Teaching class: A pedagogy and politics for working-class writing

In her short story "Different Worlds" (1978) Isabell's articulation of the position of otherness and its relation to geographic space is intensified by the sheer number of different worlds represented in the text. Her struggle to understand the world in terms of class and sexual identity is now complicated by her new observations of the centrality of academic and racial stratifications as well, as Sharon begins to attend a community college and to work in a liquor store in a working-class African-American neighborhood. The different worlds she tries-but fails-to inhabit simultaneously return us to the issue that began this essay. To what extent is class bias inscribed in academic discourse and in academic reception of working-class writers? And what can we do as teachers to begin to disrupt that discourse from within the institution that produces it?

Living as a lesbian, working as a liquor store cashier in a working-class African-American section of Oakland, attending college part time, Isabell is constantly in spaces that allow her to observe the construction (and the deconstruction) of difference. Sharon begins to realize that the racial, sexual, economic, and academic boundaries she crosses on a daily basis are in fact meant to divide society. The very presence of her writing signals her commitment to exposing and critiquing bourgeois ideologies even when living out that commitment (if not writing about it) is fraught with danger. She describes her first days on the job:

I began to notice that people looked at me strange. By the third day I had figured out what it was. I was somewhere I wasn't supose to be. One night a woman yelled at me, "Whatsa matter couldn't you make it in your own neighborhood?" The Black people didn't like a white person working in there [sic] store and the white people that came in didn't think much of a white woman that worked in a Black store. The air felt thick with unsaid thoughts and bad feelings. I wished I could yell out I need this job, why does it have to be like this. (54)

Moving from one racially defined space to another, Sharon is confronted by people who see the world divided by racial difference while she herself sees how classed exploitation binds them all together.10

But finally, class-consciousness is articulated as the singular most significant means of overcoming the oppressive dichotomies she has spent a lifetime observing. The power that academic discourse has in shaping people's ideas and experiences is made clear by the fact that Isabell sees and articulates class division most pointedly once she arrives at the community college. Sharon describes Grove Street College as a "strange, wonderful place" because it is like "real life" in the ways it admits people of different class. But her happiness at discovering an institution that admits difference does not blind her to the ways in which difference continues to be constructed hierarchically. Confused by the grammatically perfect speech of the middle-class students, Sharon remains silent in her classes, even though she sees what others cannot: