ “acting” of affect might be needed to forestall the tendency for instructors either to retain a position outside the affect generated in the classroom and merely “manage” the affective work done by students, or to impose their own affective commitments on students’ inquiry. Such a pedagogy might enable students, and particularly working-class students, to locate their own affectively structured experiences of class within more integrated understandings of social structures and identity formation.

In contrast to the idea that students’ instrumental views of their own education are necessarily productive of conservative middle-class values, the author describes a “work memoir” project he has developed in which working-class students reflect on and articulate their own values, memories, and expectations related to work. The students in the project, four of whom are discussed in detail in the essay, reveal far more complex concerns of identity, social capital, and acculturation.

The author explores his vexation with David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” in terms of its assumptions about class. He suggests that it both negates his own experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy he employs as a teacher of writing with middle-class students, given its insistence on mimicry of a dominant discourse that involves a betrayal of self for both working-class and middle-class learners of academic discourse.