"Racializing" Class

Educational Foundations, Summer 2003 by Hatt-Echeverria, Beth, Urrieta, Luis Jr

As I step out of the airplane and head towards the terminal, I thinkto myself, "I am finally home. " My sister picks me up and we begin the three-hour ride back. While we are driving, she updates me on the latest news from our small town: So-and-so got married, had a baby, got arrested. Eventually we turn off the highway onto a graveled road and drive another fifteen minutes going by cornfields, farmhouses, and cow pastures. Hookup at the sky and smile at being able to see the stars - there are no city lights here to hide them. I sigh and have the feeling again of being "home."

The road ends at my grandma's house where instead of hearing cars going by you hear the wind blowing through the leaves and nothing more. I notice a fire on the edge of the cow pasture. I go in the house and ask my grandma about it: "Oh, one of our calves died. Forrest Wayne (my cousin) started the fire to get rid of it." My brother comes in the house and begins telling me about two deer he killed that morning. My brain seems foggy while talking to him. I had not talked about deer hunting in a long time. Slowly, my memory clears and I remember what a button buck is and to ask what part of the woods he was in and where his shots hit the deer. I feel that I am losing a part of myself because this world now seems foreign to me rather than life at school.

During Thanksgiving dinner I get asked questions about hove much longer I will be in school and what I am going to be when I am finished. I feel tense talking about it. I am the secondperson and first female in my family to receive a bachelor's degree, let alone a graduate degree. My grandma asks me what degree I will have and she does not realize that a Ph.D. involves the title of doctor. The conversation soon changes to discussing medical expenses, feeling manipulated by insurance companies, and concerns about paying fees. I begin thinking about how poor or working-class people are controlled by bureaucracies - can I not stop being a student for a second?

I arrive back at school and wonder where I really belong. Have I lost my roots? I brought back a pair of my grandpa's overalls-should I dare to wear them here? Will I be accused of being unprofessional? I do not like this game. I am learning the rules of how to talk, what to know, how to dress, and who to know but I feel like I am losing myself in the process. I fear that if I let go I will quit being real.

-Beth

Wow! What an accomplishment! I finally turned it in; my dissertation, finally it was all done. I was getting ready to go home, all dressed up. I was wearing my dark gray slacks and my royal blue long-sleeve shirt, nice and pressed, I learned somewhere along the way that people with myphenotype (short and dark) get treated better at airports if they're dressed up. I had a plane to catch right after I turned in my dissertation so I was in full costume. I had my Kenneth Cole watch on and my Motorola cellphone in hand. I felt so proud, so accomplished. I walked toward the student store with myheaduphigh andwith a special strut in my walk, looking around and not seeing any other brown bodies in sight.

I needed to buy some gifts for the family so I was looking around the clothing section when a white middle-aged man wearing sweat pants approached me. "Excuseme, "hesaid. "Can I ask you a question? "I was a little puzzled, but I smiled and said, "Sure. "He proceeded, "You see that shirt over there with the logo on the front right side, do you have it with the logo on the sleeve instead?" Immediately I felt the blood rush to my head and I must have turned bright red. I stared at the man with anger, but was unable to say more than, "I don't work here."

After my reply, he smiled with a look of satisfaction that I cannot fully describe. he looked me up and down and said, "Well, I'm sorry. I thought you did. "He then proceeded to tap my shoulder and walked away with a smile from ear to ear. Henever once asked anyone else about the shirt, and left the building, I knew that this whole interaction was not a mistake and I asked myself what could make a person so miserable that they'd want to do something like that deliberately. So, I have a Ph.D. now? How does that change things? And I know that it does, in some ways, but it most certainly doesn't in others.

-Luis

The previous vignettes provide a snapshot of how we, the authors of this paper, interacted with the institution of education while in graduate school. In an effort to explore how racial and class oppressions intersect, within this paper we will use our autobiographical narratives to depict cultural and experiential continuity and discontinuity in growing up white working class versus Chicano working class. We specifically wanted to focus on "racializing class" due to the ways class is often used as a copout by working-class whites to deny the existence of white privilege (Rothenberg, 2002) and to address the ways scholars of color romanticize being working class (Brayboy, 2003).

Academic discussions of oppression typically compartmentalize various "isms" into separate, static categories (i.e. racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism). As an alternative, we offer a more dynamic, complicated picture of oppression in everyday life. One reason for this effort is that the compartmentalization of oppression arises from imperialistic and institutionalized motivation to quantify, order, and label the world in order to "know" it and, consequently, control it (Foucault, 1990; Willinsky, 1998). Oppression and discrimination have become classifications used to sort and categorize groups that then become perceived as faceless, nameless, and emotionless people (Urrieta, 2003b). The discourse becomes rational rather than personal.