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REREADING AMERICA Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and

Writing

ELEVENTH EDITION

EDITED BY

Gary Colombo

Emeritus—Los Angeles City College

Robert Cullen

Emeritus—San Jose State University

Bonnie Lisle

University of California, Los Angeles

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For Bedford/St. Martin’s

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Edwin Hill

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Cover Image: American Landscape #1, Nabil Mousa

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Acknowledgments

Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the

book on pages 715–716, which constitute an extension of the

copyright page. Art acknowledgments and copyrights appear on

the same page as the art selections they cover.

At the time of publication all Internet URLs published in this

text were found to accurately link to their intended website. If

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PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS ABOUT REREADING AMERICA Designed for first-year writing and critical thinking courses,

Rereading America anthologizes a diverse set of readings

focused on the myths that dominate U.S. culture. This central

theme brings together thought-provoking selections on a broad

range of topics — family, education, technology, success,

gender, and race — topics that raise controversial issues

meaningful to college students of all backgrounds. We’ve drawn

these readings from many sources, both within the academy

and outside of it; the selections are both multicultural and

cross-curricular and thus represent an unusual variety of

voices, styles, and subjects.

The readings in this book speak directly to students’

experiences and concerns. Every college student has had some

brush with prejudice, and most have something to say about

education, the family, or the gender stereotypes they see in

films and on television. The issues raised here help students

link their personal experiences with broader cultural

perspectives and lead them to analyze, or “read,” the cultural

forces that have shaped and continue to shape their lives. By

linking the personal and the cultural, students begin to

recognize that they are not academic outsiders — they too have

knowledge, assumptions, and intellectual frameworks that give

them authority in academic culture. Connecting personal

knowledge and academic discourse helps students see that they

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are able to think, speak, and write academically and that they

don’t have to absorb passively what the “experts” say.

FEATURES OF THE ELEVENTH EDITION

A Cultural Approach to Critical Thinking Like its predecessors, the eleventh edition of Rereading

America is committed to the premise that learning to think

critically means learning to identify and see beyond dominant

cultural myths — collective and often unconsciously held beliefs

that influence our thinking, reading, and writing. Instead of

treating cultural diversity as just another topic to be studied or

“appreciated,” Rereading America encourages students to

grapple with the real differences in perspective that arise in a

pluralistic society like ours. This method helps students to

break through conventional assumptions and patterns of

thought that hinder fresh critical responses and inhibit

dialogue. It helps them recognize that even the most apparently

“natural” fact or obvious idea results from a process of social

construction. And it helps them to develop the intellectual

independence essential to critical thinking, reading, and

writing.

Timely New Readings To keep Rereading America up to date, we’ve worked hard to

bring you the best new voices speaking on issues of race,

gender, class, family, education, and technological progress. As

in past editions, we’ve retained old favorites like Gary Soto,

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Stephanie Coontz, John Taylor Gatto, Mike Rose, Sherry Turkle,

Barbara Ehrenreich, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Kilbourne, Rebecca

Solnit, Sherman Alexie, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. But you’ll also

find a host of new selections by authors such as Amy Ellis Nutt,

Nikole Hannah-Jones, Peggy Orenstein, Yuval Noah Harari,

Jean M. Twenge, Ellen K. Pao, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Marc

Lamont Hill, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, and José Orduña. And like

earlier versions, this edition of Rereading America includes a

healthy mix of personal and academic writing, representing a

wide variety of genres, styles, and rhetorical strategies.

Visual Portfolios In addition to frontispieces and cartoons, we’ve included a

Visual Portfolio of myth-related images in every chapter of

Rereading America. These collections of photographs invite

students to examine how visual “texts” are constructed and

how, like written texts, they are susceptible to multiple readings

and rereadings. Each portfolio is accompanied by a series of

questions that encourage critical analysis and connect portfolio

images to ideas and themes in chapter reading selections. As in

earlier editions, the visual frontispieces that open each chapter

are integrated into the prereading assignments found in the

chapter introductions. The cartoons, offered as a bit of comic

relief and as opportunities for visual thinking, are paired with

appropriate readings throughout the text.

Focus on Struggle and Resistance Most multicultural readers approach diversity in one of two

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ways: either they adopt a pluralist approach and conceive of

American society as a kind of salad bowl of cultures or, in

response to worries about the lack of “objectivity” in the

multicultural curriculum, they take what might be called the

“talk show” approach and present American culture as a series

of pro-and-con debates on a number of social issues. The

eleventh edition of Rereading America, like its predecessors,

follows neither of these approaches. Pluralist readers, we feel,

make a promise that’s impossible to keep: no single text, and no

single course, can do justice to the many complex cultures that

inhabit the United States. Thus the materials selected for

Rereading America aren’t meant to offer a taste of what “family”

means for Native Americans or the flavor of gender relations

among immigrants. Instead, we’ve included materials like

excerpts from Sheryll Cashin’s Loving: Interracial Intimacy in

America and the Threat to White Supremacy or Ta-Nehisi

Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” because they offer us fresh

critical perspectives on the common myths that shape our

ideas, values, and beliefs. Rather than seeing this anthology as a

mosaic or kaleidoscope of cultural fragments that combine to

form a beautiful picture, it’s more accurate to think of

Rereading America as a handbook that helps students explore

the ways that the dominant culture shapes their ideas, values,

and beliefs.

This notion of cultural dominance is studiously avoided in

most multicultural anthologies. “Salad bowl” readers generally

sidestep the issue of cultural dynamics: intent on celebrating

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America’s cultural diversity, they offer a relatively static picture

of a nation fragmented into a kind of cultural archipelago. “Talk

show” readers admit the idea of conflict, but they distort the

reality of cultural dynamics by presenting cultural conflicts as a

matter of rational — and equally balanced — debate. All of the

materials anthologized in Rereading America address the

cultural struggles that animate American society — the tensions

that result from the expectations established by our dominant

cultural myths and the diverse realities that these myths often

contradict.

Extensive Apparatus Rereading America offers a wealth of features to help students

hone their analytic abilities and to aid instructors as they plan

class discussions, critical thinking activities, and writing

assignments. These include:

A Comprehensive Introductory Essay The book begins with a comprehensive essay, “Thinking Critically, Challenging Cultural Myths,” that introduces students to the relationships among thinking, cultural diversity, and the notion of dominant cultural myths, and that shows how such myths can influence their academic performance. We’ve also included a section devoted to active reading, which offers suggestions for prereading, prewriting, note taking, text marking, and keeping a reading journal. Another section helps students work with the many visual images included in the book.

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“Fast Facts” Begin Each Chapter Several provocative statistics before each chapter introduction provide context for students and prompt discussion. For example, “Following the 2016 presidential election, 64% of Americans said that fake news stories online had left the nation confused about basic facts. However, 84% also feel either ‘very confident’ or ‘somewhat confident’ that they can recognize fake news when they see it.”

Detailed Chapter Introductions An introductory essay at the beginning of each chapter offers students a thorough overview of each cultural myth, placing it in historical context, raising some of the chapter’s central questions, and orienting students to the chapter’s internal structure.

Prereading Activities Following each chapter introduction you’ll find prereading activities designed to encourage students to reflect on what they already know about the cultural myth in question. Often connected to the images that open every chapter, these prereading activities help students to engage the topic even before they begin to read.

Questions to Stimulate Critical Thinking Three groups of questions following each selection encourage students to consider the reading carefully in several contexts: “Engaging the Text” focuses on close reading of the selection itself; “Exploring Connections” puts the selection into dialogue with other selections throughout the book; “Extending the Critical Context” invites students to connect the ideas they read about here with sources of knowledge outside the anthology, including library and Internet

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research, personal experience, interviews, ethnographic- style observations, and so forth. As in past editions, we’ve included a number of questions linking readings with contemporary television shows and feature films for instructors who want to address the interplay of cultural myths and the mass media. Also as in past editions, we’ve included a number of questions focusing on writers’ rhetorical and stylistic strategies. Identified as “Thinking Rhetorically” for easy reference, these questions typically appear as the final item under “Engaging the Text.”

“Further Connections” Close Each Chapter Located at the end of each chapter, these questions and assignments invite students to undertake more challenging projects related to the chapter’s theme. They often provide suggestions for additional in-depth research or activities that require community engagement.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Critical thinking is always a collaborative activity, and the kind

of critical thinking involved in the creation of a text like

Rereading America represents collegial collaboration at its very

best. Since publication of the last edition, we’ve heard from

instructors across the country who have generously offered

suggestions for new classroom activities and comments for

further refinements and improvements. Among the many

instructors who shared their insights with us as we reworked

this edition, we’d particularly like to thank James Allen, College

of DuPage; Deborah Bertsch, Columbus State Community

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College; Ruth Blandon, East Los Angeles College; Nancy Botkin,

Indiana University South Bend; Tony Bowers, College of

DuPage; Michael Duncan, University of Houston–Downtown;

Irene Faass, Minneapolis Community and Technical College;

Rebecca Fleming, Columbus State Community College; Karen

Forgette, University of Mississippi; Melanie Gagich, Cleveland

State University; Rick Garza, Reedley College; Joshua Giorgio-

Rubin, Indiana University South Bend; Sara Heaser, University

of Wisconsin–La Crosse; Owen Kaufman, Quinebaug Valley

Community College; Julia Klimek, Coker College; David

McCracken, Coker College; Alisea McLeod, Rust College; Ilona

Missakian, Fullerton College; Stan Porter, Merced College;

Pegeen Powell, Columbia College Chicago; Edwin Sams, San

Jose State University; Jasna Shannon, Coker College; Abha

Sood, Monmouth University; Jeffrey Susla, University of

Hartford; Kerry Taylor, Anne Arundel Community College;

Bronte Wieland, Iowa State University.

For their help with the tenth edition, we’d like to thank the

following: Douglas Armendarez, East Los Angeles College; Tolu

Bamishigbin, University of California, Los Angeles; Sheena

Boran, University of Mississippi; David Bordelon, Ocean County

College; Jane Carey, Quinebaug Valley Community College;

Kirsti Cole, Minnesota State University; Rachelle Costello,

Indiana University South Bend; Virginia Crisco, California State

University, Fresno; Peter DeNegre, Tunxis Community College;

Tiffany Denman, Sacramento City College; Peter Dorman,

Central Virginia Community College; Chip Dunkin, University

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of Mississippi; Randa Elbih, Grand Valley State University;

Maria Estrada, Mt. San Antonio College; Karen Forgette,

University of Mississippi; JoAnn Foriest, Prairie State College;

Kimberly Hall, Harrisburg Area Community College; Barbara

Heifferon, Louisiana State University; Cristina Herrera,

California State University, Fresno; Robert Imbur, University of

Toledo; Danielle Lake, Grand Valley State University; Catherine

Lamas, East Los Angeles College; Danielle Muller, Los Angeles

City College; Pamela McGlynn, Southwestern College; Charlotte

Morgan, Cleveland State University; Eduardo Munoz, East Los

Angeles College; Kylie Olean, University of Hartford; Heather

Seratt, University of Houston–Downtown; Phil Wagner,

University of California, Los Angeles; Jessica Walsh, Harper

College; Vallie Watson, University of North Carolina at

Wilmington; Judith Wigdortz, Monmouth University; Mary

Williams, San Jose State University.

For their help with the ninth edition, we’d like to thank the

following: Janice Agee, Sacramento City College; Fredric J. Ball,

Southwestern College; Chantell M. Barnhill, Indiana University

South Bend; Norka Blackman-Richards, Queens College, City

University of New York; Candace Boeck, San Diego State

University; Mark Brock-Cancellieri, Stevenson University;

Audrey Cameron, North Idaho College; Catheryn Cheal,

Oakland University; Kirsti Cole, Minnesota State University,

Mankato; Sean P. Connolly, Tulane University; Jackson Connor,

Guilford College; Myrto Drizou, State University of New York at

Buffalo; David Estrada, Fullerton College; Jacquelyn Lee

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Gardner, Western Michigan University; Rochelle Gregory,

North Central Texas College; Gwyn Fallbrooke, University of

Minnesota; Philip Fishman, Barry University; Naomi E. Hahn,

Illinois College; Rick Hansen, California State University,

Fresno; Nels P. Highberg, University of Hartford; Amy Lynn

Ingalls, Three Rivers Community College; Asao B. Inoue,

California State University, Fresno; Amanda Katz, Worcester

State University; O. Brian Kaufman, Quinebaug Valley

Community College; Barbara Kilgust, Carroll University;

Carolyn Kremers, University of Alaska Fairbanks; Catherine

Lamas, East Los Angeles College; Sharon A. Lefevre,

Community College of Philadelphia; Alisea Williams McLeod,

Indiana University South Bend; Tanya Millner-Harlee,

Manchester Community College; Ilona Missakian, Rio Hondo

College; Roxanne Munch, Joliet Junior College; Katrina J.

Pelow, Kent State University; M. Karen Powers, Kent State

University at Tuscarawas; Kevin Quirk, DePaul University; Alex

Reid, State University of New York at Buffalo; Brad C. Southard,

Appalachian State University; Terry Spaise, University of

California, Riverside; Sarah Stanley, University of Alaska

Fairbanks.

We are also grateful to those reviewers who helped shape

previous editions.

As always, we’d also like to thank all the kind folks at

Bedford/St. Martin’s, who do their best to make the effort of

producing a book like this a genuine pleasure. We’re especially

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grateful to Edwin Hill, Leasa Burton, and John Sullivan. We

thank Cara Kaufman, our editor, whose patience and

professionalism have helped us immensely throughout the

development of this new edition. We also want to thank Pamela

Lawson, who served as content project manager; Lumina

Datamatics, Inc., who managed copyediting and composition;

William Boardman, who produced our new cover; Mark

Schaefer, for clearing text permissions; Candice Cheesman and

Krystyna Borgen, for researching and tracking down art; and

editorial assistant William Hwang who helped out with many of

the hundreds of details that go into a project such as this.

Finally, we’d like to acknowledge our spouses, Elena Barcia, Liz

Silver, and Roy Weitz, for their love and support.

Gary Colombo

Robert Cullen

Bonnie Lisle

WE’RE ALL IN. AS ALWAYS. Bedford/St. Martin’s is as passionately committed to the

discipline of English as ever, working hard to provide support

and services that make it easier for you to teach your course

your way.

Find community support at the Bedford/St. Martin’s English

Community (community.macmillan.com), where you can

follow our Bits blog for new teaching ideas, download titles

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from our professional resource series, and review projects in

the pipeline.

Choose curriculum solutions that offer flexible custom

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resources, acclaimed works from Macmillan’s trade imprints,

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Rely on outstanding service from your Bedford/St. Martin’s

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Trusted content from our best-selling handbooks

Choose Writer’s Help 2.0, Hacker Version, or Writer’s Help

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Diagnostics that help establish a baseline for instruction

Assign diagnostics to identify areas of strength and areas

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study. Use visual reports to track performance by topic,

class, and student as well as improvement over time.

Adaptive exercises that engage students

Writer’s Help 2.0 includes LearningCurve, game-like online

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Student access is packaged with Rereading America at a

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Help 2.0, Hacker Version, or ISBN 978-1-319-24515-3 for Writer’s

Help 2.0, Lunsford Version to ensure your students have easy

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used book can purchase access and instructors may request free

access at macmillanlearning.com/writershelp2.

Instructor Resources You have a lot to do in your course. We want to make it easy for

you to find the support you need — and to get it quickly.

Resources for Teaching Rereading America: Cultural

Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing, Eleventh Edition, is

available as a PDF that can be downloaded from

macmillanlearning.com. Visit the instructor resources tab for

Rereading America. In addition to chapter overviews and

teaching tips, the instructor’s manual includes sample syllabi.

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CONTENTS PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS

INTRODUCTION: Thinking Critically, Challenging Cultural Myths

1 HARMONY AT HOME

Myths of Family

LOOKING FOR WORK, GARY SOTO

“For weeks I had drunk Kool-Aid and watched morning reruns of Father Knows Best, whose family was so uncomplicated in its routine that I very much wanted to imitate it. The first step was to get my brother and sister to wear shoes at dinner.”

WHAT WE REALLY MISS ABOUT THE 1950s, STEPHANIE COONTZ

“What most people really feel nostalgic about . . . is the belief that the 1950s provided a more family-friendly economic and social environment, an easier climate in which to keep kids on the straight and narrow, and above all, a greater feeling of hope for a family’s long-term future, especially for its young.”

THE COLOR OF FAMILY TIES: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND EXTENDED FAMILY INVOLVEMENT, NAOMI GERSTEL AND NATALIA SARKISIAN

“Marriage actually diminishes ties to kin.”

WHEN SHOULD A CHILD BE TAKEN FROM HIS PARENTS?, LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

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“When a child has been left alone because his mother can’t afford childcare and has to go to work, is that poverty or neglect?”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF AMERICAN

FAMILIES

FROM BECOMING NICOLE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY, AMY ELLIS NUTT

“I am the proud father of identical twins. One is a boy and one is a girl.”

FROM LOVING: INTERRACIAL INTIMACY IN AMERICA AND THE THREAT TO WHITE SUPREMACY, SHERYLL CASHIN

“White people who have an intimate relationship with a person of color, particularly a black person, can lose the luxury of racial blindness . . . and gain something tragic, yet real.”

FROM BEYOND MONOGAMY: POLYAMORY AND THE FUTURE OF POLYQUEER SEXUALITIES, MIMI SCHIPPERS

“What if having more than one long-term partner was available to wives as well as husbands, and tolerated or even expected across and within all races and classes?”

2 LEARNING POWER

The Myth of Education and Empowerment

AGAINST SCHOOL, JOHN TAYLOR GATTO

“School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children.”

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“I JUST WANNA BE AVERAGE,” MIKE ROSE

“I was placed in the vocational track, a euphemism for the bottom level. Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant.”

FROM SOCIAL CLASS AND THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM OF WORK, JEAN ANYON

“Public schools in complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes.”

CHOOSING A SCHOOL FOR MY DAUGHTER IN A SEGREGATED CITY, NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES

“Legally and culturally, we’ve come to accept segregation once again. Today, across the country, black children are more segregated than they have been at any point in nearly half a century.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF EDUCATION

AND EMPOWERMENT

EDUCATION: ATTENTIONAL DISARRAY, SHERRY TURKLE

“Other generations passed notes, doodled, or zoned out. [Oliver’s] generation can send texts and go to Facebook. He calls his generation ‘lucky’: ‘We have the awesome new power to erase boredom.’”

BLURRED LINES, TAKE TWO, PEGGY ORENSTEIN

“A paramedic who responded to some UC Berkeley calls . . . told a reporter that he had personally stopped a group of these top-tier college boys as they dragged an

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unconscious girl out of a party. . . . ‘Who knows what their intentions were?’ the paramedic mused.”

CITY OF BROKEN DREAMS, SARA GOLDRICK-RAB

“‘Money has a lot to do with stress. . . . People obviously start thinking, should I just stop going to school? This is a lot of money I’m paying for classes, I shouldn’t be here.’”

3 THE WILD WIRED WEST

Myths of Progress on the Tech Frontier

OUR FUTURE SELVES, ERIC SCHMIDT AND JARED COHEN

“Soon everyone on Earth will be connected. With five billion more people set to join the virtual world, the boom in digital connectivity will bring gains in productivity, health, education, quality of life and myriad other avenues in the physical world.”

HAS THE SMARTPHONE DESTROYED A GENERATION?, JEAN M. TWENGE

“There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives — and making them seriously unhappy.”

LET’S GET LOST, KENNETH GOLDSMITH

“I think it’s time to drop the simplistic guilt about wasting time on the Internet and instead begin to explore — and perhaps even celebrate — the complex possibilities that lay before us.”

ZOË AND THE TROLLS, NOREEN MALONE

“Gamergaters had not only created a whole new set of

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celebrities, like [Milo] Yiannopoulos and [Mike] Cernovich; it had solidified their methods . . . and their grudges had calcified into a worldview.”

TWITTER AND WHITE SUPREMACY, A LOVE STORY, JESSIE DANIELS

“On Twitter, Trump and white supremacists are in a racists-loving-each-other-feedback-loop through retweets while they simultaneously use the platform to bully, harass, and threaten black women, Jews, and anyone else who opposes them.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF WIRED

CULTURE

HOW WE SOLD OUR SOULS — AND MORE — TO THE INTERNET GIANTS, BRUCE SCHNEIER

“It’s the location of your phone, who you’re talking to and what you’re saying, what you’re searching and writing. . . . Corporations gather, store, and analyze this data, often without our consent. . . . We may not like to admit it, but we are under mass surveillance.”

YOU WILL LOSE YOUR JOB TO A ROBOT — AND SOONER THAN YOU THINK, KEVIN DRUM

“No matter what job you name, robots will be able to do it. They will manufacture themselves, program themselves, and manage themselves. If you don’t appreciate this, then you don’t appreciate what’s barreling toward us.”

BIG DATA, GOOGLE, AND THE END OF FREE WILL, YUVAL

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NOAH HARARI

“Proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data . . . and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data- processing system — and then merge into it.”

4 MONEY AND SUCCESS

The Myth of Individual Opportunity

CLASS IN AMERICA, GREGORY MANTSIOS

“From cradle to grave, class position has a significant impact on our well-being.”

SERVING IN FLORIDA, BARBARA EHRENREICH

“I had gone into this venture in the spirit of science, to test a mathematical proposition, but somewhere along the line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, it became a test of myself, and clearly I have failed.”

FROM A TANGLE OF PATHOLOGY TO A RACE-FAIR AMERICA, ALAN AJA, DANIEL BUSTILLO, WILLIAM DARITY JR., AND DARRICK HAMILTON

“What explains the marked and persistent racial gaps in employment and wealth? Is discrimination genuinely of only marginal importance in America today?”

FROM HOW THE OTHER HALF BANKS, MEHRSA BARADARAN

“Approximately 70 million Americans do not have a bank account or access to traditional financial services. That is more people than live in California, New York, and

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Maryland combined.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF INDIVIDUAL

OPPORTUNITY

FRAMING CLASS, VICARIOUS LIVING, AND CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION, DIANA KENDALL

“The poor do not fare well on television entertainment shows, where writers typically represent them with one- dimensional, bedraggled characters standing on a street corner holding cardboard signs that read ‘Need money for food.’”

FROM RESET: MY FIGHT FOR INCLUSION AND LASTING CHANGE, ELLEN K. PAO

“So many super-rich people I encountered in the corridors of power believed that the rules didn’t, or shouldn’t, apply to them. Any of the rules.”

THANK GOD IT’S MONDAY, KATE ARONOFF

“A few trends surface: a near-total collapse of work-life balance, marathon working days, unclear job descriptions, a cult-like enforcement of the company’s mission, and a senior management that’s as demanding and raucous as it is disorganized.”

WHY WE SHOULD GIVE FREE MONEY TO EVERYONE, RUTGER BREGMAN

“It is now within our means to take the next step in the history of progress: to give each and every person the security of a basic income.”

5 TRUE WOMEN AND REAL MEN

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Myths of Gender

GIRL, JAMAICA KINCAID

“Try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.”

HOW TO DO GENDER, LISA WADE AND MYRA MARX FERREE

“Somewhere between reaching out to learn the rules [and] learning . . . what rules were ‘meant to be broken,’ we manage to develop a way of doing gender that works for us.”

GUYS’ CLUB: NO FAGGOTS, BITCHES, OR PUSSIES ALLOWED, CARLOS ANDRÉS GÓMEZ

“I want more than this narrow slice of humanity I’ve been given permission to taste. . . . I’m tired of needing to throw hurtful words like ‘faggot’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘pussy’ around to prove that I’m a man.”

SISTERHOOD IS COMPLICATED, RUTH PADAWER

“Where . . . should Wellesley draw a line, if a line should even be drawn? At trans men? At transmasculine students? What about students who are simply questioning their gender?”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF GENDER

FROM THE GENDER KNOT: “PATRIARCHY,” ALLAN G. JOHNSON

“We cannot avoid participating in patriarchy. It was handed to us the moment we come into the world. But we can choose how to participate in it.”

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“TWO WAYS A WOMAN CAN GET HURT”: ADVERTISING AND VIOLENCE, JEAN KILBOURNE

“Ads don’t directly cause violence, of course. But the violent images contribute to the state of terror . . . a climate in which there is widespread and increasing violence.”

THE LONGEST WAR, REBECCA SOLNIT

“Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

FROM RUSH LIMBAUGH TO DONALD TRUMP: CONSERVATIVE TALK RADIO AND THE DEFIANT REASSERTION OF WHITE MALE AUTHORITY, JACKSON KATZ

“Conservative talk radio, like Trumpism, champions the reassertion of an idealized, throwback White masculinity as the solution to America’s myriad problems at home and abroad.”

6 CREATED EQUAL

Myths of Race

THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS, TA-NEHISI COATES

“An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

THEORIES AND CONSTRUCTS OF RACE, LINDA HOLTZMAN AND LEON SHARPE

“While race itself is fiction, the consequences of racism

29

are a historical and contemporary fact of American life.”

GENTRIFICATION, SHERMAN ALEXIE

“I waved to them but they didn’t wave back. I pretended they hadn’t noticed me and waved again. They stared at me. They knew what I had done.”

NOBODY, MARC LAMONT HILL

“The stories of Ferguson, Baltimore, Flint, and countless other sites of gross injustice . . . spotlight the nagging presence of the exploited, the erased, the vulnerable, the dehumanized — those who are imagined, treated, and made to feel like Nobody.”

VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF RACE

FROM MUSLIM GIRL, AMANI AL-KHATAHTBEH

“I was suddenly confronted by my own suffocating vulnerability: the intense self-realization that, among the three of us, I was the only one wearing a headscarf — the only one ‘visibly’ Muslim.”

PASSPORT TO THE NEW WEST, JOSÉ ORDUÑA

“In this border region, the horizon between natural violence and state violence has been collapsed. The arid climate, the flash floods, the diamondbacks, the mountain impasses, the distance, and the heat of the sun have all been weaponized. . . . This is murder without a murderer.”

HOW IMMIGRANTS BECOME “OTHER,” MARCELO M. SUÁREZ-OROZCO AND CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO

“Unauthorized immigrants live in a parallel universe.

30

Their lives are shaped by forces and habits that are unimaginable to many American citizens.”

INDEX OF AUTHORS AND TITLES

31

THINKING CRITICALLY, CHALLENGING CULTURAL MYTHS

BECOMING A COLLEGE STUDENT Beginning college can be a disconcerting experience. It may be

the first time you’ve lived away from home and had to deal with

the stresses and pleasures of independence. There’s increased

academic competition, increased temptation, and a whole new

set of peer pressures. In the dorms you may find yourself

among people whose backgrounds make them seem foreign

and unapproachable. If you commute, you may be struggling

against a feeling of isolation that you’ve never faced before. And

then there are increased expectations. For an introductory

history class you may read as many books as you covered in a

year of high school coursework. In anthropology, you might be

asked to conduct ethnographic research — when you’ve barely

heard of an ethnography before, much less written one. In

English, you may tackle more formal analytic writing in a single

semester than you’ve ever done in your life.

College typically imposes fewer rules than high school, but

also gives you less guidance and makes greater demands —

demands that affect the quality as well as the quantity of your

work. By your first midterm exam, you may suspect that your

previous academic experience is irrelevant, that nothing you’ve

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done in school has prepared you to think, read, or write in the

ways your professors expect. Your sociology instructor says she

doesn’t care whether you can remember all the examples in the

textbook as long as you can apply the theoretical concepts to

real situations. In your composition class, the perfect five-

paragraph essay you turn in for your first assignment is

dismissed as “superficial, mechanical, and dull.” Meanwhile,

the lecturer in your political science or psychology course is

rejecting ideas about country, religion, family, and self that

have always been a part of your deepest beliefs. How can you

cope with these new expectations and challenges?

There is no simple solution, no infallible five-step method

that works for everyone. As you meet the personal challenges of

college, you’ll grow as a human being. You’ll begin to look

critically at your old habits, beliefs, and values, to see them in

relation to the new world you’re entering. You may have to re-

examine your relationships to family, friends, neighborhood,

and heritage. You’ll have to sort out your strengths from your

weaknesses and make tough choices about who you are and

who you want to become. Your academic work demands the

same process of serious self-examination. To excel in college

work you need to grow intellectually — to become a critical

thinker.

WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING? What do instructors mean when they tell you to think critically?

Most would say that it involves asking questions rather than

33

memorizing information. Instead of simply collecting the

“facts,” a critical thinker probes them, looking for underlying

assumptions and ideas. Instead of focusing on dates and events

in history or symptoms in psychology, she probes for motives,

causes — an explanation of how these things came to be. A

critical thinker cultivates the ability to imagine and value points

of view different from her own — then strengthens, refines,

enlarges, or reshapes her ideas in light of those other

perspectives. She is at once open and skeptical: receptive to

new ideas yet careful to test them against previous experience

and knowledge. In short, a critical thinker is an active learner,

someone with the ability to shape, not merely absorb,

knowledge.

All this is difficult to put into practice, because it requires

getting outside your own skin and seeing the world from

multiple perspectives. To see why critical thinking doesn’t come

naturally, take another look at the cover of this book. Many

would scan the title, Rereading America, take in the surface

meaning — to reconsider America — and go on to page one.

There isn’t much to question here; it just “makes sense.” But

what happens with the student who brings a different

perspective? For example, a student from El Salvador might

justly complain that the title reflects an ethnocentric view of

what it means to be an American. After all, since America

encompasses all the countries of North, South, and Central

America, he lived in “America” long before arriving in the

United States. When this student reads the title, then, he

34

actually does reread it; he reads it once in the “commonsense”

way but also from the perspective of someone who has lived in

a country dominated by U.S. intervention and interests. This

double vision or double perspective frees him to look beyond

the “obvious” meaning of the book and to question its

assumptions.

Of course you don’t have to be bicultural to become a

proficient critical thinker. You can develop a genuine sensitivity

to alternative perspectives even if you’ve never lived outside

your hometown. But to do so you need to recognize that there

are no “obvious meanings.” The automatic equation that the

native-born student makes between “America” and the United

States seems to make sense only because our culture has

traditionally endorsed the idea that the United States is America

and, by implication, that other countries in this hemisphere are

somehow inferior — not the genuine article. We tend to accept

this equation and its unfortunate implications because we are

products of our culture.

THE POWER OF CULTURAL MYTHS Culture shapes the way we think; it tells us what “makes sense.”

It holds people together by providing us with a shared set of

customs, values, ideas, and beliefs, as well as a common

language. We live enmeshed in this cultural web: it influences

the way we relate to others, the way we look, our tastes, our

35

habits; it enters our dreams and desires. But as culture binds us

together it also selectively blinds us. As we grow up, we accept

ways of looking at the world, ways of thinking and being that

might best be characterized as cultural frames of reference or

cultural myths. These myths help us understand our place in

the world — our place as prescribed by our culture. They define

our relationships to friends and lovers, to the past and future, to

nature, to power, and to nation. Becoming a critical thinker

means learning how to look beyond these cultural myths and

the assumptions embedded in them.

You may associate the word “myth” primarily with the myths

of the ancient Greeks. The legends of gods and heroes like

Athena, Zeus, and Oedipus embodied the central ideals and

values of Greek civilization — notions like civic responsibility,

the primacy of male authority, and humility before the gods.

The stories were “true” not in a literal sense but as reflections of

important cultural beliefs. These myths assured the Greeks of

the nobility of their origins; they provided models for the roles

that Greeks would play in their public and private lives; they

justified inequities in Greek society; they helped the Greeks

understand human life and destiny in terms that “made sense”

within the framework of that culture.

Our cultural myths do much the same. Take, for example, the

American dream of success. Since the first European colonists

came to the “New World” some four centuries ago, America has

been synonymous with the idea of individual opportunity. For

36

generations, immigrants have been lured across the ocean to

make their fortunes in a land where the streets were said to be

paved with gold. Of course we don’t always agree on what

success means or how it should be measured. Some calculate

the meaning of success in terms of six-figure salaries or the

acreage of their country estates. Others discover success in the

attainment of a dream — whether it’s graduating from college,

achieving excellence on the playing field, or winning new rights

and opportunities for less fortunate fellow citizens. For some

Americans, the dream of success is the very foundation of

everything that’s right about life in the United States. For

others, the American dream is a cultural mirage that keeps

workers happy in low-paying jobs while their bosses pocket the

profits of an unfair system. But whether you embrace or reject

the dream of success, you can’t escape its influence. As

Americans, we are steeped in a culture that prizes individual

achievement; growing up in the United States, we are told again

and again by parents, teachers, advertisers, Hollywood writers,

politicians, and opinion makers that we, too, can achieve our

dream — that we, too, can “Just Do It” if we try. You might

aspire to become an Internet tycoon, or you might rebel and opt

for a simple life, but you can’t ignore the impact of the myth.

Cultural myths gain such enormous power over us by

insinuating themselves into our thinking before we’re aware of

them. Most are learned at a deep, even unconscious level.

Gender roles are a good example. As children we get gender

role models from our families, our schools, our churches, and

37

other important institutions. We see them acted out in the

relationships between family members or portrayed on

television, in the movies, or in song lyrics. Before long, the

culturally dominant roles we see for women and men appear to

us as “self-evident”: for many Americans it still seems “natural”

for a man to be strong, competitive, and heterosexual, just as it

may seem “unnatural” for a man to shun competitive activity or

to be romantically attracted to other men. Our most dominant

cultural myths shape the way we perceive the world and blind

us to alternative ways of seeing and being. When something

violates the expectations that such myths create, it may even be

called unnatural, immoral, or perverse.

CULTURAL MYTHS AS OBSTACLES TO CRITICAL THINKING Cultural myths can have more subtle effects as well. In

academic work they can reduce the complexity of our reading

and thinking. A few years ago, for example, a professor at Los

Angeles City College noted that he and his students couldn’t

agree in their interpretations of the following poem by

Theodore Roethke:

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

38

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

The instructor read this poem as a clear expression of a child’s

love for his blue-collar father, a rough-and-tumble man who

had worked hard all his life (“a palm caked hard by dirt”), who

was not above taking a drink of whiskey to ease his mind, but

who also found the time to “waltz” his son off to bed. The

students didn’t see this at all. They saw the poem as a story

about an abusive father and heavy drinker. They seemed

unwilling to look beyond the father’s roughness and the

whiskey on his breath, equating these with drunken violence.

Although the poem does suggest an element of fear mingled

with the boy’s excitement (“I hung on like death”), the class

39

ignored its complexity — the mixture of fear, love, and

boisterous fun that colors the son’s memory of his father. It’s

possible that some students might overlook the positive traits in

the father in this poem because they have suffered child abuse

themselves. But this couldn’t be true for all the students in the

class. The difference between these interpretations lies,

instead, in the influence of cultural myths. After all, in a culture

now dominated by images of the family that emphasize

“positive” parenting, middle-class values, and sensitive fathers,

it’s no wonder that students refused to see this father

sympathetically. Our culture simply doesn’t associate good,

loving families with drinking or with even the suggestion of

physical roughness.

Years of acculturation — the process of internalizing cultural

values — leave us with a set of rigid categories for “good” and

“bad” parents, narrow conceptions of how parents should look,

talk, and behave toward their children. These cultural

categories work like mental pigeonholes: they help us sort out

and evaluate our experiences rapidly, almost before we’re

consciously aware of them. They give us a helpful shorthand for

interpreting the world; after all, we can’t stop to ponder every

new situation we meet as if it were a puzzle or a philosophical

problem. But while cultural categories help us make practical

decisions in everyday life, they also impose their inherent

rigidity on our thinking and thus limit our ability to understand

the complexity of our experience. They reduce the world to

dichotomies — simplified either/or choices: either women or

40

men, either heterosexuals or homosexuals, either nature or

culture, either animal or human, either “alien” or American,

either them or us.

Rigid cultural beliefs can present serious obstacles to success

for first-year college students. In a psychology class, for

example, students’ cultural myths may so color their thinking

that they find it nearly impossible to comprehend Freud’s ideas

about infant sexuality. Ingrained assumptions about childhood

innocence and sexual guilt may make it impossible for them to

see children as sexual beings — a concept absolutely basic to an

understanding of the history of psychoanalytic theory. Yet

college-level critical inquiry thrives on exactly this kind of

revision of common sense: academics prize the unusual, the

subtle, the ambiguous, the complex — and expect students to

appreciate them as well. Good critical thinkers in all academic

disciplines welcome the opportunity to challenge conventional

ways of seeing the world; they seem to take delight in

questioning everything that appears clear and self-evident.

QUESTIONING: THE BASIS OF CRITICAL THINKING By questioning the myths that dominate our culture, we can

begin to resist the limits they impose on our vision. In fact, they

invite such questioning. Often our personal experience fails to

fit the images the myths project: a young woman’s ambition to

be a test pilot may clash with the ideal of femininity our culture

41

promotes; a Cambodian immigrant who has suffered from

racism in the United States may question our professed

commitment to equality; a student in the vocational track may

not see education as the road to success that we assume it is;

and few of our families these days fit the mythic model of

husband, wife, two kids, a dog, and a house in the suburbs.

Moreover, because cultural myths serve such large and

varied needs, they’re not always coherent or consistent.

Powerful contradictory myths coexist in our society and our

own minds. For example, while the myth of “the melting pot”

celebrates equality, the myth of individual success pushes us to

strive for inequality — to “get ahead” of everyone else. Likewise,

our attitudes toward education are deeply paradoxical: on one

level, Americans tend to see schooling as a valuable experience

that unites us in a common culture and helps us bring out the

best in ourselves; yet at the same time, we suspect that formal

classroom instruction stifles creativity and chokes off natural

intelligence and enthusiasm. These contradictions infuse our

history, literature, and popular culture; they’re so much a part

of our thinking that we tend to take them for granted, unaware

of their inconsistencies.

Learning to recognize contradictions lies at the very heart of

critical thinking, for intellectual conflict inevitably generates

questions. Can both (or all) perspectives be true? What evidence

do I have for the validity of each? Is there some way to reconcile

them? Are there still other alternatives? Questions like these

42

represent the beginning of serious academic analysis. They

stimulate the reflection, discussion, and research that are the

essence of good scholarship. Thus whether we find

contradictions between myth and lived experience, or between

opposing myths, the wealth of powerful, conflicting material

generated by our cultural mythology offers a particularly rich

context for critical inquiry.

THE STRUCTURE OF REREADING AMERICA We’ve designed this book to help you develop the habits of mind

you’ll need to become a critical thinker — someone who

recognizes the way that cultural myths shape thinking and can

move beyond them to evaluate issues from multiple

perspectives. Each of the book’s six chapters addresses one of

the dominant myths of American culture. We begin with the

myth that’s literally closest to home — the myth of the model

family. In Chapter One, “Harmony at Home,” we begin with

readings that show what makes the mythical nuclear family so

appealing and yet so elusive. Subsequent readings enrich our

understanding of family by exploring the intersections of family

life with race, class, and gender — key themes that resonate

throughout Rereading America. These selections ask

fascinating questions: How can a family best help a transgender

daughter navigate her adolescence? When should child

protection agencies or courts intervene in a family’s affairs, and

are their life-altering decisions swayed by racial bias? Is

43

choosing a partner of a different ethnicity a political as well as a

romantic act? And what about setting monogamy aside and

choosing two or more partners? Chapter Two, “Learning

Power,” gives you the chance to reflect on how the “hidden

curriculum” of schooling has shaped your own attitudes toward

learning. You’ll also encounter readings here that address

problems currently associated with higher education, including

campus sexual assault and student debt. We begin our

exploration of American cultural myths by focusing on home

and education because most students find it easy to make

personal connections with these topics and because they both

involve institutions — families and schools — that are

surrounded by a rich legacy of cultural stories and myths. These

two introductory chapters are followed by consideration of one

of the most durable American myths — our national belief in

progress. In Chapter Three, “The Wild Wired West: Myths of

Progress on the Tech Frontier,” you’ll have the chance to

explore how technologies like the Internet and social media are

reshaping American lives. You’ll also be invited to consider how

technologies like data mining and artificial intelligence may

threaten our privacy, our ability to make a living, and even our

sense of personal agency.

The second portion of the book focuses on three cultural

myths that offer greater intellectual and emotional challenges

because they touch on highly charged social issues. Chapter

Four introduces what is perhaps the most famous of all

American myths, the American Dream. “Money and Success”

44

addresses the idea of unlimited personal opportunity that

brought millions of immigrants to our shores and set the story

of America in motion. It invites you to weigh some of the

human costs of the dream and to reconsider your own

definition of a successful life. The next chapter, “True Women

and Real Men,” considers the socially constructed categories of

gender — the traditional roles that enforce differences between

women and men. This chapter explores the perspectives of

Americans who defy conventional gender boundaries. Chapter

Six, “Created Equal,” critically examines the meaning of race

and the myth of racial and ethnic superiority. It looks at the

historical and contemporary consequences of racism, offers

personal perspectives on racial and religious discrimination,

and explores antiracist activism. Each of these two chapters

questions how our culture divides and defines our world, how it

artificially channels our experience into oppositions like black

and white, male and female, straight and gay.

THE SELECTIONS Our identities — who we are and how we relate to others — are

deeply entangled with the cultural values we have internalized

since infancy. Cultural myths become so closely identified with

our personal beliefs that rereading them actually means

rereading ourselves, rethinking the way we see the world.

Questioning long-held assumptions can be an exhilarating

experience, but it can be distressing too. Thus you may find

certain selections in Rereading America difficult, controversial,

45

or even downright offensive. They are meant to challenge you

and to provoke classroom debate. But as you discuss the ideas

you encounter in this book, remind yourself that your

classmates may bring with them very different, and equally

profound, beliefs. Keep an open mind, listen carefully, and

treat other perspectives with the same respect you’d expect

other people to show for your own. It’s by encountering new

ideas and engaging with others in open dialogue that we learn

to grow.

Because Rereading America explores cultural myths that

shape our thinking, it doesn’t focus on the kind of well-defined

public issues you might expect to find in a traditional

composition anthology. You won’t be reading arguments for

and against affirmative action, bilingual education, or the death

penalty here. We’ve deliberately avoided the traditional pro-

and-con approach because we want you to aim deeper than

that; we want you to focus on the subtle cultural beliefs that

underlie, and frequently determine, the debates that are waged

on public issues. We’ve also steered clear of the “issues

approach” because we feel it reinforces simplistic either/or

thinking. Polarizing American culture into a series of debates

doesn’t encourage you to examine your own beliefs or explore

how they’ve been shaped by the cultures you’re part of. To

begin to appreciate the influence of your own cultural myths,

you need new perspectives: you need to stand outside the

ideological machinery that makes American culture run to

begin to appreciate its power. That’s why we’ve included many

46

strongly dissenting views: there are works by community

activists, gay-rights activists, socialists, libertarians, and more.

You may find that their views confirm your own experience of

what it means to be an American, or you may find that you

bitterly disagree with them. We only hope that you will use the

materials here to gain some insight into the values and beliefs

that shape our thinking and our national identity. This book is

meant to complicate the mental categories that our cultural

myths have established for us. Our intention is not to present a

new “truth” to replace the old but to expand the range of ideas

you bring to all your reading and writing in college. We believe

that learning to see and value other perspectives will enable you

to think more critically — to question, for yourself, the truth of

any statement.

You may also note that several selections in Rereading

America challenge the way you think writing is supposed to

look or sound. You won’t find any “classic” essays in this book,

the finely crafted reflective essays on general topics that are

often held up as models of “good writing.” It’s not that we reject

this type of essay in principle. It’s just that this kind of writing

has lost its appeal for many authors who stand outside the

dominant culture, and it is being supplanted today by new

forms of expression evolving in academia, in the business

world, and on the Internet.

Our selections, instead, come from a wide variety of sources:

professional books and journals from many disciplines, popular

47

magazines, college textbooks, personal memoirs, literary

works, nonfiction best sellers, and online publications. We’ve

included this variety partly for the very practical reason that

you’re likely to encounter texts like these in your college

coursework. But we also see textual diversity, like ethnic and

political diversity, as a way to multiply perspectives and

stimulate critical analysis. For example, an academic article like

Jean Anyon’s study of social class and school curriculum might

give you a new way of understanding Mike Rose’s personal

narrative about his classroom experiences. On the other hand,

you may find that some of the teachers Rose encounters don’t

neatly fit Anyon’s theoretical model. Do such discrepancies

mean that Anyon’s argument is invalid? That her analysis needs

to be modified to account for these teachers? That the teachers

are simply exceptions to the rule? You’ll probably want to

consider your own classroom experience as you wrestle with

such questions. Throughout the book, we’ve chosen readings

that “talk to each other” in this way and that draw on the

cultural knowledge you bring with you. These readings invite

you to join the conversation; we hope they raise difficult

questions, prompt lively discussion, and stimulate critical

inquiry.

THE POWER OF DIALOGUE Good thinking, like good writing and good reading, is an

intensely social activity. Thinking, reading, and writing are all

forms of relationship — when you read, you enter into dialogue

48

with an author about the subject at hand; when you write, you

address an imaginary reader, testing your ideas against

probable responses, reservations, and arguments. Thus you

can’t become an accomplished writer simply by declaring your

right to speak or by criticizing as an act of principle: real

authority comes when you enter into the discipline of an active

exchange of opinions and interpretations. Critical thinking,

then, is always a matter of dialogue and debate — discovering

relationships between apparently unrelated ideas, finding

parallels between your own experiences and the ideas you read

about, exploring points of agreement and conflict between

yourself and other people.

We’ve designed the readings and questions in this text to

encourage you to make just these kinds of connections. You’ll

notice, for example, that we often ask you to divide into small

groups to discuss readings, and we frequently suggest that you

take part in projects that require you to collaborate with your

classmates. We’re convinced that the only way you can learn

critical reading, thinking, and writing is by actively engaging

others in an intellectual exchange. So we’ve built into the text

many opportunities for listening, discussion, and debate.

The questions that follow each selection should guide you in

critical thinking. Like the readings, they’re intended to get you

started, not to set limits; we strongly recommend that you also

devise your own questions and pursue them either individually

or in study groups. We’ve divided our questions into three

49

categories. Here’s what to expect from each:

Those labeled “Engaging the Text” focus on the individual selection they follow. They’re designed to highlight important issues in the reading, to help you begin questioning and evaluating what you’ve read, and sometimes to remind you to consider the author’s choices of language, evidence, structure, and style. Questions in this category are labeled “Thinking Rhetorically,” and we’ve included more of them in this edition.

The questions labeled “Exploring Connections” will lead you from the selection you’ve just finished to one or more other readings in this book. When you think critically about these connecting questions, though, you’ll see some real collisions of ideas and perspectives, not just polite and predictable “differences of opinion.”

The final questions for each reading, “Extending the Critical Context,” invite you to extend your thinking beyond the book — to your family, your community, your college, the media, the Internet, or the more traditional research environment of the library. The emphasis here is on creating new knowledge by applying ideas from this book to the world around you and by testing these ideas in your world.

ACTIVE READING You’ve undoubtedly read many textbooks, but it’s unlikely that

you’ve had to deal with the kind of analytic, argumentative, and

50

scholarly writing you’ll find in college and in Rereading

America. These different writing styles require a different

approach to reading as well. In high school you probably read

to “take in” information, often for the sole purpose of

reproducing it later on a test. In college you’ll also be expected

to recognize larger issues, such as the author’s theoretical slant,

her goals and methods, her assumptions, and her relationship

to other writers and researchers. These expectations can be

especially difficult in the first two years of college, when you

take introductory courses that survey large, complex fields of

knowledge. With all these demands on your attention, you’ll

need to read actively to keep your bearings. Think of active

reading as a conversation between you and the text: instead of

listening passively as the writer talks, respond to what she says

with questions and comments of your own. Here are some

specific techniques you can practice to become a more active

reader.

Prereading and Prewriting It’s best with most college reading to “preread” the text. In

prereading, you briefly look over whatever information you

have on the author and the selection itself. Reading chapter

introductions and headnotes like those provided in this book

can save you time and effort by giving you information about

the author’s background and concerns, the subject or thesis of

the selection, and its place in the chapter as a whole. Also take a

look at the title and at any headings or subheadings in the piece.

These will give you further clues about an article’s general

51

scope and organization. Next, quickly skim the entire selection,

paying a bit more attention to the first few paragraphs and the

conclusion. Now you should have a pretty good sense of the

author’s position — what she’s trying to say in this piece of

writing.

At this point you may do one of several things before you

settle down to in-depth reading. You may want to jot down in a

few lines what you think the author is doing. Or you may want

to make a list of questions you can ask about this topic based on

your prereading. Or you may want to freewrite a page or so on

the subject. Informally writing out your own ideas will prepare

you for more in-depth reading by recalling what you already

know about the topic.

We emphasize writing about what you’ve read because

reading and writing are complementary activities: being an avid

reader will help you as a writer by familiarizing you with a wide

range of ideas and styles to draw on; likewise, writing about

what you’ve read will give you a deeper understanding of your

reading. In fact, the more actively you “process” or reshape

what you’ve read, the better you’ll comprehend and remember

it. So you’ll learn more effectively by marking a text as you read

than by simply reading; taking notes as you read is even more

effective than marking, and writing about the material for your

own purposes (putting it in your own words and connecting it

with what you already know) is better still.

52

Marking the Text and Taking Notes After prereading and prewriting, you’re ready to begin critical

reading in earnest. As you read, be sure to highlight ideas and

phrases that strike you as especially significant — those that

seem to capture the gist of a particular paragraph or section, or

those that relate directly to the author’s purpose or argument.

While prereading can help you identify central ideas, you may

find that you need to reread difficult sections or flip back and

skim an earlier passage if you feel yourself getting lost. Many

students think of themselves as poor readers if they can’t whip

through an article at high speed without pausing. However, the

best readers read recursively — that is, they shuttle back and

forth, browsing, skimming, and rereading as necessary,

depending on their interest, their familiarity with the subject,

and the difficulty of the material. This shuttling actually

parallels what goes on in your mind when you read actively, as

you alternately recall prior knowledge or experience and

predict or look for clues about where the writer is going next.

Keep a record of your mental shuttling by writing comments

in the margins as you read. It’s often useful to gloss the contents

of each paragraph or section, to summarize it in a word or two

written alongside the text. This note will serve as a reminder or

key to the section when you return to it for further thinking,

discussion, or writing. You may also want to note passages that

puzzled you. Or you may want to write down personal reactions

or questions stimulated by the reading. Take time to ponder

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why you felt confused or annoyed or affirmed by a particular

passage. Let yourself wonder “out loud” in the margins as you

read.

The following section illustrates one student’s notes on a

passage from Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average” (p. 123). In

this example, you can see that the reader puts glosses or

summary comments to the left of the passage and questions or

personal responses to the right. You should experiment and

create your own system of note taking, one that works best for

the way you read. Just remember that your main goals in taking

notes are to help you understand the author’s overall position,

to deepen and refine your responses to the selection, and to

create a permanent record of those responses.

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Keeping a Reading Journal You may also want (or be required) to keep a reading journal in

response to the selections you cover in Rereading America. In

such a journal you’d keep all the freewriting that you do either

before or after reading. Some students find it helpful to keep a

double-entry journal, writing initial responses on the left side of

the page and adding later reflections and reconsiderations on

the right. You may want to use your journal as a place to explore

personal reactions to your reading. For example, you might

make notes about ideas or lines in the reading that surprise you.

Or you might want to note how the selection connects to your

own experiences or why you found it particularly interesting or

dull. You can do this by writing out imaginary dialogues —

between two writers who address the same subject, between

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yourself and the writer of the selection, or between two parts of

yourself. You can use the journal as a place to rewrite passages

from a poem or an essay in your own voice and from your own

point of view. You can write letters to an author you particularly

like or dislike or to a character in a story or poem. You might

even draw a cartoon that comments on one of the reading

selections.

Many students don’t write as well as they could because

they’re afraid to take risks. They may have been repeatedly

penalized for breaking “rules” of grammar or essay form; their

main concern becomes avoiding trouble rather than exploring

ideas or experimenting with style. But without risk and

experimentation, there’s little possibility of growth. One of the

benefits of journal writing is that it gives you a place to

experiment with ideas, free from worries about “correctness.”

Here are two examples of student journal entries, in response to

Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average” (we reprint the entries

as they were written):

Entry 1: Personal Response to Rose

It’s interesting that Rose describes how school can label

you and stifle your dreams and also how it can empower

you and open doors in your life. When he goes to Our Lady,

they put him in a crappy Voc-Ed. track by mistake —

incredible because this could mess up his entire life. I

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knew lots of kids who were forced into ESL back in middle

school just because they spoke Spanish. What a waste! Still,

when Rose meets Mr. MacFarland, his whole life changes

cause the guy makes learning exciting and he knows how to

hook the kids on ideas. Mr. Moore was my Mr. Mac. He

used to push us to read stuff way beyond grade level, things

like Fight Club and Malcolm X. He was also like

MacFarland because he made everything personal. We

used to spend weeks doing research on big issues like

police brutality — and then we’d hold day-long debates

that’d get really heated. But then there were a-hole teachers

too — the ones who didn’t care and would just sit there and

read the paper while we did homework drills in our books.

We had some nut-jobs like Brother Dill, but nobody’d dare

hit us or call us names. All that’s changed since Rose was in

school — or maybe it’s changed at least in public school.

Maybe the nuns still can get away with it?

Entry 2: Dialogue Between Rose and Ken Harvey

Rose: I never really understood why you said that you just

wanted to be average. It always seemed to me that you

were just buying into the bull that the Voc-Ed. teachers

were handing out about us. Why would you give up

when you were obviously smarter than most of them?

Harvey: You wouldn’t understand ’cause you were one of

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MacFarland’s favorites. You were a hipster-nerd and that

was the ID that got you through school. Mine was

different. I was a jock and a rebel—and both seemed

better than being a brain. We thought you guys were just

kissing up—and that you read books because you

couldn’t make it on the field.

Rose: But you just threw your future away. We all knew you

were a leader and that you could’ve done anything if you

tried.

Harvey: Yeah, but why try? I wasn’t interested in

postponing my life the way you were. I had girlfriends

and people thought I was cool. My parents didn’t expect

much out of me except sports. So why not just do the

minimum in school and enjoy my life? Reading a lot of

weird books on religion and philosophy didn’t make me

particularly happy. Maybe we just wanted different

things. Have you thought about that?

Rose: I just figured you were protecting yourself against

being classified as a Voc-Ed. Protecting yourself against

being seen as working class.

Harvey: Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was happy being who I

was and I didn’t need school to change me the way you

did. School just isn’t for everybody.

You’ll notice that in the first entry the writer uses Rose’s

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memoir as a point of departure for her own reflections on

school and education. She also uses the journal as a place to

pose questions about Rose’s essay and about schooling in

general. In the second entry she explores how a shift in

perspective might challenge Rose’s conclusions about Ken

Harvey and his attitude toward education. Rose sees the damage

schooling can do, but he ultimately accepts the idea that

education can empower us. That’s why he assumes that Harvey

has given up on himself when he won’t try to be more than just

average. But what if Harvey’s choice isn’t just a matter of self-

protection? What if it’s a rational expression of who he is? Here,

the writer uses an imaginary dialogue to explore alternatives to

Rose’s own thinking about school as a means of self-

transformation.

WORKING WITH VISUAL IMAGES The myths we examine in Rereading America make their

presence felt not only in the world of print — essays, stories,

poems, memoirs — but in every aspect of our culture. Consider,

for example, the myth of “the American family.” If you want to

design a minivan, a restaurant, a cineplex, a park, a synagogue,

a personal computer, or a tax code, you had better have some

idea of what families are like and how they behave. Most

important, you need a good grasp of what Americans believe

about families, about the mythology of the American family.

The Visual Portfolio in each chapter, while maintaining our

focus on myths, also carries you beyond the medium of print

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and thus lets you practice your analytic skills in a different

arena.

Although we are all surrounded by visual stimuli, we don’t

always think critically about what we see. Perhaps we are

numbed by constant exposure to a barrage of images on TV, in

films, and in social media and other websites. In any case, here

are a few tips on how to get the most out of the images we have

collected for this book. Take the time to look at the images

carefully; first impressions are important, but many of the

photographs contain details that might not strike you

immediately. Once you have noted the immediate impact of an

image, try focusing on separate elements such as background,

foreground, facial expressions, and body language. Read any

text that appears in the photograph, even if it’s on a T-shirt or a

belt buckle. Remember that many photographs are carefully

constructed, no matter how “natural” they may look. In a photo

for a magazine advertisement, for example, everything is

meticulously chosen and arranged: certain actors or models are

cast for their roles; they wear makeup; their clothes are really

costumes; the location or setting of the ad is designed to

reinforce its message; lighting is artificial; and someone is

trying to sell you something.

Also be sure to consider the visual images contextually, not

in isolation. How does each resemble or differ from its

neighbors in the portfolio? How does it reinforce or challenge

cultural beliefs or stereotypes? Put another way, how can it be

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understood in the context of the myths examined in Rereading

America? Each portfolio is accompanied by a few questions to

help you begin this type of analysis. You can also build a

broader context for our visual images by collecting your own,

then working in small groups to create a portfolio or collage.

Finally, remember that both readings and visual images are

just starting points for discussion. You have access to a wealth

of other perspectives and ideas among your family, friends,

classmates; in your college library; in your personal experience;

and in your imagination. We urge you to consult them all as you

grapple with the perspectives you encounter in this text.

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CHAPTER 1 HARMONY AT HOME Myths of Family

Self-portrait with family in SUV, Michigan (2007)

FAST FACTS

1. Among adults younger than 35, roughly 61% live without a spouse or partner. In 2017 the median household income for partnered adults was $86,000, versus $61,000 for unpartnered adults.

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2. Nearly 33% of the U.S. adult population share a household with at least one “extra adult” (e.g., an adult child, a sibling, an elderly parent, or an unrelated housemate). This percentage, measured in 2017, is up from 14% in 1995.

3. Since the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide (Obergefell v. Hodges), the percentage of same-sex cohabiting couples who are married has risen from 38% to 61%. LGBTQ Americans who marry are twice as likely as the general public to cite legal rights and benefits as a very important reason to marry.

4. Ten percent of Americans today say they would oppose a close relative marrying someone of a different race or ethnicity — down from 32% in 2000. The percentage of nonblack Americans who would oppose a relative marrying a black person has dropped from 63% in 1990 to 14% today.

5. Among 41 countries studied by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, the United States is the only country that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents. Several countries offer a year or more of paid leave.

6. Nearly 450,000 American children live in foster care. Drug abuse by a parent is associated with roughly a third of the cases in which a child is removed from home.

7. Estimates of the number of Americans in polyamorous (multiple- partner) relationships vary widely — from 1.2 to 9.8 million people, according to Internet polyamory sites.

Data from (1), (2), (3), (4) Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

tank/2017/10/11/the-share-of-americans-living-without-a-partner-has-increased-

especially-among-young-adults/; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

tank/2018/01/31/more-adults-now-share-their-living-space-driven-in-part-by-parents-

living-with-their-adult-children/; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

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tank/2017/06/26/same-sex-marriage/; http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-

tank/2017/06/12/key-facts-about-race-and-marriage-50-years-after-loving-v-virginia/; (5)

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,

https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF2_1_Parental_leave_systems.pdf; (6) “Number of

Children in Foster Care Continues to Increase,” US Department of Health and Human

Services, Administration for Children & Families, November 30, 2017; (7) Elisabeth Sheff,

The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families (New York:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 3.

THE FAMILY MAY BE THE ORIGINAL CULTURAL INSTITUTION; people lived in families long before they invented the wheel, began farming, or founded cities. You might think that by now we would have clear and stable ideas about what defines a family, how families form and dissolve, what forms they can take, and how they can best raise their children, but such absolutely fundamental elements of family life have shifted dramatically through the centuries and continue to change today — perhaps faster than ever before. The most dramatic recent change in the United States is the groundswell of support for same-sex marriage: marriage equality, a concept almost unheard of thirty years ago, is now being claimed as a fundamental human right. Other changes are garnering fewer headlines but nonetheless are reshaping the values and behaviors we associate with family life. Both divorce and cohabitation have become more common and less stigmatized, and “singlehood” has gained traction as a perfectly normal alternative to marriage. An increasing number of adult Americans are now living in multigenerational families, whose larger households help them economize in tough times as well as

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provide for elderly members. Meanwhile, birth control, reproductive technologies, surrogacy, and genetic screening for heritable diseases are giving people more choices about whether, when, and how to have children.

Although experts agree that family and marriage are changing, there is little consensus about what these changes mean. Are we witnessing the collapse of family values, or a welcome evolution beyond restrictive and discriminatory models of family life? Central to this cultural debate is the traditional nuclear family — Dad, Mom, a couple of kids, maybe a dog, and a spacious suburban home. Millions of Americans aspire to this middle-class “model family,” while others see it as limiting, unattainable, or simply outdated. Whatever value you, your family, or your community may place on the nuclear family, it’s important to recognize that it has been around only a short time, especially when compared with the long history of the family itself.

In fact, what we call the “traditional” family, headed by a breadwinner-father and a housewife-mother, has existed for little more than two hundred years, and the suburbs came into being only in the 1950s. But the family as a social institution was legally recognized in Western culture at least as far back as the Code of Hammurabi, created in ancient Mesopotamia some four thousand years ago. To appreciate how profoundly concepts of family life have changed, consider the absolute power of the Mesopotamian father, the patriarch: the law allowed him to use

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any of his dependents, including his wife, as collateral for loans or even to sell family members outright to pay his debts.

Although patriarchal authority was less absolute in Puritan America, fathers remained the undisputed heads of families. Seventeenth-century Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire enacted laws condemning rebellious children to severe punishment and, in extreme cases, to death. In the early years of the American colonies, as in Western culture stretching back to Hammurabi’s time, unquestioned authority within the family served as both the model for and the basis of state authority. Just as family members owed complete obedience to the father, so all citizens owed unquestioned loyalty to the king and his legal representatives. In his influential volume Democracy in America (1835), French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville describes the relationship between the traditional European family and the old political order:

Among aristocratic nations, social institutions recognize, in truth, no one in the family but the father; children are received by society at his hands; society governs him, he governs them. Thus, the parent not only has a natural right, but acquires a political right to command them; he is the author and the support of his family; but he is also its constituted ruler.

By the mid-eighteenth century, however, new ideas about individual freedom and democracy were stirring the colonies. And by the time Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831,

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they had evidently worked a revolution in the family as well as in the nation’s political structure. He observes: “When the condition of society becomes democratic, and men adopt as their general principle that it is good and lawful to judge of all things for one’s self,… the power which the opinions of a father exercise over those of his sons diminishes, as well as his legal power.” To Tocqueville, this shift away from strict patriarchal rule signaled a change in the emotional climate of families: “as manners and laws become more democratic, the relation of father and son becomes more intimate and more affectionate; rules and authority are less talked of, confidence and tenderness are oftentimes increased, and it would seem that the natural bond is drawn closer.” In Tocqueville’s view, the American family heralded a new era in human relations. Freed from the rigid hierarchy of the past, parents and children could meet as near equals, joined by “filial love and fraternal affection.”

This vision of the democratic family — a harmonious association of parents and children united by love and trust — has mesmerized popular culture in the United States. From the nineteenth century to the present, popular novels, magazines, music, and advertising images have glorified the comforts of loving domesticity. For several decades we have absorbed our strongest impressions of the family from television. In the 1950s we watched the Andersons on Father Knows Best, the Stones on The Donna Reed Show, and the real-life Nelson family on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet — shows which portrayed the mythical American family as happy, healthy, and modestly

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affluent. Over the next three decades the model stretched to include single parents, second marriages, and interracial adoptions on My Three Sons, The Brady Bunch, and Diff ’rent Strokes, but the underlying ideal of wise, loving parents and harmonious happy families remained unchanged. More recently, our collective vision of the family has grown more complicated. In shows like The Sopranos, Sister Wives, Here and Now, Transparent, The Fosters, and This Is Us, we encounter not only diverse families (for example, same-sex, multiracial, or polygamous households), but also a wide range of social issues including adoption, foster care, infidelity, substance abuse, domestic abuse, immigration status, and transgenderism. Although media portrayals of family have evolved dramatically since the 1950s, our never-ending fascination with television families underscores the cultural importance of family dynamics and family boundaries.

There are a few reasons why Rereading America begins with this chapter on myths of family. First, we all know a lot about families from living in our own families, observing our communities, and consuming various media. We may not be licensed experts, but we are deeply knowledgeable. In addition, the notion of an ideal nuclear family is a perfect example of a cultural myth that held sway for decades despite its dubious relation to real life. As you proceed through the chapter you can judge for yourself how much power that myth retains today. Finally, other key topics in Rereading America — notions about gender, race, and success, for example — are powerfully shaped

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by family life.

The myth of the idealized nuclear family is explored in the chapter’s first reading selection, “Looking for Work,” in which Gary Soto recalls his boyhood desire to transform his working- class Chicano family into a facsimile of the Cleavers on Leave It to Beaver. Stephanie Coontz, in “What We Really Miss About the 1950s,” then takes a close analytical look at the 1950s family, explaining its lasting appeal to some Americans but also documenting its dark side. Together these selections describe and then reread a complex set of cultural assumptions.

The next few selections draw on sociology, public policy, law, and the visual arts to provide broader and more recent perspectives on the meanings of family. “The Color of Family Ties: Race, Class, Gender, and Extended Family Involvement,” by Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian, challenges common misconceptions by carefully examining how ethnicity and social class shape the behaviors of American families. The next reading — “When Should a Child Be Taken from His Parents?” — asks us to consider one of the most difficult and consequential decisions a society can make, the decision to break apart a family to guarantee the safety or even the survival of its children. The need to separate some parents from their children is in itself a troubling reality, but as author Larissa MacFarquhar reveals, such decisions about child welfare may also reflect racial or class bias. Next, midway through the chapter, the Visual Portfolio offers you a chance to practice interpreting images; the

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photographs in this collection suggest some of the complex ways the contemporary American family intersects with gender, ethnicity, and social class.

The chapter ends with three readings that explore twenty-first century challenges and opportunities for American families. First, Amy Ellis Nutt tells the story of how a family supports the transition of one of their identical twin boys, Wyatt, into a young transgender woman, Nicole. Next, in a selection from Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White

Supremacy, Sheryll Cashin explains why the growing number of interracial marriages may foster healthier race relations and serve as a powerful counterforce to white supremacism. The chapter concludes with a short reading by sociologist Mimi Schippers that questions our cultural assumption that a monogamous couple is the best or only foundation of family life.

Sources

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Print.

Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Life. New York: Free Press, 1988. Print.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

BEFORE READING

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Spend ten minutes or so jotting down every word, phrase, or image you associate with the idea of “family.” Write as freely as possible, without censoring your thoughts or worrying about grammatical correctness. Working in small groups, compare lists and try to categorize your responses. What assumptions about families do they reveal?

Draw a visual representation of your family. This could take the form of a graph, chart, diagram, map, cartoon, symbolic picture, or literal portrait. Don’t worry if you’re not a skillful artist: the main point is to convey an idea, and even stick figures can speak eloquently. When you’re finished, write a journal entry about your drawing. Was it easier to depict some feelings or ideas visually than it would have been to describe them in words? Did you find some things about your family difficult or impossible to convey visually? Does your drawing “say” anything that surprises you?

Write a journal entry about how you think attending college has changed, or will change, your relationship to your family.

Study the frontispiece to this chapter on page 15 and discuss the way photographer Julie Mack has chosen to portray her family. Is this a “typical” family? How do you read the expressions of the people and the emotional tone of the image as a whole? Why is the family posing in their SUV, in their driveway, seemingly at dusk?

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LOOKING FOR WORK GARY SOTO

“Looking for Work” is the narrative of a nine-year-old

Mexican American boy who wants his family to imitate

the “perfect families” he sees on TV. Much of the humor

in this essay comes from the author’s perspective as an

adult looking back at his childhood self, but Soto also

respects the child’s point of view. In the marvelous

details of this midsummer day, Soto captures the

interplay of seductive myth and complex reality. Gary

Soto (b. 1952) grew up “on the industrial side of Fresno,

right smack against a junkyard and the junkyard’s cross-

eyed German shepherd.” Having discovered poetry

almost by chance in a city college library, he has now

published more than forty books of poetry, fiction, and

nonfiction for children, young adults, and adults. He has

also received fellowships from the National Endowment

for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, in addition

to numerous other awards. His recent publications

include Meatballs for the People: Proverbs to Chew On

(2017) and The Elements of San Joaquin (2018).

ONE JULY, WHILE KILLING ANTS ON THE KITCHEN SINK

with a rolled newspaper, I had a nine-year-old’s vision of wealth

that would save us from ourselves. For weeks I had drunk Kool-

Aid and watched morning reruns of Father Knows Best, whose

family was so uncomplicated in its routine that I very much

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5

wanted to imitate it. The first step was to get my brother and

sister to wear shoes at dinner.

“Come on, Rick — come on, Deb,” I whined. But Rick

mimicked me and the same day that I asked him to wear shoes

he came to the dinner table in only his swim trunks. My mother

didn’t notice, nor did my sister, as we sat to eat our beans and

tortillas in the stifling heat of our kitchen. We all gleamed like

cellophane, wiping the sweat from our brows with the backs of

our hands as we talked about the day: Frankie our neighbor was

beat up by Faustino; the swimming pool at the playground

would be closed for a day because the pump was broken.

Such was our life. So that morning, while doing-in the train

of ants which arrived each day, I decided to become wealthy,

and right away! After downing a bowl of cereal, I took a rake

from the garage and started up the block to look for work.

We lived on an ordinary block of mostly working class

people: warehousemen, egg candlers, welders, mechanics, and

a union plumber. And there were many retired people who kept

their lawns green and the gutters uncluttered of the chewing

gum wrappers we dropped as we rode by on our bikes. They

bent down to gather our litter, muttering at our evilness.

At the corner house I rapped the screen door and a very

large woman in a muu-muu answered. She sized me up and

then asked what I could do.

1

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“Rake leaves,” I answered smiling.

“It’s summer, and there ain’t no leaves,” she countered. Her

face was pinched with lines; fat jiggled under her chin. She

pointed to the lawn, then the flower bed, and said: “You see any

leaves there — or there?” I followed her pointing arm, stupidly.

But she had a job for me and that was to get her a Coke at the

liquor store. She gave me twenty cents, and after ditching my

rake in a bush, off I ran. I returned with an unbagged Pepsi, for

which she thanked me and gave me a nickel from her apron.

I skipped off her porch, fetched my rake, and crossed the

street to the next block where Mrs. Moore, mother of Earl the

retarded man, let me weed a flower bed. She handed me a

trowel and for a good part of the morning my fingers dipped

into the moist dirt, ripping up runners of Bermuda grass.

Worms surfaced in my search for deep roots, and I cut them in

halves, tossing them to Mrs. Moore’s cat who pawed them

playfully as they dried in the sun. I made out Earl whose face

was pressed to the back window of the house, and although he

was calling to me I couldn’t understand what he was trying to

say. Embarrassed, I worked without looking up, but I imagined

his contorted mouth and the ring of keys attached to his belt —

keys that jingled with each palsied step. He scared me and I

worked quickly to finish the flower bed. When I did finish Mrs.

Moore gave me a quarter and two peaches from her tree, which

I washed there but ate in the alley behind my house.

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10

I was sucking on the second one, a bit of juice staining the

front of my T-shirt, when Little John, my best friend, came

walking down the alley with a baseball bat over his shoulder,

knocking over trash cans as he made his way toward me.

Little John and I went to St. John’s Catholic School, where

we sat among the “stupids.” Miss Marino, our teacher,

alternated the rows of good students with the bad, hoping that

by sitting side-by-side with the bright students the stupids might

become more intelligent, as though intelligence were

contagious. But we didn’t progress as she had hoped. She grew

frustrated when one day, while dismissing class for recess,

Little John couldn’t get up because his arms were stuck in the

slats of the chair’s backrest. She scolded us with a shaking

finger when we knocked over the globe, denting the already

troubled Africa. She muttered curses when Leroy White, a real

stupid but a great softball player with the gift to hit to all fields,

openly chewed his host when he made his First Communion;

his hands swung at his sides as he returned to the pew looking

around with a big smile.

Little John asked what I was doing, and I told him that I was

taking a break from work, as I sat comfortably among high

weeds. He wanted to join me, but I reminded him that the last

time he’d gone door-to-door asking for work his mother had

whipped him. I was with him when his mother, a New Jersey

Italian who could rise up in anger one moment and love the

next, told me in a polite but matter-of-fact voice that I had to

2

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leave because she was going to beat her son. She gave me a

homemade popsicle, ushered me to the door, and said that I

could see Little John the next day. But it was sooner than that. I

went around to his bedroom window to suck my popsicle and

watch Little John dodge his mother’s blows, a few hitting their

mark but many whirring air.

It was midday when Little John and I converged in the alley,

the sun blazing in the high nineties, and he suggested that we go

to Roosevelt High School to swim. He needed five cents to make

fifteen, the cost of admission, and I lent him a nickel. We ran

home for my bike and when my sister found out that we were

going swimming, she started to cry because she didn’t have the

fifteen cents but only an empty Coke bottle. I waved for her to

come and three of us mounted the bike — Debra on the cross

bar, Little John on the handle bars and holding the Coke bottle

which we would cash for a nickel and make up the difference

that would allow all of us to get in, and me pumping up the

crooked streets, dodging cars and pot holes. We spent the day

swimming under the afternoon sun, so that when we got home

our mom asked us what was darker, the floor or us? She feigned

a stern posture, her hands on her hips and her mouth puckered.

We played along. Looking down, Debbie and I said in unison,

“Us.”

That evening at dinner we all sat down in our bathing suits to

eat our beans, laughing and chewing loudly. Our mom was in a

good mood, so I took a risk and asked her if sometime we could

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15

have turtle soup. A few days before I had watched a television

program in which a Polynesian tribe killed a large turtle, gutted

it, and then stewed it over an open fire. The turtle, basted in a

sugary sauce, looked delicious as I ate an afternoon bowl of

cereal, but my sister, who was watching the program with a

glass of Kool-Aid between her knees, said, “Caca.”

My mother looked at me in bewilderment. “Boy, are you a

crazy Mexican. Where did you get the idea that people eat

turtles?”

”On television,” I said, explaining the program. Then I

took it a step further. “Mom, do you think we could get dressed

up for dinner one of these days? David King does.”

“Ay, Dios,” my mother laughed. She started collecting the

dinner plates, but my brother wouldn’t let go of his. He was still

drawing a picture in the bean sauce. Giggling, he said it was me,

but I didn’t want to listen because I wanted an answer from

Mom. This was the summer when I spent the mornings in front

of the television that showed the comfortable lives of white

kids. There were no beatings, no rifts in the family. They wore

bright clothes; toys tumbled from their closets. They hopped

into bed with kisses and woke to glasses of fresh orange juice,

and to a father sitting before his morning coffee while the

mother buttered his toast. They hurried through the day making

friends and gobs of money, returning home to a warmly lit

living room, and then dinner. Leave It to Beaver was the

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program I replayed in my mind:

“May I have the mashed potatoes?” asks Beaver with a smile.

“Sure, Beav,” replies Wally as he taps the corners of his

mouth with a starched napkin.

The father looks on in his suit. The mother, decked out in

earrings and a pearl necklace, cuts into her steak and blushes.

Their conversation is politely clipped.

”Swell,” says Beaver, his cheeks puffed with food.

Our own talk at dinner was loud with belly laughs and

marked by our pointing forks at one another. The subjects were

commonplace.

“Gary, let’s go to the ditch tomorrow,” my brother suggests.

He explains that he has made a life preserver out of four empty

detergent bottles strung together with twine and that he will

make me one if I can find more bottles. “No way are we going to

drown.”

“Yeah, then we could have a dirt clod fight,” I reply, so happy

to be alive.

Whereas the Beaver’s family enjoyed dessert in dishes at the

table, our mom sent us outside, and more often than not I went

into the alley to peek over the neighbor’s fences and spy out

fruit, apricots or peaches.

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I had asked my mom and again she laughed that I was a

crazy chavalo as she stood in front of the sink, her arms rising

and falling with suds, face glistening from the heat. She sent me

outside where my brother and sister were sitting in the shade

that the fence threw out like a blanket. They were talking about

me when I plopped down next to them. They looked at one

another and then Debbie, my eight-year-old sister, started in.

“What’s this crap about getting dressed up?”

She had entered her profanity stage. A year later she would

give up such words and slip into her Catholic uniform, and into

squealing on my brother and me when we “cussed this” and

“cussed that.”

I tried to convince them that if we improved the way we

looked we might get along better in life. White people would

like us more. They might invite us to places, like their homes or

front yards. They might not hate us so much.

My sister called me a “craphead,” and got up to leave with a

stalk of grass dangling from her mouth. “They’ll never like us.”

My brother’s mood lightened as he talked about the ditch

— the white water, the broken pieces of glass, and the rusted car

fenders that awaited our knees. There would be toads, and

rocks to smash them.

David King, the only person we knew who resembled the

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middle class, called from over the fence. David was Catholic, of

Armenian and French descent, and his closet was filled with

toys. A bear-shaped cookie jar, like the ones on television, sat

on the kitchen counter. His mother was remarkably kind while

she put up with the racket we made on the street. Evenings, she

often watered the front yard and it must have upset her to see

us — my brother and I and others — jump from trees laughing,

the unkillable kids of the very poor, who got up unshaken,

brushed off, and climbed into another one to try again.

David called again. Rick got up and slapped grass from his

pants. When I asked if I could come along he said no. David said

no. They were two years older so their affairs were different

from mine. They greeted one another with foul names and took

off down the alley to look for trouble.

I went inside the house, turned on the television, and was

about to sit down with a glass of Kool-Aid when Mom shooed

me outside.

“It’s still light,” she said. “Later you’ll bug me to let you stay

out longer. So go on.”

I downed my Kool-Aid and went outside to the front yard.

No one was around. The day had cooled and a breeze rustled

the trees. Mr. Jackson, the plumber, was watering his lawn and

when he saw me he turned away to wash off his front steps.

There was more than an hour of light left, so I took advantage of

it and decided to look for work. I felt suddenly alive as I skipped

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down the block in search of an overgrown flower bed and the

dime that would end the day right.

ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. Why is the narrator attracted to the kind of family life depicted on TV? What, if anything, does he think is wrong with his life? Why do his desires apparently have so little impact on his family?

2. Why does the narrator first go looking for work? How has the meaning of work changed by the end of the story, when he goes out again “in search of an overgrown flower bed and the

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dime that would end the day right”? Explain.

3. As Soto looks back on his nine-year-old self, he has a different perspective on things than he had as a child. How would you characterize the mature Soto’s thoughts about his childhood family life? (Was it “a good family”? What was wrong with Soto’s thinking as a nine-year-old?) Back up your remarks with specific references to the narrative.

4. Review the story to find each mention of food or drink. Explain the role these references play.

5. Review the cast of “supporting characters” in this narrative — the mother, sister, brother, friends, and neighbors. What does each contribute to the story and in particular to the meaning of family within the story?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

6. Look ahead to the excerpt from Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (p. 73). Compare Soto’s family to the Maines family, being sure to consider ethnicity, gender roles, levels of affluence, and the different time periods and locations. What would it be like to live in each of these families — particularly as a young boy like Gary or like Nicole’s brother Jonas? Can you see any important similarities in addition to the numerous differences?

7. Compare and contrast the relationship of school and family in this narrative to that described by Mike Rose in “I Just Wanna Be Average” (p. 123).

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EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

8. Write a journal entry about a time when you wished your family were somehow different. What caused your dissatisfaction? What did you want your family to be like? Was your dissatisfaction ever resolved?

9. “Looking for Work” is essentially the story of a single day. Write a narrative of one day when you were eight or nine or ten; use details as Soto does to give the events of the day broader significance.

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WHAT WE REALLY MISS ABOUT THE 1950s STEPHANIE COONTZ

Popular myth has it that the 1950s were the ideal decade

for the American family. In this example of academic

writing at its best, Stephanie Coontz (b. 1944) provides a

clear, well-documented, and insightful analysis of what

was really going on and suggests that our nostalgia for

the 1950s could mislead us today. Coontz teaches family

studies and history at The Evergreen State College in

Olympia, Washington; she also serves as Director of

Public Education at the Council on Contemporary

Families, a nonprofit association based at the University

of Texas, Austin. An award-winning writer and

internationally recognized expert on the family, she has

testified before a House Select Committee on families,

appeared in several television documentaries, and

published extensively for both general and scholarly

audiences. Her recent books include Marriage, a History:

How Love Conquered Marriage and The Way We Never

Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (both

2016); this excerpt is from her earlier study The Way We

Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing

Families (1997).

IN A 1996 POLL BY THE KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS AGENCY,

more Americans chose the 1950s than any other single decade

as the best time for children to grow up. And despite the4

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research I’ve done on the underside of 1950s families, I don’t

think it’s crazy for people to feel nostalgic about the period. For

one thing, it’s easy to see why people might look back fondly to

a decade when real wages grew more in any single year than in

the entire ten years of the 1980s combined, a time when the

average 30-year-old man could buy a median-priced home on only 15–18 percent of his salary.

But it’s more than just a financial issue. When I talk with

modern parents, even ones who grew up in unhappy families,

they associate the 1950s with a yearning they feel for a time

when there were fewer complicated choices for kids or parents

to grapple with, when there was more predictability in how

people formed and maintained families, and when there was a

coherent “moral order” in their community to serve as a

reference point for family norms. Even people who found that

moral order grossly unfair or repressive often say that its

presence provided them with something concrete to push

against.

I can sympathize entirely. One of my most empowering

moments occurred the summer I turned 12, when my mother

marched down to the library with me to confront a librarian

who’d curtly refused to let me check out a book that was “not

appropriate” for my age. “Don’t you ever tell my daughter what

she can and can’t read,” fumed my mom. “She’s a mature young

lady and she can make her own choices.” In recent years I’ve

often thought back to the gratitude I felt toward my mother for

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that act of trust in me. I wish I had some way of earning similar

points from my own son. But much as I’ve always respected his

values, I certainly wouldn’t have walked into my local video

store when he was 12 and demanded that he be allowed to

check out absolutely anything he wanted!

Still, I have no illusions that I’d actually like to go back to the

1950s, and neither do most people who express such occasional

nostalgia. For example, although the 1950s got more votes than

any other decade in the Knight-Ridder poll, it did not win an

outright majority: 38 percent of respondents picked the 1950s;

27 percent picked the 1960s or the 1970s. Voters between the

ages of 50 and 64 were most likely to choose the 1950s, the

decade in which they themselves came of age, as the best time

for kids; voters under 30 were more likely to choose the 1970s.

African Americans differed over whether the 1960s, 1970s, or

1980s were best, but all age groups of blacks agreed that later

decades were definitely preferable to the 1950s.

Nostalgia for the 1950s is real and deserves to be taken

seriously, but it usually shouldn’t be taken literally. Even people

who do pick the 1950s as the best decade generally end up

saying, once they start discussing their feelings in depth, that

it’s not the family arrangements in and of themselves that they

want to revive. They don’t miss the way women used to be

treated, they sure wouldn’t want to live with most of the fathers

they knew in their neighborhoods, and “come to think of it” — I

don’t know how many times I’ve recorded these exact words —

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“I communicate with my kids much better than my parents or

grandparents did.” When Judith Wallerstein recently

interviewed 100 spouses in “happy” marriages, she found that

only five “wanted a marriage like their parents’.” The husbands

“consciously rejected the role models provided by their fathers.

The women said they could never be happy living as their

mothers did.”

People today understandably feel that their lives are out of

balance, but they yearn for something totally new — a more

equal distribution of work, family, and community time for

both men and women, children and adults. If the 1990s are

lopsided in one direction, the 1950s were equally lopsided in the

opposite direction.

What most people really feel nostalgic about has little to do

with the internal structure of 1950s families. It is the belief that

the 1950s provided a more family-friendly economic and social

environment, an easier climate in which to keep kids on the

straight and narrow, and above all, a greater feeling of hope for

a family’s long-term future, especially for its young. The

contrast between the perceived hopefulness of the fifties and

our own misgivings about the future is key to contemporary

nostalgia for the period. Greater optimism did exist then, even

among many individuals and groups who were in terrible

circumstances. But if we are to take people’s sense of loss

seriously, rather than merely to capitalize on it for a hidden

political agenda, we need to develop a historical perspective on

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where that hope came from.

Part of it came from families comparing their prospects in

the 1950s to their unstable, often grindingly uncomfortable

pasts, especially the two horrible decades just before. In the

1920s, after two centuries of child labor and income insecurity,

and for the first time in American history, a bare majority of

children had come to live in a family with a male breadwinner,

a female homemaker, and a chance at a high school education.

Yet no sooner did the ideals associated with such a family begin

to blossom than they were buried by the stock market crash of

1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the 1930s

domestic violence soared; divorce rates fell, but informal

separations jumped; fertility plummeted. Murder rates were

higher in 1933 than they were in the 1980s. Families were

uprooted or torn apart. Thousands of young people left home to

seek work, often riding the rails across the country.

World War II brought the beginning of economic recovery,

and people’s renewed interest in forming families resulted in a

marriage and childbearing boom, but stability was still beyond

most people’s grasp. Postwar communities were rocked by

racial tensions, labor strife, and a right-wing backlash against

the radical union movement of the 1930s. Many women

resented being fired from wartime jobs they had grown to

enjoy. Veterans often came home to find that they had to elbow

their way back into their families, with wives and children

resisting their attempts to reassert domestic authority. In one

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recent study of fathers who returned from the war, four times

as many reported painful, even traumatic, reunions as

remembered happy ones.

By 1946 one in every three marriages was ending in

divorce. Even couples who stayed together went through rough

times, as an acute housing shortage forced families to double up

with relatives or friends. Tempers frayed and generational

relations grew strained. “No home is big enough to house two

families, particularly two of different generations, with

opposite theories on child training,” warned a 1948 film on the

problems of modern marriage.

So after the widespread domestic strife, family disruptions,

and violence of the 1930s and the instability of the World War II

period, people were ready to try something new. The postwar

economic boom gave them the chance. The 1950s was the first

time that a majority of Americans could even dream of creating

a secure oasis in their immediate nuclear families. There they

could focus their emotional and financial investments, reduce

obligations to others that might keep them from seizing their

own chance at a new start, and escape the interference of an

older generation of neighbors or relatives who tried to tell them

how to run their lives and raise their kids. Oral histories of the

postwar period resound with the theme of escaping from in-

laws, maiden aunts, older parents, even needy siblings.

The private family also provided a refuge from the anxieties

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of the new nuclear age and the cold war, as well as a place to get

away from the political witch hunts led by Senator Joe

McCarthy and his allies. When having the wrong friends at the

wrong time or belonging to any “suspicious” organization could

ruin your career and reputation, it was safer to pull out of

groups you might have joined earlier and to focus on your

family. On a more positive note, the nuclear family was where

people could try to satisfy their long-pent-up desires for a more

stable marriage, a decent home, and the chance to really enjoy

their children.

The 1950s Family Experiment The key to understanding the successes, failures, and

comparatively short life of 1950s family forms and values is to

understand the period as one of experimentation with the

possibilities of a new kind of family, not as the expression of

some longstanding tradition. At the end of the 1940s, the

divorce rate, which had been rising steadily since the 1890s,

dropped sharply; the age of marriage fell to a 100-year low; and

the birth rate soared. Women who had worked during the

Depression or World War II quit their jobs as soon as they

became pregnant, which meant quite a few women were

specializing in child raising; fewer women remained childless

during the 1950s than in any decade since the late nineteenth

century. The timing and spacing of childbearing became far

more compressed, so that young mothers were likely to have

two or more children in diapers at once, with no older sibling to

help in their care. At the same time, again for the first time in

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100 years, the educational gap between young middle-class

women and men increased, while job segregation for working

men and women seems to have peaked. These demographic

changes increased the dependence of women on marriage, in

contrast to gradual trends in the opposite direction since the

early twentieth century.

The result was that family life and gender roles became

much more predictable, orderly, and settled in the 1950s than

they were either twenty years earlier or would be twenty years

later. Only slightly more than one in four marriages ended in

divorce during the 1950s. Very few young people spent any

extended period of time in a nonfamily setting: They moved

from their parents’ family into their own family, after just a

brief experience with independent living, and they started

having children soon after marriage. Whereas two-thirds of

women aged 20 to 24 were not yet married in 1990, only 28

percent of women this age were still single in 1960.

Ninety percent of all the households in the country were

families in the 1950s, in comparison with only 71 percent by

1990. Eighty-six percent of all children lived in two-parent

homes in 1950, as opposed to just 72 percent in 1990. And the

percentage living with both biological parents — rather than,

say, a parent and stepparent — was dramatically higher than it

had been at the turn of the century or is today: seventy percent

in 1950, compared with only 50 percent in 1990. Nearly 60

percent of kids — an all-time high — were born into male

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breadwinner–female homemaker families; only a minority of

the rest had mothers who worked in the paid labor force.

If the organization and uniformity of family life in the 1950s

were new, so were the values, especially the emphasis on

putting all one’s emotional and financial eggs in the small

basket of the immediate nuclear family. Right up through the

1940s, ties of work, friendship, neighborhood, ethnicity,

extended kin, and voluntary organizations were as important a

source of identity for most Americans, and sometimes a more

important source of obligation, than marriage and the nuclear

family. All this changed in the postwar era. The spread of

suburbs and automobiles, combined with the destruction of

older ethnic neighborhoods in many cities, led to the decline of

the neighborhood social club. Young couples moved away from

parents and kin, cutting ties with traditional extrafamilial

networks that might compete for their attention. A critical

factor in this trend was the emergence of a group of family

sociologists and marriage counselors who followed Talcott

Parsons in claiming that the nuclear family, built on a sharp

division of labor between husband and wife, was the

cornerstone of modern society.

The new family experts tended to advocate views such as

those first raised in a 1946 book, Their Mothers’ Sons, by

psychiatrist Edward Strecker. Strecker and his followers argued

that American boys were infantilized and emasculated by

women who were old-fashioned “moms” instead of modern

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“mothers.” One sign that you might be that dreaded “mom,”

Strecker warned women, was if you felt you should take your

aging parents into your own home, rather than putting them in

“a good institution … where they will receive adequate care and

comfort.” Modern “mothers” placed their parents in nursing

homes and poured all their energies into their nuclear family.

They were discouraged from diluting their wifely and maternal

commitments by maintaining “competing” interests in friends,

jobs, or extended family networks, yet they were also supposed

to cheerfully grant early independence to their (male) children

— an emotional double bind that may explain why so many

women who took this advice to heart ended up abusing alcohol

or tranquilizers over the course of the decade.

The call for young couples to break from their parents and

youthful friends was a consistent theme in 1950s popular

culture. In Marty, one of the most highly praised TV plays and

movies of the 1950s, the hero almost loses his chance at love by

listening to the carping of his mother and aunt and letting

himself be influenced by old friends who resent the time he

spends with his new girlfriend. In the end, he turns his back on

mother, aunt, and friends to get his new marriage and a little

business of his own off to a good start. Other movies, novels,

and popular psychology tracts portrayed the dreadful things

that happened when women became more interested in careers

than marriage or men resisted domestic conformity.

Yet many people felt guilty about moving away from older

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parents and relatives; “modern mothers” worried that fostering

independence in their kids could lead to defiance or even

juvenile delinquency (the recurring nightmare of the age); there

was considerable confusion about how men and women could

maintain clear breadwinner-homemaker distinctions in a

period of expanding education, job openings, and consumer

aspirations. People clamored for advice. They got it from the

new family education specialists and marriage counselors, from

columns in women’s magazines, from government pamphlets,

and above all from television. While 1950s TV melodramas

warned against letting anything dilute the commitment to

getting married and having kids, the new family sitcoms gave

people nightly lessons on how to make their marriage or rapidly

expanding family work — or, in the case of I Love Lucy,

probably the most popular show of the era, how not to make

their marriage and family work. Lucy and Ricky gave weekly

comic reminders of how much trouble a woman could get into

by wanting a career or hatching some hare-brained scheme

behind her husband’s back.

At the time, everyone knew that shows such as Donna

Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows

Best were not the way families really were. People didn’t watch

those shows to see their own lives reflected back at them. They

watched them to see how families were supposed to live — and

also to get a little reassurance that they were headed in the right

direction. The sitcoms were simultaneously advertisements,

etiquette manuals, and how-to lessons for a new way of

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organizing marriage and child raising. I have studied the scripts

of these shows for years, since I often use them in my classes on

family history, but it wasn’t until I became a parent that I felt

their extraordinary pull. The secret of their appeal, I suddenly

realized, was that they offered 1950s viewers, wracked with the

same feelings of parental inadequacy as was I, the promise that

there were easy answers and surefire techniques for raising

kids.

Ever since, I have found it useful to think of the sitcoms as

the 1950s equivalent of today’s beer ads. As most people know,

beer ads are consciously aimed at men who aren’t as strong and

sexy as the models in the commercials, guys who are uneasily

aware of the gap between the ideal masculine pursuits and their

own achievements. The promise is that if the viewers on the

couch will just drink brand X, they too will be able to run 10

miles without gasping for breath. Their bodies will firm up,

their complexions will clear up, and maybe the Swedish bikini

team will come over and hang out at their place.

Similarly, the 1950s sitcoms were aimed at young couples

who had married in haste, women who had tasted new

freedoms during World War II and given up their jobs with

regret, veterans whose children resented their attempts to

reassert paternal authority, and individuals disturbed by the

changing racial and ethnic mix of postwar America. The

message was clear: Buy these ranch houses, Hotpoint

appliances, and child-raising ideals; relate to your spouse like

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this; get a new car to wash with your kids on Sunday afternoons;

organize your dinners like that — and you too can escape from

the conflicts of race, class, and political witch hunts into

harmonious families where father knows best, mothers are

never bored or irritated, and teenagers rush to the dinner table

each night, eager to get their latest dose of parental wisdom.

Many families found it possible to put together a good

imitation of this way of living during the 1950s and 1960s.

Couples were often able to construct marriages that were much

more harmonious than those in which they had grown up, and

to devote far more time to their children. Even when marriages

were deeply unhappy, as many were, the new stability,

economic security, and educational advantages parents were

able to offer their kids counted for a lot in people’s assessment

of their life satisfaction. And in some matters, ignorance could

be bliss: The lack of media coverage of problems such as abuse

or incest was terribly hard on the casualties, but it protected

more fortunate families from knowledge and fear of many

social ills.

There was tremendous hostility to people who could be

defined as “others”: Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans,

the poor, gays or lesbians, and “the red menace.” Yet on a day-

to-day basis, the civility that prevailed in homogeneous

neighborhoods allowed people to ignore larger patterns of

racial and political repression. Racial clashes were ever-present

in the 1950s, sometimes escalating into full-scale antiblack riots,

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but individual homicide rates fell to almost half the levels of the

1930s. As nuclear families moved into the suburbs, they

retreated from social activism but entered voluntary

relationships with people who had children the same age; they

became involved in PTAs together, joined bridge clubs, went

bowling. There does seem to have been a stronger sense of

neighborly commonalities than many of us feel today. Even

though this local community was often the product of exclusion

or repression, it sometimes looks attractive to modern

Americans whose commutes are getting longer and whose

family or work patterns give them little in common with their

neighbors.

The optimism that allowed many families to rise above

their internal difficulties and to put limits on their

individualistic values during the 1950s came from the sense that

America was on a dramatically different trajectory than it had

been in the past, an upward and expansionary path that had

already taken people to better places than they had ever seen

before and would certainly take their children even further.

This confidence that almost everyone could look forward to a

better future stands in sharp contrast to how most

contemporary Americans feel, and it explains why a period in

which many people were much worse off than today sometimes

still looks like a better period for families than our own.

Throughout the 1950s, poverty was higher than it is today,

but it was less concentrated in pockets of blight existing side-by-

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side with extremes of wealth, and, unlike today, it was falling

rather than rising. At the end of the 1930s, almost two-thirds of

the population had incomes below the poverty standards of the

day, while only one in eight had a middle-class income (defined

as two to five times the poverty line). By 1960, a majority of the

population had climbed into the middle-income range.

Unmarried people were hardly sexually abstinent in the

1950s, but the age of first intercourse was somewhat higher

than it is now, and despite a tripling of nonmarital birth rates

between 1940 and 1958, more than 70 percent of nonmarital

pregnancies led to weddings before the child was born. Teenage

birth rates were almost twice as high in 1957 as in the 1990s, but

most teen births were to married couples, and the effect of teen

pregnancy in reducing further schooling for young people did

not hurt their life prospects the way it does today. High school

graduation rates were lower in the 1950s than they are today,

and minority students had far worse test scores, but there were

jobs for people who dropped out of high school or graduated

without good reading skills — jobs that actually had a future.

People entering the job market in the 1950s had no way of

knowing that they would be the last generation to have a good

shot at reaching middle-class status without the benefit of

postsecondary schooling.

Millions of men from impoverished, rural, unemployed, or

poorly educated family backgrounds found steady jobs in the

steel, auto, appliance, construction, and shipping industries.

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Lower-middle-class men went further on in college during the

1950s than they would have been able to expect in earlier

decades, enabling them to make the transition to secure white-

collar work. The experience of shared sacrifices in the

Depression and war, reinforced by a New Deal–inspired belief

in the ability of government to make life better, gave people a

sense of hope for the future. Confidence in government,

business, education, and other institutions was on the rise. This

general optimism affected people’s experience and assessment

of family life. It is no wonder modern Americans yearn for a

similar sense of hope.

But before we sign on to any attempts to turn the family clock

back to the 1950s we should note that the family successes and

community solidarities of the 1950s rested on a totally different

set of political and economic conditions than we have today.

Contrary to widespread belief, the 1950s was not an age of

laissez-faire government and free market competition. A major

cause of the social mobility of young families in the 1950s was

that federal assistance programs were much more generous and

widespread than they are today.

In the most ambitious and successful affirmative action

program ever adopted in America, 40 percent of young men

were eligible for veterans’ benefits, and these benefits were far

more extensive than those available to Vietnam-era vets.

Financed in part by a federal income tax on the rich that went

up to 87 percent and a corporate tax rate of 52 percent, such

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benefits provided quite a jump start for a generation of young

families. The GI Bill paid most tuition costs for vets who

attended college, doubling the percentage of college students

from prewar levels. At the other end of the life span, Social

Security began to build up a significant safety net for the

elderly, formerly the poorest segment of the population.

Starting in 1950, the federal government regularly mandated

raises in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation. The

minimum wage may have been only $1.40 as late as 1968, but a

person who worked for that amount full-time, year-round,

earned 118 percent of the poverty figure for a family of three.

By 1995, a full-time minimum-wage worker could earn only 72

percent of the poverty level.

An important source of the economic expansion of the 1950s

was that public works spending at all levels of government

comprised nearly 20 percent of total expenditures in 1950, as

compared to less than 7 percent in 1984. Between 1950 and 1960,

nonmilitary, nonresidential public construction rose by 58

percent. Construction expenditures for new schools (in dollar

amounts adjusted for inflation) rose by 72 percent; funding on

sewers and waterworks rose by 46 percent. Government paid 90

percent of the costs of building the new Interstate Highway

System. These programs opened up suburbia to growing

numbers of middle-class Americans and created secure, well-

paying jobs for blue-collar workers.

Government also reorganized home financing, underwriting

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low down payments and long-term mortgages that had been

rejected as bad business by private industry. To do this,

government put public assets behind housing lending

programs, created two new national financial institutions to

facilitate home loans, allowed veterans to put down payments

as low as a dollar on a house, and offered tax breaks to people

who bought homes. The National Education Defense Act funded

the socioeconomic mobility of thousands of young men who

trained themselves for well-paying jobs in such fields as

engineering.

Unlike contemporary welfare programs, government

investment in 1950s families was not just for immediate

subsistence but encouraged long-term asset development,

rewarding people for increasing their investment in homes and

education. Thus it was far less likely that such families or

individuals would ever fall back to where they started, even

after a string of bad luck. Subsidies for higher education were

greater the longer people stayed in school and the more

expensive the school they selected. Mortgage deductions got

bigger as people traded up to better houses.

These social and political support systems magnified the

impact of the postwar economic boom. “In the years between

1947 and 1973,” reports economist Robert Kuttner, “the median

paycheck more than doubled, and the bottom 20 percent

enjoyed the greatest gains.” High rates of unionization meant

that blue-collar workers were making much more financial

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progress than most of their counterparts today. In 1952, when

eager home buyers flocked to the opening of Levittown,

Pennsylvania, the largest planned community yet constructed,

“it took a factory worker one day to earn enough money to pay

the closing costs on a new Levittown house, then selling for

$10,000.” By 1991, such a home was selling for $100,000 or more,

and it took a factory worker eighteen weeks to earn enough

money for just the closing costs.

The legacy of the union struggle of the 1930s and 1940s,

combined with government support for raising people’s living

standards, set limits on corporations that have disappeared in

recent decades. Corporations paid 23 percent of federal income

taxes in the 1950s, as compared to just 9.2 percent in 1991. Big

companies earned higher profit margins than smaller firms,

partly due to their dominance of the market, partly to America’s

postwar economic advantage. They chose (or were forced) to

share these extra earnings, which economists call “rents,” with

employees. Economists at the Brookings Institution and

Harvard University estimate that 70 percent of such corporate

rents were passed on to workers at all levels of the firm,

benefiting secretaries and janitors as well as CEOs.

Corporations routinely retained workers even in slack periods,

as a way of ensuring workplace stability. Although they often

received more generous tax breaks from communities than they

gave back in investment, at least they kept their plants and

employment offices in the same place. AT&T, for example,

received much of the technology it used to finance its postwar

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expansion from publicly funded communications research

conducted as part of the war effort, and, as current AT&T

Chairman Robert Allen puts it, there “used to be a lifelong

commitment on the employee’s part and on our part.” Today,

however, he admits, “the contract doesn’t exist anymore.”

Television trivia experts still argue over exactly what the

fathers in many 1950s sitcoms did for a living. Whatever it was,

though, they obviously didn’t have to worry about downsizing.

If most married people stayed in long-term relationships during

the 1950s, so did most corporations, sticking with the

communities they grew up in and the employees they originally

hired. Corporations were not constantly relocating in search of

cheap labor during the 1950s; unlike today, increases in worker

productivity usually led to increases in wages. The number of

workers covered by corporate pension plans and health benefits

increased steadily. So did limits on the work week. There is

good reason that people look back to the 1950s as a less hurried

age: The average American was working a shorter workday in

the 1950s than his or her counterpart today, when a quarter of

the workforce puts in 49 or more hours a week.

So politicians are practicing quite a double standard when

they tell us to return to the family forms of the 1950s while they

do nothing to restore the job programs and family subsidies of

that era, the limits on corporate relocation and financial

wheeling-dealing, the much higher share of taxes paid by

corporations then, the availability of union jobs for noncollege

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youth, and the subsidies for higher education such as the

National Defense Education Act loans. Furthermore, they’re not

telling the whole story when they claim that the 1950s was the

most prosperous time for families and the most secure decade

for children. Instead, playing to our understandable nostalgia

for a time when things seemed to be getting better, not worse,

they engage in a tricky chronological shell game with their

figures, diverting our attention from two important points.

First, many individuals, families, and groups were excluded

from the economic prosperity, family optimism, and social

civility of the 1950s. Second, the all-time high point of child

well-being and family economic security came not during the

1950s but at the end of the 1960s.

We now know that 1950s family culture was not only

nontraditional; it was also not idyllic. In important ways, the

stability of family and community life during the 1950s rested

on pervasive discrimination against women, gays, political

dissidents, non-Christians, and racial or ethnic minorities, as

well as on a systematic cover-up of the underside of many

families. Families that were harmonious and fair of their own

free will may have been able to function more easily in the

fifties, but few alternatives existed for members of discordant

or oppressive families. Victims of child abuse, incest,

alcoholism, spousal rape, and wife battering had no recourse,

no place to go, until well into the 1960s.

At the end of the 1950s, despite ten years of economic

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growth, 27.3 percent of the nation’s children were poor,

including those in white “underclass” communities such as

Appalachia. Almost 50 percent of married-couple African

American families were impoverished — a figure far higher

than today. It’s no wonder African Americans are not likely to

pick the 1950s as a golden age, even in comparison with the

setbacks they experienced in the 1980s. When blacks moved

north to find jobs in the postwar urban manufacturing boom

they met vicious harassment and violence, first to prevent them

from moving out of the central cities, then to exclude them

from public space such as parks or beaches.

In Philadelphia, for example, the City of Brotherly Love,

there were more than 200 racial incidents over housing in the

first six months of 1955 alone. The Federal Housing Authority,

such a boon to white working-class families, refused to insure

homes in all-black or in racially mixed neighborhoods. Two-

thirds of the city dwellers evicted by the urban renewal projects

of the decade were African Americans and Latinos; government

did almost nothing to help such displaced families find

substitute housing.

Women were unable to take out loans or even credit cards in

their own names. They were excluded from juries in many

states. A lack of options outside marriage led some women to

remain in desperately unhappy unions that were often not in

the best interests of their children or themselves. Even women

in happy marriages often felt humiliated by the constant

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messages they received that their whole lives had to revolve

around a man. “You are not ready when he calls — miss one

turn,” was a rule in the Barbie game marketed to 1950s girls; “he

criticizes your hairdo — go to the beauty shop.” Episodes of

Father Knows Best advised young women: “The worst thing you

can do is to try to beat a man at his own game. You just beat the

women at theirs.” One character on the show told women to

always ask themselves, “Are you after a job or a man? You can’t

have both.”

The Fifties Experiment Comes to an End The social stability of the 1950s, then, was a response to the

stick of racism, sexism, and repression as well as to the carrot of

economic opportunity and government aid. Because social

protest mounted in the 1960s and unsettling challenges were

posed to the gender roles and sexual mores of the previous

decade, many people forget that families continued to make

gains throughout the 1960s and into the first few years of the

1970s. By 1969, child poverty was down to 14 percent, its lowest

level ever; it hovered just above that marker until 1975, when it

began its steady climb up to contemporary figures (22 percent

in 1993; 21.2 percent in 1994). The high point of health and

nutrition for poor children was reached in the early 1970s.

So commentators are being misleading when they claim that

the 1950s was the golden age of American families. They are

disregarding the number of people who were excluded during

that decade and ignoring the socioeconomic gains that

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continued to be made through the 1960s. But they are quite

right to note that the improvements of the 1950s and 1960s came

to an end at some point in the 1970s (though not for the elderly,

who continued to make progress).

Ironically, it was the children of those stable, enduring,

supposedly idyllic 1950s families, the recipients of so much

maternal time and attention, that pioneered the sharp break

with their parents’ family forms and gender roles in the 1970s.

This was not because they were led astray by some youthful

Murphy Brown in her student rebel days or inadvertently

spoiled by parents who read too many of Dr. Spock’s child-

raising manuals.

Partly, the departure from 1950s family arrangements was

a logical extension of trends and beliefs pioneered in the 1950s,

or of inherent contradictions in those patterns. For example,

early and close-spaced childbearing freed more wives up to join

the labor force, and married women began to flock to work. By

1960, more than 40 percent of women over the age of 16 held a

job, and working mothers were the fastest growing component

of the labor force. The educational aspirations and

opportunities that opened up for kids of the baby boom could

not be confined to males, and many tight-knit, male-

breadwinner, nuclear families in the 1950s instilled in their

daughters the ambition to be something other than a

homemaker.28

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Another part of the transformation was a shift in values.

Most people would probably agree that some changes in values

were urgently needed: the extension of civil rights to racial

minorities and to women; a rejection of property rights in

children by parents and in women by husbands; a reaction

against the political intolerance and the wasteful materialism of

1950s culture. Other changes in values remain more

controversial: opposition to American intervention abroad;

repudiation of the traditional sexual double standard; rebellion

against what many young people saw as the hypocrisy of

parents who preached sexual morality but ignored social

immorality such as racism and militarism.

Still other developments, such as the growth of me-first

individualism, are widely regarded as problematic by people on

all points along the political spectrum. It’s worth noting,

though, that the origins of antisocial individualism and self-

indulgent consumerism lay at least as much in the family values

of the 1950s as in the youth rebellion of the 1960s. The

marketing experts who never allowed the kids in Ozzie and

Harriet sitcoms to be shown drinking milk, for fear of offending

soft-drink companies that might sponsor the show in

syndication, were ultimately the same people who slightly later

invested billions of dollars to channel sexual rebelliousness and

a depoliticized individualism into mainstream culture.

There were big cultural changes brewing by the beginning of

the 1970s, and tremendous upheavals in social, sexual, and

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family values. And yes, there were sometimes reckless or

simply laughable excesses in some of the early experiments

with new gender roles, family forms, and personal expression.

But the excesses of 1950s gender roles and family forms were

every bit as repellent and stupid as the excesses of the sixties:

Just watch a dating etiquette film of the time period, or recall

that therapists of the day often told victims of incest that they

were merely having unconscious oedipal fantasies.

Ultimately, though, changes in values were not what brought

the 1950s family experiment to an end. The postwar family

compacts between husbands and wives, parents and children,

young and old, were based on the postwar social compact

between government, corporations, and workers. While there

was some discontent with those family bargains among women

and youth, the old relations did not really start to unravel until

people began to face the erosion of the corporate wage bargain

and government broke its tacit societal bargain that it would

continue to invest in jobs and education for the younger

generation.

In the 1970s, new economic trends began to clash with all

the social expectations that 1950s families had instilled in their

children. That clash, not the willful abandonment of

responsibility and commitment, has been the primary cause of

both family rearrangements and the growing social problems

that are usually attributed to such family changes, but in fact

have separate origins.

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ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. According to Coontz, what do we really miss about the 1950s, and what don’t we miss? Explain how it might be possible for us to miss an era that’s now half a century in the past.

2. In Coontz’s view, what was the role of the government in making the 1950s in America what they were? What part did broader historical forces or other circumstances play?

3. Although she concentrates on the 1950s, Coontz also describes the other decades from the 1920s to the 1990s, when she wrote this piece. Use her information to create a brief chart naming the key characteristics of each decade. Then consider your own family history and see how well it fits the pattern Coontz outlines. Discuss the results with classmates or write a journal entry reflecting on what you learn.

4. Consider the most recent ten years of American history. What events or trends (e.g., same-sex marriage, immigration policies, and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements) do you think a sociologist or cultural historian might consider important for understanding our current mythologies of family? How do you think our ideas about family have changed in this decade?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

5. The mythic nuclear family of the 1950s included kids. Do you think people today place less emphasis on raising children, and if so, why? How might Coontz respond to the “Future Salmon”

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cartoon on page 24 or to the frontispiece to this chapter (p. 15)?

6. Review “Looking for Work” by Gary Soto (p. 20). How does this narrative evoke nostalgia for a simpler, better era for families? Does it reveal any of the problems with the 1950s that Coontz describes?

7. Look at the image on page 525 and discuss which elements of the photo — and of the 2016 Trump-Pence campaign more generally — could be considered nostalgic. Do you think the title “What We Really Miss about the 1850s” would be an apt one for this image?

EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

8. Watch an episode of a 1950s sitcom such as Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver, or I Love Lucy. Analyze the extent to which it reveals both positive and negative aspects of the 1950s that Coontz discusses — for example, an authoritarian father figure, limited roles for wives, economic prosperity, or a sense of a secure community.

9. Coontz suggests that an uninformed nostalgia for the 1950s could promote harmful political agendas. What connections do you see between her analysis and the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” or other recent political stances or events? Do you agree with Coontz that nostalgia can be dangerous? Why or why not?

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THE COLOR OF FAMILY TIES: RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND EXTENDED FAMILY INVOLVEMENT NAOMI GERSTEL AND NATALIA SARKISIAN

The myth of the nuclear family is not just a harmless

cliché; rather, it can lock us into fundamental

misunderstandings of how American families live,

misunderstandings that can divide groups and promote

simplistic public policy. In this study, sociologists Naomi

Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian examine data on black,

white, and Latino/a families to challenge the popular

notion that minority families have weaker ties and are

more fragmented than white families. They find that

social class is more important than ethnicity; moreover,

while differences between ethnic groups do exist, each

group has developed ways to cope with the practical,

emotional, and financial challenges they face and to

maintain family solidarity. Gerstel is Distinguished

University Professor and professor of sociology at the

University of Massachusetts, Amherst; she has published

widely on such topics as the changing American family,

elder care, child care, and work schedules. Sarkisian is

Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College. The

two coauthored the 2012 book Nuclear Family Values,

Extended Family Lives: The Importance of Gender, Race,

and Class. “The Color of Family Ties” appeared in

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American Families: A Multicultural Reader, edited by

Stephanie Coontz (see p. 26) with Maya Parson and

Gabrielle Raley (2008).

WHEN TALKING ABOUT FAMILY OBLIGATIONS and

solidarities, politicians and social commentators typically focus

on the ties between married couples and their children. We

often hear that Black and Latino/a, especially Puerto Rican,

families are more disorganized than White families, and that

their family ties are weaker, because rates of non-marriage and

single parenthood are higher among these minority groups. But

this focus on the nuclear family ignores extended family

solidarities and caregiving activities. Here we examine these

often overlooked extended kinship ties.

Taking this broader perspective on family relations refutes

the myth that Blacks and Latinos/as lack strong families.

Minority individuals are more likely to live in extended family

homes than Whites and in many ways more likely to help out

their aging parents, grandparents, adult children, brothers,

sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, and other kin.

According to our research using the second wave of the

National Survey of Families and Households, as Figures 1 and 2

show, Blacks and Latinos/as, both women and men, are much

more likely than Whites to share a home with extended kin: 42

percent of Blacks and 37 percent of Latinos/as, but only 20

percent of Whites, live with relatives. Similar patterns exist for

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living near relatives: 54 percent of Blacks and 51 percent of

Latinos/as, but only 37 percent of Whites, live within two miles

of kin. Blacks and Latinos/as are also more likely than Whites to

frequently visit kin. For example, 76 percent of Blacks, 71

percent of Latinos/as, but just 63 percent of Whites see their

relatives once a week or more.

Figure 1. Ethnicity and extended kin involvement among men.

Data from National Survey of Families and Households, 1992–1994.

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Figure 2. Ethnicity and extended kin involvement among women.

Data from National Survey of Families and Households, 1992–1994.

Even if they don’t live together, Blacks and Latinos/as are as

likely as Whites — and in some ways more likely — to be

supportive family members. But there are important racial and

ethnic differences in the type of support family members give

each other. Whites are more likely than ethnic minorities to

give and receive large sums of money, and White women are

more likely than minority women to give and receive emotional

support, such as discussing personal problems and giving each

other advice. When it comes to help with practical tasks,

however, we find that Black and Latino/a relatives are more

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likely than Whites to be supportive: they are more likely to give

each other help with household work and child care, as well as

with providing rides and running errands. These differences

are especially pronounced among women.

This is not to say that Black and Latino men are not

involved with kin, as is implied in popular images of minority

men hanging out on street corners rather than attending to

family ties. In fact, Black and Latino men are more likely than

White men to live near relatives and to stay in touch with them.

White men, however, are more likely to give and receive large-

scale financial help. Moreover, the three groups of men are

very similar when it comes to giving and getting practical help

and emotional support.

These data suggest that if we only consider married couples

or parents and their young children, we are missing much of

what families in general and families of color in particular do

for each other. A focus on nuclear families in discussions of

race differences in family life creates a biased portrait of

families of color.

Explaining Race Differences: Is It Culture or Class? When discussing differences in family experiences of various

racial and ethnic groups, commentators often assume that

these differences can be traced to cultural differences or

competing “family values.” Sometimes these are expressed in a

positive way, as in the stereotype that Latino families have more

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extended ties because of their historical traditions and religious

values. Other times these are expressed in a negative way, as

when Blacks are said to lack family values because of the

cultural legacy of slavery and subsequent years of oppression.

Either way, differences in family behaviors are often explained

by differences in cultural heritage.

In contrast, in our research, we find that social class rather

than culture is the key to understanding the differences in

extended family ties and behaviors between Whites and ethnic

minorities. To be sure, differences in cultural values do exist.

Blacks and Latinos/as are more likely than Whites to say they

believe that extended family is important; both groups are also

more likely to attend religious services. Blacks tend to hold

more egalitarian beliefs about gender than Whites, while

Latinos/as, especially Mexican Americans, tend to hold more

“traditional” views. But these differences in values do not

explain racial differences in actual involvement with relatives.

It is, instead, social class that matters most in explaining these

differences.

It is widely known (and confirmed by U.S. Census data

presented in Table 1) that Blacks and Latinos/as tend to have far

less income and education than Whites. Families of color are

also much more likely than White families to be below the

official poverty line. In our research, we find that the

differences in extended family ties and behaviors between

Whites and ethnic minorities are primarily the result of these

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social class disparities.

TABLE 1 Education, Income, and Poverty Rates by Race

WHITES BLACKS LATINOS/AS

Median household income $50,784 $30,858 $35,967

Percentage below poverty line 8.4% 24.7% 22.0%

Education:

Less than high school 14.5% 27.6% 47.6%

High school graduate 58.5% 58.1% 42.0%

Bachelor’s degree or higher 27.0% 14.3% 10.4%

Data from U.S. Census Bureau, 2005.

Simply put, White, Black, and Latino/a individuals with

the same amount of income and education have similar

patterns of involvement with their extended families. Just like

poor minorities, impoverished Whites are more likely to

exchange practical aid and visit with extended kin than are their

wealthier counterparts. Just like middle-class Whites, middle-

class Blacks and Latinos/as are more likely to talk about their

personal concerns or share money with relatives than are their

poorer counterparts.

More specifically, it is because Whites tend to have more

income than Blacks and Latinos/as that they are more likely to

give money to their relatives or get it from them. And the higher

levels of emotional support among White women can be at least

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in part traced to their higher levels of education, perhaps

because schooling encourages women to talk out their

problems and makes them more likely to give (and get) advice.

Conversely, we find that the relative economic deprivation of

racial/ethnic minorities leads in many ways to higher levels of

extended family involvement. Individuals’ lack of economic

resources increases their need for help from kin and boosts

their willingness to give help in return. Because Blacks and

Latinos/as typically have less income and education than

Whites, they come to rely more on their relatives for daily needs

such as child care, household tasks, or rides. The tendency of

Blacks and Latinos/as to live with or near kin may also reflect

their greater need for kin cooperation, as well as their

decreased opportunities and pressures to move away, including

moving for college.

Social Class and Familial Trade-Offs How do our findings on race, social class, and familial

involvement challenge common understandings of minority

families? They show that poor minority families do not

necessarily lead lives of social isolation or lack strong family

solidarities. The lower rates of marriage among impoverished

groups may reflect not a rejection of family values but a realistic

assessment of how little a woman (and her children) may be

able to depend upon marriage. Sociologists Kathryn Edin and

Maria Kefalas (2007) recently found that because disadvantaged

men are often unable to offer women the kind of economic

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security that advantaged men provide, poor women are less

likely to marry. Instead, these women create support networks

beyond the nuclear family, regularly turning to extended kin for

practical support.

Reliance on extended kin and lack of marital ties are linked.

In another analysis of the National Survey of Families and

Households, we found that, contrary to much rhetoric about

marriage as a key source of adult social ties, marriage actually

diminishes ties to kin. Married people — women as well as men

— are less involved with their parents and siblings than those

never married or previously married. These findings indicate a

trade-off between commitments to nuclear and extended family

ties. Marriage, we have found, is a “greedy” institution: it has a

tendency to consume the bulk of people’s energies and

emotions and to dilute their commitments beyond the nuclear

family.

On the one hand, then, support given to spouses and

intimate partners sometimes comes at the expense of broader

kin and community ties. Indeed, married adult children take

care of elderly parents less often than their unmarried siblings.

Marriage can also cut people off from networks of mutual aid.

Married mothers, for example, whether Black, Latina, or White,

are often unable to obtain help from kin in the way that their

single counterparts can. Although the “greedy” nature of

marriage may pose a problem across social class, it is especially

problematic for those less well off economically, as these

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individuals most need to cultivate wider circles of obligation,

mutual aid, and reciprocity.

On the other hand, support to relatives sometimes comes at

the expense of care for partners, and can interfere with nuclear

family formation or stability. Indeed, individuals who are

deeply immersed in relationships with extended families may

be less likely to get married or, if they marry, may be less likely

to put the marital ties first in their loyalties. Several decades ago

in her observations of a poor Black community, anthropologist

Carol Stack (1974) found that the reciprocal patterns of sharing

with kin and “fictive kin” forged in order to survive hardship

often made it difficult for poor Blacks either to move up

economically or to marry. To prevent the dilution of their social

support networks, some extended families may even discourage

their members from getting married, or unconsciously sabotage

relationships that threaten to pull someone out of the family

orbit. As sociologists Domínguez and Watkins (2003) argue, the

ties of mutual aid that help impoverished individuals survive on

a day-to-day basis may also prevent them from saying “no” to

requests that sap their ability to get ahead or pursue individual

opportunities.

Overall, we should avoid either denigrating or glorifying the

survival strategies of the poor. Although social class disparities

are key to understanding racial and ethnic variation in familial

involvement, it is too simple to say that class differences create

“more” involvement with relatives in one group and “less” in

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another. In some ways economic deprivation increases ties to

kin (e.g., in terms of living nearby or exchanging practical help)

and in other ways it reduces them (e.g., in terms of financial

help or emotional support). These findings remind us that love

and family connections are expressed both through talk and

action. Equally important, focusing solely on the positive or on

the negative aspects of either minority or White families is

problematic. Instead, we need to think in terms of trade-offs —

among different kinds of care and between the bonds of kinship

and the bonds of marriage. Both trade-offs are linked to social

class.

Why Do These Differences in Family Life Matter? Commentators often emphasize the disorganization and

dysfunction of Black and Latino/a family life. They suggest that

if we could “fix” family values in minority communities and get

them to form married-couple households, all their problems

would be solved. This argument misunderstands causal

connections by focusing on the family as the source of

problems. Specifically, it ignores the link between race and

class and attributes racial or ethnic differences to cultural

values. Instead, we argue, it is important to understand that

family strategies and behaviors often emerge in response to the

challenges of living in economic deprivation or constant

economic insecurity. Therefore, social policies should not focus

on changing family behaviors, but rather aim to support a range

of existing family arrangements and improve economic

conditions for the poor.

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Social policies that overlook extended family obligations may

introduce, reproduce, or even increase ethnic inequalities. For

example, the relatives of Blacks and Latinos/as are more likely

than those of Whites to provide various kinds of support that

policymakers tend to assume is only provided by husbands and

wives. Such relatives may need the rights and support systems

that we usually reserve for spouses. For instance, the Family

and Medical Leave Act is an important social policy, but it only

guarantees unpaid leave from jobs to provide care to spouses,

children, or elderly parents requiring medical attention. Our

findings suggest that, if we really want to support families, such

policies must be broadened to include adult children, needy

grown-up brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles.

Similarly, Medicaid regulations that only pay for non-familial

care of ill, injured, or disabled individuals implicitly

discriminate against Blacks and Latinos/as who provide

significant amounts of care to extended kin. “Pro-marriage”

policies that give special incentives to impoverished women for

getting married may penalize other women who turn down

marriage to a risky mate and rely instead on grandparents or

other relatives to help raise their children.

Extended family obligations should be recognized and

accommodated where possible. But they should not be counted

on as a substitute for antipoverty measures, nor should

marriage promotion be used in this way. Policymakers must

recognize that support from family — whether extended or

nuclear — cannot fully compensate for the disadvantages of

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being poor, or minority, or both. Neither marital ties nor

extended family ties can substitute for educational

opportunities, jobs with decent wages, health insurance, and

affordable child care. Instead of hoping that poor families pull

themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps, social policy

should explicitly aim to rectify economic disadvantages. In

turn, improvements in economic opportunities and resources

will likely shape families.

References

Domínguez, Silvia, and Celeste Watkins. “Creating Networks for Survival and Mobility: Examining Social Capital Amongst Low-Income African- American and Latin-American Mothers.” Social Problems, 50 (2003), 1 (February), 111–135.

Edin, Kathryn, and Maria Kefalas. Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).

Stack, Carol B. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. In paragraph 1, what might politicians and social commentators mean when they describe black and Latino/a families as “more disorganized” than white families? How accurate is this label in Gerstel and Sarkisian’s view? Why might a politician find the term “disorganized” useful?

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2. What evidence do Gerstel and Sarkisian give that social class is even more important than ethnicity in understanding differences among families? Why is this a critical distinction to the authors?

3. What examples of “extended family solidarities and caregiving activities” (para. 1) do the authors provide? How common or uncommon are these in your own family or community? Do your personal experiences and those of your classmates tend to support, refute, or complicate Gerstel and Sarkisian’s analysis?

4. Explain why you agree or disagree with the claim that “social policy should explicitly aim to rectify economic disadvantages” (para. 20). What would this abstract language mean in practice?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

5. Read or review Gary Soto’s “Looking for Work” (p. 20), Larissa MacFarquhar’s “When Should a Child Be Taken from His Parents?” (below), or the excerpt from Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt (p. 73). To what extent could each family be described as “disorganized” (para. 1) and to what extent does it exhibit “extended family solidarities and caregiving activities” (para. 1)?

6. Carefully study the frontispiece to Chapter Four on page 341. What symbols of affluence does the photograph contain? How might Gerstel and Sarkisian read the importance of family background in the man’s level of economic achievement?

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7. How might Gerstel and Sarkisian read the cartoon on page 36?

EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

8. In this article, Gerstel and Sarkisian focus on just three groups — blacks, Latinos/as, and whites. What do you think the data would look like for other groups such as Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, or recent immigrants? Find data to support or refute your guesses.

9. Study the footnote on page 44, which lists seven articles by Gerstel, Sarkisian, and others. Based on the journal and article titles in the footnote, what can you say about the scope, purpose, and methodologies of Gerstel and Sarkisian’s research? To extend the assignment, read one of the articles and report its key findings to the class.

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WHEN SHOULD A CHILD BE TAKEN FROM HIS PARENTS? LARISSA MACFARQUHAR

In the idealized families of television sitcoms, child-

protective services never shows up at night to remove

kids from their home. Yet this is a common occurrence in

America today, as it has been for decades. Through the

story of a single mom trying to hold on to her kids, this

essay introduces us to the complexities of a system that

balances the sanctity of family with the urgent need to

protect some children from their own parents. Larissa

MacFarquhar (b. 1968) is a staff writer at the New Yorker

and an Emerson Fellow at New America, a think tank of

writers, researchers, activists, and technologists. Before

joining the New Yorker she wrote and edited for

numerous publications, including the Paris Review,

Artforum, Slate, the New Republic, and the Nation.

MacFarquhar is author of the 2015 book Strangers

Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Ideals, Drastic

Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help.

What should you do if child-protective services comes to your

house?

You will hear a knock on the door, often late at night. You

don’t have to open it, but if you don’t the caseworker outside

may come back with the police. The caseworker will tell you

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you’re being investigated for abusing or neglecting your

children. She will tell you to wake them up and tell them to take

clothes off so she can check their bodies for bruises and marks.

She will interview you and your kids separately, so you can’t

hear what she’s asking them or what they’re saying. She opens

your fridge and your cabinets, checking to see if you have food,

and what kind of food. She looks around for unsafe conditions,

for dirt, for mess, for bugs or rats. She takes notes. You must be

as calm and deferential as possible. However disrespectful and

invasive she is, whatever awful things she accuses you of, you

must remember that child protection has the power to remove

your kids at any time if it believes them to be in danger. You can

tell her the charges are not true, but she’s required to

investigate them anyway. If you get angry, your anger may be

taken as a sign of mental instability, especially if the caseworker

herself feels threatened. She has to consider the possibility that

you may be hurting your kids, that you may even kill one of

them. You may never find out who reported you. If your child

has been hurt, his teacher or doctor may have called the state

child-abuse hotline, not wanting to assume, as she might in a

richer neighborhood, that it was an accident. But it could also

have been a neighbor who heard yelling, or an ex-boyfriend

who wants to get back at you, or someone who thinks you drink

too much or simply doesn’t like you. People know that a call to

the hotline is an easy way to blow up your life. If the caseworker

believes your kids are in imminent danger, she may take them.

You may not be allowed to say goodbye. It is terrifying for them

to be taken from their home by a stranger, but this experience

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has repercussions far beyond the terror of that night. Your

children may hear accusations against you — you’re using

drugs, your apartment is filthy, you fail to get them to school,

you hit them — and even if they don’t believe these things they

will remember. And, after your children see that you are

powerless to protect them, this will permanently change things

between you. Whatever happens later — whether the kids come

back the next week, or in six months, or don’t come back at all

— that moment can never be undone.

The caseworker has sixty days to investigate the charges

against you. She will want you to admit to your faults as a

parent, and you should, because this tells her you have insight

into your problems and that you have a sincere desire to accept

her help and change your life. But you should admit only so

much, because she is not just there to help you: she is also there

to evaluate and report on you, so anything you say may be used

against you in court. The Administration for Children’s Services

— A.C.S., as child-protective services is known in New York City

— has to prove its allegations against you only by

“preponderance of the evidence.” It can bring in virtually

anything as evidence — an old drug habit, even if you’ve been

clean for years; a D.U.I.; a diagnosis of depression. While the

court case is proceeding, you may be asked to submit to drug

testing or a mental-health evaluation, to attend parenting

classes or anger-management classes or domestic-violence

classes and some kind of therapy. These services are intended

to help you, but, if you want to get your kids back, they are not

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really voluntary, even though they may be so time-consuming

and inflexibly scheduled that you lose your job. The more

obedient you are, the better things will go for you. Even if you

are innocent and can prove it, it could be more than a year

before you get a hearing, and during those crucial months your

compliance and deference are the currency that buys you visits

with your children.

When should you take a child from his parents?

You must start your investigation within twenty-four hours

of the hotline call. Go at night — people are more likely to be

home. As you look around, you have to be very, very careful,

because if you miss something it will be partly your fault if a

child ends up hurt, or dead. You may be shocked by the living

conditions you encounter, but you’re not allowed to remove

children solely because of poverty — if, for instance, there’s no

food in the kitchen because the parent’s food stamps have run

out — only for “imminent risk” due to abuse or neglect. But it’s

often difficult to draw a line between poverty and neglect.

When a child has been left alone because his mother can’t

afford childcare and has to go to work, is that poverty or

neglect? What if the child has been injured because there wasn’t

an adult there to prevent it? Unless you’ve become desensitized

through repetition, emergency removals are awful. Parents may

scream at you and call you terrible names. Sometimes a parent

will get violent. When you suspect in advance that a situation is

going to be dicey, you can bring a colleague or a police officer,

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but sometimes things turn very fast and you’re on your own. If

you remove the children that night, you will take them to a

processing center to be assigned to a temporary foster home.

Once you get there, it could take a long time for a home to be

found — many hours. The children sit and wait, along with

other children in the same situation. They may be crying, but

it’s unlikely you will be able to comfort them, because you may

never have met them before, and you have just separated them

from their parents. If the children ask you where they’re going

next, or when they’ll go home, or if they’ll stay together with

their brothers and sisters, you can’t answer them, because you

don’t know.

After that first visit, you have sixty days to investigate the

charges. You should interview the child’s teacher, his

pediatrician, and anyone else you think relevant. You should

seek out neighbors and relatives; they may be too wary to talk to

you, or else so eager to talk that you suspect they’re trying to get

the parent in trouble. You must also draw out the parent

herself; this is tricky, because you must play two conflicting

roles — helper and investigator. Even if you feel for the parent

and believe her kids should not be taken away, that is not the

end of the story, because the final decision to ask in court for

the removal of children is not yours to make; your supervisor,

or your supervisor’s manager, will make it. Even though this

manager has likely never met the parent or her kids, she may

override your recommendation and take what she believes to be

the safer course of action. Many at A.C.S. believe that taking

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kids from their parents is the cautious thing to do. Nobody

wants to end up on the front page of the Daily News. You are

working to protect children, and you will remind yourself of

that when your job gets really difficult. Maybe once or twice a

parent will thank you, and tell you that the services you

provided made a difference in her life, and you will feel that

those thanks make up for all the other parents who cursed at

you and called you a baby snatcher. But that’s unlikely. The

turnover among A.C.S. caseworkers is very high.

This is how Mercedes describes what happened. She was

running a bath for her children. It was 2009, so Leslie was

eleven months old and Camron was two. (To protect her kids’

privacy, Mercedes provided pseudonyms.) She plugged in her

curling iron, because she was planning to curl and wrap her

hair while they were in the tub. The kids were playing with toys

in the living room. She left the curling iron on the side of the

sink and went to fetch towels. She heard crying and, running

back to the bathroom, she saw that Leslie had pulled the hot

curling iron off the sink by its dangling cord, and it had fallen

on her legs and burned them. She looked at the burns and they

weren’t blistering, so she figured they were O.K.

The next day, at her cousin’s house, she saw that the burns

had blistered, and announced that she was going to take Leslie

to the E.R., but her aunt told her, Do not go to the E.R. If they

see those burns, child services will take your kids. So she didn’t.

The next day, she went to her mother’s house. She and her

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mother started fighting, as they usually did, and she left the

apartment with Leslie and sat with her outside. It was a warm

night. She saw two women she didn’t know walk past her and

into the building. Her mother called her phone and told her to

come upstairs. The two women were in her mother’s

apartment, they told her they were from A.C.S., and had come

to see what happened to the baby.

She answered a few questions, growing increasingly

outraged, and then, guessing her mother had called A.C.S. to get

back at her, began cursing at her and screaming that she would

never see her grandchildren again. She started putting on

Leslie’s clothes to leave, but the A.C.S. women told her that first

they had to take photographs of Leslie’s burns. Mercedes said

no, she was going, and one of the women said, Miss, you are

making me real nervous right now. The women left, but a few

minutes later they came back, accompanied by a couple of

policemen. Mercedes sat on the floor crying, holding Camron

and Leslie and begging the women, Don’t take my kids, please

don’t take my kids. But her mother, believing it was best to

comply, picked up Camron and then Leslie and gave them to

the women, both kids wailing, and the women took them away.

Mercedes grew up in Brooklyn. Her father was a drunk,

who beat her and her mother. One time he nearly killed them,

trying to run their car off the road as they fled from him on the

Belt Parkway. When Mercedes was old enough to understand

what was going on, she started calling the cops on him. When

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she was older still, she started running away, at which point her

mother called the authorities on her. When she was a teenager,

her mother sat the kids down and they voted on whether they

should kick their father out of the house. Mercedes’s younger

brother, who was six, voted no, but Mercedes and her older

brother and her mother voted yes, so her father left. Mercedes

got pregnant when she was fourteen, but her boyfriend beat her

up and she lost the baby. When she was eighteen she got

pregnant again. Her father turned up and beat her, but she

didn’t miscarry, and in 2007 she had her first baby, Camron.

Camron’s father had told her to get an abortion, and was

violent with her, too, so her mother came and brought her

home. “She told me, ‘I’m going to help you with the baby, I got

you,’ “ Mercedes says. But although Mercedes and her mother

were best friends when they weren’t living together — they

talked every day on the phone, spent every weekend together —

when they were in the same house they fought constantly, and

when Camron was eight months old Mercedes’s mother threw

her out, so Mercedes and the baby moved into a shelter. When

she got pregnant again, with Leslie, the same thing happened:

she moved in with her mother and then ended up in a shelter

again six months later. It was in this second shelter that the

incident with the curling iron occurred.

At the Bronx Family Court, A.C.S. argued that Mercedes had

burned Leslie with the curling iron on purpose, but the judge

was not persuaded. Rejecting the charges of abuse, she issued a

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lesser finding of neglect, because Mercedes had failed to

supervise her children properly and had not taken Leslie to the

hospital. The children were put into foster care with Mercedes’s

cousin, and Mercedes set about doing what A.C.S. told her she

had to do to get them back—going to parenting class, submitting

to inspections by a caseworker. By this time, she was pregnant

again. “The first thing that caseworker said to me when she met

me was not ‘Hello’ but ‘Oh, you’re pregnant again? They ain’t

going to do nothing but take that baby, too.’ That was the first

thing that came out of her mouth.” But the caseworker was

wrong: shortly before Mercedes gave birth to her third child,

Tiana, the judge gave Camron and Leslie back to Mercedes, on

the condition that she live with her mother.

A.C.S. was still uneasy about Mercedes, however. Right after

Tiana was born it requested that the court find “derivative

neglect” of Tiana by Mercedes, on the ground that she had been

found to neglect Camron and Leslie, and argued that all three

children should be taken into foster care. It pointed out that

Mercedes’s home had been observed to be unsanitary on at least

two occasions, that she had refused to participate in drug

treatment despite admitting that she smoked marijuana

“whenever I get the urge,” and had missed two child-safety

conferences, and therefore posed an imminent risk to Tiana’s

life or health. But the children’s attorney argued that Mercedes

should be allowed to keep the baby, and the judge agreed.

Six months later, A.C.S. filed another petition to remove the

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children: Leslie had cellulitis and eczema, and Tiana was

seriously underweight, and A.C.S. argued that the persistence of

these problems suggested that Mercedes was failing to care for

them properly. The judge pointed out that since Tiana had not

gained weight even during a two-week stay in the hospital, it

was not clear that Mercedes had anything to do with it. (Years

later, Tiana was given a diagnosis of growth-hormone

deficiency.) Moreover, she said, there was a strong bond

between mother and infant, the disruption of which would only

make things worse. Three months after that, A.C.S. tried to

remove Tiana a third time, but again the judge said no.

Mercedes fought with her mother and moved with the

kids to a shelter again, but there were bedbugs, so she left. The

next day she took Leslie and Tiana to the doctor, and he told her

they were so sick he wanted to admit them both to the hospital.

For a couple of nights she and Camron slept in the girls’ hospital

room, but the hospital kicked them out. Then, soon afterward,

Mercedes’s mother and a woman friend of hers from church

turned up at the hospital, along with a caseworker from A.C.S.

The caseworker told Mercedes that since she didn’t have

anywhere for Camron to go she had to give him to either her

mother or the friend, or else A.C.S. would take all three kids. As

Mercedes understood the arrangement, the caseworker

promised her that, if she gave up Camron temporarily, then

when the girls were released from the hospital A.C.S. would get

the family on a priority list for proper housing and she would

get Camron back. Mercedes desperately needed housing, and

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she didn’t have anywhere else for Camron to go, so she said

O.K. Because she was still angry with her mother, she told the

caseworker that Camron could go with the friend. That turned

out to be the wrong decision.

Leslie was released from the hospital a few days later, and

she was given to the friend, too. Mercedes kept calling A.C.S.,

asking when she was getting her kids back. Tiana was still in the

hospital — were they waiting for her to be released? Why did

she not have Leslie? When was she going to get her housing?

What was going on? But now a caseworker was telling her that

she had given up all three children of her own free will.

The judge on Mercedes’s case was Carol Sherman, who had

worked in family court in various capacities for nearly forty

years. As a law student, she had studied reformatories in

Massachusetts and was appalled by what she saw — children

being held in prisonlike conditions, with only the most

rudimentary attempts at education — so when she graduated

she looked for an organization that defended children in court.

She found only one, the Juvenile Rights Division of the Legal

Aid Society in New York, and went to work there in the summer

of 1971. The reason she could find only one such organization

was that, until a few years before, juvenile defense had not been

thought necessary. The Progressive Era creators of family

court had imagined its judges as quasi-parents, helping rather

than punishing, ruling benevolently in a child’s best interest.

But, in 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that it was irrelevant

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whether a judge felt benevolent or not: family court had the

power to deprive citizens of their liberty, and that kind of state

power had to be restrained by the law, so a juvenile delinquent

was entitled to an attorney.

The mission to protect children, combined with the

excitement of creating a whole new field of law, made the

Juvenile Rights Division in the early seventies a thrilling place

to be. Martin Guggenheim, now a professor of law at N.Y.U.,

arrived at the same time that Sherman did, and together they

felt themselves to be part of a righteous crusade on behalf of

their underage clients. “We defended murderers and muggers

with zeal,” he says. “And if our client was found guilty and sent

away, we’d say, That fucking judge. We were warriors!”

When Sherman and Guggenheim started out, their caseload

was almost all delinquencies. But then growing awareness of

“battered-child syndrome” — an awareness that the abuse of

children at home was not a rare pathology but a frequent

occurrence that demanded attention — led, in 1974, to the Child

Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. The Juvenile Rights

Division saw more and more abuse and neglect cases, and as

this happened a divide opened among the warriors. To

Sherman, it seemed clear that these new cases were very

different — that whereas in the delinquency cases children

accused of crimes had to be protected from the state, in the

neglect and abuse cases the state itself was protecting children,

from their parents. But to Guggenheim the child-welfare cases

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and the delinquency cases looked all too similar: in both, the

state possessed the fearsome power to remove children from

their homes, and so in both that power had to be kept in check.

By the time Sherman became a judge, in 2008, a great deal

had changed in family court. In the eighties and nineties,

putting children in foster care was very common: in 1991, there

were nearly fifty thousand children in care in New York City.

But study after study had shown how harmful foster care could

be, and judges had become leery of it; by 2005, the number had

dropped to eighteen thousand. (It is now under nine thousand.)

But this didn’t mean that all the children who were no longer in

foster care had stayed with their parents: many experts in the

field had come to believe that the solution to the problem of

children spending years in foster care was to speed up

adoption. In 1997, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe

Families Act, which required states to file for termination of

parental rights in most cases when a child had been in foster

care for fifteen of the previous twenty-two months. This gave

parents far less time to satisfy child-protection agencies that

they had adequately reformed, and made it far more likely that

they would never get their children back.

Sherman knew that foster care could be harmful, so she felt

more comfortable removing children if there was a relative who

could pass a background check and take them — she believed

that children almost always did better with family.… She

worked tirelessly, aware that she now had more power than

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ever to affect children’s lives. She read every report in advance,

she took detailed notes and reviewed them, she interrogated.…

When it came to abuse, she tried to parse the different sorts of

violence. Was the parent whipping with a belt, which was

painful but not usually dangerous, or choking, which was? And

why was the parent doing these things in the first place?…

Sherman became known in family court for examining the

tiniest of details. When inquiring how a child was doing, she

wanted to know everything there was to know about him. “I

want to see every report card, and if the child isn’t doing well in

school I order tutoring in the home,” she says. “I will order

P.S.A.T. and S.A.T. review courses. Information about

scholarships. My experience is that unless I give a very detailed

order the things that need to be done won’t necessarily get

done.” She was notorious among caseworkers for her obsession

with summer camp: if a child was not enrolled by the middle of

spring, she would issue an order requiring it. She found out that

one boy loved science but had never been to the natural-history

museum, so she issued a court order requiring his foster

mother to take him there. When he was adopted, she bought

him a book about atoms and tickets to the planetarium to

celebrate.

Although she issued dozens of orders in every case, she kept

track of all of them, and excoriated the caseworkers when they

weren’t carried out. Some judges seemed to be concerned

chiefly that their cases proceeded according to schedule;

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Sherman was not one of them. “Judge Sherman cares very

deeply for children,” Mary Anne Mendenhall, Mercedes’s

lawyer, says. “That is something you can never doubt.”

Sherman would often say, “All the children before me are

entitled to everything that my child’s entitled to.” To her, this

was a matter of social justice: she believed that it was not right

for poor children to be deprived of the after-school activities

and therapy and evaluations and tutoring and domestic

orderliness that middle-class children had, so when a child

came into her purview she did her utmost to insure that the

child’s life and prospects were substantially improved before

she was done with him. The trouble was, what to her seemed

like helpful services could feel to a parent like intrusion, and

the high standards she set could become barriers to

reunification. “It moved into social control very quickly, in her

courtroom,” Emma Ketteringham, the managing director of the

Family Defense Practice at the law firm the Bronx Defenders,

says. “I will never forget one case where a case planner had put

in her report that there was a lot of stuff in the crib. Judge

Sherman issued an order that nothing be allowed in the crib

except the baby.”…

”Carol does not see intervention as a terrible cost,”

Guggenheim says. “She sees it as a price to pay to avoid what is

for many in this field the thing to avoid above all else:

wrongfully failing to protect a child. She really has a Progressive

mind-set, in that she sees herself as the instrument of power to

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improve children’s lives. But, on the privileged side of town in

all parts of America, children are raised by drunks, by drug

addicts, by violent people. We don’t care how privileged

children are raised, because we’ve arranged our world around

the fundamental principle that the state doesn’t intrude on the

family. Equality requires that we give the same freedom to

underprivileged children as we give to privileged children — to

be raised by crappy parents.”

For a long time after she lost her children, Mercedes was

homeless. She couldn’t sleep at her mother’s anymore, and she

didn’t have close friends, so she floated from place to place,

staying in each as long as her host would let her, sometimes

staying with someone she had met that day. She refused to go to

a shelter for single women — she had heard there were fights in

those places, and people stole things. She was used to this. Her

life had been this way since she was sixteen — staying with her

mother, getting thrown out, staying with a friend, getting in an

argument, moving on. Besides, she didn’t have her kids, so she

barely cared what happened to her. “When they take your kids,

it’s like everything stops,” she says. “Your heart stops.

Everything stops. Then you’re trying to figure out what the hell

to do next. What do I do? Once they take them, you don’t have

no reason to be here no more. Your kids give you purpose.”

She was permitted to see her children each week in a room at

the foster-care agency, but she came to dread these visits,

because they were so short and saying goodbye was awful for

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everyone, and because someone from the agency would watch

them, taking notes on how she and the kids behaved together.

But mostly she dreaded them because the kids had started

saying things about her. They said that their foster mother had

told them that Mercedes was bad, that she was a drug addict,

that she didn’t want them back. Mercedes started coming late to

visits, and sometimes she wouldn’t show up at all, and the kids

would get very upset. Sherman ruled that if Mercedes was late

for a visit it would be cancelled, and Mercedes was late. She was

late for court dates, too. “Mercedes has no sense of time,” her

mother says. “I tell her, Don’t leave when you feel like it, stop

getting up when you feel like it, you got to be in court at twelve,

how dare you get there when it’s over?” The foster agency

warned the foster mother not to disparage Mercedes in front of

the children, but she continued to do it. (A.C.S., Judge Sherman,

and the foster agency all have a policy of not discussing open

cases.)

Before she took in Mercedes’s kids, the foster mother had

been earning a little money cleaning houses and watching

people’s children, but now she began receiving foster-care

benefits. Mercedes’s children were medically complicated, so

the payments were higher than usual. For “special children” in

New York, foster parents are paid up to $1,289 a month; for

“exceptional children,” the payment is $1,953; so to take care of

all three of them the foster mother was likely being paid

between forty-six and sixty-two thousand dollars a year, plus up

to seventeen hundred dollars a year in clothing allowance. If

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she ended up adopting the children, she would receive benefits

until each child turned twenty-one.

She wanted to adopt them. In the past, foster parents often

did not want to adopt, so if a parent’s rights were terminated the

children were forced to go to yet another home. To overcome

this problem, the foster agency that was supervising Mercedes’s

children had a policy of encouraging foster parents to consider

adoption. The trouble with this solution was that foster parents

were prompted from the start to form attachments to the

children, and their hopes were pitted against those of the

biological parents.

While the case dragged on and Mercedes drifted, the

agency was helping the foster mother with housing. “They done

moved this lady three times, and every time the apartment’s

getting bigger,” Mercedes said bitterly. “But you can’t help the

biological mother who’s showing you that she wants her kids? If

they would have done that for me in the first place, I wouldn’t

be in the situation that I’m in now, and I’d have my kids.”

Between constantly moving from place to place and feeling that

A.C.S. had it in for her, and wasn’t going to return her kids no

matter how hard she tried or how many parenting classes she

enrolled in, Mercedes had started to fray. “By this time, I’m

tired. I love my kids, but I’m tired. My mind is tired. My body is

tired. I keep getting — excuse my language — dicked around by

A.C.S. They’re lying to me, they’re being disrespectful. So I start

to disappear for a while.”

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Every time she came to court she felt surrounded by people

who were convinced that she was a bad mother and a bad

person, although they barely knew her. “At one point, we had a

court date when the lawyer for the foster-care agency first came

on,” she says. “And when we met outside he kept saying, ‘Oh,

you’re really clean.’ What the fuck does that mean? ‘I don’t see

nothing wrong with you, you look clean.’ Because I’m black I’m

supposed to be dirty?” She would sit in the courtroom

resentfully listening to the caseworker note when she’d been

late to a visit, or missed a therapy appointment, but not

mention when the foster mother was late, or when she missed

the kids’ doctors’ appointments, or that she had been telling the

kids terrible and untrue things about their mother. The lawyers

only ever brought up the bad stuff about her, she felt; never the

good. One time when she was at a conference at the foster-care

agency, Leslie burst into the room and said, “I have an

announcement to make — I love my mommy”; and then next

time they were in court there was Leslie’s attorney advocating

against reuniting her with her mother, and there was no

mention of what Leslie had said until Mary Anne Mendenhall,

representing Mercedes, brought it up.

The judge kept saying she understood Mercedes, because

they had been encountering each other in court for years, but

she knew only a few things about her life. “It always bothered

Mercedes when Judge Sherman would look at her and say, ‘I

know you very well,’ “ Mendenhall says. “Mercedes would walk

out crying and say, ‘She doesn’t know me! She only knows what

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they say about me! She’s never talked to me, she doesn’t know

anything about who I am.’ Just because of the number of pages

she’d read about Mercedes, to feel entitled to look her in the eye

and say, ‘I know you very well.’ I don’t think Judge Sherman

recognized what that meant to Mercedes. And how wrong it

was. And how many times she said it.”…

Because A.C.S. continued to complain in court about

Mercedes’s marijuana use, and because she hoped that a

dramatic demonstration of compliance and sacrifice might

convince them that she was determined to reform, in 2012 she

enrolled in a yearlong in-patient drug-treatment program called

La Casita. At first, it was hard. “I didn’t have no phone,” she

says. “You got to get rid of everything — no nails, no hair, no

makeup, nothing, you’re in there Plain Jane. I didn’t really

understand the logic of why you got to take my weave out, or

why I can’t wear earrings. I cried about my hair. They said, ‘To

strip you down to nothing and build you back up.’ But you

already feel like shit because your kids are in the system. Why

would you want me to feel like nothing? I already feel like

nothing.” She couldn’t believe she was there in the first place —

she looked around and saw dope fiends and crackheads, and all

she’d done was smoke some pot.

But then she grew close to a couple of the counsellors; she

felt they understood her and gave her good advice. They

believed in her and thought she should get her children back.

Little by little, she started to unfurl. “Like most women that

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enter treatment, she didn’t trust, she came from a broken

home, she was always fighting,” Yolanda Stevenson, one of the

counsellors, says. “She was angry at herself, and at the system. I

also think that she suffered from some form of depression,

which was taboo for her. For a lot of African-Americans, we feel

it’s taboo — we’re not crazy, why should we have therapy? But

when you’re fighting with your mother like boxers, that’s a little

off.” Mercedes felt that, after months of shutting down and

running away from her life, this was her last chance, and she

seized it.

Judge Sherman saw how hard she was trying, and how far

she’d come, and said that the kids could visit her on weekends.

She said that soon they’d be able to come for overnight visits, so

La Casita moved Mercedes to a bigger room, with enough beds

for all the kids to sleep there. Tiana was being fed through a

tube into her stomach now, and Mercedes studied up on it so

she would know how to take care of her. “I knew how to flush it,

I knew how to mix it, I knew how to put the milk and cereal

together and put the tube in and everything,” she says.

Mendenhall argued that the only remaining barrier to reuniting

the family was housing, and Sherman charged the foster-care

agency with arranging it. The agency resisted — it believed that

the children should be adopted by their foster mother — but she

ordered it to comply. Now it was only a matter of finding an

apartment: after three and a half years, it would be just a few

more months before the family could be together.

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That year — 2013 — Mercedes brought her kids to

Thanksgiving dinner at her aunt’s house. “Thanksgiving was

beautiful,” she says. “My aunt and my grandfather hadn’t seen

Leslie, Camron, and Tiana since they were babies. We ate, we

laughed, we talked. My aunt has one of them big dummies with

no arms that they have in defense classes, and Camron was

fighting that — they put boxing gloves on him and he went at it

and had a ball. He was play-wrestling with my brother. Tiana,

she was playing with toys with my cousin. Leslie was eating,

talking to my mother, talking to my aunt.”

Then, two days later, the agency told Mercedes that Camron

had said that during the Thanksgiving dinner she had taken him

into the bathroom and punched him in the stomach while her

mother held his shirt up. More accusations followed: Leslie said

that she had been abused, sexually and otherwise, by Mercedes

and other people in her family. Later, Camron admitted to

Mercedes and a caseworker at La Casita that the punching at

Thanksgiving hadn’t happened, that his foster mother had told

him to say that, and the caseworker recorded his statement, but

the foster-care agency said the statement sounded coerced.

A.C.S. investigated each of these reports but pursued none of

them in court. But as soon as one was closed another accusation

would be made, and no reunion could take place before the new

report was properly looked into. It seemed that nobody really

believed that Mercedes had abused her children, because she

was never arrested, and during this period she gave birth to a

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fourth child, Amaya, and Amaya was never taken away. But the

reports continued….

By the spring of 2017, Mercedes hadn’t seen her children in

nearly two years. She was living with Amaya in a shelter in

Manhattan, near the F.D.R. Drive. “So much time has gone past,

I don’t even know what my kids look like right now,” she said. “I

look at them old pictures, I know Camron looks older. He’s

taller. I know Leslie looks older and she’s taller. I don’t know

what they look like.” The foster-care agency was advocating

strenuously for adoption. The point of no return was getting

closer….

For Mercedes, spring was the hardest time of year,

because of birthdays. Camron’s was March 21st, Tiana’s March

30th, Leslie’s May 5th. Each year, she braced herself for this

dark period by going all out for Amaya’s birthday, in January.

She would spend her food stamps on a birthday cake and they

would celebrate together. “Your birthday is special,” she would

tell her. “That’s the day you changed me. That’s the day you

made me feel like I need to be here. Because I didn’t feel like I

needed to be here for a long time. They always made me feel

like my kids never needed me, they didn’t want me, they was

better off with this lady. I just lost the will to live. It was like,

whatever happened to me happened to me, I’m on the streets

until whatever. But, when I saw Amaya, that was my purpose —

to make sure she didn’t go into care. I made sure that that baby

stayed with me, and I’m going to continue to make sure that my

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baby stay with me. I refuse to lose her. I fucking refuse to. They

will have to kill me.”

“The reckless destruction of American families in pursuit of

the goal of protecting children is as serious a problem as the

failure to protect children,” Martin Guggenheim, Sherman’s

former colleague, says. “We need to understand that destroying

the parent-child relationship is among the highest forms of

state violence. It should be cabined and guarded like a nuclear

weapon. You use it when you must.” He believes the tide is

turning in his direction — nine thousand children in foster care

in New York City compared with fifty thousand, changing views

on drugs — but each time a child is murdered by a parent some

gain is lost. After the death of Zymere Perkins, last year, Mayor

de Blasio spoke on the radio about the case. “Our mission is to

save every child,” he said. “Unlike pretty much any other area

in government — we do not set a standard for perfection in

policing or so many other areas — in this case we do set a

standard of perfection.” He said, “Our job is to get there first

and intervene and stop it.”…

Children are killed all the time. But when confronted with

one particular dead child and asked if there is no limit to what

we should do to prevent another from dying like that — if

perfection should be the goal of child-protective services, and if

the state should intervene before bad things happen, just in

case — it is very difficult to say no, even if the price is other

children and parents suffering while alive.

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Mercedes knows that, at this point, she has very little chance

of getting her kids back. She knows that they will probably grow

up without her, and that she may not even be allowed to see

them. The foster mother and Mercedes’s mother aren’t friends

anymore. The photographs she has will get more and more out

of date, and Camron, Leslie, and Tiana will become people she

doesn’t know. What she hopes for now is that when they’re

grown, when they’re adults and can do as they like, one day

they will come and find her. “I will always be looking for that

phone call, for that hit up on Facebook: ‘Mommy, what

happened?’ “ she says. It will be years till then, but it’s been

years already, and she’ll survive as long as she has Amaya. “I’m

waiting for it,” she says. “I got time. Camron, that’s eight more

years till he’s eighteen. Leslie is, what, nine more years. Tiana is

six now. So I’m waiting for it. I’m waiting for it.”

ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. Who are the key players in Mercedes’s story? Where do their interests align, and where do they conflict? With whose views and actions are you most and least sympathetic, and why? To what extent do you think MacFarquhar reveals her own sympathies?

2. Can you imagine a story like this unfolding in the community where you grew up? Why or why not? What elements here seem universal, and which are specific to Mercedes’s personal history, family relationships, or social class?

3. Discuss the decisions made by Carol Sherman, the judge

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assigned to Mercedes’s case. What are her guiding principles, and do they strike you as reasonable and laudable? Do you think she is overzealous or guilty of micromanaging people’s lives as a kind of “social engineering”?

4. MacFarquhar quotes Martin Guggenheim as arguing that “Equality requires that we give the same freedom to underprivileged children as we give to privileged children — to be raised by crappy parents” (para. 25). Consider the roles A.C.S., the courts, and foster-care agencies play in Mercedes’s story. Debate whether they have too much power over her life and whether she seems to be treated unjustly because of her ethnicity or poverty.

5. Thinking Rhetorically Jot down several of the important issues raised in this reading — for example, the difficulty of knowing whose account of an event is more accurate. Then review the opening paragraphs of the article, before MacFarquhar introduces Mercedes (paras. 1–6). Which of the essay’s main themes are prefigured in the opening? How effective do you find the strategy of beginning by creating the dual perspectives of parent and caseworker?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

6. In “Looking for Work” (p. 20), Gary Soto recollects that Little John’s mother “told me in a polite but matter-of-fact voice that I had to leave because she was going to beat her son” (para. 11). Does MacFarquhar’s serious and extended discussion of child abuse cause you to reread Soto’s brief description of this incident? Why or why not?

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7. If you are not already familiar with the idea of a universal basic income, read “Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone” by Rutger Bregman (p. 456). How and to what extent do you think simply having more money might have helped Mercedes deal with some of the challenges she faced?

8. Using “Looking for Work” by Gary Soto (p. 20) as a rough model, write a fictional account of a single day in Mercedes’s life from the perspective of her mother, her son Camron, or Judge Sherman. Compare your narrative with those of classmates to see how you interpret the personalities and motivations of the people around Mercedes.

EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

9. Dividing the work among teams, research child-protective services in your state. How many children are removed from their families each year, either temporarily or permanently, and is the number trending up or down? What demographic information can you find about which families are most commonly affected (e.g., data by region, ethnicity, income, or dual- vs. single-parent household)? What laws govern protective services, and when were they passed? What agencies are involved, and what information do they publish about their missions, guidelines, and procedures? How do foster care and adoption work?

10. What resources are available in your community for women dealing with any of Mercedes’s challenges (e.g., free counseling, legal aid, or temporary housing)? How robust and accessible are these resources?

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VISUAL PORTFOLIO READING IMAGES OF AMERICAN FAMILIES

Freedom from What (2014), by Pops Peterson.

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VISUAL PORTFOLIO:

READING IMAGES OF AMERICAN FAMILIES 1. The illustration on page 66 by artist Pops Peterson closely

mirrors Freedom from Fear, an iconic painting by Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) that depicts two American children being safely tucked into bed while World War II rages in Europe. Find Freedom from Fear online and list all the similarities and differences you can see between the original painting and Peterson’s recreation. Then explain how you read the relationship between the two pieces, accounting not only for Peterson’s switch to showing an African American family but also for details like the doll, the facial expressions, the body language, and the newspaper headlines (the partially visible headline

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“Bombings Ki … Horror Hit” in Freedom from Fear and “I Can’t Breathe!” in Peterson’s reinterpretation). What is Peterson saying about freedom, fear, and race in America?

2. The young women pictured on page 67 are Lucy and Maria Aylmer; they are sisters — in fact twin sisters born to a white father and half-Jamaican mother. Explain how this image of biracial twins may complicate our understanding of racial and family identity. Do you think Maria’s and Lucy’s divergent appearances are likely to impact their life experiences? Why or why not?

3. The image on page 68 was taken in April 2015 during demonstrations after Freddie Gray Jr., a twenty-five-year- old African American, died while in Baltimore Police custody. What emotions can you read in the faces pictured? How do you read the signs and symbols in the image — the children’s hands, the father’s Baltimore Orioles T-shirt, and the photograph itself in its racially charged context? Compare this image to the portrait of Lucy and Maria Aylmer, who are also members of a multi-ethnic family (p. 67).

4. In the photo of Rachel watching her dad transforming into Paula (p. 69), how would the meaning and the impact of the image change if Rachel were not included? What claims do Rachel’s dad and the photographer, Mariette Pathy Allen, seem to be making about families, parenting, and gender, and to what extent do you accept or challenge their perspectives?

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5. What strikes you first in the photo on page 70 — perhaps the cat, the cute kids, or all the smiling faces? Or perhaps you notice right away that the family is interracial. In any case, you likely don’t see that the father here is transgender. Discuss this photo and others in the Visual Portfolio as images designed to disrupt our notions of family by combining everyday or even clichéd elements with controversial ideas about gender, race, religion, or immigration.

6. What do you imagine the relationships to be among the three people pictured on page 71? Assuming the photograph has been carefully staged, explain details such as the positioning of the three bodies, the camera angle, the furniture, the partially concealed faces, and the man’s ring. To extend your analysis, read the excerpt from Beyond Monogamy on page 100 and explain any changes in your assessment of the photo.

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FROM BECOMING NICOLE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY AMY ELLIS NUTT

In 1997, Wayne and Kelly Maines adopted identical twin

boys, Wyatt and Jonas. From a very young age, Wyatt

identified as female, and she is now Nicole Maines, a

transgender actress and activist. The excerpt below

describes key events in Nicole’s adolescence — her move

away from a school where she suffered harassment; the

family’s emerging activism on transgender issues; and

the twins’ enrollment at a progressive school where

Nicole could come out about her gender. Nicole was

featured in the 2016 HBO documentary The Trans List,

and in 2018 was cast as the first transgender superhero in

the CW television series Supergirl. Journalist Amy Ellis

Nutt (b. 1955) is currently a science writer at the

Washington Post. She won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in

feature writing for her series “The Wreck of the Lady

Mary.” Her 2009 series, “The Accidental Artist,” was a

Pulitzer Prize finalist and later became the book Shadows

Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man’s

Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph (2014).

Becoming Nicole, the source of this selection, was a 2016

New York Times notable book and was named the

Stonewall Honor Book in nonfiction.

Going Stealth

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THE MAINESES WERE ABOUT TO ESSENTIALLY shred the

world they’d lived in for the past decade and trade it for an

unknown one. Time was not on their side. They had to put their

house on the market, then find a home for Kelly and the kids in

Portland. They had to register Jonas and Nicole at King Middle

School, meet with the principal and teachers, pack up

everything they owned and put some of it in storage — and they

had two months to do it. The easiest part was registering the

kids and meeting with more than two dozen of the staff and

teachers at King. No one, except this group of adults at King

Middle School, could know about Nicole. If anyone found out

she was transgender the family would have to come up with a

new game plan, perhaps even move again, and that seemed

unimaginable. Could Kelly and Wayne trust the school to keep

Nicole’s secret? Yes, the administrators said. But there was one

other worry: Kelly wasn’t 100 percent sure Nicole could keep

the secret.

The temperature hovered around ninety degrees the day of

the move, and the heat baked the blacktop on the roads out of

Orono. Wayne was getting over a bout with pneumonia, and

when he finally slid behind the wheel of the rented U-Haul he

was already exhausted. There was little joy and a lot of frayed

nerves and the whole family couldn’t help but feel as if they

were somehow sneaking out of town. On the highway, the truck

whined louder the faster Wayne drove.

“Dad, it sounds like it’s going to blow up,” Jonas said.

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Wayne tried not to push the truck. It had clearly seen better

days, and the last thing he needed was for the engine to break

down. Nearly three hours later he finally pulled into the

driveway of the Portland duplex they’d rented, and the moment

the truck came to a stop, the engine’s manifold loudly

disconnected from the exhaust system. On top of everything

else, Wayne now had a useless U-Haul he had to get back to

Orono.

The University of Southern Maine is located in Portland

and its law school was just two blocks from the duplex.

Generations of students living in off-campus housing gave the

neighborhood a worn, dilapidated feel. There was more traffic

on the street in front of the house, including police cars and

ambulances at all hours, than either Kelly or Wayne had ever

experienced, and it took them quite a while to learn how to

sleep through the noise, especially with Wayne visiting only on

weekends.

The entrance to the house had two doors, separated by a few

feet, with the inner door secured by two locks. That was

something Wayne had never seen before. Then again, he and

Kelly had never felt the need to lock their house in Orono.

Immediately inside was the living room, with just enough space

for a couch and an armchair, wedged around a large cast-iron

radiator. Layers of paint from one tenant after another coated

the walls, and cracks in the plaster spidered across the ceiling.

Three windows opened up one side of the living room to a bit of

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light, but the house sat so close to the one next door, occupied

by six female college students, that Kelly and the kids could

watch them ironing their clothes in the morning. The back door

of the house was only thirty feet from the girls’ porch, which

was the scene of many raucous parties. Once, when Wayne was

cooking dinner, a drunken young man stumbled through the

back door and began talking to Wayne as if they were both at

the party.

“You better turn around and walk away before you get shot,”

Wayne told him.

The young man quickly sobered up and scampered out.

When they finally finished unloading that first day in

Portland, Wayne took a moment to lean against the bumper of

the truck. From the other side of the street he watched Jonas

and Nicole lug their toys into the tired old apartment. The

bright blue wallpaper was peeling, the attic bedroom had no

heat, and the only emergency exit was a small window with no

outside staircase. After more than a decade of marriage, he and

Kelly weren’t moving up in the world, they were moving down.

They’d bought the house in Orono when real estate prices were

sky-high and it was going to take a long time to sell. They were

paying a mortgage on a house only Wayne was living in and rent

on a new one where Wayne would only ever be a visitor.

Wayne found himself vacillating between panic and

depression. They were breaking up the family. How was he

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going to leave them here and drive home alone to Orono? He

didn’t want to let the kids see him crying. They really didn’t

know how serious it all was, and now Kelly was going to have to

shoulder everything alone. In truth, she was used to it. She’d

pretty much steered the family through one crisis after another

on her own. In a way, she thought, living apart might be good

for both of them. Now she could focus all her attention on

Nicole and Jonas without worrying about her husband’s

obstinacy.

Wayne shook off the mood. His self-pity wouldn’t do anyone

any good. Kelly was already trying to make the best of things.

While his wife scrubbed the apartment from attic to basement,

he went out and bought a small hot-oil heater, a thermometer to

keep track of the temperature in Nicole’s attic bedroom, and a

fire escape ladder for her little window. He also tried to glue the

wallpaper back into place — a losing battle.

Closing up the truck that first night in Portland, Wayne could

hear the faint sounds of a sports announcer floating over the

treetops from the high school football field a few blocks away.

Taking the kids to University of Maine games was something

he’d enjoyed when they all lived in Orono. So a few weeks after

the move, on one of his weekend visits, he suggested to Jonas

and Nicole they all walk over to the high school to watch the

football game. At halftime Jonas said he was going to the snack

bar for a hot dog. Nicole wanted to watch the cheerleaders

closer to the field. During a break in the cheerleaders’ routine,

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Nicole hiked back up into the stands and sat down next to her

father. Jonas was still nowhere in sight.

Nicole looked up at her dad.

“Sometimes I hate being transgender,” she said.

“Transgender kids commit suicide or they’re killed.”

Wayne was caught by surprise. It had been a hard year,

with all the harassment in school and the lawsuit, then this

move to a new city. But this seemed different.

“Why do you say that?”

“It was in a movie I saw. They said most transgender kids

commit suicide or are killed.”

Nicole had seen a documentary called Two Spirits: Sexuality,

Gender, and the Murder of Fred Martinez, about a transgender

Native American teenager. It had been shown at a meeting of

the Proud Rainbow Youth of Southern Maine, or PRYSM. Kelly

had pressed hard to find a place in Portland where Nicole could

be herself, and PRYSM was the only group that seemed like it

might be a good fit. The PRYSM meetings were held at

Portland’s Community Counseling Center, in a neighborhood

just north of shabby, and were mostly attended by older LGBT

individuals.

As PRYSM members filtered into a room at the center to

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watch the film, the smell of stale cigarettes lingered in the air.

When the room darkened and the movie started, interviews

with experts on hate crimes were interspersed with pictures

and videos of Fred and his mother, scenes from the reservation,

including the place where Fred was killed, and a close-up of the

bloody twenty-five-pound rock that was used to bash in his

skull.

Nicole sunk lower in her chair. On screen an activist

described other hate crimes against transgender people: a man

who was repeatedly run over by the same car, another person

who was set on fire. Nicole felt sick to her stomach. Fred

Martinez, the murder victim, hadn’t been a troubled teen; he

was described by someone who knew him as having “a high

degree of self-acceptance about who he was,” just like Nicole.

Fred’s eighteen-year-old killer, who was eventually convicted of

the crime, had bragged to his friends before his arrest that he’d

“bug-smashed a fag.”

Nicole didn’t tell her parents or Jonas about the movie when

she got home. She didn’t want to talk about it, and not too long

afterward she stopped going to PRYSM meetings, primarily

because she had failed to meet any other transgender teens.

“Many of the trans kids mentioned in that movie didn’t have

parents who loved and accepted them and were supportive of

their children,” he told Nicole. “They didn’t let them be who

they needed to be.”

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Wayne wasn’t sure if this was the right thing to say, because

being who you are was, in many ways, more dangerous. It had

proved fatal for Fred, and it was that danger that chiefly worried

Kelly and Wayne.

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t mean, dangerous people out

there who can hurt you,” he said. “You have to be very careful

about who you let into your circle of trust. You have to watch

where you go and who you are with at all times. Never go

anywhere alone.”…

On the Outside Looking In On the first day of seventh grade, the twins walked the half mile

to King Middle School under a chilly, overcast sky, saying little

to each other. The school, a sprawling two-story brick and

concrete building, sat at the bottom of a hill in a working-class

neighborhood. Two years earlier King had made the news when

it became the first middle school in Maine (and one of the first

in the nation) to offer birth control to students as young as

eleven years old. The decision was made after Portland’s three

middle schools reported seventeen pregnancies over a four-

year span.

When Nicole and Jonas arrived at King that September

morning, they were told they had to wait in the parking lot with

about five hundred other students before the first bell signaling

the start of the school day. This would be a daily ritual. To

Jonas, the other students looked much older and, for some

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reason, unhappy. Many were children of recent immigrants —

Africans, East Asians, Muslims, and Sikhs. In fact, there were

more minorities in their middle school than Jonas and Nicole

had ever seen in Orono. It was hard not to feel both intimidated

and terrified, and all the twins wanted to do was blend into the

background. The seventh graders were split into two sections

and assembled on opposite sides of the parking lot. They also

ate lunch and had recess at different times. So from the second

day of school, Jonas and Nicole actually saw very little of each

other.

Nothing about King Middle School felt right. It was large and

unfriendly, especially if you didn’t belong to one of the many

cliques. Having to hide who they were, and why they were

there, only added to the twins’ sense of not belonging.

Nicole was always acutely aware of leading a kind of double

life, never more so than the time, only two months into the

seventh grade, when a boy in one of her classes asked her out

on a date as they stood talking in the hallway. The boy was lean

and lanky with short hair and braces. And he was the first boy

to ever ask her out on a real date, to go to a concert. It took her

aback. She knew she couldn’t say yes, and yet she also didn’t

want to hurt the boy.

”I’m sorry, I can’t,” she said as gently and politely as she

could.

No explanations were asked for. “Can’t” was better — or at

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least easier — to say than “won’t,” and it had the added benefit

of being true. There was no way she could go out on any dates

for the next two years, a source of both sadness and frustration.

But it was more than that. It hurt deeply because it confirmed

for Nicole the reason she’d never been asked out on a date in

Orono, where all her schoolmates knew who she was: It was

because she was transgender. The word, the identity — she had

already fought long and hard for them. And yet, it was precisely

that identity that seemed to prevent any boy who really knew

her from getting too close. It was that distance she dreaded

she’d never overcome, and, ironically, this boy had just

reminded her of it.

There was an edginess to the school that made it hard for the

twins to let their guard down. Several times during the seventh

grade, brawls broke out. Neither Jonas nor Nicole had ever seen

someone their age in a fistfight, much less partaken in one, but

that soon changed. Jonas had developed a crush on a girl and,

trying to fit in, had made it known to some of the other boys in

his class that he was interested in her. Unfortunately, one of the

other boys decided he liked this girl, too, and asked her out.

Jonas felt betrayed and quietly seethed. Not long afterward,

when his class was playing a vigorous game of floor hockey,

Jones singled out the student he was angry at, and was a bit

more physical with him than he should have been. Arms and

elbows flew, shoulders crunched. Finally Jonas called the other

boy a “bitch” and the other boy retaliated. Before he knew what

he was doing, Jones turned around and punched the kid in the

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face. Immediately he realized he’d done something very wrong.

Fighting was something he generally didn’t do, but his anger

had gotten the best of him.

Maybe that’s why Jonas withdrew into music and playing the

guitar — things he could do on his own. At Asa Adams he’d

played the drums in the school band and orchestra. Maybe he’d

try that again. He signed up for band class, but on the first day,

when he walked into the room, he immediately felt out of place,

as if everyone was looking at him. When Jonas began

drumming, another student mocked him loudly. Wounded,

Jonas simply stood up and walked out.

As attuned as they were to what was happening with Nicole

on a day-to-day basis, Kelly and Wayne both knew they needed

to be more aware of what was going on with Jonas. He had a

tendency to be passive, to step aside and let the world — or

Nicole — not only rush by him, but overwhelm him. Their

whole lives, Kelly had made sure each child had the same

opportunities. What one received the other received, and most

of the time the twins were in sync, not only sharing toys and

games but most of their friends as well. But where Nicole was

impulsive, explosive, and domineering, Jonas was reflective

and intellectual. Sometimes indolent, he let others make

decisions for him. What worries he had, he usually buried, but

every now and then the came surging to the fore, sometimes

with disastrous results.

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Toward the end of April 2010, almost eight months after

Wayne and Kelly and the kids started living apart, Wayne

lingered on the phone with his son a bit longer than usual.

That’s when Jonas admitted to his father that some kids at

school had punched him.

“Why didn’t you say something earlier to your mother?”

Wayne asked.

“Because Mom would have gotten upset and she would want

to do something.”

“Do something” meant calling the school or the parents of

the boy who punched Jonas, and that was the last thing he

wanted. What he did want, just like Nicole, was to fit in, to be a

normal kid, not the brother of a transgender sister, and

especially not the identical twin of a transgender sister. Jonas

understood that at King Middle School you didn’t tell anyone

anything or you’d be labeled for life. But Jonas’s sense of justice

was acute. He told his father that when he heard another

student refer to someone as a fag, he couldn’t just stand there,

even if it wasn’t directed at his sister. So he’d confronted the kid

and the kid threw a punch.

Wayne told him he understood, but he still needed to deal

with things differently.

”I don’t want you to fight. You need to look the kid in the eye

and tell him not to do it again and if he does, then walk away

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and tell someone. There are better ways to deal with things.”

Nicole knew this, too. And while she never wanted to

respond physically to someone, there were many times she

wanted to say exactly how she felt but couldn’t for fear that it

would inevitably lead to being outed. Being true to her beliefs,

and not just about being transgender, had never felt this

dangerous. The hardest times were keeping her mouth shut

when she’d hear someone say “Oh, that’s so gay,” which kids

often did. She knew if she tried to object, the other person

would only say, “Why do you care? Are you gay?” And then she’d

be stuck. She had good reason to challenge others’ prejudices,

but she couldn’t because they hit too close to home. So she kept

her mouth shut, buttoned down her anger, and sealed off her

sense of self-righteousness.

Jonas, like Nicole, walked to school every day, and nearly

every day walked home right afterward and watched TV or

played video games. He had a couple of friends, who were also

Nicole’s, but neither twin hung out with them much after the

school day was over. No one could get too close for fear they’d

find out too much. It was strange and stressful, trying to be

“half friends” with certain classmates. As for classwork, Jonas

found it hard to motivate himself. He was extraordinarily

bright, but being around so many other disinterested kids

sapped him of his normal curiosity and love of knowledge. King

was an expeditionary learning school, modeled on the reforms

of Kurt Hahn, the German educator who also founded Outward

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Bound. The central idea was project-based learning, which

involved multidiscipline group activities. The theme that year

was invasive species, but as far as Jonas could tell, neither the

students nor the teachers seemed all that excited about the

project. There was very little joy in learning, on either side of

the desk, Jonas thought. By the end of the year he’d sunk into a

deep depression and admitted to his mother he felt like cutting

himself. Kelly immediately called Wayne. What could he do two

hundred miles away? He would talk to Jonas on the phone, but

Kelly would have to handle it with the school. She sat down and

sent an email to school officials:

Yesterday, Jonas came home and said he felt like cutting

himself. My husband and I have decided to pursue

counseling for him and I will arrange that today.

Meanwhile, we would appreciate all of you keeping a close

eye on him while he is in school. I will be giving him a ride

to school and walking with him after school until we are

sure he is not truly going to hurt himself. Thanks for your

help, and any insight you may have would be greatly

appreciated.

Wayne and Kelly both realized that hormones were likely

playing a big part in Jonas’s life at that moment. Jonas was also

a thinker, and sometimes he was just too far inside his head for

his own good. Kelly set him up with a therapist, and he

appeared to benefit from having someone to talk to outside the

family. But Jonas also liked figuring things out for himself,

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turning them over in his mind until he’d explored every nook

and cranny and felt satisfied he understood the issue. It was a

tool he had to use frequently at King Middle School because

nearly every day something got under his skin. He couldn’t

abide meanness in others, or stupidity, but he also knew it was

pointless and self-defeating to expend the energy to lash out

every time something bothered him.

Jonas knew this acutely because he had that same strange

ability his mother had, the capacity to look at himself as if he

were floating outside his own body, and when he did, he came

to the conclusion that it was unreasonable to respond to every

single thing that irritated him. Instead, he needed to keep

things at a low simmer, to suppress his frustrations and let

them out slowly. It was all about self-control, and Jonas saw

himself as immensely self-controlled. So he examined the

slights as they came his way, first figuring out why others felt

the need to act the way they did. Next he examined how those

acts or words made him feel. Then he put them away. Puzzles

solved, frustrations defused. It was all very neat and clean —

until it wasn’t.

Nicole isolated herself in her own thoughts as well. She read,

played video games, and talked online with former classmates

in Orono. But the house in Portland was almost too quiet when

the kids were home.

Jonas stayed in his room, Nicole in hers. Concentrating on

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homework was hard for both of them. Jonas, an excellent

science and math student, had let his grades slip, and Nicole

was flunking Spanish. She brooded about her future, convinced

she’d never be loved and never find someone who’d marry her.

Nicole was not only afraid of getting close to a person, she was

afraid of getting close to the ’’wrong” person and the secret

suddenly becoming very public.

It almost happened twice. The first time it came from outside

the school, just after Nicole had joined a club called A Company

of Girls, or ACOG, an organization that seeks to empower

teenage girls primarily through theater and the arts. Nicole,

who already enjoyed drawing, also wanted to explore acting. At

one of the meetings, out of the blue, another student asked her

if she was transgender.

“What?” Nicole responded.

Her heart was pounding so loud she was certain everyone in

the room could hear it, but she tried to remain low-key and

reacted as if she didn’t understand what the girl was talking

about. How had she found out? Nicole tried to be as blasé as

possible, and prayed the other girl would drop the subject,

which she did, but not before Nicole had spent a few anxious

moments worrying her cover had been blown. Another time, in

the girls’ locker room, a girl asked Nicole why she always

dressed and undressed for gym in a stall, not out in the open

like the others. Before she could answer, though, another

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student distracted the girl and she wandered off without waiting

for Nicole’s reply.

Eighth grade was not much better than seventh. The twins

had each other, and that was about it. Jonas watched TV. Nicole

played video games. Sometimes she closed the door at the

bottom of the staircase to the attic and curled up on one of the

lower steps to read a book. Her favorites were Luna and Almost

Perfect, two young adult novels about transgender youth her

father had given her.

Nicole had been miserable her final two years at Asa

Adams when she was out of the closet, and she was miserable

her first two years at King when she was in it. It was all so

bewildering and depressing, like never having a sense of

balance. How could she, when she and Jonas felt as isolated as

they did and were actively hiding a part of their lives from

people who might otherwise have become their friends?

Friendships, in fact, were more tease than reality. Just when

Nicole seemed on the verge of making a good connection with

someone, she’d ask her mother, “Can’t I tell anyone?” And every

time her mother said, “No.” When Nicole balked once and

asked why she couldn’t at least tell just one person, since it was

her life after all, Kelly answered her in no uncertain terms.

“It’s not just about you. It’s about the whole family, Nicole. If

you tell someone and it all goes downhill, we’ll all have to move

again.”

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After the ACOG incident, there was really only one other

close call, and it came on one of those rare occasions when

Nicole invited someone over to the house after school. On the

stairway leading up to her bedroom, Nicole had lined the walls

with drawings and photos. One of the photographs was a still

from The Wizard of Oz, autographed by one of the Munchkins.

The twins’ uncle Andy had gotten it for Nicole years earlier, and

it was inscribed “To Wyatt.”

”Who’s Wyatt?” the friend from King asked Nicole as she

passed the photo on the staircase.

“Oh, that’s my uncle Wyatt. He gave me the picture because

he didn’t want it anymore.”

Nicole barely missed a beat, but her heart was pounding.

When her classmate left she took the photo down and hid it in a

drawer.

The oddest part about being in the closet at King was that

anything even remotely related to being transgender felt

threatening. One day, Kelly received a call from Nicole’s

teacher, who wanted her to know that the following week there

was going to be a bullying-awareness day and a film shown to

all students that included transgender issues. Nicole might feel

uncomfortable during the discussion afterward, the teacher

said, so she was being given permission to call in sick that day if

she wanted. She did.

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Even when things were going well, it wasn’t about the danger

of slipping up so much as the sense of always having to hold

back. Eventually Nicole and Jonas developed a small, select

group of friends, but they were always held at an emotional

distance. For Nicole, it wasn’t about shutting people out so

much as shutting herself down. It felt especially hard one

weekend when she and about five others gathered at a friend’s

house and built a campfire in the backyard, then watched

movies. Everyone was so relaxed and the conversations often

veered toward the intimate. These were people who knew

Nicole, and yet didn’t. She knew them well enough to know she

could probably trust them, but not saying anything was a

promise she’d made to her mother — to her whole family — and

she couldn’t break that….

We Can’t Lose A middle-aged man wearing reading glasses stood silently at the

microphone before the House Judiciary Committee of the 124th

Maine legislature. Then he cleared his throat and began:

My name is Wayne Maines, I live in Old Town. I have a

thirteen-year-old transgender daughter. In the beginning, I

was not on board with this reality. Like many of you I

doubted transgender children could exist, I doubted my

wife, and I doubted our counselors and doctors. However, I

never doubted my love for my child. It was only through

observing her pain and her suffering and examining my

lack of knowledge about these issues did I begin to question

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my behavior and my conservative values….

When my daughter lost her privileges at school and both

children and adults targeted her, I knew I had to change

and I have never looked back.… When she was told she

could no longer use the appropriate bathroom her

confidence and self-esteem took a major hit. Prior to this

my daughter often said, “Dad, being transgender is no big

deal, my friends and I have it under control.” I was very

proud of her. It was only when adults became involved

with their unfounded fears that her world would be turned

upside down.… This bill tells my daughter that she does not

have the same rights as her classmates and reinforces her

opinion that she has no future. Help me give her the future

she deserves. Do not pass this bill.

Trembling, Wayne wiped away the tears streaming down his

face. It was Tuesday, April 12, 2011, and he felt like he’d just

come out of his own closet. He had spoken openly and honestly

about his transgender daughter, about himself and his family,

and now there was no turning back.

State representative Ken Fredette was the conservative

legislator sponsoring the bill with the support of the Republican

governor, Paul LePage. The Maine Civil Liberties Union and

several other organizations had gone on record opposing it. The

hearing before the Judiciary Committee was a chance for the

public to speak, and it was an overflow crowd. Before Wayne

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addressed the committee, Jennifer Levi, one of the Maineses’

lawyers in their suit against the Orono school district, spoke:

The only way a business could enforce LD 1046 in a

consistent and nondiscriminatory fashion without

resorting to gender profiling would be through physical

inspections, which raises serious privacy and medical

confidentiality concerns and, again, risk of litigation. Not to

mention that a person’s anatomy is personal, private

information that nobody would want to be required to

disclose (or worse, viewed) before being given access to a

public facility.

Levi set out not only the reasons why transgender people

should be allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity,

but logically, pragmatically, and legally why enforcing a

biological-sex accommodation rule would not work. Everything

Nicole, Kelly, Wayne, and Jonas had fought for, sued for, been

harassed for, was suddenly at stake, and not just for Nicole, but

for every transgender person in the state of Maine. Before he

spoke, Wayne wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, or even if

he could. Now he knew there had never been any other option.

For years Kelly had quietly borne the family burden of protector

and provider for Nicole’s needs. Now it was Wayne’s turn to step

up and speak out. He was oddly ebullient, as if he’d finally rid

himself of some suffocating weight, and it was all he could do to

keep himself tethered to the ground. All those values he’d been

taught growing up — defending the defenseless, helping the

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downtrodden — he’d always thought they meant standing up for

a friend or a neighbor or a stranger in need, not his own child.

No one, however, was confident LD 1046 would be defeated.

In fact, Wayne was worried enough it might pass that just days

after he spoke at the hearing he called Kelly from work and said

he’d been thinking about the state legislators and the upcoming

vote.

“I think they have to meet Nicole,” he told his wife. “We can’t

lose.”

Wayne liked to write things down. Partly it was an

organizational habit. He had many thoughts running through

his mind. In a way, he talked more to himself than to Kelly, but

it was how he worked things out. When he first began to do his

own searches on the Internet he was stunned to find so little

information for fathers of transgender children. Being the self-

starter he was, he realized that maybe he could fill the void. It

wasn’t that he knew any better than anyone else how to raise a

transgender child; he just thought it could help other fathers if

he shared his own questions and experiences. Maybe he’d even

hear back from someone. Every few months he wrote a piece

for the Huffington Post blog called Gay Voices. At first he posted

anonymously, but, encouraged by responses from other

bloggers and readers, he began to write more personally. The

responses were often a means for further discussion, such as

the column he wrote about allowing Nicole to wear dresses.

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After reading the post, one person wrote:

You may be correct. However, is it not a parent’s job to

show a kid some direction in life and not just giving in to

what they say?

Sorry, I would never let my son wear a dress at five

because I would not have given up on him so early in the

process, but that is the manly side of me talking. Whatever

he develops into later, I would accept, but it wouldn’t be

because I decided to throw him over the fence to the other

side at an early age.

Wayne and Kelly had heard all this before. It had taken

them both time to realize that it didn’t matter how much they’d

encouraged or discouraged Nicole’s feminine behavior. The

truth was going to win out no matter what. Wayne was

reminded of something Kelly had said when a friend “kindly”

suggested that perhaps Nicole was transgender because her

parents had given her dolls at such a young age.

“Are you kidding?” Kelly asked. “So what you’re saying is,

every man is just one doll away from being a woman?”

Nicole never flinched. For two days, along with her father,

she walked around the statehouse, a thirteen-year-old kid,

knocking on doors and stopping representatives in the

hallways.

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“Hi, my name is Nicole Maines, and I really want your

support to defeat this bill,” she’d tell each person she met.

A few walked away when they saw her coming, but most

were polite and listened. Of the 151 state representatives, she

spoke with 60 or 70. What bothered Nicole wasn’t simply the

injustice of the bill; it was the stupidity of it. She asked the

politicians, “How are you going to know if a person is

transgender in order to stop them from using the bathroom of

their choice?” For the past two years, she’d been just another

teenage girl at Helen King Middle School. No one knew her

story, no one knew she was transgender, and so no one thought

twice about her using the girls’ restroom.

Accompanying Nicole to the statehouse, Wayne made his

own personal pleas, distributing leaflets that began with a

single, simple declaration:

Today I am announcing I am the proud father of identical

twins. One is a boy and one is a girl.

Included in the handouts were photographs of Nicole in her

sparkly tutus, with scarves over her head or wearing her

princess costume.

Wayne went on to describe how, as a child, when Nicole first

began talking she tried to tell her parents she was a girl, not a

boy. He asked others to imagine how painfully hard that must

have been for a toddler.

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We have tried to live our lives privately, but the stakes are

now too high to sit on the sidelines.… Nicole is not alone.

Children as young as age four will experience severe

consequences [if the bill is passed].… These children

deserve better. They deserve unconditional love and

support.… Transgender children deserve the same level of

safety and same basic human rights that their friends and

their parents often take for granted. If each of us does our

part, other children, like Nicole, will not have to say,

“Daddy, what did I do wrong?”

Kelly was proud of both her husband and her daughter.

Public speaking was not something she was comfortable doing,

and she didn’t like her family’s life suddenly being pried open,

but it was all worth it if they could help defeat the proposed

restrictions on public accommodation.

There was one positive development for both Jonas and

Nicole, and that was the prospect of starting over at a new

school in ninth grade. The experience of going stealth at King

had drained them both, and Kelly and Wayne knew they

couldn’t keep it up. They still needed to be protected, but they

also needed to be in an environment where they could be

themselves, freely and without reservation. Casco Bay, a public

high school in Portland, appeared to be a good fit. Kelly met

with the principal and found the school was both progressive

and welcoming. But because there were never enough slots for

the number of kids who wanted to attend, a lottery was held

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every year. Jonas and Nicole put their names in, but only Jonas

was offered a slot. Kelly and Wayne had assumed the twins

were entered into the lottery together, as a family unit, but

when they contacted the school and asked them how they could

accept one and not the other, they were told those were the

rules. The options were dwindling. There was another public

school in Portland as well as a Catholic school, but the former

did not have as good a reputation as Casco Bay, and neither

Kelly nor Wayne was particularly religious, so their last best

hope was Waynflete, a private school, pre-K through twelfth

grade, of fewer than six hundred total students. Nicole and

Jonas passed the entrance tests easily and were accepted as

ninth graders for the 2010–11 school year.

Waynflete, named by its two female founders after a

British educator, opened in 1898 with forty-nine students. The

curriculum was based on the progressive educational ideals of

American philosopher John Dewey, who emphasized the need

for a balance of physical, social, emotional, and intellectual

development in young people. Its mission, according to the

school’s website, is to “engage the imagination and intellect of

our students, to guide them toward self-governance and self-

knowledge, and to encourage their responsible and caring

participation in the world.”

Waynflete’s mission embodied ideals that had become the

family’s watchwords. At King, Jonas and Nicole had arrived as

strangers and, for the most part, stayed that way for the next

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two years. But they arrived at Waynflete on the first day of

classes having already made friends during Wilderness Week,

an outing held every year for incoming students. Chewonki is

an environmental education camp on a 400-acre peninsula in

Wiscasset, fifty miles north of Portland. The incoming ninth

graders canoed, kayaked, played games, and hiked for miles.

”Hi, how are you?” more than one person asked Jonas as he

walked down the path to the campsite with a book under his

arm. One kid even stopped to ask him what he was reading. It

took Jonas a moment to compute what had just happened. At

King no one went out of their way to talk to you, unless it was to

make fun of you. Jonas had nearly forgotten how to socialize.

There had been the harassment in the fifth and sixth grades,

then the depression of the seventh and eighth grades, when he

and Nicole couldn’t tell their friends why they’d moved to

Portland. It was tiring keeping secrets, and it had exhausted

everyone in the family. Sometimes it had been so hard Jonas

didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. Now, all that

seemed to vanish. Life didn’t feel like a battle anymore.

Nicole’s biggest worry was no longer about keeping a secret,

but about how to finally share it, now that she and Jonas were in

a small, progressive school. She’d forgotten how to talk about

herself, something that had always come naturally to her,

growing up as an effusive, self-confident child who thought

there was nothing unusual about saying she was a boy-girl. But

as a teenager, especially after two years of burying her identity,

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she didn’t know how to resurrect it, to let people back in. Nicole

desperately wanted to, but she bottled it in, looking for an

opening that didn’t come until the class was on its way back to

Portland. She’d bonded with another girl on one of the first

nights at Chewonki when they both broke out in song, singing

Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.’’ So the two sat next to each other

for the hour-long bus ride home. Nicole was feeling

comfortable; her worries about being at a new school were

slowly melting away. There was just this one last hurdle. That

was when her new friend told her she was pansexual. Yes!

Nicole thought to herself. She smiled and nodded and told the

other girl she was transgender.

“Cool.”

And that was it. Relief, joy — every good feeling she’d ever

had about herself, poured right back in. When classes began the

following week, Nicole came out to someone nearly every day.

No one had an issue; no one turned away. One classmate did

ask her if that meant she was now going to start dressing like a

boy. Nicole laughed so hard she almost cried.

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ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. Review the opening few pages of this reading. What dislocations did the family have to cope with when Kelly and the twins moved from Orono to Portland? Discuss the impact of each of these disruptions. Is it an exaggeration to describe them as a “shredding” of the Maineses’ prior lives?

2. Why might Nicole herself be the most likely person to reveal her secret after the move to Portland? Why does Kelly forbid her to tell even a single friend (para. 50), and what do you make of Kelly’s decision?

3. Paragraphs 14–24 recount Nicole’s response to the documentary film Two Spirits: Sexuality, Gender, and the Murder

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of Fred Martinez. When you consider how and what you have learned about gender in your own life, can you think of times when you were surprised, confused, or frightened? Write a journal entry or short essay about such a moment.

4. As the subtitle of Nutt’s book emphasizes, Nicole’s transgenderism was deeply important to the entire family. How would you assess Kelly and Wayne’s parenting? What did they get right, and where may they have made mistakes? Also discuss Jonas’s experience of being the identical twin of a transgender girl. How well did he handle the challenges he faced?

5. Compare the middle school you attended to King Middle School, addressing size, ethnic makeup, educational philosophy, social cliques, discriminatory language, bullying/fights, and the degree to which LGBTQ students were welcomed, safe, and supported.

6. Nutt writes that Waynflete’s mission statement “embodied ideals that had become the family’s watch words” (paras. 75–76). What specific moments in this reading reflect the ideals of the mission statement? To extend the assignment, learn more about the school at waynflete.org and write a few paragraphs comparing it to one of the schools you attended.

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

7. Look ahead to “How to Do Gender” by Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Ferree (p. 480) and discuss how the concept of “doing gender” sheds light on Nicole’s performances of gender as a

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transgender girl. For example, you might focus on the need to have “more than one pair of gender binary glasses” (para. 11); gender policing and self-policing; or ways of bending and breaking gender rules.

8. Look ahead to Ruth Padawer’s “Sisterhood Is Complicated” (p. 505), which describes the experiences of transgender students at women’s colleges. Write a dialogue between Nicole and one of the students profiled by Padawer in which they discuss the complexities of being transgender in an educational setting.

EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

9. Becoming Nicole is far from the only source of information about Nicole and her family. Learn more about the story from one or more of the media resources below and share what you learn with classmates.

Nicole’s TEDxSMCC talk, “Transgender: You’re Part of the Story” — a moving overview of Nicole’s story in her own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=bXnTAnsVfN8&feature=share Nicole’s interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air: http://freshairnpr.npr.libsynfusion.com/transgender- activists-nicole-maines-kylar-broadus The segment about Nicole included in the HBO documentary The Trans List (2016) The ABC Nightline segment “‘Becoming Nicole’: Born Identical Twin Boys, Now Brother and Sister”: http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/nicole-born- identical-twin-boys-now-brother-sister-34539470

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An ABC Good Morning America segment which uses some of the Nightline footage but also covers issues of nature/nurture and parenting: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/identical- male-twins-brother-sister-34517564 A conversation featuring Nicole, Jonas, and Dr. Norman P. Spack, cofounder of the Gender Management Service clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital. The symposium was hosted by the Boston Museum of Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNvTFH0uHHU

10. The National Conference of State Legislatures tracks legislation on dozens of issues, including the so-called bathroom bills that have been proposed in many states. Check their website (ncsl.org) to see the history of LD 1046 in Maine (para. 60) and similar legislation in other states. Do you think the battle over bathrooms is over, either nationally or in particular states or regions?

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FROM LOVING: INTERRACIAL INTIMACY IN AMERICA AND THE THREAT TO WHITE SUPREMACY SHERYLL CASHIN

It’s common to think of intimacy as closeness within a

family, as romantic attachment, or perhaps as bonding

among a circle of friends, teammates, or fellow

worshippers. Sheryll Cashin expands the notion of

intimacy to consider its role in America’s race history. In

the example of the interracial couple Richard and

Mildred Loving, who were banished from Virginia in 1958

for the felony of marrying across race lines, Cashin finds

not only a particular courageous couple, but also a model

of a powerful antiracist practice — the nourishing of what

she calls “cultural dexterity.” This excerpt from Loving

recounts some of our history’s most shameful moments

but also finds hope in the increasing number of

Americans ready to abandon hate and embrace diversity.

Sheryll Cashin is Professor of Law at Georgetown

University. An expert on civil rights and race relations in

America, she has published widely in academic journals

as well as in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the

Washington Post, and other media. Her 2014 book Place

Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America was

nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding

Non-Fiction. Loving, the source of this selection, was

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published in 2017, fifty years after the Supreme Court

struck down bans on interracial marriage in Loving v.

Virginia.

To love beyond boundaries is the most radical of acts. It also

requires optimism. Richard Loving must have followed the light

of his surname. In news clips he didn’t smile much, perhaps

because his teeth were irregular. He didn’t look the part of an

ardent integrator. His buzz cut, rugged face, and tobacco-

scarred Southern accent marked him as a white, working rural

man of simple means and tastes.

Like many Southerners, Loving knew people of color. But his

relations with them were more intimate than most whites were

willing to countenance. His father worked on a farm for a

prosperous man of color, and his parents’ home was “down in

the community where all the Indians lived,” according to a

resident. Loving and friends would gather at a favorite bend in

the road or at the back of a general store they had turned into a

juke joint. Someone would bring a guitar or a fiddle, and this

motley crew would play music and hang out together. They

were black, white, racially ambiguous “high yellow”, or

“Indian,” depending on the perspective of who was observing

and who was claiming labels. Their crossing of color lines

irritated the county sheriff, who literally was the race police and

tried to break up their fun. Loving was perhaps the most

culturally dexterous among this group. He could blend in with

anybody, people said. He was playful and lived the life he

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wanted, loved the red-brown girl he wanted, drag-raced cars

with his high-yellow friends. In the 1950s, in Central Point,

Virginia — a hamlet with a penchant for race mixing — he and

others willfully defied the old Jim Crow.

Mildred Jeter Loving accorded with central casting. In a

documentary about the couple and the Supreme Court case that

she and her husband brought fifty years ago, she played herself

better than any actress could. She was dignified, slender, and

pretty, with a quiet voice that made people lean in to hear her.

Richard called her “Bean,” short for “String Bean.” She dressed

like the housewife that she was; her short, bobbed hair was

fuzzy at the roots but ended in shiny curls that betrayed either

her complicated lineage or the pressing comb. She appeared to

be a Negro or colored, words then used to describe African

Americans, although she identified herself as a descendant of

an indigenous nation rather than slaves.

In 1958, Mildred and Richard were arrested and jailed for the

felony crime of marrying. Virginia was among sixteen states in

that era still sufficiently obsessed with the purity of its white

citizens’ bloodlines to ban whites from marrying nonwhites,

with varying definitions for who could claim whiteness. From

1661 until the Supreme Court ruled against such measures in

the Loving case, forty-one states had enacted statutes that

penalized interracial marriages. Every state with such laws

discouraged or prohibited whites from marrying blacks, but

many statutes also named other groups that could not

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intermarry with whites: Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, American

Indians, native Hawaiians, and South Asians, among others.

There were legal bans, and there were social ones.

Marrying, loving, and having sex across lines of phenotype

were not considered normal or acceptable among most people

in pre-civil-rights America. In 1958, only 4 percent of Americans

approved of marriages between blacks and whites.

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court sided with the Lovings.

The civil rights revolution had roiled from a Woolworth’s lunch

counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, to a thousand similar

nonviolent protests in over one hundred Southern cities,

resulting in over twenty thousand arrests. When Police

Commissioner Bull Connor turned water hoses and attack dogs

on child protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, people of

goodwill supported the protesters, as did moderate Republicans

in Congress, who added their votes to overcome the staunch

opposition of segregation-forever Southern Democrats. The

Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination in education and

employment and allowed people of color to dine, shop, and

travel where they wanted. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 began

to desegregate politics. In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court

added to the movement’s momentum.

Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for his unanimous

brethren, plainly stated that Virginia’s ban on interracial

marriage was “designed to maintain White Supremacy,” an

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objective no longer permitted by the Constitution. It was the

first time the court used those potent words to name what the

Civil War and the resulting Fourteenth Amendment should have

defeated. Twice Warren mentioned “the doctrine of White

Supremacy” animating these laws, implicitly acknowledging

that the case was not only about intermarriage but also the

ideology itself. This idea, created and propagated by patriarchs,

had required separation in all forms of social relations. The

ideology told whites in particular that they could not marry,

sleep with, live near, play checkers with, much less ally

politically with a black person. It built a wall that supremacists

believed was necessary to elevate whiteness above all else. A

dominant whiteness, constructed by law, was embedded in

people’s habits. Perhaps Warren thought being transparent

about this pervasive racial dogma would help cure the nation of

its mental illness.

The onset of the long hot summer of 1967 may also have

hastened the court’s desire to help dismantle the architecture of

division. A race riot had erupted in the Roxbury neighborhood

of Boston on June 2 and raged for three days. The day before the

court announced its Loving opinion, Tampa, Florida, had

ignited. By the end of the year, 159 race riots had roiled the

United States, most lethally in Detroit, where a police raid on an

after-hours bar set off a revolt that ended five days later with

forty-three deaths and two thousand injuries.

There was an “impasse in race relations,” as Dr. Martin

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Luther King Jr. delicately phrased it — a wide gap in perception

between blacks and most whites about the aims of the civil

rights movement and the riots. Black people were outraged by

the inequality they suffered. They wanted opportunity and

freedom from police harassment, squalor, and isolation.

According to Dr. King, whites wanted improvement for the

Negro, but not necessarily economic equality. When black folks

moved beyond sitting down to order a hamburger to trying to

integrate the neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools that

whites dominated, a firm, even violent resistance ensued. Black

people trapped in high-poverty ghettoes expressed rage at their

limited possibilities, and white people considered riots evidence

that blacks were unconstructive and undeserving. This was the

impasse Dr. King described, alas, solely in terms of Negro and

white. In 1967, the many-hued people of the United States

were more focused on the Vietnam War and ameliorating or

fleeing the aftermath of the riots than on the Lovings’ victory

for quiet acts of interracial love.

Mildred Loving was motivated more by her desperation to

end her family’s years of exile from Virginia than by the civil

rights movement. In lieu of prison, a Virginia judge had

banished them from the state for twenty-five years. They had

settled, unhappily, in Washington, DC, a world away from tight-

knit Central Point. For Mildred, the last straw came when one of

her children was hit by a car. At her cousin’s urging, she wrote a

letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking for help. This

infant step toward her personal liberation ultimately led to a

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transformation in national consciousness about the freedom to

love.

Loving v. Virginia was one of a series of antiracist decisions

by the Warren Court. Neither it, nor its famous predecessor,

Brown v. Board of Education, would dismantle segregation, the

enduring structures of white supremacy. While Loving removed

legal barriers to interracial intimacy, the true import of the case

is only beginning to emerge, as social barriers to interracial love

have fallen and will continue to play out in coming decades.

In the long arc of history, the meaning of the case becomes

clearer. It is impossible to understand America’s persistent race

business without examining its origins, and antimiscegenation

was an enduring protagonist. Enacting laws to ban or penalize

interracial sex and marriage and stoking loathing about race

mixing were key legal and rhetorical tools for constructing and

propagating white supremacy. This ideology, in turn, was the

organizing plank for regimes of oppression that were essential

to American capitalism and expansion — from slavery, to

indigenous and Mexican conquest, to exclusion of Asian and

other immigrants, and, later, to Jim Crow….

Before Loving, lawgivers constructed whiteness as the

preferred identity for citizen and country and then set about

protecting this fictional white purity from mixture. Over three

centuries, our nation was caught in a seemingly endless cycle of

political and economic elites using law to separate light and

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dark people who might love one another or revolt together

against supremacist regimes the economic elites created. After

Loving, the game of divide and conquer continues, but rising

interracial intimacy could alter tired scripts.

White people who have an intimate relationship with a

person of color, particularly a black person, can lose the luxury

of racial blindness if they really are in love with their paramour,

their adopted child, their “ace” in that nonsexual way that one

can adore a friend. They can lose their blindness and gain

something tragic, yet real — the ability to see racism clearly and

to weep for a loved one and a country that suffers because of it.

For the culturally dexterous, race is more salient, not less, and

difference is a source of wonder, not fear.

This transition from blindness to seeing, from anxiety to

familiarity, that comes with intimate cross-racial contact is a

process of acquiring dexterity. And if one chooses to undertake

the effort, the process is never-ending. Some folks are more

dexterous than others. Some, like Richard Loving, are more

adventurous and get more practice than others at crossing

boundaries or immersion in another culture. I do not make the

simplistic and silly claim that interracial intimacy in and of

itself will destroy white supremacy or eliminate race. Instead, I

argue that a growing cohort is acquiring dexterity and race

consciousness through intimate interracial contact, especially

in dense metropolitan areas. Although I do not claim that every

interracial relationship automatically confers such knowledge,

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many do, leading us on an arc toward less emotional

segregation, of many but obviously not all whites choosing to

work at adjusting to difference.

With proximity, race mixing has always occurred in America.

In every generation, some people defied color lines to love,

befriend, or agitate with racial others. From the founding of

Jamestown in 1607, throughout much of the seventeenth

century in colonial Virginia, indentured and enslaved people

were allies and sometimes lovers without much distinction

among themselves about color. After 1660, their masters began

to introduce a color line to transition to and sustain the

American institution of black chattel slavery. Laws prohibiting

miscegenation encouraged struggling whites to see black

people as inferior and to police black slaves. The investor class,

those with the power to own people and write laws, began to

assess special penalties for interracial sex and interracial

cooperation, such as when servants and slaves ran away

together.

Lawgivers enacted Virginia’s first comprehensive slave code

in 1705, stripping African slaves of rights they had enjoyed

along with indentured servants in the previous century and

bolstering the white bonded with new privileges. The code

also included penalties against interracial marriage and

fornication among bonded people. There was no penalty,

however, for master-slave sex, which would become the

dominant form of interracial sex in the eighteenth and

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nineteenth centuries. Mixed-race people were common. The

one-drop rule that rendered them black or Negro has roots in

the Virginia slave code. Under that law, the child of a slave, no

matter how fair the baby’s skin or elevated the status of the

father, was also a slave.

Virginia’s slave code became a model for other states. As the

state with the most slaves and the most to lose economically

from any efforts to undermine slavery, Virginia relentlessly

policed interracial intimacy and interracial cooperation among

people who were not themselves slaveholders. The miasma of

racism that suffused legal code would soon spread to the

consciousness of men without political or economic power. The

1705 code helped reconcile rich and working whites, classes

that had been economic antagonists. Race pride would emerge

as a source of unity for all who could claim whiteness.

The color line and a discourse against race mixing had a

political function as well. In Notes on the State of Virginia,

Thomas Jefferson expounded on his belief in supremacy of

whites over Africans and offered his fear of amalgamation of

whites with blacks as part of his justification for not

championing black freedom. Slavery was an evil, Jefferson

admitted. Blame it on King George, he wrote in his first draft of

the Declaration of Independence, for introducing this stain and

thousands of dark bodies into the colonies. Jefferson couldn’t

imagine a country where whites would accept blacks as citizens,

much less intermix with them, his relationship with Sally

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Hemings notwithstanding.

Jefferson’s arguments with himself in Notes and with

others in correspondence are consistent with nearly two

centuries of subsequent discourse about the perceived problem

of race mixing and American identity. These questions arose in

the debate about whether and how the US should conquer

northern Mexico, which was replete with Spanish-speaking,

mixed-race people. The ideology of white supremacy that

animated slavery and Manifest Destiny placed politicians on the

horns of an American dilemma. What to do with adventurous

people who defied this ideology and muddied the lines? Hence,

dog-whistling in the nineteenth century was often about

interracial sex and, in turn, American identity.

In seven debates with Stephen Douglas in their bid for

senator from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln was forced to address

the issue. He countered Douglas with humor and played to the

electorate’s racism. “Now I protest against the counterfeit logic

which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for

a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife,” he said, to

laughter.

The Party of Lincoln prosecuted the Civil War, ended slavery,

and extended citizenship to black males. During

Reconstruction, the Radical Republicans offered the world its

first glimpse of racially integrated democracy, and several

Reconstruction governments repealed miscegenation laws. But

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in an odd twist of logic, white supremacy Democrats equated

black voting power with black male sexuality, and the myth of

the black man as sexual predator was born. Supremacist-

orchestrated hysteria about black bodies would soon ferment

the regular if strange public ritual of lynching. And when

Southern Democrats retook control, they reinstated

miscegenation laws throughout the states of the former

Confederacy. Lawgivers in Midwestern and Western states also

adopted miscegenation laws in an attempt to insulate whites

from myriad groups they might mix or compete with

economically. White political power translated into separate

social worlds.

For a brief moment in the 1890s, the South saw a resurgence

of biracial politics. Economically oppressed whites joined with

blacks to create a biracial farmers’ alliance that challenged

unfair financial policies. Seeing such alliances as a threat,

economic elites destroyed them with the offer of supremacy to

the white working class. Jim Crow became the only political

game to play, and Southern politicians competed with one

another by proposing ever-more-ingenious forms of racial

apartheid. Voting and full citizenship were reserved for whites

who could afford poll taxes. Race mixing was banned in politics

and life.

By the early twentieth century, interracial violence seemed

much more normal than interracial love. Lynching continued,

mainly though not exclusively in the South, and race riots broke

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out in three dozen cities in the Red Summer of 1919. Violent

mobs enforced social codes about the lowly place of the Negro

in America’s racial pecking order. As Gunnar Myrdal explained

two decades later in An American Dilemma, his classic treatise

on American race relations, the regime of Jim Crow proliferated

on the fear of black men having sex with white women. It was

easy to use this ruse to garner widespread support for

segregation, and false accusations against black men would

regularly incite public lynching. Families brought picnic

baskets to these ritual atrocities, and people fought over body

parts after a body was cut down from the noose. In this context,

the Virginia legislature niggardly redrew the color line to

narrow the class of people who could claim whiteness.

The state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which would cause

Mildred and Richard Loving’s arrest years later, was enacted at

the apex of the American eugenics movement. The ideology of

supremacy supported not only Jim Crow but also eugenics laws

authorizing state-enforced sterilization of undesired

populations and constricted immigration. In 1924, a federal law

banned or severely restricted immigration for all nationalities

except people from northern Europe. For much of the twentieth

century, the nation would continue to limit immigration of

colored and olive-skinned people and promote forced

sterilization and racial segregation — all of it to the benefit of

white upper classes.

Much has changed, although segregation, inequality, and

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race-baiting endure. Today, the Loving decision has a fan base,

and most people in the United States now approve of interracial

marriage. Loving has been chronicled in films, and the

decision has its own annual worldwide celebration, Loving Day,

on June 12. Loving was also a progenitor of the Supreme Court’s

2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which constitutionalized

same-sex marriage.

Since Loving was decided, race mixing and same-sex

marriage have gained acceptance, and social tolerance is rising

for people and lifestyles that diverge from white, patriarchal,

heterosexual norms. At least that is what removal of legal and

social restrictions against mixing is beginning to mean. Racist

or insensitive people often capture our attention. Millennials

make news for hanging a noose on a campus, chanting a frat-

boy song about lynching, wearing gangsta’-blackface to a

Halloween party, or murdering nine African Americans at a

Wednesday night Bible study. The majority of millennials,

however, are more open to our majority-minority future than

are their parents and grandparents. Much less attention is paid

to the 54 percent of millennials who have friends of a different

race or the 67 percent who say that they view increasing

diversity as a good thing.

In the 2010s, the American people changed their minds about

same-sex marriage with seemingly lightning speed, although

the patrons at the Stonewall Inn rose up against homophobia in

1969. Acceptance spread as straight people had conversations

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with gay people or their allies about their hardships and dreams

for equality. Attitudes about race will also undergo exponential

change in coming decades in part because countless individuals

will have acquired the scar tissue of seeing how race affects a

loved one or a friend. Many already recognize that we are all

trapped in the architecture of division supremacists and cynics

created. The rise of the culturally dexterous offers a possibility

for breaking free, for creating something that might have been,

had the first Reconstruction, or the second, been allowed to

stand.

Most who love interracially take the time to understand and

value racial and cultural differences. I believe that rising

interracial intimacy, combined with immigration and

demographic and generational change, will contribute to the

rise of what I call the culturally dexterous class. From cross-

racial marriage, adoption, and romance to the simple act of

entering the home of someone of another race or ethnicity to

have a meal, the dexterous cross different cultures daily and are

forced to practice pluralism. Though relatively few today,

ardent integrators will inevitably create a tipping point, as

Malcolm Gladwell defines it. In this case, integrators are

spreading the social epidemic or virus of cultural dexterity — an

enhanced capacity for intimate connections with people outside

one’s own tribe, for seeing and accepting difference rather than

demanding assimilation to an unspoken norm of whiteness. For

whites in particular, intimate contact reduces prejudice and

anxiety about dealing with an out-group.

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30 In a fast future, culturally dexterous people will redefine American culture and, hopefully, politics. The descriptor

“American” will no longer imply a dominant norm of English-

speaking whiteness. Instead, the majority of “We the People of

the United States” will accept that the country is and should be a

pluralistic mash-up of myriad human strains, a gorgeous

multicolored quilt, not a melting pot of assimilation. It is the

difference, say, between those who loved and those who hated a

Super Bowl commercial featuring “America the Beautiful” sung

in seven languages. The nondexterous recoiled at this montage.

No matter. As older generations die, as racial demographics

change, and as cultural dexterity proliferates, math will

overtake haters. The haters will continue to fight and fear the

future, but when a third or more of whites have acquired

cultural dexterity, it will be much easier to create a functional,

multiracial politics for the common good….

Today the ranks of tolerant, culturally dexterous people are

exploding even as non-dexterous reactionaries rage. Activists

for #BlackLives, for example, have more allies than they might

imagine. About 60 percent of whites under age thirty support

this movement and agree with its critique of law enforcement.

That the other 40 percent are more circumspect should not

diminish the potential power of people not wedded to old ways

of thinking. Culturally dexterous whites are quite similar to

people of color in their vision for this country. Those who live

integrated lives are less racist and more likely to support

policies designed to promote diversity and reduce inequality.

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Of course, there are potent reasons to be skeptical about the

political and cultural influence of racial intimacy. As Brazil and

other examples throughout Latin America demonstrate, intense

racial mixing does not lead necessarily to racial or economic

equality. If America is to be exceptional, a critical mass of

whites must act with allies of color to dismantle supremacy.

And so I offer suppositions that are both radical and modest.

In his 1967 lecture on race relations, Dr. King spoke of the

“millions who have morally risen above prevailing prejudices,”

people who were “willing to share power and to accept

structural alternations of society even at the cost of traditional

privilege.” Such culturally dexterous, other-regarding souls

were not a majority in 1967 and still are not in 2017. I suggest

that in the future, there will be a tipping point at which a critical

mass, though not a majority, of white people accepts that

structural change and sharing power is what rejecting

supremacy, with its embedded notions of white cultural and

political dominance, actually means and requires….

The ultimate question is whether more loving and more

pluralism will lead to the dismantling of stubborn structures

born of supremacist thinking. I dare to imagine what the

culturally dexterous class could deliberately dismantle and

create. Many a cynic will believe that we cannot overcome

supremacy constructed and reified for centuries or the

plutocracy that results. Some people are too disappointed by the

America they live in to hope for or imagine anything different,

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too grief stricken by too many killings of innocents, too beaten

down by racial or economic oppression. Those who still have

hope for a beautiful America owe it both to themselves and to

those who have lost faith to keep fighting. This is an agitator’s

burden. You never get to stop fighting for your vision for this

country. And when you tire, you pass the baton to the next

generation, which is hopefully more creative at agitation and

more open-minded than yours.

ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. What does Cashin mean by “cultural dexterity”? How is it gained, and why does she consider it so valuable?

2. Aside from romantic relationships, what kinds of “intimate cross-racial contact” (para. 15) might promote cultural dexterity? What settings do you consider most and least likely to promote dexterity, and why?

3. What is Cashin implying when she describes whiteness as something people “claimed” (paras. 18 and 24)? What does she

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suggest when she notes that whiteness was “constructed” as the ideal “identity for citizen and country” (para. 13)?

4. In paragraph 7 Cashin stresses that Chief Justice Earl Warren viewed laws banning interracial marriage as motivated by “the doctrine of White Supremacy.” Why was it important for him to frame the Loving case this way instead of interpreting it as a matter of injustice or discrimination? What point was he trying to make?

5. Thinking Rhetorically Cashin writes that “we are all trapped in the architecture of division supremacists and cynics created” (para. 28). What do the metaphors of “trap” and “architecture” suggest about race relations? Similarly, explain why Cashin stresses the importance of Chief Justice Warren using the words “white supremacy.”

6. Is Cashin suggesting that only those who have had personal experience with interracial relationships can move beyond the structural racism she sees as defining American culture? Do you think people who haven’t had such relationships are perhaps less tolerant and/or more likely to harbor racist attitudes?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

7. Look ahead to “From a Tangle of Pathology to a Race-Fair America” (p. 382), which focuses on the African American experience from 1965 to the present — that is, the half century after Loving v. Virginia. What elements of Cashin’s overview of race history carry over into the more modern era, and what elements were fundamentally changed by the civil rights

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movement? Overall, do you think Aja and his coauthors see white supremacist ideology in roughly the same way as Cashin does? Is their vision of a “race-fair America” compatible with hers?

8. Although Cashin acknowledges that some young people commit racist acts, she thinks “the majority are more open to our majority-minority future than are their parents and grandparents” (para. 27). With this in mind, how do you think she might react to the photo of Trump/Pence supporters on page 525? Is using a Confederate flag in a twenty-first century campaign clearly racist? Will shifting demographics mean that we won’t see something similar in another ten or twenty years?

EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

9. Cashin cites a 1924 law which “banned or severely restricted immigration for all nationalities except people from northern Europe” (para. 25). To what extent have president Trump’s attitudes toward people of color and policies on immigration undermined the development of cultural dexterity in America today?

10. Watch the film Loving and discuss how well the film conveys Cashin’s appreciation of the historical significance of the Lovings’ story.

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FROM BEYOND MONOGAMY: POLYAMORY AND THE FUTURE OF POLYQUEER SEXUALITIES MIMI SCHIPPERS

The classic American marriage was once assumed to be

both heterosexual and monogamous. “Traditional

marriage,” we’ve been told, is a union between “one man

and one woman.” As the title of this selection suggests,

however, Americans are beginning to embrace a view of

relationships that goes Beyond Monogamy. According to

Mimi Schippers, some Americans see “polyamory” — the

practice of having intimate relationships with more than

one other person — as a welcome alternative. Polyamory,

in her view, liberates those who practice it and

challenges the cultural dominance of white heterosexual

men. Schippers (b. 1964) is Associate Professor of

Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tulane

University and author of Rockin’ Out of the Box: Gender

Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock (2002). Her new

book, The Poly Gaze (expected 2018), focuses on how

monogamy and polyamory are represented in the media.

Beyond Monogamy, the source of this reading, appeared

in 2016.

A man and woman are in an open relationship. They have

agreed that having sexual partners outside of their couple

relationship is permissible. One night, when her partner is in

another city, the woman has sex with the man’s best friend.

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A man is in love with two people at the same time. He is

under tremendous pressure from his family and community to

be a respectable black man by attending church, having a

successful career, and marrying a beautiful, talented, and smart

black woman. The woman he loves is perfect, and he wants to

marry her. However, he is also in love with his best friend, with

whom he has a sexual relationship. While he loves this man and

has loved other men, he has never felt at home in the “gay

community” and does not identify as gay. His best friend is well

aware of his relationship with the woman, but the woman has

no idea he is in love with his best friend.

A woman has a twelve-year affair with a man other than her

husband. Over the twelve years, despite pleas from her lover to

leave her husband, she refuses because she loves them both.

One evening, her husband — knowing he shouldn’t, but unable

to resist the temptation — listens to a voicemail message on his

wife’s cell phone. It is a message from her lover saying that he

can’t live without her and needs to see her. Enraged, the

husband swears to himself that he will find the other man and

kill him.

A married man tells a friend that he and his wife had a

threesome with another woman. With pride, he tells the friend

that it was “every guy’s dream” and that he had a great time.

When the friend asks him if he’d ever have a threesome with his

wife and another man, he balks with repulsion and says, “No

way. I’m not gay, and I would never want to see my wife have

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sex with someone else.”

What do these vignettes have in common? With whom do

you identify, if anyone? Do you judge some and sympathize with

others? While most people might read these vignettes and

cringe and shake their heads in disgust at the disruption and

possible destruction of the heterosexual couple through sexual

infidelity, I see potentialities.

Advocating for queer utopian politics, José Esteban Muñoz

(2009) writes, “Unlike a possibility, a thing that simply might

happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is

eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the

present tense” (9). No doubt, what is present in these scenarios

is non-monogamy, and we assume that what is eminent is some

kind of violation of the integrity of the couple.

We all know how these stories should unfold. A man is

expected to reject the woman who becomes lovers with his best

friend; choose one or the other — the perfect woman or a gay

identity; if not kill his wife’s lover, use violence to get him out of

the picture; and vociferously decline the invitation for a

threesome with another man. The woman, in contrast, should

expect to lose her partner and her new lover — his best friend;

live a “lie” because her partner is “on the down low”; end the

love affair or lose her family; enjoy a threesome with another

woman but never entertain the possibility of, let alone request,

a threesome with another man. The only viable path is one of

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either relationship destruction and emotional trauma or

restoring the couple through monogamy.

In her book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects,

Others, Sara Ahmed (2007) offers a phenomenological

approach to thinking about sexual orientation. According to

Ahmed, heteronormativity is a “straight” line from one’s

position as a gendered and sexual subject to objects in the

world, not just in terms of objects of desire, but also in choosing

a life. She writes, “The lines we follow might … function as

forms of ‘alignment,’ or as ways of being in line with others. We

might say that we are orientated when we are in line. We are ‘in

line’ when we face the direction that is already faced by others”

(15). In order to be “in line” with the direction faced by others,

the individuals in the vignettes above must choose monogamy.

Ahmed goes on to write,

In the case of sexual orientation, it is not simply that we

have it. To become straight means that we not only have to

turn toward the objects that are given to us by heterosexual

culture, but also that we must “turn away” from objects that

take us off this line.… The concept of “orientations” allows

us to expose how life gets directed in some ways rather

than others, through the very requirement that we follow

what is already given to us. For a life to count as a good life,

then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the

direction promised as a social good, which means

imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points

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along a life course. A queer life might be one that fails to

make such a gesture of return. (21)

One of the objects given to us by heterosexual culture is the

monogamous couple. In order to live a “good life” of sexual and

emotional intimacy, we must turn away from other lovers.

Perhaps, then, a queer life would mean reorienting oneself

toward other lovers, and non-monogamy would constitute a

queer life.

The people described in the situations above could “fail to

make such a gesture of return” to monogamy and choose a

different line. A man could accept a love affair between his

partner and best friend or enthusiastically say “yes” to a

threesome with another man. What if the man who is

simultaneously in love with a woman and a man were honest

with himself and his lovers, refuses to identify as straight or

gay, and insists on being openly polyamorous with both of

them, and what if they both agree? Even the man whose wife is

having a twelve-year affair could, if he chose, somehow learn to

accept the “other” man as part of the family; after all, the wife

and “other” man have also been in a long-term relationship and,

in that sense, their relationship has been part of the family all

along. What if having more than one long-term partner was

available to wives as well as husbands, and tolerated or even

expected across and within all races and classes?…

I approach compulsory monogamy in a similar way to how

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Adrienne Rich (1983) interrogated compulsory heterosexuality.

According to Rich, compulsory heterosexuality is a network or

system of social beliefs, customs, and practices that compel

women into intimate relationships with men. As an institution,

compulsory heterosexuality systematically ensures men’s

access to and “ownership” of women’s bodies, labor, and

children. According to Rich, compulsory heterosexuality is

characterized by male identification , androcentrism, and

the erasure of lesbian existence, and, as such, prevents women

from bonding with each other sexually, emotionally, and

politically. In her groundbreaking essay, Rich suggests that

woman-identification and lesbian sexuality are important to

feminist practice because they refuse and disrupt compulsory

heterosexuality as a central mechanism of men’s dominance

over and access to women.

But whatever [compulsory heterosexuality’s] origins, when

we look hard and clearly at the extent and elaboration of

measures designed to keep women within a male sexual

purlieu, it becomes an inescapable question whether the

issue we have to address as feminists is not simply “gender

inequality,” nor the domination of culture by males, nor

mere “taboos against homosexuality,” but the enforcement

of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male

right of physical, economical, and emotional access. One of

the means of enforcement is, of course, the rendering

invisible of the lesbian possibility, an engulfed continent

that rises fragmentedly to view from time to time only to

65 66

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become submerged again. (191)

… As a sociologist, I follow in Rich’s feminist footsteps but

reorient my theoretical focus away from radical feminist

theory, where men are the oppressors and women are the

oppressed, and toward gender sociology and queer theory to

theorize the monogamous couple as central to white

heteromasculine privilege and superiority and to social and

cultural regimes of normalcy implicated in power relations and

sexual stratification. I argue that consensual non-monogamy,

like lesbian sexuality according to Rich, “rises... to view from

time to time” in the feminist consciousness and feminist theory

“only to become submerged again.” Given the emergence in the

mainstream media of polyamory as a viable relationship form,

it is imperative that feminist, queer, and critical race theorists

take this opportunity to unpack mono-normativity, develop an

interest in the queer, feminist, and anti-racist potential of

polyamory, and advocate and cultivate polyqueer sex and

relationships.

Bibliography

1. Ahmed, Sara. 2007. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

2. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.

3. Rich, Adrienne. 1983. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” In Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson

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(Eds.), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review Press.

ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. After presenting four polyamorist vignettes, Schippers herself poses three questions about them in paragraph 5. Write a journal entry in response to one or more of her questions.

2. When you first read the four vignettes, did you “see potentialities” or perhaps “cringe and shake [your] head in disgust” (para. 5)? What do you make of the alternative outcomes Schippers describes in paragraph 7? How plausible and how desirable do you consider each of these? Having finished the reading and perhaps discussed it with classmates, do you now see opportunities in the vignettes?

3. One simple view of polyamory is that whatever adults do is nobody’s business but their own. How strong an argument do you consider this, and what counterarguments can you think of? When, if ever, might the state have a legitimate interest in governing the romantic or sexual behavior of consenting adults? Furthermore, if you accept polyamory as a choice some people make, explain why you would or would not support legal recognition of polyamorous marriages.

4. The passage by José Esteban Muñoz that Schippers quotes is challenging: it describes a paradoxical situation in which something is present, but not quite fully present. Discuss why Schippers uses this slippery idea to explain how nonmonogamy functions in the vignettes she is analyzing.

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5. Discuss the metaphor of the “straight line” that appears in the quotations from Sara Ahmed (paras. 8–9). What does it mean for a person to line up — not just in terms of gender and sexual desire, but also life choices? Do you find “the straight line” a useful metaphor for investigating conformity versus nonconformity? What influences in our lives work most powerfully to keep us in line, oriented, conforming? What do we risk when we step out of line?

6. Echoing Adrienne Rich’s analysis of lesbianism, Schippers suggests that polyamory is rarely visible (para. 13). Brainstorm with classmates to identify places where polyamory is visible in American culture today, even if only temporarily or incompletely.

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

7. Read or review the excerpts from Sheryll Cashin’s Loving (p. 88) and Amy Ellis Nutt’s Becoming Nicole (p. 73). Discuss how each author connects a private, personal, intimate realm to a public, legal, political sphere. Do you find these connections as substantive and important as the authors claim they are? Would you go so far as to say that sex and gender are always political? Why or why not?

8. Look ahead to “How to Do Gender” by Lisa Wade and Myra Marx Ferree (p. 480). How do their descriptions of gender policing help explain mainstream attitudes about polyamory?

9. How do you think Schippers might respond to the cartoon on p. 86?

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EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

10. Thinking Rhetorically Mimi Schippers is author of the blog marxindrag.com, billed as “Karl Marx’s social critique and utopian vision all dolled up in queer drag.” Read one of her blog posts and compare it to this excerpt from Beyond Monogamy — both in subject matter and in authorial voice or “persona.”

11. Look online for a glossary of polyamorous terminology. What picture of polyamorous relationships does the glossary paint? What words and concepts do you find most surprising, instructive, revealing, or creative?

12. Adultery — sex with someone other than one’s spouse — could be considered a form of polyamory. It is also a crime in some states. Research the legal situation in your own state plus two or three others from this list: Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin. In which states is adultery legal, a misdemeanor, or a felony, and how often are people prosecuted or convicted? Then discuss whether you think your state’s legislation should be kept as is, revised, or repealed.

FURTHER CONNECTIONS

1. Family relationships are a frequent subject for novels and films, perhaps because these extended forms can take the time to explore the complexities of family dynamics. Keeping in mind the issues raised in this chapter, write an essay analyzing the

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portrayal of family in a single contemporary novel or film.

2. Writers and analysts routinely use data from the U.S. Census Bureau to get a “snapshot” of the American population as a whole or to track national trends over time. However, the bureau also provides a wealth of information at the state and county levels. Choose two counties in your state that you think are substantially different demographically; explore the Census Bureau website (www.census.gov) and gather statistical data on items like size of households, their median income, the number of households headed by women, and so on. Report your findings to the class, or collaborate with classmates to build an overview of your state.

3. Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, but that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Taking into account your own experience and the readings in this chapter, write a journal entry or an essay articulating your views of what makes families happy or unhappy, and assessing your own experiences of family up to this point in your life.

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CHAPTER 2 LEARNING POWER The Myth of Education and Empowerment

FAST FACTS

1. In 2017, recent U.S. high school graduates had an unemployment rate of 16.9% and earned, on average, only $10.89 an hour, while recent college graduates had an unemployment rate of 5.6% and earned $19.18 an hour.

2. According to the latest international school assessment results, American students rank 35th out of 72 nations in math — behind students in countries such as Singapore, Japan, China, Canada, Finland, Slovenia, Germany, Russia, Spain, Latvia, and Lithuania.

3. Between 1993 and 2014, college enrollment among 18- to 24-year- olds rose from 22% to 35% for Latinos, from 25% to 33% for

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African Americans, from 37% to 42% for whites, and from 55% to 64% for Asians.

4. Among undergraduate students, about 23% of females and 5% of males have experienced rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation. Only 20% of female student victims, age 18–24, report assaults to law enforcement. For every 100 rapes committed, only two rapists will ever serve a day in prison.

5. As of January 2018, U.S. college students shouldered a total debt load of $1.48 trillion. More than 44 million U.S. college students currently have student loans, with the average student borrower owing more than $37,000.

6. Between 1980 and 2011, states cut college budgets, on average, by 40.2%. Colorado reduced funding the most (by 69%), followed by South Carolina (67%), Arizona (62%), and Minnesota (56%). Extrapolating this trend, the national average state investment in higher education will reach zero by 2059.

7. As of 2016, over 4,180 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by private companies and universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford had enrolled millions of students worldwide. The completion rate for MOOCs ranges between 5% and 15% of those enrolling.

Data from (1) Economic Policy Institute, “The Class of 2017,”

https://www.epi.org/publication/the-class-of-2017/; (2) “PISA Results in Focus,”

Organization for Economic Cooperation, https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-

focus.pdf; (3) “5 facts about Latinos and education,” Pew Research Center,

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/28/5-facts-about-latinos-and-education/;

(4) Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/campus-

sexual-violence; KnowyourtitleIX, https://www.knowyourix.org/issues/statistics/; (5) Board

of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/current/default.htm; Center for

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Microeconomic Data Fed Res Bank of NY,

https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/databank.html; Wall Street Journal,

“Student Debt Is About to Set Another Record,” May 2, 2016; (6) American Council on

Education, “State Funding: A Race to the Bottom,” http://www.acenet.edu/the-

presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx; (7)

“Who Is Studying Online, and Where?” Inside Higher Education, January 5, 2018,

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/01/05/new-us-data-show-

continued-growth-college-students-studying; “Completion Rates Are the Greatest

Challenge for MOOCs,” edu4me, May 19, 2016, http://edu4.me/en/completion-rates-are-

the-greatest-challenge-for-moocs.

MOST AMERICANS TEND TO SEE EDUCATION as something intrinsically valuable or important. After all, education is the engine that drives the American Dream. The chance to learn, better oneself, and gain the skills that pay off in upward mobility has sustained the hope of millions of Americans. As a nation we look up to figures like Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who learned to see beyond poverty and slavery by learning to read. Education tells us that the American Dream can work for everyone. It reassures us that we are, in fact, “created equal” and that the path to achievement lies through individual effort and hard work, not blind luck or birth.

But American attitudes toward teachers and teaching haven’t always been overwhelmingly positive. The Puritans who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony viewed education with respectful skepticism. Schooling in Puritan society was a force for spiritual rather than worldly advancement. Lessons were designed to reinforce moral and religious training and to teach children to read the Bible for themselves. Education was

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important to the Puritan “Divines” because it was a source of order, control, and discipline. But when education aimed at more worldly goals or was undertaken for self-improvement, it was seen as a menacing, sinful luxury. Little wonder, then, that the Puritans often viewed teaching as something less than an ennobling profession. In fact, teachers in the early colonies were commonly treated as menial employees by the families and communities they served, performing duties like serving summonses, ringing bells for church service, and digging graves. Frequently, they came to the New World as indentured servants. Once here, they drilled their masters’ children in spiritual exercises until they earned their freedom — or escaped.

The reputation of education in America began to improve with the onset of the Revolutionary War. Following the overthrow of British rule, leaders sought to create a spirit of nationalism that would unify the former colonies. Differences were to be set aside, for, as George Washington pointed out, “the more homogeneous our citizens can be made … the greater will be our prospect of permanent union.” The goal of schooling became the creation of uniformly loyal, patriotic Americans. In the words of Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, “Our schools of learning, by producing one general and uniform system of education, will render the mass of people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.”

Thomas Jefferson saw school as a training ground for

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citizenship and democratic leadership. Recognizing that an illiterate and ill-informed population would be unable to assume the responsibilities of self-government, Jefferson laid out a comprehensive plan in 1781 for public education in the state of Virginia. According to Jefferson’s blueprint, all children would be eligible for three years of free public instruction. Of those who could not afford further schooling, one promising “genius” from each school was to be “raked from the rubbish” and given six more years of free education. At the end of that time, ten boys would be selected to attend college at public expense. Jeffersonian Virginia may have been the first place in the United States where education so clearly offered the penniless boy a path to self-improvement. However, this path was open to very few, and Jefferson, like Washington and Rush, was more concerned with benefiting the state than serving the individual student: “We hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated.” For leaders of the American Revolution, education was seen as a tool for nation-building, not personal development.

In the nineteenth century two great historical forces — industrialization and immigration — combined to exert pressure for the “homogenization” of young Americans. Massive immigration from Ireland and Eastern and Central Europe led to fears that “non-native” peoples would undermine the cultural identity of the United States. Many saw school as the first line of defense against this perceived threat, a place where the children

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of “foreigners” could become Americanized. In a meeting of educators in 1836, one college professor stated the problem as bluntly as possible:

Let us now be reminded, that unless we educate our immigrants, they will be our ruin. It is no longer a mere question of benevolence, of duty, or of enlightened self- interest, but the intellectual and religious training of our foreign population has become essential to our own safety; we are prompted to it by the instinct of self-preservation.

Industrialization gave rise to another kind of uniformity in nineteenth-century public education. Factory work didn’t require the kind of educational preparation needed to transform a child into a craftsman or merchant. So, for the first time in American history, school systems began to categorize students into different educational “tracks” that offered qualitatively different kinds of education to different groups. Some — typically students from well-to-do homes — were prepared for professional and managerial positions. But most were consigned to education for life “on the line.” Increasing demand for factory workers put a premium on young people who were obedient and able to work in large groups according to fixed schedules. As a result, leading educators in 1874 proposed a system of schooling that would meet the needs of the “modern industrial community” by stressing “punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence, as habits necessary through life.” History complicates the myth of education as a source of personal empowerment.

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School can bind as effectively as it can liberate; it can enforce conformity and limit life chances as well as foster individual talent.

But history also supplies examples of education serving the idealistic goals of democracy, equality, and self-improvement. Nineteenth-century educator and reformer Horace Mann worked to expand educational opportunity for all. Perhaps more than any other American, Mann helped fashion the myth of personal empowerment through education. Born on a farm in Franklin, Massachusetts, in 1796, Mann raised himself from poverty to a position of national importance through study and hard work. His own early educational experiences left an indelible imprint: the ill-trained and often brutal schoolmasters he encountered in rural Massachusetts made rote memorization and the power of the rod the hallmarks of their classroom practice. After graduating from Brown University and a successful career in politics, Mann became Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837, a role that gave him the opportunity to design what he called the “common school,” the model of the first comprehensive public school in the United States.

Mann sketched his vision of democratic public education in the “Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1848.” In this famous document, he claimed that if the people were to govern themselves, every citizen had to be sufficiently educated to make independent judgments about the issues of the day. Education, according to Mann, “must prepare our citizens to

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become municipal officers, intelligent jurors, honest witnesses, legislators, or competent judges of legislation — in fine, to fill all the manifold relations of life.” Mann saw the school as “the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization.” In his view, schooling fulfills an almost sacred social mission:

In teaching the blind and the deaf and dumb, in kindling the latent spark of intelligence that lurks in an idiot’s mind, and in the more holy work of reforming abandoned and outcast children, education has proved what it can do by glorious experiments. These wonders it has done in its infancy, and with the lights of a limited experience; but when its faculties shall be fully developed, when it shall be trained to wield its mighty energies for the protection of society against the giant vices which now invade and torment it, — against intemperance, avarice, war, slavery, bigotry, the woes of want, and the wickedness of waste, — then there will not be a height to which these enemies of the race can escape which it will not scale, nor a Titan among them all whom it will not slay.

The common school, according to Mann, would empower students by providing them with the physical, moral, intellectual, and political tools they would need to lead socially productive lives. Compulsory public education would target every major social ill — including what Mann saw as a dangerous, growing division between the classes:

Now, surely nothing but universal education can

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counterwork this tendency to the domination of capital and servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called: the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependants and subjects of the former. But, if education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it by the strongest of all attractions, for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor … Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, — the balance-wheel of the social machinery … I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor.

At the turn of the century, philosopher and educational theorist John Dewey made even greater claims for educational empowerment. A fierce opponent of the kind of “tracking” associated with industrial education, Dewey proposed that schools should strive to produce thinking citizens rather than obedient workers. As members of a democracy, all men and women, according to Dewey, are entitled to an education that helps them make the best of their natural talents and enables them to participate as fully as possible in the life of their community: “only by being true to the full growth of the

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individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.” Most of our current myths of education echo the optimism of Mann and Dewey. Guided by their ideas, most Americans still believe that education leads to self-improvement and can help us empower ourselves — and perhaps even transform our society.

In recent decades, however, the reputation of schools has also been deeply questioned. In 1983, a special commission appointed by President Ronald Reagan published A Nation at Risk, an assessment of public schools that portrayed them as failing students and their families at every level. Since then, the country has experienced more than thirty years of federal and state educational reform efforts aimed at improving the “mediocre” performance of our schools. Interventions like the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, the 2009 Race to the Top grant program, and the 2010 Common Core Standards Initiative have invested billions of taxpayer dollars to “fix” our educational system. Charter schools have proliferated, and high-stakes testing has become a staple of American education, often taking up time that once was dedicated to art, music, and physical education.

Higher education in the United States has also experienced its share of challenges. Over the past two decades college costs have skyrocketed as states have systematically reduced funding for higher education, and, as a result, students have often been left with crippling levels of debt. Smartphones and laptops have

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disrupted and transformed the classroom, and innovations like the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) now offer an alternative to the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar college. Even student social life has become a topic of passionate debate. Once seen as a sanctuary for learning and personal growth, the college campus lost much of its allure in the early 2000s following a series of harshly critical reports on the issue of campus rape. As a result, many students today recognize that college may be a place for reflection and self-improvement, but it’s also become a “hunting ground” where students of all orientations are vulnerable to sexual assault.

We find ourselves, then, still asking the central question: Does education empower us, or does it stifle personal growth? This chapter takes a critical look at what American education can do and how it shapes or enhances our identities. The first four readings focus on schooling in elementary and secondary classrooms. In “Against School,” award-winning teacher and libertarian John Gatto offers a provocative analysis of how public education “cripples our kids” by training them to be “employees and consumers.” The next selection, by renowned educator Mike Rose, offers a counterpoint to Gatto. In “I Just Wanna Be Average,” Rose provides a moving personal account of the dream of educational success and pays tribute to a teacher who never loses sight of what can be achieved in the classroom. Next, Jean Anyon’s “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” explores how schools program students for success or failure according to their socioeconomic status. Nikole Hannah-

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Jones rounds off the first half of the chapter by discussing the resegregation of America’s public schools and her reasons for sending her own daughter to an “intensely segregated” elementary school in New York City.

Following these initial readings, the chapter’s Visual Portfolio opens with the image of a 1950s classroom that echoes both the idyllic and nightmarish aspects of the school experience. The photographs that follow raise questions about our national and personal educational priorities and about the current state of U.S. college campuses.

The second half of the chapter focuses on some of the recent challenges confronting higher education in America. In “Education: Attentional Disarray,” the founder of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and the Self, Sherry Turkle, asks us to consider how smartphones and social media are changing the way students focus and relate to each other in the classroom. Next, in “Blurred Lines, Take Two,” Peggy Orenstein explores issues surrounding the campus sexual assault crisis, including the role played by binge drinking and the prospects for change offered by the adoption of “affirmative consent” policies. The chapter concludes with “City of Broken Dreams,” Sara Goldrick-Rab’s account of how students struggle with the rising price of college and how the costs of higher education stack the deck against the aspirations of low-income students.

Sources

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Best, John Hardin, and Robert T. Sidwell, eds. The American Legacy of Learning: Readings in the History of Education. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1966. Print.

Dewey, John. “The School and Society” (1899) and “My Pedagogic Creed” (1897). John Dewey on Education. New York: Modern Library, 1964. Print.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. Print.

Mann, Horace. “Report of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1848.” An American Primer. Ed. Daniel Boorstein. New York: Penguin Books, 1966. Print.

Pangle, Lorraine Smith, and Thomas L. Prangle. The Learning of Liberty: The Educational Ideas of the American Founders. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. Print.

Stevens, Edward, and George H. Wood. Justice, Ideology, and Education: An Introduction to the Social Foundations of Education. New York: Random House, 1987. Print.

Vallance, Elizabeth. “Hiding the Hidden Curriculum: An Interpretation of the Language of Justification in Nineteenth- Century Educational Reform.” Curriculum Theory Network, Vol. 4, No. 1. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1973–1974. 5–21. Print.

Westbrook, Robert B. “Public Schooling and American Democracy.” Democracy, Education, and the Schools. Ed. Roger Soder. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996. Print.

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BEFORE READING

Freewrite for fifteen or twenty minutes about your best and worst educational experiences. Then, working in groups, compare notes to see if you can find recurring themes or ideas in what you’ve written. What aspects of school seem to stand out most clearly in your memories? Do the best experiences have anything in common? How about the worst? What aspects of your school experience didn’t show up in the freewriting?

Work in small groups to draw a collective picture that expresses your experience of high school or college. Don’t worry about your drawing skill — just load the page with imagery, feelings, and ideas. Then show your work to other class members and let them try to interpret it.

Write a journal entry about the first graders reciting the Pledge of Allegiance back in 1955 on the title page of this chapter (p. 107). What does this photo suggest about the role of education in American society? How realistic is this depiction of public schooling?

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AGAINST SCHOOL JOHN TAYLOR GATTO

The official mission statements of most American schools

brim with good intentions. On paper, schools exist to

help students realize their full potential, to equip them

with the skills they’ll need to achieve success and

contribute to society, or to foster the development of

independence, critical thinking, and strong ethical

values. But as John Taylor Gatto (b. 1935) sees it, public

schools actually exist to fulfill six covert functions meant

to “cripple our kids.” The frightening thing is that Gatto

might know what he’s talking about. An award-winning

educator and ardent libertarian, Gatto taught in New

York public schools for more than two decades. In 1989,

1990, and 1991, he was named New York City Teacher of

the Year, and in 1991 he was also honored as New York

State Teacher of the Year. His publications include

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of

Compulsory Schooling (1992), A Different Kind of

Teacher (2000), The Underground History of American

Education (2001), and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A

Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of

Compulsory Schooling (2008). This selection originally

appeared in Harper’s magazine in 2003.

I TAUGHT FOR THIRTY YEARS in some of the worst schools in

Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I

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became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my

world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so

bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work

was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it.

They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just

sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much

about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning

more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as

bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and

anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for

the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be

found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend

to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored

teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If

even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the

same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so

thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they

are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those

imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon

when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he

batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use

that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my

fault and no one else’s. The obligation to amuse and instruct

myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that

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were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to

be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here

and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some

remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it

futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and

childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom.

Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids

break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly

conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a

medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been

granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job

had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a

teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was

able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to

witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered

more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in

1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools —

with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of

both students and teachers — as virtual factories of

childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be

that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many

other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to

themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily

and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help

kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling.

We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness —

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5

curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising

insight — simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and

tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by

giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to

take a risk every now and then.

But we don’t do that. And the more I asked why not, and

persisted in thinking about the “problem” of schooling as an

engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no

“problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are,

so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long

experience in how children learn things, not because they are

doing something wrong but because they are doing something

right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the

truth when he said we would “leave no child behind”? Could it

be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them

ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced

schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a

year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary?

And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and

arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy

homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.

Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known

Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids

currently go through, and they turned out all right. George

Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham

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Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not

products of a school system, and not one of them was ever

“graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of

American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet

the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors,

like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and

Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and

even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently

people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as

children at all. Ariel Durant, who cowrote an enormous, and

very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband,

Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably

claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person?

Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to

think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent

upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an

intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people

throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves

without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools

that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans

confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the

purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth

into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was

conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of

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the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous

upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly

speaking, threefold:

1. To make good people.

2. To make good citizens.

3. To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and

most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent

definition of public education’s mission, however short schools

actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong.

Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature

holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of

compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example,

the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury

for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken

their intelligence.… Nothing could be further from the

truth. The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as

possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a

standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

That is its aim in the United States … and that is its aim

everywhere else.

Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be

tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm.

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His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own

educational system back to the now vanished, though never to

be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was

certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war

with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture,

Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational

system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for

concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools

pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William

James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century.

Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991

book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the

Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace

Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts State

Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of

Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought

here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly

surprising given our early association with that utopian state. A

Prussian served as Washington’s aide during the Revolutionary

War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by

1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language

edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so

eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian

culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce

mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny

students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and

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incomplete citizens — all in order to render the populace

“manageable.”

It was from James Bryant Conant — president of Harvard for

twenty years, World War I poison-gas specialist, World War II

executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of

the American zone in Germany after World War II, and truly

one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century —

that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling.

Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style

and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor

would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that

warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous

Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired

from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, The

Child, the Parent, and the State, and was more than a little

intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern

schools we attend were the result of a “revolution” engineered

between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate,

but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander

Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which

“one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.”

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named,

makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this

continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in

the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic

movement that threatened to give the peasants and the

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proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern,

industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of

surgical incision into the prospective unity of these

underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by

constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle

means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind,

separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a

dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose — the actual purpose — of

modern schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is

enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the

three traditional goals listed earlier:

1. The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2. The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3. The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by

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logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.

4. The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits — and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5. The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit — with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments — clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6. The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

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That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public

education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an

isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational

enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in

championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas

of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an

American school system designed along the same lines. Men

like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory

schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the

Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless

electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of

mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans

came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating

and tending just such a herd via public education, among them

Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

There you have it. Now you know. We don’t need Karl

Marx’s conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see

that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or

political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide

them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t

conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow

Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the

following to the New York City School Teachers Association in

1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education,

and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class,

of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal

education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult

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manual tasks.” But the motives behind the disgusting decisions

that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They

can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief

that “efficiency” is the paramount virtue, rather than love,

liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple

greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy

based on mass production and organized to favor the large

corporation rather than the small business or the family farm.

But mass production required mass consumption, and at the

turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it

both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually

need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School

didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should

consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it

encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting

ducks for another great invention of the modern era —

marketing.

Now, you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there

are two groups of people who can always be convinced to

consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School

has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts,

but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into

children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to

Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be

cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and

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independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing

emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow

older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once

well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood

P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of

successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two

to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite

new. This same Cubberley — who was dean of Stanford’s School

of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and

Conant’s friend and correspondent at Harvard — had written

the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School

Administration: “Our schools are … factories in which the raw

products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.… And it is

the business of the school to build its pupils according to the

specifications laid down.”

It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those

specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from

nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have

removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has

removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has

removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers

have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a

nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our

wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments

that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we

buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and

then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150

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sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall

apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe

the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when

we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an

eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say,”

even if we remember having been told somewhere back in

school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that

one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic

behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to

avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers;

teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains

children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically

and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for

boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll

never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the

grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music,

art, economics, theology — all the stuff schoolteachers know

well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of

solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to

conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned

to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship

through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through

shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned.

Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they

can.

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20 First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill

centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society

demands. Mandatory education serves children only

incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t

let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day.

If David Farragut could take command of a captured British

warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a

broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could

apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put

himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale

senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do.

After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches,

I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress

our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to

manage a population of educated men and women. The

solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage

themselves.

ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. Why does Gatto think that school is boring and childish? How does Gatto’s depiction of school compare with your own elementary and secondary school experience?

2. What, according to Gatto, are the six unstated purposes of public schooling? To what extent does your own prior educational experience support this bleak view of American education?

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3. To what extent would you agree that we really don’t need to go to school? Given the current state of technology and a globalizing economy, do you think most people would gain the abilities they need to survive and thrive through homeschooling?

4. How would you go about teaching your own children to be “leaders and adventurers,” to think “critically and independently,” and to “develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored” (para. 19)? How many parents, in your estimation, have the time, experience, and resources to make Gatto’s ideal education a reality?

5. Thinking Rhetorically When does Gatto introduce his thesis in this essay, and why does he postpone it so long? What kinds of evidence does he offer to support his thesis, and how effective is this support? For example, how persuasive are his allusions to the Prussian approach to education or the influence of James Conant and Alexander Inglis? What other types of evidence could he have used to support his critique of American education?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

6. Given his belief that public education exists to “ensure docile and incomplete citizens … in order to render the populace ‘manageable’” (para. 10), how might you expect Gatto to view the image of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance that opens this chapter (p. 107)? What lessons might this daily ritual teach children, and how might it shape their behavior? What else might this image suggest about the functions and

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purposes of schooling?

7. Look ahead to Jean Anyon’s excerpt from Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work (p. 136), and compare Anyon’s analysis of the real agenda of American public education with that described by Gatto. To what extent does Anyon’s class- based analysis of education in America support Gatto’s description of the unspoken purposes of public schooling?

EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

8. Working in groups, write a proposal for a school that wouldn’t be boring or childish and that would create the kind of independent, critical, active thinkers that Gatto prizes. What would a day in such a school be like? What would the students do? What would they learn? Who would teach them?

9. Research the state of Prussia and Frederick the Great to learn more about Prussian history and culture. How might your findings change your response to Gatto’s argument? Would you agree that the Prussian influence on American schooling is really a “cause for concern”? Why? What other nineteenth- century nation might have offered a better model?

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“I JUST WANNA BE AVERAGE” MIKE ROSE

Mike Rose is anything but average: he has published

poetry, scholarly research, a textbook, and several

widely praised books on education in America. A

professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and

Information Studies, Rose (b. 1944) has won awards from

the National Academy of Education, the National Council

of Teachers of English, and the John Simon Guggenheim

Memorial Foundation. Below you’ll read the story of how

this highly successful teacher and writer started high

school in the vocational education track, learning dead-

end skills from teachers who were often underprepared

or incompetent. Rose shows that students whom the

system has written off can have tremendous unrealized

potential, and his critique of the school system specifies

several reasons for the failure of students who go

through high school belligerent, fearful, stoned,

frustrated, or just plain bored. This selection comes from

Lives on the Boundary (1989), Rose’s exploration of

America’s educationally underprivileged. His

publications also include Possible Lives (1996), an

examination of nationwide educational innovation; The

Mind at Work (2006), a study of the complex thinking

involved in vocational fields; Back to School: Why

Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education (2012);

and, with Michael B. Katz, Public Education Under Siege

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(2013). A member of the National Academy of Education,

Rose has been honored with more than a dozen awards

for his research on schooling.

IT TOOK TWO BUSES TO GET TO Our Lady of Mercy. The first

started deep in South Los Angeles and caught me at midpoint.

The second drifted through neighborhoods with trees, parks,

big lawns, and lots of flowers. The rides were long but were

livened up by a group of South L.A. veterans whose parents also

thought that Hope had set up shop in the west end of the

county. There was Christy Biggars, who, at sixteen, was dealing

and was, according to rumor, a pimp as well. There were Bill

Cobb and Johnny Gonzales, grease-pencil artists extraordinaire,

who left Nembutal-enhanced swirls of “Cobb” and “Johnny”

on the corrugated walls of the bus. And then there was Tyrrell

Wilson. Tyrrell was the coolest kid I knew. He ran the dozens

like a metric halfback, laid down a rap that outrhymed and

outpointed Cobb, whose rap was good but not great — the curse

of a moderately soulful kid trapped in white skin. But it was

Cobb who would sneak a radio onto the bus, and thus

underwrote his patter with Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck

Berry, the Coasters, and Ernie K. Doe’s mother-in-law, an

awful woman who was “sent from down below.” And so it was

that Christy and Cobb and Johnny G. and Tyrrell and I and

assorted others picked up along the way passed our days in the

back of the bus, a funny mix brought together by geography and

parental desire.

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Entrance to school brings with it forms and releases and

assessments. Mercy relied on a series of tests, mostly the

Stanford-Binet, for placement, and somehow the results of my

tests got confused with those of another student named Rose.

The other Rose apparently didn’t do very well, for I was placed

in the vocational track, a euphemism for the bottom level.

Neither I nor my parents realized what this meant. We had no

sense that Business Math, Typing, and English-Level D were

dead ends. The current spate of reports on the schools criticizes

parents for not involving themselves in the education of their

children. But how would someone like Tommy Rose, with his

two years of Italian schooling, know what to ask? And what sort

of pressure could an exhausted waitress apply? The error went

undetected, and I remained in the vocational track for two

years. What a place.

My homeroom was supervised by Brother Dill, a troubled

and unstable man who also taught freshman English. When his

class drifted away from him, which was often, his voice would

rise in paranoid accusations, and occasionally he would lose

control and shake or smack us. I hadn’t been there two months

when one of his brisk, face-turning slaps had my glasses sliding

down the aisle. Physical education was also pretty harsh. Our

teacher was a stubby ex-lineman who had played old-time pro

ball in the Midwest. He routinely had us grabbing our ankles to

receive his stinging paddle across our butts. He did that, he

said, to make men of us. “Rose,” he bellowed on our first

encounter; me standing geeky in line in my baggy shorts.

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“‘Rose’? What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Italian, sir,” I squeaked.

“Italian! Ho. Rose, do you know the sound a bag of shit

makes when it hits the wall?”

“No, sir.”

“Wop!”

Sophomore English was taught by Mr. Mitropetros. He was a

large, bejeweled man who managed the parking lot at the

Shrine Auditorium. He would crow and preen and list for us the

stars he’d brushed against. We’d ask questions and glance

knowingly and snicker, and all that fueled the poor guy to brag

some more. Parking cars was his night job. He had little

training in English, so his lesson plan for his day work had us

reading the district’s required text, Julius Caesar, aloud for the

semester. We’d finished the play way before the twenty weeks

was up, so he’d have us switch parts again and again and start

again: Dave Snyder, the fastest guy at Mercy, muscling through

Caesar to the breathless squeals of Calpurnia, as interpreted by

Steve Fusco, a surfer who owned the school’s most envied

paneled wagon. Week ten and Dave and Steve would take on

new roles, as would we all, and render a water-logged Cassius

and a Brutus that are beyond my powers of description.

Spanish I — taken in the second year — fell into the hands of

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a new recruit. Mr. Montez was a tiny man, slight, five foot six at

the most, soft-spoken and delicate. Spanish was a particularly

rowdy class, and Mr. Montez was as prepared for it as a doily

maker at a hammer throw. He would tap his pencil to a room in

which Steve Fusco was propelling spitballs from his heavy lips,

in which Mike Dweetz was taunting Billy Hawk, a half-Indian,

half-Spanish, reed-thin, quietly explosive boy. The vocational

track at Our Lady of Mercy mixed kids traveling in from South

L.A. with South Bay surfers and a few Slavs and Chicanos from

the harbors of San Pedro. This was a dangerous miscellany:

surfers and hodads and South-Central blacks all ablaze to the

metronomic tapping of Hector Montez’s pencil.

One day Billy lost it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him

strike out with his right arm and catch Dweetz across the neck.

Quick as a spasm, Dweetz was out of his seat, scattering desks,

cracking Billy on the side of the head, right behind the eye.

Snyder and Fusco and others broke it up, but the room felt hot

and close and naked. Mr. Montez’s tenuous authority was

finally ripped to shreds, and I think everyone felt a little strange

about that. The charade was over, and when it came down to it,

I don’t think any of the kids really wanted it to end this way.

They had pushed and pushed and bullied their way into a

freedom that both scared and embarrassed them.

Students will float to the mark you set. I and the others in the

vocational classes were bobbing in pretty shallow water.

Vocational education has aimed at increasing the economic

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opportunities of students who do not do well in our schools.

Some serious programs succeed in doing that, and through

exceptional teachers — like Mr. Gross in Horace’s

Compromise — students learn to develop hypotheses and

troubleshoot, reason through a problem, and communicate

effectively — the true job skills. The vocational track, however,

is most often a place for those who are just not making it, a

dumping ground for the disaffected. There were a few teachers

who worked hard at education; young Brother Slattery, for

example, combined a stern voice with weekly quizzes to try to

pass along to us a skeletal outline of world history. But mostly

the teachers had no idea of how to engage the imaginations of

us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond.

And the teachers would have needed some inventiveness, for

none of us was groomed for the classroom. It wasn’t just that I

didn’t know things — didn’t know how to simplify algebraic

fractions, couldn’t identify different kinds of clauses, bungled

Spanish translations — but that I had developed various faulty

and inadequate ways of doing algebra and making sense of

Spanish. Worse yet, the years of defensive tuning out in

elementary school had given me a way to escape quickly while

seeming at least half alert. During my time in Voc. Ed., I

developed further into a mediocre student and a somnambulant

problem solver, and that affected the subjects I did have the

wherewithal to handle: I detested Shakespeare; I got bored with

history. My attention flitted here and there. I fooled around in

class and read my books indifferently — the intellectual

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equivalent of playing with your food. I did what I had to do to

get by, and I did it with half a mind.

But I did learn things about people and eventually came into

my own socially. I liked the guys in Voc. Ed. Growing up where

I did, I understood and admired physical prowess, and there

was an abundance of muscle here. There was Dave Snyder, a

sprinter and halfback of true quality. Dave’s ability and his

quick wit gave him a natural appeal, and he was welcome in any

clique, though he always kept a little independent. He enjoyed

acting the fool and could care less about studies, but he

possessed a certain maturity and never caused the faculty much

trouble. It was a testament to his independence that he included

me among his friends — I eventually went out for track, but I

was no jock. Owing to the Latin alphabet and a dearth of Rs and

Ss, Snyder sat behind Rose, and we started exchanging one-

liners and became friends.

There was Ted Richard, a much-touted Little League pitcher.

He was chunky and had a baby face and came to Our Lady of

Mercy as a seasoned street fighter. Ted was quick to laugh and

he had a loud, jolly laugh, but when he got angry he’d smile a

little smile, the kind that simply raises the corner of the mouth

a quarter of an inch. For those who knew, it was an eerie signal.

Those who didn’t found themselves in big trouble, for Ted was

very quick. He loved to carry on what we would come to call

philosophical discussions: What is courage? Does God exist? He

also loved words, enjoyed picking up big ones like salubrious

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and equivocal and using them in our conversations — laughing

at himself as the word hit a chuckhole rolling off his tongue.

Ted didn’t do all that well in school — baseball and parties and

testing the courage he’d speculated about took up his time. His

textbooks were Argosy and Field and Stream, whatever

newspapers he’d find on the bus stop — from the Daily Worker

to pornography — conversations with uncles or hobos or

businessmen he’d meet in a coffee shop, The Old Man and the

Sea. With hindsight, I can see that Ted was developing into one

of those rough-hewn intellectuals whose sources are a mix of

the learned and the apocryphal, whose discussions are both

assured and sad.

And then there was Ken Harvey. Ken was good-looking in

a puffy way and had a full and oily ducktail and was a car

enthusiast … a hodad. One day in religion class, he said the

sentence that turned out to be one of the most memorable of

the hundreds of thousands I heard in those Voc. Ed. years. We

were talking about the parable of the talents, about

achievement, working hard, doing the best you can do, blah-

blah-blah, when the teacher called on the restive Ken Harvey

for an opinion. Ken thought about it, but just for a second, and

said (with studied, minimal affect), “I just wanna be average.”

That woke me up. Average? Who wants to be average? Then the

athletes chimed in with the clichés that make you want to

laryngectomize them, and the exchange became a platitudinous

melee. At the time, I thought Ken’s assertion was stupid, and I

wrote him off. But his sentence has stayed with me all these

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years, and I think I am finally coming to understand it.

Ken Harvey was gasping for air. School can be a

tremendously disorienting place. No matter how bad the

school, you’re going to encounter notions that don’t fit with the

assumptions and beliefs that you grew up with — maybe you’ll

hear these dissonant notions from teachers, maybe from the

other students, and maybe you’ll read them. You’ll also be

thrown in with all kinds of kids from all kinds of backgrounds,

and that can be unsettling — this is especially true in places of

rich ethnic and linguistic mix, like the L.A. basin. You’ll see a

handful of students far excel you in courses that sound exotic

and that are only in the curriculum of the elite: French, physics,

trigonometry. And all this is happening while you’re trying to

shape an identity, your body is changing, and your emotions are

running wild. If you’re a working-class kid in the vocational

track, the options you’ll have to deal with this will be

constrained in certain ways: you’re defined by your school as

“slow”; you’re placed in a curriculum that isn’t designed to

liberate you but to occupy you, or, if you’re lucky, train you,

though the training is for work the society does not esteem;

other students are picking up the cues from your school and

your curriculum and interacting with you in particular ways. If

you’re a kid like Ted Richard, you turn your back on all this and

let your mind roam where it may. But youngsters like Ted are

rare. What Ken and so many others do is protect themselves

from such suffocating madness by taking on with a vengeance

the identity implied in the vocational track. Reject the confusion

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and frustration by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe.

Champion the average. Rely on your own good sense. Fuck this

bullshit. Bullshit, of course, is everything you — and the others

— fear is beyond you: books, essays, tests, academic

scrambling, complexity, scientific reasoning, philosophical

inquiry.

The tragedy is that you have to twist the knife in your own

gray matter to make this defense work. You’ll have to shut

down, have to reject intellectual stimuli or diffuse them with

sarcasm, have to cultivate stupidity, have to convert boredom

from a malady into a way of confronting the world. Keep your

vocabulary simple, act stoned when you’re not or act more

stoned than you are, flaunt ignorance, materialize your dreams.

It is a powerful and effective defense — it neutralizes the insult

and the frustration of being a vocational kid and, when

perfected, it drives teachers up the wall, a delightful secondary

effect. But like all strong magic, it exacts a price.

My own deliverance from the Voc. Ed. world began with

sophomore biology. Every student, college prep to vocational,

had to take biology, and unlike the other courses, the same

person taught all sections. When teaching the vocational group,

Brother Clint probably slowed down a bit or omitted a little of

the fundamental biochemistry, but he used the same book and

more or less the same syllabus across the board. If one class got

tough, he could get tougher. He was young and powerful and

very handsome, and looks and physical strength were high

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currency. No one gave him any trouble.

I was pretty bad at the dissecting table, but the lectures and

the textbook were interesting: plastic overlays that, with each

turned page, peeled away skin, then veins and muscle, then

organs, down to the very bones that Brother Clint, pointer in

hand, would tap out on our hanging skeleton. Dave Snyder was

in big trouble, for the study of life — versus the living of it — was

sticking in his craw. We worked out a code for our multiple-

choice exams. He’d poke me in the back: once for the answer

under A, twice for B, and so on; and when he’d hit the right one,

I’d look up to the ceiling as though I were lost in thought. Poke:

cytoplasm. Poke, poke: methane. Poke, poke, poke: William

Harvey. Poke, poke, poke, poke: islets of Langerhans. This

didn’t work out perfectly, but Dave passed the course, and I

mastered the dreamy look of a guy on a record jacket. And

something else happened. Brother Clint puzzled over this Voc.

Ed. kid who was racking up 98s and 99s on his tests. He checked

the school’s records and discovered the error. He

recommended that I begin my junior year in the College Prep

program. According to all I’ve read since, such a shift, as one

report put it, is virtually impossible. Kids at that level rarely

cross tracks. The telling thing is how chancy both my placement

into and exit from Voc. Ed. was; neither I nor my parents had

anything to do with it. I lived in one world during spring

semester, and when I came back to school in the fall, I was

living in another.

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20 Switching to College Prep was a mixed blessing. I was an erratic student. I was undisciplined. And I hadn’t caught onto

the rules of the game: why work hard in a class that didn’t grab

my fancy? I was also hopelessly behind in math. Chemistry was

hard; toying with my chemistry set years before hadn’t

prepared me for the chemist’s equations. Fortunately, the priest

who taught both chemistry and second-year algebra was also

the school’s athletic director. Membership on the track team

covered me; I knew I wouldn’t get lower than a C. U.S. history

was taught pretty well, and I did okay. But civics was taken over

by a football coach who had trouble reading the textbook aloud

— and reading aloud was the centerpiece of his pedagogy.

College Prep at Mercy was certainly an improvement over the

vocational program — at least it carried some status — but the

social science curriculum was weak, and the mathematics and

physical sciences were simply beyond me. I had a miserable

quantitative background and ended up copying some

assignments and finessing the rest as best I could. Let me try to

explain how it feels to see again and again material you should

once have learned but didn’t.

You are given a problem. It requires you to simplify algebraic

fractions or to multiply expressions containing square roots.

You know this is pretty basic material because you’ve seen it for

years. Once a teacher took some time with you, and you learned

how to carry out these operations. Simple versions, anyway. But

that was a year or two or more in the past, and these are more

complex versions, and now you’re not sure. And this, you keep

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telling yourself, is ninth- or even eighth-grade stuff.

Next it’s a word problem. This is also old hat. The basic

elements are as familiar as story characters: trains speeding so

many miles per hour or shadows of buildings angling so many

degrees. Maybe you know enough, have sat through enough

explanations, to be able to begin setting up the problem: “If one

train is going this fast…” or “This shadow is really one line of a

triangle…” Then: “Let’s see…” “How did Jones do this?”

“Hmmmm.” “No.” “No, that won’t work.” Your attention

wavers. You wonder about other things: a football game, a

dance, that cute new checker at the market. You try to focus on

the problem again. You scribble on paper for a while, but the

tension wins out and your attention flits elsewhere. You

crumple the paper and begin daydreaming to ease the

frustration.

The particulars will vary, but in essence this is what a

number of students go through, especially those in so-called

remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again

the familiar and impenetrable formulas and diagrams and

terms that have stumped them for years. There is no excitement

here. No excitement. Regardless of what the teacher says, this is

not a new challenge. There is, rather, embarrassment and

frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded

once again of long-standing inadequacies. No wonder so many

students finally attribute their difficulties to something inborn,

organic: “That part of my brain just doesn’t work.” Given the

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troubling histories many of these students have, it’s miraculous

that any of them can lift the shroud of hopelessness sufficiently

to make deliverance from these classes possible.

Through this entire period, my father’s health was

deteriorating with cruel momentum. His arteriosclerosis

progressed to the point where a simple nick on his shin

wouldn’t heal. Eventually it ulcerated and widened. Lou Minton

would come by daily to change the dressing. We tried renting an

oscillating bed — which we placed in the front room — to force

blood through the constricted arteries in my father’s legs. The

bed hummed through the night, moving in place to ward off the

inevitable. The ulcer continued to spread, and the doctors

finally had to amputate. My grandfather had lost his leg in a

stockyard accident. Now my father too was crippled. His

convalescence was slow but steady, and the doctors placed him

in the Santa Monica Rehabilitation Center, a sun-bleached

building that opened out onto the warm spray of the Pacific.

The place gave him some strength and some color and some

training in walking with an artificial leg. He did pretty well for a

year or so until he slipped and broke his hip. He was confined

to a wheelchair after that, and the confinement contributed to

the diminishing of his body and spirit.

I am holding a picture of him. He is sitting in his

wheelchair and smiling at the camera. The smile appears

forced, unsteady, seems to quaver, though it is frozen in silver

nitrate. He is in his mid-sixties and looks eighty. Late in my

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junior year, he had a stroke and never came out of the resulting

coma. After that, I would see him only in dreams, and to this

day that is how I join him. Sometimes the dreams are sad and

grisly and primal: my father lying in a bed soaked with his

suppuration, holding me, rocking me. But sometimes the

dreams bring him back to me healthy: him talking to me on an

empty street, or buying some pictures to decorate our old

house, or transformed somehow into someone strong and adept

with tools and the physical.

Jack MacFarland couldn’t have come into my life at a better

time. My father was dead, and I had logged up too many years

of scholastic indifference. Mr. MacFarland had a master’s

degree from Columbia and decided, at twenty-six, to find a little

school and teach his heart out. He never took any credentialing

courses, couldn’t bear to, he said, so he had to find employment

in a private system. He ended up at Our Lady of Mercy teaching

five sections of senior English. He was a beatnik who was born

too late. His teeth were stained, he tucked his sorry tie in

between the third and fourth buttons of his shirt, and his pants

were chronically wrinkled. At first, we couldn’t believe this guy,

thought he slept in his car. But within no time, he had us so

startled with work that we didn’t much worry about where he

slept or if he slept at all. We wrote three or four essays a month.

We read a book every two to three weeks, starting with the Iliad

and ending up with Hemingway. He gave us a quiz on the

reading every other day. He brought a prep school curriculum

to Mercy High.

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MacFarland’s lectures were crafted, and as he delivered them

he would pace the room jiggling a piece of chalk in his cupped

hand, using it to scribble on the board the names of all the

writers and philosophers and plays and novels he was weaving

into his discussion. He asked questions often, raised everything

from Zeno’s paradox to the repeated last line of Frost’s

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He slowly and

carefully built up our knowledge of Western intellectual history

— with facts, with connections, with speculations. We learned

about Greek philosophy, about Dante, the Elizabethan world

view, the Age of Reason, existentialism. He analyzed poems

with us, had us reading sections from John Ciardi’s How Does a

Poem Mean?, making a potentially difficult book accessible

with his own explanations. We gave oral reports on poems

Ciardi didn’t cover. We imitated the styles of Conrad,

Hemingway, and Time magazine. We wrote and talked, wrote

and talked. The man immersed us in language.

Even MacFarland’s barbs were literary. If Jim Fitzsimmons,

hung over and irritable, tried to smart-ass him, he’d rejoin with

a flourish that would spark the indomitable Skip Madison —

who’d lost his front teeth in a hapless tackle — to flick his

tongue through the gap and opine, “good chop,” drawing out

the single “o” in stinging indictment. Jack MacFarland, this

tobacco-stained intellectual, brandished linguistic weapons of a

kind I hadn’t encountered before. Here was this egghead, for

God’s sake, keeping some pretty difficult people in line. And

from what I heard, Mike Dweetz and Steve Fusco and all the

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notorious Voc. Ed. crowd settled down as well when

MacFarland took the podium. Though a lot of guys groused in

the schoolyard, it just seemed that giving trouble to this

particular teacher was a silly thing to do. Tomfoolery, not to

mention assault, had no place in the world he was trying to

create for us, and instinctively everyone knew that. If nothing

else, we all recognized MacFarland’s considerable intelligence

and respected the hours he put into his work. It came to this:

the troublemaker would look foolish rather than daring. Even

Jim Fitzsimmons was reading On the Road and turning his

incipient alcoholism to literary ends.

There were some lives that were already beyond Jack

MacFarland’s ministrations, but mine was not. I started reading

again as I hadn’t since elementary school. I would go into our

gloomy little bedroom or sit at the dinner table while, on the

television, Danny McShane was paralyzing Mr. Moto with the

atomic drop, and work slowly back through Heart of Darkness,

trying to catch the words in Conrad’s sentences. I certainly was

not MacFarland’s best student; most of the other guys in College

Prep, even my fellow slackers, had better backgrounds than I

did. But I worked very hard, for MacFarland had hooked me. He

tapped my old interest in reading and creating stories. He gave

me a way to feel special by using my mind. And he provided a

role model that wasn’t shaped on physical prowess alone, and

something inside me that I wasn’t quite aware of responded to

that. Jack MacFarland established a literacy club, to borrow a

phrase of Frank Smith’s, and invited me — invited all of us — to

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join.

There’s been a good deal of research and speculation

suggesting that the acknowledgment of school performance

with extrinsic rewards — smiling faces, stars, numbers, grades

— diminishes the intrinsic satisfaction children experience by

engaging in reading or writing or problem solving. While it’s

certainly true that we’ve created an educational system that

encourages our best and brightest to become cynical grade

collectors and, in general, have developed an obsession with

evaluation and assessment, I must tell you that venal though it

may have been, I loved getting good grades from MacFarland. I

now know how subjective grades can be, but then they came

tucked in the back of essays like bits of scientific data, some sort

of spectroscopic readout that said, objectively and publicly, that

I had made something of value. I suppose I’d been mediocre for

too long and enjoyed a public redefinition. And I suppose the

workings of my mind, such as they were, had been private for

too long. My linguistic play moved into the world; … these

papers with their circled, red B-pluses and A-minuses linked my

mind to something outside it. I carried them around like a club

emblem.

One day in the December of my senior year, Mr. MacFarland

asked me where I was going to go to college. I hadn’t thought

much about it. Many of the students I teach today spent their

last year in high school with a physics text in one hand and the

Stanford catalog in the other, but I wasn’t even aware of what

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“entrance requirements” were. My folks would say that they

wanted me to go to college and be a doctor, but I don’t know

how seriously I ever took that; it seemed a sweet thing to say, a

bit of supportive family chatter, like telling a gangly daughter

she’s graceful. The reality of higher education wasn’t in my

scheme of things: no one in the family had gone to college; only

two of my uncles had completed high school. I figured I’d get a

night job and go to the local junior college because I knew that

Snyder and Company were going there to play ball. But I hadn’t

even prepared for that. When I finally said, “I don’t know,”

MacFarland looked down at me — I was seated in his office —

and said, “Listen, you can write.”

My grades stank. I had A’s in biology and a handful of B’s in a

few English and social science classes. All the rest were C’s — or

worse. MacFarland said I would do well in his class and laid

down the law about doing well in the others. Still, the record for

my first three years wouldn’t have been acceptable to any four-

year school. To nobody’s surprise, I was turned down flat by

USC and UCLA. But Jack MacFarland was on the case. He had

received his bachelor’s degree from Loyola University, so he

made calls to old professors and talked to somebody in

admissions and wrote me a strong letter. Loyola finally

accepted me as a probationary student. I would be on trial for

the first year, and if I did okay, I would be granted regular

status. MacFarland also intervened to get me a loan, for I could

never have afforded a private college without it. Four more

years of religion classes and four more years of boys at one

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school, girls at another. But at least I was going to college.

Amazing.

In my last semester of high school, I elected a special English

course fashioned by Mr. MacFarland, and it was through this

elective that there arose at Mercy a fledgling literati. Art Mitz,

the editor of the school newspaper and a very smart guy, was

the kingpin. He was joined by me and by Mark Dever, a quiet

boy who wrote beautifully and who would die before he was

forty. MacFarland occasionally invited us to his apartment, and

those visits became the high point of our apprenticeship: we’d

clamp on our training wheels and drive to his salon.

He lived in a cramped and cluttered place near the airport,

tucked away in the kind of building that architectural critic

Reyner Banham calls a dingbat. Books were all over: stacked,

piled, tossed, and crated, underlined and dog eared, well worn

and new. Cigarette ashes crusted with coffee in saucers or

spilling over the sides of motel ashtrays. The little bedroom

had, along two of its walls, bricks and boards loaded with notes,

magazines, and oversized books. The kitchen joined the living

room, and there was a stack of German newspapers under the

sink. I had never seen anything like it: a great flophouse of

language furnished by City Lights and Café le Metro. I read

every title. I flipped through paperbacks and scanned jackets

and memorized names: Gogol, Finnegans Wake, Djuna Barnes,

Jackson Pollock, A Coney Island of the Mind, F. O.

Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, all sorts of Freud,

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Troubled Sleep, Man Ray, The Education of Henry Adams,

Richard Wright, Film as Art, William Butler Yeats, Marguerite

Duras, Redburn, A Season in Hell, Kapital. On the cover of

Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer was an Edward Gorey drawing

of a young man on a road winding into dark trees. By the

hotplate sat a strange Kafka novel called Amerika, in which an

adolescent hero crosses the Atlantic to find the Nature Theater

of Oklahoma. Art and Mark would be talking about a movie or

the school newspaper, and I would be consuming my English

teacher’s library. It was heady stuff. I felt like a Pop Warner

athlete on steroids.

Art, Mark, and I would buy stogies and triangulate from

MacFarland’s apartment to the Cinema, which now shows X-

rated films but was then L.A.’s premier art theater, and then to

the musty Cherokee Bookstore in Hollywood to hobnob with

beatnik homosexuals — smoking, drinking bourbon and coffee,

and trying out awkward phrases we’d gleaned from our

mentor’s bookshelves. I was happy and precocious and a little

scared as well, for Hollywood Boulevard was thick with a kind

of decadence that was foreign to the South Side. After the

Cherokee, we would head back to the security of MacFarland’s

apartment, slaphappy with hipness.

Let me be the first to admit that there was a good deal of

adolescent passion in this embrace of the avant-garde: self-

absorption, sexually charged pedantry, an elevation of the odd

and abandoned. Still it was a time during which I absorbed an

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awful lot of information: long lists of titles, images from

expressionist paintings, new wave shibboleths, snippets of

philosophy, and names that read like Steve Fusco’s misspellings

— Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Now this is hardly the stuff

of deep understanding. But it was an introduction, a phrase

book, a Baedeker to a vocabulary of ideas, and it felt good at

the time to know all these words. With hindsight I realize how

layered and important that knowledge was.

It enabled me to do things in the world. I could browse

bohemian bookstores in far-off, mysterious Hollywood; I could

go to the Cinema and see events through the lenses of European

directors; and, most of all, I could share an evening, talk that

talk, with Jack MacFarland, the man I most admired at the time.

Knowledge was becoming a bonding agent. Within a year or

two, the persona of the disaffected hipster would prove too

cynical, too alienated to last. But for a time it was new and

exciting: it provided a critical perspective on society, and it

allowed me to act as though I were living beyond the limiting

boundaries of South Vermont.

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ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. Describe Rose’s life in Voc. Ed. What were his teachers like? Have you ever had experience with teachers like these?

2. What did Voc. Ed. do to Rose and his fellow students? How did it affect them intellectually, emotionally, and socially? Why was it subsequently so hard for Rose to catch up in math?

3. Why is high school so disorienting to students like Ken Harvey? How does he cope with it? What other strategies do students use to cope with the pressures and judgments they encounter in school?

4. What does Jack MacFarland offer Rose that finally helps him learn? Do you think it was inevitable that someone with Rose’s intelligence would eventually succeed?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

5. To what extent do Rose’s experiences challenge or confirm John Taylor Gatto’s critique of public education in “Against School” (p. 114)? How might Gatto account for the existence of truly remarkable teachers like Rose’s Jack MacFarland?

6. Read Gregory Mantsios’s “Class in America” (p. 347) and write an imaginary dialogue between Rose and Mantsios about why some students, like Rose, seem to be able to break through social class barriers and others, like Dave Snyder, Ted Richard, and Ken Harvey, do not.

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EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

7. Rose explains that high school can be a “tremendously disorienting place” (para. 16). What, if anything, do you find disorienting about college? What steps can students at your school take to lessen feelings of disorientation? What could your college do to help them?

8. Review one or more of Rose’s descriptions of his high school classmates; then write a description of one of your own high school classmates, trying to capture in a nutshell how that person coped or failed to cope with the educational system.

9. Watch any one of the many films that have been made about charismatic teachers (for example, Dangerous Minds, Renaissance Man, Stand and Deliver, or Dead Poets Society) and compare Hollywood’s depiction of a dynamic teacher to Rose’s portrayal of Jack MacFarland. What do such charismatic teachers offer their students personally and intellectually? Do you see any disadvantages to classes taught by teachers like these?

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FROM SOCIAL CLASS AND THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM OF WORK JEAN ANYON

It’s no surprise that schools in wealthy communities are

better than those in poor communities, or that they

better prepare their students for desirable jobs. It may be

shocking, however, to learn how vast the differences in

schools are — not so much in resources as in teaching

methods and philosophies of education. Jean Anyon

observed five elementary schools over the course of a full

school year and concluded that fifth graders of different

economic backgrounds are already being prepared to

occupy particular rungs on the social ladder. In a sense,

some whole schools are on the vocational education

track, while others are geared to produce future doctors,

lawyers, and business leaders. Anyon’s main audience is

professional educators, so you may find her style and

vocabulary challenging, but, once you’ve read her

descriptions of specific classroom activities, the more

analytic parts of the essay should prove easier to

understand. Anyon (1941–2013) was a social activist and

professor of educational policy in the Ph.D. Program in

Urban Education at The City University of New York. Her

publications include Radical Possibilities: Public Policy,

Urban Education and a New Social Movement (2005) and

Theory and Educational Research: Toward Critical Social

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Explanation (2009). This essay first appeared in the

Journal of Education in 1980.

SCHOLARS IN POLITICAL ECONOMY and the sociology of

knowledge have recently argued that public schools in complex

industrial societies like our own make available different types

of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to

students in different social classes. Bowles and Gintis, for

example, have argued that students in different social-class

backgrounds are rewarded for classroom behaviors that

correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the

different occupational strata — the working classes for docility

and obedience, the managerial classes for initiative and

personal assertiveness. Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, and

Michael W. Apple, focusing on school knowledge, have

argued that knowledge and skills leading to social power and

regard (medical, legal, managerial) are made available to the

advantaged social groups but are withheld from the working

classes, to whom a more “practical” curriculum is offered

(manual skills, clerical knowledge). While there has been

considerable argumentation of these points regarding

education in England, France, and North America, there has

been little or no attempt to investigate these ideas empirically in

elementary or secondary schools and classrooms in this

country.

This article offers tentative empirical support (and

qualification) of the above arguments by providing illustrative

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examples of differences in student work in classrooms in

contrasting social-class communities. The examples were

gathered as part of an ethnographical study of curricular,

pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices in five elementary

schools. The article attempts a theoretical contribution as well

and assesses student work in the light of a theoretical approach

to social-class analysis.… It will be suggested that there is a

“hidden curriculum” in schoolwork that has profound

implications for the theory — and consequence — of everyday

activity in education….

The Sample of Schools … The social-class designation of each of the five schools will be

identified, and the income, occupation, and other relevant

available social characteristics of the students and their parents

will be described. The first three schools are in a medium-sized

city district in northern New Jersey, and the other two are in a

nearby New Jersey suburb.

The first two schools I will call working-class schools. Most of

the parents have blue-collar jobs. Less than a third of the

fathers are skilled, while the majority are in unskilled or

semiskilled jobs. During the period of the study (1978–1979),

approximately 15 percent of the fathers were unemployed. The

large majority (85 percent) of the families are white. The

following occupations are typical: platform, storeroom, and

stockroom workers; foundrymen, pipe welders, and

boilermakers; semiskilled and unskilled assemblyline

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5

operatives; gas station attendants, auto mechanics,

maintenance workers, and security guards. Less than 30

percent of the women work, some part-time and some full-time,

on assembly lines, in storerooms and stockrooms, as

waitresses, barmaids, or sales clerks. Of the fifth-grade parents,

none of the wives of the skilled workers had jobs.

Approximately 15 percent of the families in each school are at

or below the federal “poverty” level; most of the rest of the

family incomes are at or below $12,000, except some of the

skilled workers whose incomes are higher. The incomes of the

majority of the families in these two schools (at or below

$12,000) are typical of 38.6 percent of the families in the United

States.

The third school is called the middle-class school, although

because of neighborhood residence patterns, the population is a

mixture of several social classes. The parents’ occupations can

be divided into three groups: a small group of blue-collar “rich,”

who are skilled, well-paid workers such as printers, carpenters,

plumbers, and construction workers. The second group is

composed of parents in working-class and middle-class white-

collar jobs: women in office jobs, technicians, supervisors in

industry, and parents employed by the city (such as firemen,

policemen, and several of the school’s teachers). The third

group is composed of occupations such as personnel directors

in local firms, accountants, “middle management,” and a few

small capitalists (owners of shops in the area). The children of

several local doctors attend this school. Most family incomes

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are between $13,000 and $25,000, with a few higher. This

income range is typical of 38.9 percent of the families in the

United States.

The fourth school has a parent population that is at the upper

income level of the upper middle class and is predominantly

professional. This school will be called the affluent professional

school. Typical jobs are: cardiologist, interior designer,

corporate lawyer or engineer, executive in advertising or

television. There are some families who are not as affluent as

the majority (the family of the superintendent of the district’s

schools, and the one or two families in which the fathers are

skilled workers). In addition, a few of the families are more

affluent than the majority and can be classified in the capitalist

class (a partner in a prestigious Wall Street stock brokerage

firm). Approximately 90 percent of the children in this school

are white. Most family incomes are between $40,000 and

$80,000. This income span represents approximately 7 percent

of the families in the United States.

In the fifth school the majority of the families belong to the

capitalist class. This school will be called the executive elite

school because most of the fathers are top executives (for

example, presidents and vice-presidents) in major United

States–based multinational corporations — for example, AT&T,

RCA, Citibank, American Express, U.S. Steel. A sizable group of

fathers are top executives in financial firms on Wall Street.

There are also a number of fathers who list their occupations as

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“general counsel” to a particular corporation, and these

corporations are also among the large multinationals. Many of

the mothers do volunteer work in the Junior League, Junior

Fortnightly, or other service groups; some are intricately

involved in town politics; and some are themselves in well-paid

occupations. There are no minority children in the school.

Almost all the family incomes are over $100,000, with some in

the $500,000 range. The incomes in this school represent less

than 1 percent of the families in the United States.

Since each of the five schools is only one instance of

elementary education in a particular social-class context, I will

not generalize beyond the sample. However, the examples of

schoolwork which follow will suggest characteristics of

education in each social setting that appear to have theoretical

and social significance and to be worth investigation in a larger

number of schools….

The Working-Class Schools In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of

a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving

rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The

teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it

might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies

behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps

meaning or significance. Available textbooks are not always

used, and the teachers often prepare their own dittos or put

work examples on the board. Most of the rules regarding work

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are designations of what the children are to do; the rules are

steps to follow. These steps are told to the children by the

teachers and are often written on the board. The children are

usually told to copy the steps as notes. These notes are to be

studied. Work is often evaluated not according to whether it is

right or wrong but according to whether the children followed

the right steps.

The following examples illustrate these points. In math,

when two-digit division was introduced, the teacher in one

school gave a four-minute lecture on what the terms are called

(which number is the divisor, dividend, quotient, and

remainder). The children were told to copy these names in their

notebooks. Then the teacher told them the steps to follow to do

the problems, saying, “This is how you do them.” The teacher

listed the steps on the board, and they appeared several days

later as a chart hung in the middle of the front wall: “Divide,

Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down.” The children often did

examples of two-digit division. When the teacher went over the

examples with them, he told them what the procedure was for

each problem, rarely asking them to conceptualize or explain it

themselves: “Three into twenty-two is seven; do your

subtraction and one is left over.” During the week that two-digit

division was introduced (or at any other time), the investigator

did not observe any discussion of the idea of grouping involved

in division, any use of manipulables, or any attempt to relate

two-digit division to any other mathematical process. Nor was

there any attempt to relate the steps to an actual or possible

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thought process of the children. The observer did not hear the

terms dividend, quotient, and so on, used again. The math

teacher in the other working-class school followed similar

procedures regarding two-digit division and at one point her

class seemed confused. She said, “You’re confusing yourselves.

You’re tensing up. Remember, when you do this, it’s the same

steps over and over again — and that’s the way division always

is.” Several weeks later, after a test, a group of her children “still

didn’t get it,” and she made no attempt to explain the concept of

dividing things into groups or to give them manipulables for

their own investigation. Rather, she went over the steps with

them again and told them that they “needed more practice.”

In other areas of math, work is also carrying out often

unexplained fragmented procedures. For example, one of the

teachers led the children through a series of steps to make a 1-

inch grid on their paper without telling them that they were

making a 1-inch grid or that it would be used to study scale. She

said, “Take your ruler. Put it across the top. Make a mark at

every number. Then move your ruler down to the bottom. No,

put it across the bottom. Now make a mark on top of every

number. Now draw a line from…” At this point a girl said that

she had a faster way to do it and the teacher said, “No, you

don’t; you don’t even know what I’m making yet. Do it this way

or it’s wrong.” After they had made the lines up and down and

across, the teacher told them she wanted them to make a figure

by connecting some dots and to measure that, using the scale of

1 inch equals 1 mile. Then they were to cut it out. She said,

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“Don’t cut it until I check it.”

In both working-class schools, work in language arts is

mechanics of punctuation (commas, periods, question marks,

exclamation points), capitalization, and the four kinds of

sentences. One teacher explained to me, “Simple punctuation is

all they’ll ever use.” Regarding punctuation, either a teacher or

a ditto stated the rules for where, for example, to put commas.

The investigator heard no classroom discussion of the aural

context of punctuation (which, of course, is what gives each

mark its meaning). Nor did the investigator hear any statement

or inference that placing a punctuation mark could be a

decision-making process, depending, for example, on one’s

intended meaning. Rather, the children were told to follow the

rules. Language arts did not involve creative writing. There

were several writing assignments throughout the year, but in

each instance the children were given a ditto, and they wrote

answers to questions on the sheet. For example, they wrote

their “autobiography” by answering such questions as “Where

were you born?” “What is your favorite animal?” on a sheet

entitled “All About Me.”

In one of the working-class schools, the class had a science

period several times a week. On the three occasions observed,

the children were not called upon to set up experiments or to

give explanations for facts or concepts. Rather, on each

occasion the teacher told them in his own words what the book

said. The children copied the teacher’s sentences from the

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board. Each day that preceded the day they were to do a science

experiment, the teacher told them to copy the directions from

the book for the procedure they would carry out the next day

and to study the list at home that night. The day after each

experiment, the teacher went over what they had “found” (they

did the experiments as a class, and each was actually a class

demonstration led by the teacher). Then the teacher wrote what

they “found” on the board, and the children copied that in their

notebooks. Once or twice a year there are science projects. The

project is chosen and assigned by the teacher from a box of 3-

by-5-inch cards. On the card the teacher has written the

question to be answered, the books to use, and how much to

write. Explaining the cards to the observer, the teacher said, “It

tells them exactly what to do, or they couldn’t do it.”

Social studies in the working-class schools is also largely

mechanical, rote work that was given little explanation or

connection to larger contexts. In one school, for example,

although there was a book available, social studies work was to

copy the teacher’s notes from the board. Several times a week

for a period of several months the children copied these notes.

The fifth grades in the district were to study United States

history. The teacher used a booklet she had purchased called

“The Fabulous Fifty States.” Each day she put information from

the booklet in outline form on the board and the children

copied it. The type of information did not vary: the name of the

state, its abbreviation, state capital, nickname of the state, its

main products, main business, and a “Fabulous Fact” (“Idaho

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grew twenty-seven billion potatoes in one year. That’s enough

potatoes for each man, woman, and…”). As the children

finished copying the sentences, the teacher erased them and

wrote more. Children would occasionally go to the front to pull

down the wall map in order to locate the states they were

copying, and the teacher did not dissuade them. But the

observer never saw her refer to the map; nor did the observer

ever hear her make other than perfunctory remarks concerning

the information the children were copying. Occasionally the

children colored in a ditto and cut it out to make a stand-up

figure (representing, for example, a man roping a cow in the

Southwest). These were referred to by the teacher as their social

studies “projects.”

Rote behavior was often called for in classroom work.

When going over math and language arts skills sheets, for

example, as the teacher asked for the answer to each problem,

he fired the questions rapidly, staccato, and the scene reminded

the observer of a sergeant drilling recruits: above all, the

questions demanded that you stay at attention: “The next one?

What do I put here?… Here? Give us the next.” Or “How many

commas in this sentence? Where do I put them … The next

one?”

The four fifth-grade teachers observed in the working-class

schools attempted to control classroom time and space by

making decisions without consulting the children and without

explaining the basis for their decisions. The teacher’s control

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thus often seemed capricious. Teachers, for instance, very often

ignored the bells to switch classes — deciding among

themselves to keep the children after the period was officially

over to continue with the work or for disciplinary reasons or so

they (the teachers) could stand in the hall and talk. There were

no clocks in the rooms in either school, and the children often

asked, “What period is this?” “When do we go to gym?” The

children had no access to materials. These were handed out by

teachers and closely guarded. Things in the room “belonged” to

the teacher: “Bob, bring me my garbage can.” The teachers

continually gave the children orders. Only three times did the

investigator hear a teacher in either working-class school

preface a directive with an unsarcastic “please,” or “let’s,” or

“would you.” Instead, the teachers said, “Shut up,” “Shut your

mouth,” “Open your books,” “Throw your gum away — if you

want to rot your teeth, do it on your own time.” Teachers made

every effort to control the movement of the children, and often

shouted, “Why are you out of your seat??!!” If the children got

permission to leave the room, they had to take a written pass

with the date and time….

Middle-Class School In the middle-class school, work is getting the right answer. If

one accumulates enough right answers, one gets a good grade.

One must follow the directions in order to get the right answers,

but the directions often call for some figuring, some choice,

some decision making. For example, the children must often

figure out by themselves what the directions ask them to do and

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how to get the answer: what do you do first, second, and

perhaps third? Answers are usually found in books or by

listening to the teacher. Answers are usually words, sentences,

numbers, or facts and dates; one writes them on paper, and one

should be neat. Answers must be given in the right order, and

one cannot make them up.

The following activities are illustrative. Math involves some

choice: one may do two-digit division the long way or the short

way, and there are some math problems that can be done “in

your head.” When the teacher explains how to do two-digit

division, there is recognition that a cognitive process is

involved; she gives you several ways and says, “I want to make

sure you understand what you’re doing — so you get it right”;

and, when they go over the homework, she asks the children to

tell how they did the problem and what answer they got.

In social studies the daily work is to read the assigned pages

in the textbook and to answer the teacher’s questions. The

questions are almost always designed to check on whether the

students have read the assignment and understood it: who did

so-and-so; what happened after that; when did it happen,

where, and sometimes, why did it happen? The answers are in

the book and in one’s understanding of the book; the teacher’s

hints when one doesn’t know the answers are to “read it again”

or to look at the picture or at the rest of the paragraph. One is to

search for the answer in the “context,” in what is given.

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20 Language arts is “simple grammar, what they need for everyday life.” The language arts teacher says, “They should

learn to speak properly, to write business letters and thank-you

letters, and to understand what nouns and verbs and simple

subjects are.” Here, as well, actual work is to choose the right

answers, to understand what is given. The teacher often says,

“Please read the next sentence and then I’ll question you about

it.” One teacher said in some exasperation to a boy who was

fooling around in class, “If you don’t know the answers to the

questions I ask, then you can’t stay in this class! [pause] You

never know the answers to the questions I ask, and it’s not fair

to me — and certainly not to you!”

Most lessons are based on the textbook. This does not involve

a critical perspective on what is given there. For example, a

critical perspective in social studies is perceived as dangerous

by these teachers because it may lead to controversial topics;

the parents might complain. The children, however, are often

curious, especially in social studies. Their questions are

tolerated and usually answered perfunctorily. But after a few

minutes the teacher will say, “All right, we’re not going any

farther. Please open your social studies workbook.” While the

teachers spend a lot of time explaining and expanding on what

the textbooks say, there is little attempt to analyze how or why

things happen, or to give thought to how pieces of a culture, or,

say, a system of numbers or elements of a language fit together

or can be analyzed. What has happened in the past and what

exists now may not be equitable or fair, but (shrug) that is the

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way things are and one does not confront such matters in

school. For example, in social studies after a child is called on to

read a passage about the pilgrims, the teacher summarizes the

paragraph and then says, “So you can see how strict they were

about everything.” A child asks, “Why?” “Well, because they felt

that if you weren’t busy you’d get into trouble.” Another child

asks, “Is it true that they burned women at the stake?” The

teacher says, “Yes, if a woman did anything strange, they

hanged them. [sic] What would a woman do, do you think, to

make them burn them? [sic] See if you can come up with better

answers than my other [social studies] class.” Several children

offer suggestions, to which the teacher nods but does not

comment. Then she says, “Okay, good,” and calls on the next

child to read.

Work tasks do not usually request creativity. Serious

attention is rarely given in school work on how the children

develop or express their own feelings and ideas, either

linguistically or in graphic form. On the occasions when

creativity or self-expression is requested, it is peripheral to the

main activity or it is “enrichment” or “for fun.” During a lesson

on what similes are, for example, the teacher explains what

they are, puts several on the board, gives some other examples

herself, and then asks the children if they can “make some up.”

She calls on three children who give similes, two of which are

actually in the book they have open before them. The teacher

does not comment on this and then asks several others to

choose similes from the list of phrases in the book. Several do

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so correctly, and she says, “Oh good! You’re picking them out!

See how good we are?” Their homework is to pick out the rest of

the similes from the list.

Creativity is not often requested in social studies and science

projects, either. Social studies projects, for example, are given

with directions to “find information on your topic” and write it

up. The children are not supposed to copy but to “put it in your

own words.” Although a number of the projects subsequently

went beyond the teacher’s direction to find information and had

quite expressive covers and inside illustrations, the teacher’s

evaluative comments had to do with the amount of information,

whether they had “copied,” and if their work was neat.

The style of control of the three fifth-grade teachers observed

in this school varied from somewhat easygoing to strict, but in

contrast to the working-class schools, the teachers’ decisions

were usually based on external rules and regulations — for

example, on criteria that were known or available to the

children. Thus, the teachers always honor the bells for

changing classes, and they usually evaluate children’s work by

what is in the textbooks and answer booklets.

There is little excitement in schoolwork for the children,

and the assignments are perceived as having little to do with

their interests and feelings. As one child said, what you do is

“store facts up in your head like cold storage — until you need it

later for a test or your job.” Thus, doing well is important

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because there are thought to be other, likely rewards: a good job

or college.

Affluent Professional School In the affluent professional school, work is creative activity

carried out independently. The students are continually asked

to express and apply ideas and concepts. Work involves

individual thought and expressiveness, expansion and

illustration of ideas, and choice of appropriate method and

material. (The class is not considered an open classroom, and

the principal explained that because of the large number of

discipline problems in the fifth grade this year they did not

departmentalize. The teacher who agreed to take part in the

study said she is “more structured” this year than she usually

is.) The products of work in this class are often written stories,

editorials and essays, or representations of ideas in mural,

graph, or craft form. The products of work should not be like

everybody else’s and should show individuality. They should

exhibit good design, and (this is important) they must also fit

empirical reality. Moreover, one’s work should attempt to

interpret or “make sense” of reality. The relatively few rules to

be followed regarding work are usually criteria for, or limits on,

individual activity. One’s product is usually evaluated for the

quality of its expression and for the appropriateness of its

conception to the task. In many cases, one’s own satisfaction

with the product is an important criterion for its evaluation.

When right answers are called for, as in commercial materials

like SRA (Science Research Associates) and math, it is important

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that the children decide on an answer as a result of thinking

about the idea involved in what they’re being asked to do.

Teacher’s hints are to “think about it some more.”

The following activities are illustrative. The class takes home

a sheet requesting each child’s parents to fill in the number of

cars they have, the number of television sets, refrigerators,

games, or rooms in the house, and so on. Each child is to figure

the average number of a type of possession owned by the fifth

grade. Each child must compile the “data” from all the sheets. A

calculator is available in the classroom to do the mechanics of

finding the average. Some children decide to send sheets to the

fourth-grade families for comparison. Their work should be

“verified” by a classmate before it is handed in.

Each child and his or her family has made a geoboard. The

teacher asks the class to get their geoboards from the side

cabinet, to take a handful of rubber bands, and then to listen to

what she would like them to do. She says, “I would like you to

design a figure and then find the perimeter and area. When you

have it, check with your neighbor. After you’ve done that,

please transfer it to graph paper and tomorrow I’ll ask you to

make up a question about it for someone. When you hand it in,

please let me know whose it is and who verified it. Then I have

something else for you to do that’s really fun. [pause] Find the

average number of chocolate chips in three cookies. I’ll give you

three cookies, and you’ll have to eat your way through, I’m

afraid!” Then she goes around the room and gives help,

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suggestions, praise, and admonitions that they are getting

noisy. They work sitting, or standing up at their desks, at

benches in the back, or on the floor. A child hands the teacher

his paper and she comments, “I’m not accepting this paper. Do

a better design.” To another child she says, “That’s fantastic! But

you’ll never find the area. Why don’t you draw a figure inside

[the big one] and subtract to get the area?”

The school district requires the fifth grade to study ancient

civilization (in particular, Egypt, Athens, and Sumer). In this

classroom, the emphasis is on illustrating and re-creating the

culture of the people of ancient times. The following are typical

activities: the children made an 8mm film on Egypt, which one

of the parents edited. A girl in the class wrote the script, and the

class acted it out. They put the sound on themselves. They read

stories of those days. They wrote essays and stories depicting

the lives of the people and the societal and occupational

divisions. They chose from a list of projects, all of which

involved graphic representations of ideas: for example, “Make a

mural depicting the division of labor in Egyptian society.”

Each child wrote and exchanged a letter in hieroglyphics

with a fifth grader in another class, and they also exchanged

stories they wrote in cuneiform. They made a scroll and singed

the edges so it looked authentic. They each chose an occupation

and made an Egyptian plaque representing that occupation,

simulating the appropriate Egyptian design. They carved their

design on a cylinder of wax, pressed the wax into clay, and then

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baked the clay. Although one girl did not choose an occupation

but carved instead a series of gods and slaves, the teacher said,

“That’s all right, Amber, it’s beautiful.” As they were working

the teacher said, “Don’t cut into your clay until you’re satisfied

with your design.”

Social studies also involves almost daily presentation by the

children of some event from the news. The teacher’s questions

ask the children to expand what they say, to give more details,

and to be more specific. Occasionally she adds some remarks to

help them see connections between events.

The emphasis on expressing and illustrating ideas in social

studies is accompanied in language arts by an emphasis on

creative writing. Each child wrote a rebus story for a first grader

whom they had interviewed to see what kind of story the child

liked best. They wrote editorials on pending decisions by the

school board and radio plays, some of which were read over the

school intercom from the office and one of which was

performed in the auditorium. There is no language arts

textbook because, the teacher said, “The principal wants us to

be creative.” There is not much grammar, but there is

punctuation. One morning when the observer arrived, the class

was doing a punctuation ditto. The teacher later apologized for

using the ditto. “It’s just for review,” she said. “I don’t teach

punctuation that way. We use their language.” The ditto had

three unambiguous rules for where to put commas in a

sentence. As the teacher was going around to help the children

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with the ditto, she repeated several times, “Where you put

commas depends on how you say the sentence; it depends on

the situation and what you want to say.” Several weeks later the

observer saw another punctuation activity. The teacher had

printed a five-paragraph story on an oak tag and then cut it into

phrases. She read the whole story to the class from the book,

then passed out the phrases. The group had to decide how the

phrases could best be put together again. (They arranged the

phrases on the floor.) The point was not to replicate the story,

although that was not irrelevant, but to “decide what you think

the best way is.” Punctuation marks on cardboard pieces were

then handed out, and the children discussed and then decided

what mark was best at each place they thought one was needed.

At the end of each paragraph the teacher asked, “Are you

satisfied with the way the paragraphs are now? Read it to

yourself and see how it sounds.” Then she read the original

story again, and they compared the two.

Describing her goals in science to the investigator, the

teacher said, “We use ESS (Elementary Science Study). It’s very

good because it gives a hands-on experience — so they can

make sense out of it. It doesn’t matter whether it [what they

find] is right or wrong. I bring them together and there’s value

in discussing their ideas.”

The products of work in this class are often highly valued by

the children and the teacher. In fact, this was the only school in

which the investigator was not allowed to take original pieces of

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the children’s work for her files. If the work was small enough,

however, and was on paper, the investigator could duplicate it

on the copying machine in the office.

The teacher’s attempt to control the class involves

constant negotiation. She does not give direct orders unless she

is angry because the children have been too noisy. Normally,

she tries to get them to foresee the consequences of their

actions and to decide accordingly. For example, lining them up

to go see a play written by the sixth graders, she says, “I

presume you’re lined up by someone with whom you want to

sit. I hope you’re lined up by someone you won’t get in trouble

with.”…

One of the few rules governing the children’s movement is

that no more than three children may be out of the room at

once. There is a school rule that anyone can go to the library at

any time to get a book. In the fifth grade I observed, they sign

their name on the chalkboard and leave. There are no passes.

Finally, the children have a fair amount of officially sanctioned

say over what happens in the class. For example, they often

negotiate what work is to be done. If the teacher wants to move

on to the next subject, but the children say they are not ready,

they want to work on their present projects some more, she

very often lets them do it.

Executive Elite School In the executive elite school, work is developing one’s analytical

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intellectual powers. Children are continually asked to reason

through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are

both logically sound and of top academic quality. A primary

goal of thought is to conceptualize rules by which elements may

fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving a

problem. Schoolwork helps one to achieve, to excel, to prepare

for life.

The following are illustrative. The math teacher teaches area

and perimeter by having the children derive formulas for each.

First she helps them, through discussion at the board, to arrive

at A = W × L as a formula (not the formula) for area. After

discussing several, she says, “Can anyone make up a formula

for perimeter? Can you figure that out yourselves? [pause]

Knowing what we know, can we think of a formula?” She works

out three children’s suggestions at the board, saying to two,

“Yes, that’s a good one,” and then asks the class if they can think

of any more. No one volunteers. To prod them, she says, “If you

use rules and good reasoning, you get many ways. Chris, can

you think up a formula?”

She discusses two-digit division with the children as a

decision-making process. Presenting a new type of problem to

them, she asks, “What’s the first decision you’d make if

presented with this kind of example? What is the first thing

you’d think? Craig?” Craig says, “To find my first partial

quotient.” She responds, “Yes, that would be your first decision.

How would you do that?” Craig explains, and then the teacher

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says, “OK, we’ll see how that works for you.” The class tries his

way. Subsequently, she comments on the merits and

shortcomings of several other children’s decisions. Later, she

tells the investigator that her goals in math are to develop their

reasoning and mathematical thinking and that, unfortunately,

“there’s no time for manipulables.”

While right answers are important in math, they are not

“given” by the book or by the teacher but may be challenged by

the children. Going over some problems in late September the

teacher says, “Raise your hand if you do not agree.” A child

says, “I don’t agree with sixty-four.” The teacher responds, “OK,

there’s a question about sixty-four. [to class] Please check it.

Owen, they’re disagreeing with you. Kristen, they’re checking

yours.” The teacher emphasized this repeatedly during

September and October with statements like “Don’t be afraid to

say you disagree. In the last [math] class, somebody disagreed,

and they were right. Before you disagree, check yours, and if

you still think we’re wrong, then we’ll check it out.” By

Thanksgiving, the children did not often speak in terms of right

and wrong math problems but of whether they agreed with the

answer that had been given.

There are complicated math mimeos with many word

problems. Whenever they go over the examples, they discuss

how each child has set up the problem. The children must

explain it precisely. On one occasion the teacher said, “I’m

more — just as interested in how you set up the problem as in

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what answer you find. If you set up a problem in a good way,

the answer is easy to find.”

Social studies work is most often reading and discussion of

concepts and independent research. There are only occasional

artistic, expressive, or illustrative projects. Ancient Athens and

Sumer are, rather, societies to analyze. The following questions

are typical of those that guide the children’s independent

research. “What mistakes did Pericles make after the war?”

“What mistakes did the citizens of Athens make?” “What are the

elements of a civilization?” “How did Greece build an economic

empire?” “Compare the way Athens chose its leaders with the

way we choose ours.” Occasionally the children are asked to

make up sample questions for their social studies tests. On an

occasion when the investigator was present, the social studies

teacher rejected a child’s question by saying, “That’s just fact. If

I asked you that question on a test, you’d complain it was just

memory! Good questions ask for concepts.”

In social studies — but also in reading, science, and health —

the teachers initiate classroom discussions of current social

issues and problems. These discussions occurred on every one

of the investigator’s visits, and a teacher told me, “These

children’s opinions are important — it’s important that they

learn to reason things through.” The classroom discussions

always struck the observer as quite realistic and analytical,

dealing with concrete social issues like the following: “Why do

workers strike?” “Is that right or wrong?” “Why do we have

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inflation, and what can be done to stop it?” “Why do companies

put chemicals in food when the natural ingredients are

available?” and so on. Usually the children did not have to be

prodded to give their opinions. In fact, their statements and the

interchanges between them struck the observer as quite

sophisticated conceptually and verbally, and well-informed.

Occasionally the teachers would prod with statements such as,

“Even if you don’t know [the answers], if you think logically

about it, you can figure it out.” And “I’m asking you [these]

questions to help you think this through.”

Language arts emphasizes language as a complex system,

one that should be mastered. The children are asked to diagram

sentences of complex grammatical construction, to memorize

irregular verb conjugations (he lay, he has lain, and so on …),

and to use the proper participles, conjunctions, and

interjections in their speech. The teacher (the same one who

teaches social studies) told them, “It is not enough to get these

right on tests; you must use what you learn [in grammar classes]

in your written and oral work. I will grade you on that.”

Most writing assignments are either research reports and

essays for social studies or experiment analyses and write-ups

for science. There is only an occasional story or other “creative

writing” assignment. On the occasion observed by the

investigator (the writing of a Halloween story), the points the

teacher stressed in preparing the children to write involved the

structural aspects of a story rather than the expression of

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feelings or other ideas. The teacher showed them a filmstrip,

“The Seven Parts of a Story,” and lectured them on plot

development, mood setting, character development,

consistency, and the use of a logical or appropriate ending. The

stories they subsequently wrote were, in fact, well-structured,

but many were also personal and expressive. The teacher’s

evaluative comments, however, did not refer to the

expressiveness or artistry but were all directed toward whether

they had “developed” the story well.

Language arts work also involved a large amount of practice

in presentation of the self and in managing situations where the

child was expected to be in charge. For example, there was a

series of assignments in which each child had to be a “student

teacher.” The child had to plan a lesson in grammar, outlining,

punctuation, or other language arts topic and explain the

concept to the class. Each child was to prepare a worksheet or

game and a homework assignment as well. After each

presentation, the teacher and other children gave a critical

appraisal of the “student teacher’s” performance. Their criteria

were: whether the student spoke clearly, whether the lesson

was interesting, whether the student made any mistakes, and

whether he or she kept control of the class. On an occasion

when a child did not maintain control, the teacher said, “When

you’re up there, you have authority and you have to use it. I’ll

back you up.”…

The executive elite school is the only school where bells do

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not demarcate the periods of time. The two fifth-grade teachers

were very strict about changing classes on schedule, however,

as specific plans for each session had been made. The teachers

attempted to keep tight control over the children during

lessons, and the children were sometimes flippant, boisterous,

and occasionally rude. However, the children may be brought

into line by reminding them that “It is up to you,” “You must

control yourself,” “You are responsible for your work,” you

must “set your own priorities.” One teacher told a child, “You

are the only driver of your car — and only you can regulate your

speed.” A new teacher complained to the observer that she had

thought “these children” would have more control.

While strict attention to the lesson at hand is required, the

teachers make relatively little attempt to regulate the movement

of the children at other times. For example, except for the

kindergartners the children in this school do not have to wait

for the bell to ring in the morning; they may go to their

classroom when they arrive at school. Fifth graders often came

early to read, to finish work, or to catch up. After the first two

months of school, the fifth-grade teachers did not line the

children up to change classes or to go to gym, and so on, but,

when the children were ready and quiet, they were told they

could go — sometimes without the teachers.

In the classroom, the children could get materials when they

needed them and took what they needed from closets and from

the teacher’s desk. They were in charge of the office at

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lunchtime. During class they did not have to sign out or ask

permission to leave the room; they just got up and left. Because

of the pressure to get work done, however, they did not leave

the room very often. The teachers were very polite to the

children, and the investigator heard no sarcasm, no nasty

remarks, and few direct orders. The teachers never called the

children “honey” or “dear” but always called them by name.

The teachers were expected to be available before school, after

school, and for part of their lunchtime to provide extra help if

needed….

The foregoing analysis of differences in schoolwork in

contrasting social-class contexts suggests the following

conclusion: the “hidden curriculum” of schoolwork is tacit

preparation for relating to the process of production in a

particular way. Differing curricular, pedagogical, and pupil

evaluation practices emphasize different cognitive and

behavioral skills in each social setting and thus contribute to the

development in the children of certain potential relationships to

physical and symbolic capital, to authority, and to the process

of work. School experience, in the sample of schools discussed

here, differed qualitatively by social class. These differences

may not only contribute to the development in the children in

each social class of certain types of economically significant

relationships and not others but would thereby help to

reproduce this system of relations in society. In the

contribution to the reproduction of unequal social relations lies

a theoretical meaning and social consequence of classroom

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practice.

The identification of different emphases in classrooms in a

sample of contrasting social-class contexts implies that further

research should be conducted in a large number of schools to

investigate the types of work tasks and interactions in each to

see if they differ in the ways discussed here and to see if similar

potential relationships are uncovered. Such research could

have as a product the further elucidation of complex but not

readily apparent connections between everyday activity in

schools and classrooms and the unequal structure of economic

relationships in which we work and live.

ENGAGING THE TEXT

1. Examine the ways any single subject is taught in the four types of schools Anyon describes. What differences in teaching methods and in the student-teacher relationship do they reflect? What other differences do you note in the schools? What schools in your geographic region would closely approximate the working-class, middle-class, affluent professional, and executive elite schools of her article?

2. What attitudes toward knowledge and work are the four types of schools teaching their students? What kinds of jobs are students being prepared to do? Do you see any evidence that the schools in your community are producing particular kinds of workers?

3. What is the “hidden curriculum” of Anyon’s title? How is this

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curriculum taught, and what social, cultural, or political purposes does it serve?

EXPLORING CONNECTIONS

4. How might Anyon explain the boredom, absurdity, and childishness that John Taylor Gatto (p. 114) associates with compulsory public education? To what extent do Anyon and Gatto seem to agree about the relationship between school and social class?

5. Analyze the teaching styles that Mike Rose (p. 123) encounters at Our Lady of Mercy. Which of Anyon’s categories would they fit best? Do Rose’s experiences at his high school tend to confirm or complicate Anyon’s analysis?

EXTENDING THE CRITICAL CONTEXT

6. Should all schools be run like professional or elite schools? What would be the advantages of making these schools models for all social classes? Do you see any possible disadvantages?

7. Choose a common elementary school task or skill that Anyon does not mention. Outline four ways it might be taught in the four types of schools.

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CHOOSING A SCHOOL FOR MY DAUGHTER IN A SEGREGATED CITY NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES

Over half a century ago the U.S. Supreme Court declared

an end to school segregation in its 1954 Brown v. Board of

Education ruling. During the next two decades, school

districts worked to integrate formerly “separate but

equal” schools, often by busing black, Latino, and Asian

students to white neighborhoods miles from their homes.

Despite those efforts, thousands of public schools across

the country remain heavily segregated today, and many

Americans seem to have given up on the idea of

integration. Instead of addressing the racial and

economic inequities that have plagued American

education since its inception, many families have pulled

their kids out of local public schools and enrolled them in

private, charter, or magnet schools that have more

selective and more privileged student populations.

Nikole Hannah-Jones represents a startling exception to

this trend. When her daughter Najya was four, she and

her husband Faraji resisted the private/charter/magnet

school option, and enrolled her instead in the “intensely

segregated” public elementary school that served their

Brooklyn neighborhood. In this article, Hannah-Jones

explains the reasoning behind their decision and offers a

perspective on education and integration that challenges

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many of our assumptions about race and public

schooling. Hannah-Jones (b. 1976) is an award-winning

American journalist who focuses on issues of civil rights

and a staff writer for the New York Times, the source of

this selection.

IN THE SPRING OF 2014, when our daughter, Najya, was

turning 4, my husband and I found ourselves facing our

toughest decision since becoming parents. We live in Bedford-

Stuyvesant, a low-income, heavily black, rapidly gentrifying

neighborhood of brownstones in central Brooklyn. The nearby

public schools are named after people intended to evoke black

uplift, like Marcus Garvey, a prominent black nationalist in the

1920s, and Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black History

Month, but the schools are a disturbing reflection of New York

City’s stark racial and socioeconomic divisions. In one of the

most diverse cities in the world, the children who attend these

schools learn in classrooms where all of their classmates — and

I mean, in most cases, every single one — are black and Latino,

and nearly every student is poor. Not surprisingly, the test

scores of most of Bed-Stuy’s schools reflect the marginalization

of their students.

I didn’t know any of our middle-class neighbors, black or

white, who sent their children to one of these schools. They had

managed to secure seats in the more diverse and economically

advantaged magnet schools or gifted-and-talented programs

outside our area, or opted to pay hefty tuition to progressive but

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largely white private institutions. I knew this because from the

moment we arrived in New York with our 1-year-old, we had

many conversations about where we would, should, and

definitely should not send our daughter to school when the time

came.

My husband Faraji and I wanted to send our daughter to

public school. Faraji, the oldest child in a military family, went

to public schools that served Army bases both in America and

abroad. As a result, he had a highly unusual experience for a

black American child: He never attended a segregated public

school a day of his life. He can now walk into any room and

instantly start a conversation with the people there, whether

they are young mothers gathered at a housing-project tenants’

meeting or executives eating from small plates at a ritzy cocktail

reception.

I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, on the wrong side of the river

that divided white from black, opportunity from struggle, and

started my education in a low-income school that my mother

says was distressingly chaotic. I don’t recall it being bad, but I

do remember just one white child in my first-grade class,

though there may have been more. That summer, my mom and

dad enrolled my older sister and me in the school district’s

voluntary desegregation program, which allowed some black

kids to leave their neighborhood schools for whiter, more well-

off ones on the west side of town. This was 1982, nearly three

decades after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of

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Education that separate schools for black and white children

were unconstitutional, and near the height of desegregation in

this country. My parents chose one of the whitest, richest

schools, thinking it would provide the best opportunities for us.

Starting in second grade, I rode the bus an hour each morning

across town to the “best” public school my town had to offer,

Kingsley Elementary, where I was among the tiny number of

working-class children and the even tinier number of black

children. We did not walk to school or get dropped off by our

parents on their way to work. We showed up in a yellow bus,

visitors in someone else’s neighborhood, and were whisked

back across the bridge each day as soon as the bell rang.

I remember those years as emotionally and socially

fraught, but also as academically stimulating and world-

expanding. Aside from the rigorous classes and quality

instruction I received, this was the first time I’d shared dinners

in the homes of kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers

and scientists. My mom was a probation officer, and my dad

drove a bus, and most of my family members on both sides

worked in factories or meatpacking plants or did other manual

labor. I understood, even then, in a way both intuitive and

defensive, that my school friends’ parents weren’t better than

my neighborhood friends’ parents, who worked hard every day

at hourly jobs. But this exposure helped me imagine

possibilities, a course for myself that I had not considered

before.

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It’s hard to say where any one person would have ended up if

a single circumstance were different; our life trajectories are

shaped by so many external and internal factors. But I have no

doubt my parents’ decision to pull me out of my segregated

neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from

there to here — staff writer for the New York Times Magazine —

more likely.

Integration was transformative for my husband and me. Yet

the idea of placing our daughter in one of the small number of

integrated schools troubled me. These schools are

disproportionately white and serve the middle and upper

middle classes, with a smattering of poor black and Latino

students to create “diversity.”

In a city where white children are only 15 percent of the

more than one million public-school students, half of them are

clustered in just 11 percent of the schools, which not

coincidentally include many of the city’s top performers. Part of

what makes those schools desirable to white parents, aside

from the academics, is that they have some students of color,

but not too many. This carefully curated integration, the kind

that allows many white parents to boast that their children’s

public schools look like the United Nations, comes at a steep

cost for the rest of the city’s black and Latino children.

The New York City public-school system is 41 percent Latino,

27 percent black, and 16 percent Asian. Three-quarters of all

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students are low-income. In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at the

University of California, Los Angeles, released a report showing

that New York City public schools are among the most

segregated in the country. Black and Latino children here have

become increasingly isolated, with 85 percent of black students

and 75 percent of Latino students attending “intensely”

segregated schools — schools that are less than 10 percent

white.

This is not just New York’s problem. I’ve spent much of

my career as a reporter chronicling rampant school segregation

in every region of the country, and the ways that segregated

schools harm black and Latino children. One study published in

2009 in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management showed

that the academic achievement gap for black children increased

as they spent time in segregated schools. Schools with large

numbers of black and Latino kids are less likely to have

experienced teachers, advanced courses, instructional

materials, and adequate facilities, according to the United States

Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Most black

and Latino students today are segregated by both race and class,

a combination that wreaks havoc on the learning environment.

Research stretching back 50 years shows that the

socioeconomic makeup of a school can play a larger role in

achievement than the poverty of an individual student’s family.

Getting Najya into one of the disproportionately white schools

in the city felt like accepting the inevitability of this two-tiered

system: one set of schools with excellent resources for white

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kids and some black and Latino middle-class kids, a second set

of underresourced schools for the rest of the city’s black and

Latino kids.

When the New York City Public Schools catalog arrived in the

mail one day that spring, with information about Mayor Bill de

Blasio’s new universal prekindergarten program, I told Faraji

that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income

school. Faraji’s eyes widened as I explained that if we removed

Najya, whose name we chose because it means “liberated” and

“free” in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino

children, we would be part of the problem. Saying my child

deserved access to “good” public schools felt like implying that

children in “bad” schools deserved the schools they got, too. I

understood that so much of school segregation is structural — a

result of decades of housing discrimination, of political

calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple

inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual

parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do

what I’d seen so many others do when their values about

integration collided with the reality of where to send their own

children to school.

One family, or even a few families, cannot transform a

segregated school, but if none of us were willing to go into

them, nothing would change. Putting our child into a

segregated school would not integrate it racially, but we are

middle-class and would, at least, help to integrate it

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economically. As a reporter, I’d witnessed how the presence of

even a handful of middle-class families made it less likely that a

school would be neglected. I also knew that we would be able to

make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.

As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He

wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the “good”

public schools, or even private schools. So we argued, pleading

our cases from the living room, up the steps to our office lined

with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down, before

we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners.

There is nothing harder than navigating our nation’s racial

legacy in this country, and the problem was that we each knew

the other was right and wrong at the same time. Faraji couldn’t

believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of

education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried

that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty,

all-black school. “Are we experimenting with our child based on

our idealism about public schools?” he asked. “Are we putting

her at a disadvantage?”

At the heart of Faraji’s concern was a fear that grips black

families like ours. We each came from working-class roots,

fought our way into the middle class, and had no family wealth

or safety net to fall back on. Faraji believed that our gains were

too tenuous to risk putting our child in anything but a top-notch

school. And he was right to be worried. In 2014, the Brookings

Institution found that black children are particularly vulnerable

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to downward mobility — nearly seven of 10 black children born

into middle-income families don’t maintain that income level as