December 4, 2006
On Class Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST I hope I might be able to draw a connection between two topics that recently piqued the interest of my fellow AmericanHeritage.com bloggers. In late November John Steele Gordon and I exchanged some thoughts about affirmative action in college admissions. He is categorically against it, while I’m more accepting of the idea that universities should be permitted leeway in creating a diverse student population, insomuch as diversity enhances the learning process for all members of the college community. In a seemingly unrelated exchange, last week Mr. Gordon and I wrote about the artist Norman Rockwell. I suggested that Rockwell was attentive to issues of class and race. Mr. Gordon responded, “To me, class is almost entirely an intellectual construct with very limited utility for explaining the real world.”
As it happens, this week is admissions interview week at Cambridge University, where I teach. In the English system, faculty members conduct all of the admissions interviews and render the final admissions decisions. It’s not a process I particularly enjoy, as I’m a lot nicer a guy than Mr. Gordon gives me credit for, and I find it difficult to turn away so many bright and enthusiastic students. Too many fine candidates, too few spaces. But British academia places a high premium on this process, so I have interrupted an otherwise productive research sabbatical to meet with several dozen aspiring Cambridge historians.
In England, whatever affirmative action one finds in college admissions is mostly informed by class rather than race. I often tell my English students that the difference between our countries is that America has deep class divisions but pretends it does not, while the U.K. has less inequality but pretends that its Victorian-era class system is still rigidly in place. If race looms large in America, class looms large in Britain. This is an over-exaggeration, to be sure, but my basic point is that Mr. Gordon is both right and wrong about class.
Like gender or race, class is surely an intellectual construction. Such historians as Grace Hale (who writes about the invention of whiteness), Stuart Blumin (who writes about the creation of the American middle class), and Lawrence Levine (who wrote about the emergence of class stratification in American culture) have made precisely this point. They would also agree that, once constructed, class assumes tremendous importance as a social category. In England, it determines what kind of secondary school a university applicant attended, how much social capital, savvy, and networking assets he brings to the admissions process, and how well she presents herself in an admissions interview. The trick for the admissions officer is to see past the obvious differences between candidates from different backgrounds. The applicant from a prestigious private school (which the British call a public school) may submit more polished written work than the candidate from a state school, but does that mean he is a more promising student? Does it mean he will excel better in the classroom? Not necessarily.
In a more benign way, scholars and memoirists have written a rich body of literature chronicling the differences in mentality, taste, and outlook between people of different income levels or job categories. One of my favorites is Andrew Hurley’s book Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. Hurley reminds us that the postwar economic boom may have benefited Americans across class lines, but the aesthetic values they brought to the new consumer culture remained sharply patterned along socioeconomic lines.
All of which is to say, class may very well be an invented category. But once it’s been invented, it assumes meaning and importance.
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