New Research: “Make Sure You Look Someone in the Eye”: Socialization and Classed Comportment in Two Elementary Schools

Scholars who think and write about class have long observed the ways class norms permeate children's upbringings, resulting in adults who are either more deferential to authority (working-class) or more willing to challenge authority (middle- and upper-class).  Joan Williams trawled this literature in her early work on class, and I summarized some of it here.  

Now, Peter Francis Harvey, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, has just published an article in volume 127 of the American Journal of Sociology that shows how these classed norms seep into the very physical beings of children.  Here's the abstract: 

Limited attention has been given to how cultural skills and dispositions are transmitted from adults to children. The author examines how young children’s bodies are classed. He conducted three years of observation in two elementary schools—one upper middle class, one working class, both racially diverse. Both schools use the same program, which encourages traditionally middle-class bodily practices (e.g., handshakes at daily Morning Meetings). The author finds that effective transmission of these skills requires the repetition of both explicit and implicit lessons. Moreover, he finds that class differences creep into this socialization. Students at the upper-middle-class school increasingly refine the recommended skills (e.g., handshakes, eye contact). Meanwhile, students at the working-class school instead become increasingly expert at “respectful,” orderly types of comportment (e.g., sitting still for extended periods, not interrupting). These findings suggest that bodily socialization is a multifaceted process. It is not reserved for adults or elites but taught to children across the class spectrum. The physical quality of cultural performance is discussed.

The author further describes the work in a Twitter thread here.  I would love to see more work like this, squarely attending to class.  So much scholarly literature focuses on proving racial differences without, perhaps, looking at class differences that cut across race, as this study did.  

J.D. Vance pulls ahead in race for Republican nomination for U.S. Senate seat in Ohio, prompting comparison to positions he took in Hillbilly Elegy

Thought it's been much in the news, I've refrained from posting about J.D. Vance's rise in the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat from which Rob Portman (R) is retiring, but with Vance garnering Trump's endorsement and pulling ahead in that race, I decided to feature a particularly interesting commentary about Vance and the race. 

Anyone following the race knows that, by the time Vance threw his hat in the ring last year, he had recanted his earlier criticism of Trump (something his opponents in the primary have used against him).  Since then, he's been lurching to the right on a wide array of issues, most notably immigration.  Earlier this month, he released a television ad that begins with, "Are you a racist?  Do you hate Mexicans?"  And tonight on Twitter I saw a clip of him accusing Joe Biden of purposefully letting fentanyl into the country to kill Republican voters in places like Ohio.  In other words, Vance is trafficking in conspiracy theories.  So, things have gotten a little out of hand.  

That may help explain the New York Times decision to run this essay about Vance's candidacy--and his about face.  Christopher Caldwell's piece is titled "The Decline of Ohio and the Rise of J.D. Vance."  More than any other piece I've read since Vance got in the race, Caldwell situates Vance's current rhetoric and positions against what he said in his best selling book, Hillbilly Elegy.  Here's a provocative excerpt: 

Published on the eve of the 2016 elections, “Hillbilly Elegy” made Mr. Vance, then 31, a literary sensation. It sold more than three million copies, and is still a staple of high school and college curriculums. Pundits most likely speed-read the book for its sociological “takeaway,” a description of the left-behind whites who then seemed instrumental in rallying the Republican Party behind Mr. Trump and would soon put him in the White House.

While the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” retained a lot of the exotic patriotism of his kinfolk, even to the extent of choking up whenever he heard “Proud to Be an American,” he drew the line at their chosen candidate. In spirited interviews, articles, tweets and text messages throughout the 2016 election season, Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” He didn’t vote for him. Many of Mr. Vance’s cosmopolitan literary admirers must have been consoled to think that discerning citizens could see through Mr. Trump, even in the parts of the country most taken with him.

But Mr. Vance backed Mr. Trump in 2020. And now, 10 days before the Republican primary on May 3, Mr. Trump has traveled to Ohio to tell a frenzied crowd that, even though Mr. Vance once said a lot of nasty things about him, he is a “fearless MAGA fighter” and “a great Buckeye.” And here comes Mr. Vance, bounding onstage to call Mr. Trump “the best president of my lifetime.”

Mr. Vance’s readers may feel let down and misled. So too, in their own way, may his Republican primary rivals in Ohio, who have been professing their fidelity to Trumpism, only to see their leader confer his blessing on a Johnny-come-lately.

On the misled point, there is a funny video on Twitter right now showing a man walking up to Vance at one of his campaign events and asking for a refund on the book, $16.99 for the paperback, which he says he didn't care for.

Earlier in the New York Times piece, Caldwell offers another observation related to the book and how Vance has changed since its publication: 

Amid a nodding crowd of men and women in Trump T-shirts and MAGA hats, Mr. Vance’s gray suit may have looked a bit funereal, but his applause lines were decidedly unstodgy. He assailed Joe Biden as a “crazy fake president who will buy energy from Putin and the scumbags of Venezuela but won’t buy it from middle class Ohioans,” who live in a top fracking state.

“Scumbag” is a word that seems to have entered Mr. Vance’s public vocabulary only recently. It didn’t appear in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the tender 2016 autobiography in which he described his clannish and troubled Kentucky-descended family.

Then there is this: 

Readers of “Hillbilly Elegy” who find Mr. Vance’s campaign rhetoric a jarring departure may actually be misremembering the book. His Mamaw railed at the so-called Section 8 federal subsidies that allowed a succession of poor families to move in next door. Southern whites were migrating to the Republican Party, Mr. Vance wrote, in large part because “many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s,” a neighborhood grocery. There, thanks to food stamps, he wrote, “our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”

And that is a good segue to my own commentary on Hillbilly Elegy, published in Appalachian Reckoning:  A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, reviewed in the New York Times here.  My big criticism was that Vance threw working class whites under the proverbial bus.  Now, of course, he needs them to vote for him.  And I think that's one of Caldwell's primary points. 

Other recent commentary on the race, in which Josh Mandel is Vance's principal opponent, is here.  

Postscript:  This news item about J.D. Vance and the Ohio Senate primary appeared in the New York Times about 18 hours after this posted went up.  It's by Trip Gabriel and Jonathan Weisman.  "Once Soft-spoken, Ohio Conservatives Embrace the Bombast." The alternative headline is, "In Ohio, Republicans have gone from the Country Club to the MAGA Club." 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On Marine LePen and France's working class (and rural) vote

Today, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected to the French presidency.  As he did five years ago, Macron defeated Marine LePen, typically styled as a "far right candidate."  This time, however, Macron's  margin of victory was narrower, about 58.5% to 41.5%.  

Many have drawn parallels between Trump and LePen, just as there are parallels to be drawn between Macron and, say, Obama.  The former have been viewed as "in touch" with rural and working-class voters, the latter as over-educated, imperious elites who are globalists, looking out for the rich and out of touch with common folks.  

Rachel Donadio notes this LePen association in her guest essay in the New York Times this weekend, writing from Semur-en-Auxois, in rural Burgundy.  Here I'm picking up only the bits of the essay that speak to either rurality or the working class (emphasis mine): 

President Emmanuel Macron won in Semur-en-Auxois in the first round of voting this month, but Ms. Le Pen took the larger Burgundy Franche-Comté region, with 27 percent of the vote over Mr. Macron’s 26 percent. Ms. Le Pen’s success comes from casting herself as the defender of the countryside and the working class, focusing on cost-of-living issues and defending social protections. She has also been helped by an image makeover in which she opened up about raising her children as a single mother and now combines tough talk on immigration with social media posts about her cats.

* * *

As I drove around rural Burgundy after the first round of voting this month, I came away with a strong sense that while Mr. Macron may well defeat her in the second round this Sunday, in many ways, Ms. Le Pen has already won. In the first round, she put Mr. Macron on the defensive and convinced almost a quarter of voters that she has their best interests at heart. In the second round, polls predict she could easily win more than 40 percent, potentially 10 points more than in 2017.

* * * 

“The era of high growth is gone,” Niels Planel, a city councilor in Semur-en-Auxois and the author of a book on French economic inequality, told me. In his view, the government should “worry about mobility, worry about training, delivering a high-quality education,” so that workers are ready for today’s economy, not yesterday’s. Otherwise Ms. Le Pen is likely to maintain her grip on many of France’s rural and deindustrialized areas, while Mr. Macron will continue to win more-prosperous urban areas.

I have consumed other media this week, including reporting by NPR's Eleanor Beardsley,  that referred to LePen's base as the working poor.  And, of course, the "yellow vest" movement is often referenced as emblematic of the disgruntlement of France's non-urban workers.  Posts about that movement are here.  

Post-script from David Leonhardt's column in the New York Times on April 25, 2022: 

It’s a common story across Western democracies, including the United States. As many working-class voters have struggled with slow-growing incomes over recent decades — a result of globalization, automation and the decline of labor unions, among other forces — they have become fed up with traditional politicians.

Roger Cohen, The Times’s Paris bureau chief who was previously our foreign editor, said these voters have a sense “of being invisible, of being forgotten, of being the lowest priority.”

In France, many were angry that Macron raised a tax on diesel fuel in 2018. “Just fine for the hyperconnected folks in big cities like Paris,” Roger says, “much less so for people who have seen train stations and hospitals close in their communities and need to drive to work in some Amazon packaging warehouse 60 miles away.”

Geography is a dividing line, in France and elsewhere. Frustrated working-class voters often live in smaller metropolitan areas or rural areas. Professionals tend to live in thriving major cities like Paris, London, New York and San Francisco; they also tend to be more socially liberal, more in favor of globalization and less outwardly patriotic.

The “cosmopolitan elites,” as the Democratic political strategist David Shor notes, are now numerous enough to dominate the leadership of political parties — but still well shy of a majority of the population in the U.S. or Europe.

You can find Roger Cohen's story on Macron's win here. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.   

Another feature on Tim Ryan's effort to reach the white working class, here dubbed the "exhausted majority"

Jazmine Ulloa reports for the New York Times under the headline, "Tim Ryan Struggles to Reach Ohio’s Exhausted Majority."  The subhead is, "Mr. Ryan, the Ohio Democrat running for Senate, has been listening to white working-class voters. Whether they are listening to him and the Democratic Party is the question."  The Washington Post and NPR reported on Ryan's efforts last month, which I blogged about here.  

The NYT story plays up Ryan's 2020 loss (48%) in his native Trumbull County where he grew up--a sharp drop in support there since he first ran for Congress: 

Representative Tim Ryan won re-election in 2020. But in one sharply personal way, he lost, too.

Mr. Ryan, 48, the Ohio Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, was born and raised in Niles, a manufacturing city of roughly 18,000 that sits halfway between Youngstown and Warren in southern Trumbull County.

Mr. Ryan had once won Trumbull with as much as 74 percent of the vote. That number fell to just 48 percent in 2020, when he narrowly lost the county by roughly one percentage point. A place that was once a bastion of white blue-collar Democrats turned away from a white Democratic native son whose blue-collar grandfather had been a steelworker in Niles for four decades.

Now, Mr. Ryan is trying to win back his party’s voters in Trumbull and throughout Ohio as he runs for Senate. His problem in Trumbull exemplifies the larger problem for Democrats in the Midwest: The lingering appeal of Trumpism and the erosion of support for the party among the white working-class voters who once formed a loyal part of its base in the industrial heart of the country.

* * * 

He is focused on bringing back voters who feel forgotten by Democrats and turned off by Republicans.

“I feel like I am representing the Exhausted Majority,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview, using a phrase coined by researchers to describe the estimated two-thirds of voters who are less polarized and who feel overlooked. People, Mr. Ryan added, “just want to move on and actually focus on the things that are really important.”

I can't help think that, in this case, these voters are exhausted for another reason--that they work so hard for so little.  And let's face it--that's exhausting.   

Meanwhile, Ryan's Republican opponents have just in the last day or so released controversial television ads that evince a race to the right. Here's one by Josh Mandel using the bridge in Selma, Alabama as a backdrop to his critique of "critical race theory."  

Meanwhile, another high profile Republican candidate in the race, J.D. Vance is out with this. Like Mandel's ad, Vance's ad centers how we define "racist," asking "Are you a racist?  Do you hate Mexicans?"  Further, Vance cites his mother's drug addiction--which he laid out in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy as a basis for bashing the white working class--as a reason to stop drugs coming in over the southern border.  It is especially interesting--and ironic--that Vance draws his mother's history of drug use into his campaign in a heartstrings move about the importance of kids not losing parents--ironic because in the book Vance condemned and distanced himself from his mother. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.