Immobility in Mobility: Narratives of Social Class, Education, and Paralysis

Educational Foundations, Summer 2003 by Nainby, Keith, Pea, John B

Perhaps the reader can fill in her or his own stories like this, her or his own experiences of processing. Again, there are very good reasons for communicating this way: we are all in process. But perhaps this is one of my first places of feeling "stuck." If this is a phenomenon of middle-class culture - and please know this is the question I am wondering about, whether other people out there experience this as a difference in communication style between some middle-class and some working-class communication - if so, then I would like to know. No, I haven't completed a study; I have no "scholarly"evidence. Right now, it's just a gut feeling, and since I ' ve lost my guts somewhere, lost the courage of my own intuitions, I need other people to see me out of the woods.

I'm terrified of seeming to accuse middle-class folks of something like "insincerity" or "untruthfulness," which is how I'm afraid I will be heard. If these observations about middle-class performances can be communally constituted i. e., if anyone else has experienced these feelings, these differences, then I might venture some ideas about possible unintended consequences for those of us in the academy as we participate in such cultural communication. In the rest of this section I will try to explain why this communicative pattern of privately processing, a pattern that makes me feel stuck and crazy, is a class-based phenomenon - or at least a phenomenon that I encounter more frequently as I ascend the social scale. I also want to try to explain why this pattern of communication tears me apart and always makes me want to leave the academy. What follows is, of course, speculative in character, coming as it does from my own reflections on this communicative phenomenon.

How does the white fear Moore described come into being? What are the material consequences of the "table-ing" talk phenomenon for middle-class communities? Earlier, Keith explored how middle-class and working-class communication might differ in terms of constituting "control;" here, I want to discuss the implications of such control of communication for creating a culture of fear. In many ways I am attempting to step outside of middle-class culture, "feeling through" my working-class background to try to articulate an experiential difference. It remains for readers (and I think only those who've experienced both kinds of communication) to determine if this is also a material difference.

On an interpersonal level I notice, as I attempt to negotiate some middle-class cultures, a tendency for communication to become a matter of personal possession, of personal perspective and ownership (a point supported and elaborated by Philipsen in his work on Nacirema culture). As I have tried to suggest in the earlier examples, my communication in these cultures is my communication: I am to be held accountable for it, and I can also change the world with it - but I reserve the individual right to change it, when and where and with whom I please. I am not being sardonic here; I also believe in these points. I am an ambiguous, complicated human being and I have the right and the freedom to determine who I talk to, and when, and why.