Barbara Jensen's "The Invisible Ism" and "Belonging Versus Becoming"

I’m not quite sure how to properly label this post so I’m leaving it blank. I think this will be somewhat of a reflection post, even though it’s not on our list of post formats to choose from.

I found the two chapters assigned to us from Barbara Jensen’s Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America to be quite…interesting. I definitely learned a few new things that I thought were fascinating (like the entire section on language), but there were also a few moments where I just couldn’t completely feel (to know!) what she was saying.

Before I completely dive in I’d like to first just quote her definition of class and classism, mostly for my own benefit so that I have her definition written in a somewhat permanent space, but also for my peers’ benefit for anyone who has not yet been able to read the text or who simply missed it:

Class is an injustice that says some Americans deserve much more time, leisure, control, and far more financial reward than others. Classism is the set of myths and beliefs that keep those class divisions intact, that is, the belief that working class cultures and people are inherently inferior and that class itself demonstrates who the hardest workers and the rightful winners are (31, emphasis Jensen’s).

I found her definition of class/classism to be quite interesting because it differs a bit from what we’ve heard before. Not so much the classism part, but definitely the class definition. With a quick glance it would also seem as if her definition of class was created simply to bolster her definition and argument surrounding classism. But, if we are to think about it a little longer, it becomes much clearer that her definition of class is not there simply to serve the purpose of her argument about classism but rather to highlight the inequalities inherent in a system that stratifies in such a manner. Class is hierarchical, because of that ordering it means that some folk will be on top (superior) and others will be on the very bottom (ultimate inferiors). To have, and embrace, such a system that categorizes in such a way is to embrace inequality. That is what capitalism does. It produces, and embraces, inequalities. It thrives on inequality. For if there were no lower classes then how could there be a capitalist class? The capitalist class needs the working class because they need a class to manipulate, exploit, and dominate.

Later in the same chapter (“The Invisible Ism”) Jensen goes on to posit what she believes to be the most “common form of classism [which] is solipsism, or my-world-is-the-whole-world”. Of course this is one of the most common, and pervasive, forms of classism. It is a necessary tool in order to ensure that class, beyond simple economics, exists. I made a note of this in my last blog post: colonizers are like viruses. Generalize a bit and switch in “oppressor” for “colonizer”. The key to ensuring that the life of the oppressor will continue is to replicate the oppressor’s beliefs in the bodies of those outside of the oppressing class. The oppressing/dominant/ruling/capitalist class is a statistical minority! They cannot continue to oppress if they have not caused others to internalize classist beliefs. In order to insert these new beliefs the oppressor must erase what once was. If the structure is created to suit the middle-class, then others have to either adapt or not play the game. In order to adapt they must shed some of their own identity so that they may take on some of the oppressor’s identity. This is erasure. Solpsism causes erasure of identity and deracination.

What I find a bit funny, in an interesting way, is that while Jensen brings up, and condemns, a concept that brings my mind to erasure, she somewhat commits the act herself. She continuously mentions “ethnic identity” or “racial identity” but never really spends any time there. And I don’t expect her to, but that’s because I am jaded. However, her attempts at inclusion, at least in these two chapters, often stop after she makes note of “ethnic identity”. She often continues to make broad-based statements about the working-class without a true acknowledgment that most of her studies and observations (or at least the theoretical perspective that she is using to analyze these observations) are not inclusive of POC. Perhaps there was a general disclaimer in the introduction section of the book that I may have missed, as I did not go above and beyond and read more than what was assigned (although I do try to read introductions/prefaces, but I just did not have the time).

To give an example, as so far I have mostly been speaking in generals, let us turn to chapter 3 (“Belonging Versus Becoming”):

For those who cross the class divide, almost everything about the process asks you to forget what you knew before. How does one speak of, or grieve, a place that isn’t even on the map? Invisible, voiceless, unacknowledged—how does one remember what to remember? (53).

Jensen had the perfect opportunity at this point to discuss the way in which race is classed, and the multiple marginalities when it comes to class and people of color. For people of color crossing class lines even more must be forgotten (although it is not truly possible). For those whose skin marks them as being of a lower class even more must be stripped in order to really cross class lines. And then the question remains as to whether they can ever truly do so. For in the end it doesn’t matter quite how much agency one speaks with, or whether they can quote Derrida at length; they will forever walk around with a blatant class marker, one that cannot simply be unlearned or hidden away back home.

It wasn’t until a bit later in the chapter that the realization that perhaps Jensen is one of those ‘post-racial’ people popped into my head (she’s clearly not. She’s simply just not the best at inclusivity, either). On page 62 Jensen states that “when the working class has organized for better economic treatment, as it often has in American history, it has done so in spite of deep ethnic, geographic, gender, and color differences, forging a new and larger sense of ‘us’”. Now…I just didn’t know how to take that. It seems purposefully naïve. And through that naivety she also erases the difficulties of past mass class movements where “togetherness” just wasn’t happening, or at least wasn’t happening without a huge fight and many deaths and even more jailed. It’s as if she is purposefully false-remembering the past, and unfortunately by doing so she commits an act of erasure. I’m not the most well-read on class movements but recently I have been reading Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depressing. At times reading about the ways in which the White southerners, those of whom would benefit very much from the Communist Party and others like them at the time, were filled with such spiteful hatred just pained me. There was no “us” in their minds, at least not a broader class “us”. That is not to say that the Alabama Communists were not able to come together…eventually. But to put it as simply as “when the working class has organized…in spite of deep ethnic…and color differences, forcing a new and larger sense of ‘us’” erases the difficulties and actual BLOOD shed to make it happen. Of course, there is only so much room in a book so I may be unfairly criticizing Jensen here.

My last critique is less of a critique and moreso genuine confusion. How is it that Jensen could attribute the epistemological framework of what is essentially “connected knowing” (what she calls “emotional” knowledge/wisdom) to being a phenomenon of the working-class? It just seems to not account for things like socialized ways in which the genders are taught to learn. In “Procedural Knowledge: Separate and Connected Knowing” Mary Field Belensky, et al., posit that:

                        Separate and connected [are used] to describe two different conceptions or experiences of the self, as essentially autonomous (separate from others) or as essentially in relationship (connected to others). The separate self experiences relationships in terms of “reciprocity,” considering others as it wishes to be considered. The connected self experiences relationships as “response to others in their terms” (236).

Does this not sound quite familiar to the ways in which Jensen separates the epistemologies of the working and middle class? And yet Belenky et al stated that “separate and connected knowing are not gender-specific. The two modes may be gender-related. It is possible that more women than men tip toward connected knowing and more men than women toward separate knowing” (236). This is due to socialization. Once things are engrained in us enough they begin to seem natural (they are naturalized). Perhaps this, instead of class differences, explains why the couple she mentions on pg 60 were having such trouble. The husband wanting the wife to use more words and just be explicit with her feelings/thoughts whereas the wife is communicating but in the way that she has been taught to communicate. Maybe it was a coincidence that Jensen used the genders in such a way for this example, but by doing so it makes it harder to see whether the wife communicates in such a way because she was raised working class or because she has been socialized to be a connected/emotional learner/communicator because of her gender.

Just some things to think about! I did enjoy this text. So far this is my favorite reading of the semester.

Work Referenced

 Belenky, Mary F., Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and JillMattuck Tarule. "Procedural Knowledge: Separate and Connected Knowing."Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader. By Alison M. Jaggar.Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008. 235-47. Print.

Jensen, Barbara. Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America. Ithaca: ILR,2012. Print.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the GreatDepression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1990. Print.