Limbo

My mind has been occupied by Alfred Lubrano's book Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar dreams. It's just the kind of book I enjoy most. Rather than approaching the question of class and class mobility from an academic or theoretical perspective, he writes as a journalist and goes across the country interviewing different white collar professionals in business as well as in academia, writers as well as executives who grew up in blue collar households and neighborhoods and asks them about what it's been like making the transition out of one class into the other.

I was interested in this book because nearly every day I deal with my own feelings of being out of place in the life I lead. I love teaching. I think what keeps me going as a community college instructor is that I am dealing all the time with students who are unprivileged, who have either grown up in the working class or who have been living as people of the underclass, deeply impoverished and fighting to survive.

I also am comfortable with the fact that many of my fellow teachers also grew up, like me, in working class homes and in working class towns and approach their work with an ethic that is decidedly working class: hard driving, unpretentious, upfront, with gratitude to have the work they have, and with suspicion of those who run the college.

Nonetheless, I have entered a world where I had to change who I was to become what I am. I refined my way of speaking. I became a man making my living on the seat of my pants rather than by the exertion of my body. I studied fancy books, had to assume the language of literary and rhetorical criticism, which is decidedly nuanced and specialized. It's not language I can or want to use when I go home.

I am, as Lubrano describes those who have left the working class and moved into the middle class, a Straddler. Like so many of those he interviewed, I did just what I was encouraged to do in Kellogg: I left. I got the hell out of there.

And yet, like many of the subjects in this book, I never did leave and never could leave. I go through my days with a double consciousness. I am aware of what I must do and how I must act to adhere to the ways of talking and behaving in a white collar environment, but I see my world at work through the eyes of a blue collar guy and often feel alien, out of place.

For many of us Straddlers, it's a double bind. We find ourselves in a world that is, at one level, very satisfying. But, we have left behind a world not only that we loved, but that we are rooted in. Like many of the Straddlers, I love what I do, but it's not where my roots are.

This was especially true in graduate school. Graduate school was as much about learning and being assimilated into the culture of the university as it was reading and writing. It was about learning to pad comments, speak indirectly, to qualify what we said with a paragraph or two of "now I know your very admirable point of view is such and such" or "while I respect very much how you see this or that" or "while your point is a very compelling one" before saying what we had to say.

We learned in graduate school not to call bullshit bullshit, but to call what stunk sweet and then carefully and in a measured way slowly get around to the difference of viewpoint one person might have with another.

Lubrano's subjects talk about how unsettling it is coming out of a blue collar background and learning that many people in the white collar world grew up with these indirect ways of crushing one another. In the blue collar world, these disagreements tend to be out in the open and expressed loudly.

One of the first things I had to learn as I moved into the academic world and entered, on occasion, the social world of the university, was to quiet down. In Kellogg, we were loud. We shouted across rooms. We expressed ourselves with gusto. In the academic world, gusto was acceptable as a teacher in the classroom, pretty much, but to present oneself as refined and cultured, one spoke quietly, cleverly, subtly, with wit and intelligence.

Lubrano's book explores all of this. It explores what happens when white collar men and women return to their homes and their neighborhoods. It explores how education, the passport out of the blue collar life, separates the college educated blue collar person from the very people, whether in family or neighborhood, with whom they've had years of close connection and formative experiences.

It's not a self-pity book. It's a book about struggle, of the difficulties of refashioning one's life and not being sure who you are or what you've come to do with your life.

It's about limbo.

Many of us know what this limbo is all about.