I’ve just finished reading The Likes of Us by Michael Collins, a remarkable book that should be assigned reading. While he describes a very particular version of working-class culture, there are many similarities between his description of English urban poverty and the rural American variety I grew up in.
Collins makes a consistent argument against the sort of journalistic slumming that puts middle-class people in contrived poverty situations to collect data and report back to a scandalized public that, you know, it really sucks to be poor.
The examples of this are legion, stretching back hundreds of years and continuing today; well-meaning, surely, but essentially irritating to anyone who has a legitimate working-class background because those journalists mucking about in our world can always leave.
They have comfortable lives to return to; they have a privileged background that (unless they starved themselves on purpose) generally included sufficient nutrition and medical care to assure their health will not be derailed by the experience.
Toward the end of the book he goes home to a neighborhood that has been social-engineered nearly out of existence and visits a few friends. A boy he grew up with looks him up and down and says I bet you ain’t got a mark on you.
When I go home I rarely see anyone from the old days. My friends, with few exceptions, have fled to distant cities. Those who would more easily be described as enemies are no longer recognizable; we met last in adolescence and seventeen years does change a person.
The place itself has been mangled by reckless suburban development schemes: the forest of my childhood has dwindled to a strip of trees separating a trailer park from a busy road.
When I see a familiar face, I am not even able to place a name or memory to the ghost. And I clearly look like what I am: a newly minted member of the educated professional middle-class. I do not have a mark on me, despite the scars, and this does not endear me to folks back home. I keep my mouth shut and move along.
Poverty in and of itself does not offer a class identity. Many people choose to live ascetically; others are knocked down by circumstance, and do not find community with those at the bottom. One of the most endearing things about The Likes of Us is the way the author concisely describes an autonomous, protective, and meaningful subculture of people looking after their own.
To be working-class is to enjoy a particular world view that cannot be manually replicated.
My own expulsion from that close-knit (and, yes, at times dangerous) subculture was accidental, and a by-product of both the cancer and the experience of becoming a teen parent. I needed a good job that would provide benefits, and that could not be obtained without a college education. One thing followed another; I am more surprised than anyone to find myself so far from home.
It is a privilege to be an adult who can cross the class divide and know people from different backgrounds. But it is an even greater luxury that I have found other class traitors wandering the world, people who respect their working-class antecedents and keep that rawness alive inside.