Reflection to my life post(even though it is not in the criteria to pick from)
Barbara Jensen has a very distinct way of defining class and classism.
Class is an injustice that says some Americans deserve much more time, leisure, control, and far more financial reward than others. Classism is the set of myths and beliefs that keep those class divisions intact, that is, the belief that working class cultures and people are inherently inferior and that class itself demonstrates who the hardest workers and the rightful winners are.( Jensen 31)
Her main concern in her book is to bring attention to how class plays into culture and classism. And by culture she means "a constellation of accepted values, customs, more, attitudes, styles, behaviors, and, especially, worldwide- the shared unconscious mind of a community, to put it in psychological terms.'' ( Jensen 31)
Her two main examples for this point is the two girls coming of age stories. How the first party she attended was the working class point of view and the second one was the middle class point of view. Personally I connect more to the first example; the working class family. Jensen pretty much described my family get togethers. The men usually go to the pool table room (we usually get together at my sister in laws house), the women are in the kitchen or living room talking away about their problems, and the kids are always in someone's room playing video games or watching movies.
I can't even relate to the second example because the first example has been my whole life example. I don't even know if that is working class anymore for us because it's been like that for a really long time. It is even like that when I go visit other family members in Guatemala, it seems like everyone has their own little clique to go to. I suppose that is our culture and that plays into of class.
Moving on to chaper 4, Behaving versus Blooming was really hitting home for me because of the truth that is embedded in our class. Being a part of a certain class does define our language and the way we learn from the moment we are born. Being apart of a certain community does impact our world from the very start of our lives because depending to what class one may pertain to, it impacts that children that are born into that community. Jensen goes on to talk about Heath's ten year study of three communities: both while and black middle class "mainstream townspeople", a rural African American working class community, and a rural white working class community. She begins to talk about how middle class communities read to their babies and have conversations with them and get them to engage in a critical way. As for working class communities, working class parents don't really have the time to read to their kids because they don't have time or may not even know how to read to them in English. That is were it really hits home for me because that is the exact situation I was growing up with. Since I was about 5 years old my parents always worked opposite shifts. My mom worked the day shift and my dad worked the night shift. My mom would work and my dad would take care of me for a sometime and then he would go to bed because he would go to work later. So while he slept I would just watch television until my mom got home from work. Even if my parents really wanted to read to me they couldn't because they didn't know how to speak English or read it for that matter. They still don't know English so as I grew up I became their interpreter. When I first began school it was extremely difficult because I had a tough time learning how to read in English. Because of that I had to repeat first grade. This is how the working class aspect hurt me because I almost had to grow up someway bettering myself and help my parents because they were 10x more lost than I was when it came to English related stuff. I try to make sure my nieces and nephews don't end up like I did in the beginning even though two of my nephews also were held back for similar reasons. The other two are doing fine but that is because they had their siblings to help them, not their parents. And their is another on the way (gender not known), hopefully we all can pitch in to read to this new family member and make a difference in his/her life.
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