8.4.3: The Pain of Social Mobility:

 8.4.3: The Pain of Social Mobility: Two Distinct Worlds When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. J.D. Vance 2016 You know it would be painful if you were knocked down the social class ladder. But are you aware that it also hurts to climb this ladder? In the preceding quote, you can see that there is a starting point and a destination. The culture of the starting point does not match the culture of the destination. 

The old must be shed, to be replaced by new norms, a most uncomfortable process. Individuals who make this transition find themselves caught between two worlds—their old working-class origin and their new middle-class life. 

Sociologist Steph Lawler (1999) studied British women who had moved from the working class to the middle class Their mothers, still in the working class, didn’t like their daughters’ “uppity” new ways. 

They felt that their daughters thought they were better than they were.

 Tensions ran high, as the mothers criticized their daughters’ preferences in furniture and food, their speech, even the way they reared their children. 

As you can expect, this didn’t help the mother–daughter relationship.

 Both downward and upward social mobility bring challenges that require life adjustments. 

An extreme instance is the case of Sly Stone, the front man of the 1970s funk band, Sly and the Family Stone.

 His saga includes going from wealth of millions to living in a van. Credit: Mark Weiss/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images When sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972/1988) studied working-class parents in Boston, they found something similar. So their children could go to college, the fathers had worked two jobs and even postponed medical care.

 They expected their children to appreciate their sacrifice. But again, the result was two distinct worlds.

 The children’s educated world was so unlike that of their parents that it became awkward for parents and children to even talk to one another. 

The parents felt betrayed and bitter: Their sacrifices had ripped their children from them.

 Torn from their roots, some of those who make the jump from the working to the middle class never become comfortable with their new social class (Vance 2016). The following Cultural Diversity in the United States discusses other costs that come with the climb up the social class ladder. Cultural Diversity in the United States Social Class and the Upward Social Mobility of African Americans The overview of social class presented in this chapter doesn’t apply equally to all the groups that make up U.S. society.

 Consider geography: What constitutes the upper class of a town of 5,000 people will differ from that of a city of a million.

 In small towns, which have fewer extremes of wealth and occupation, family background and local reputation are more significant. 

So it is with racial–ethnic groups.

 All racial–ethnic groups are marked by social class, but what constitutes a particular social class can differ from one group to another—as well as from one historical period to another.

 Consider social class among African Americans. 

The earliest class divisions can be traced to slavery—to slaves who worked in the fields and those who worked in the “big house” (Andrews 2019). 

Those who worked in the slave owner's plantation home were exposed to the customs, manners, and forms of speech of wealthy whites. 

Their more privileged position—which brought with it better food and clothing, as well as lighter work—was often based on skin color. Mulattos, lighter-skinned slaves, were often chosen for this more desirable work. 

One result was the development of a “mulatto elite,” a segment of the slave population that, proud of its distinctiveness, distanced itself from other slaves. 

At this time, there also were free blacks. Not only were they able to own property but in usual cases, some even owned black slaves. After the War between the States (as the Civil War is known in the South), these two groups, the mulatto elite and the free blacks, formed an upper class that distanced itself from other blacks. By the 1870s, just ten or fifteen years after this war, some African 

Americans had become millionaires (Graham 1999). After World War II, the black middle class expanded as African Americans entered a wider range of occupations. Today, more than half of all African American adults work at white-collar jobs, about 30 percent at the professional or managerial level (U.S. Census Bureau 2018). An unwelcome cost greets many African Americans who move up the social class ladder: an uncomfortable distancing from their roots, a separation from significant others—parents, siblings, and childhood friends (Lacy 2007; Khare et al. 2014). The upwardly mobile enter a world unknown to those left behind, one that demands not only different appearance and speech, but also different values, aspirations, and ways of viewing the world. These are severe challenges to the self and often rupture relationships with those left behind. Credit: Kablonk/SuperStock An additional cost is a subtle racism that lurks beneath the surface of some work settings, poisoning what could be easy, mutually respectful interaction. 

To be aware that white co-workers perceive you as different—as a stranger, an intruder, or “the other”—engenders frustration, dissatisfaction, and cynicism (Harris and Moffitt 2019). 

To cope, many nourish their racial identity and stress the “high value of black culture and being black” (Lacy and Harris 2008). 

Some move to neighborhoods of upper-middle-class African Americans, where they can live among like-minded people who have similar experiences (Harrell-Levy and Harrell 2019). For Your Consideration → In the Cultural Diversity box on upward social mobility in Chapter 3, we discussed how Latinos face a similar situation. Why do you think this is?

→ What connections do you see among upward mobility, frustration, and racial–ethnic identity?

 → How do you think that the costs of upward mobility of whites differ from those of Latinos and African Americans? Why?