Review of “The Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City,” 2018, by Ranita Ray. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, paper, 241 pages.
The title is perhaps a bit of a misnomer because this book is actually a story of the lives and experiences of a specific and tight group of high school students in one city—and at two high schools there. The book is about the poverty and mobility of these specific young adults—not only about, and maybe not even principally about, a teenage service class.
Ranita Ray conducted this qualitative study leading to her doctoral dissertation in a small city in New England. This type of study could be called ‘Participant Observation” because she interacted so extensively with the young persons who were her subjects. High school students at the beginning of the three years of (the majority of) the reporting the subjects become college-age and work-age adults by the end of the interviews and meetings.
Ray was allowed constant access to the subjects and participated in their celebrations, problem-solving, college application processes, work and resume’ readiness sessions, and family discussions…
Her interaction was extensive, and she contributed a great deal to the application processes, especially, giving a lot of advice, hints, strategies, and even rides to jobs and other events.
When I did my interviews of the students serving as my subjects, I was discouraged from giving them advice and certainly when it came to specifics about the college application processes they constantly asked me about. I was told to avoid doing anything to mislead the students (they were all community college consumers at the time of each interview) or to give them hopes or directions which might not be suitable or realistic.
In other words, I was told to NOT take on the role of counselor or consultant or advisor. My role was to listen to their experiences and not to participate in their lives, as such. In one case, even though I kept the advice—including examples of things to do rather than specific tasks—the student afterwards thanked me profusely, saying it was I who had gotten him accepted at the four-year school he was trying for.
Ray, on the other hand, was with the students a lot—at their parties, sleepovers, and was a regular employee at the social service agency helping many of the students. Some of the students worked there, also, and this helped her become closer to the subjects and get more daily and real information from them and about them.
While the model I had to follow—phenomenology—kept me at a distance from my subjects, the model Ray used kept her in their midst, often. She took meals with them, met their extended families, other people in the projects where the students lived, and spent time with their parents also.
What Ray discovered is that the stress of balancing a wide variety of stressors is the main work these students do. It is quite Goffmanesque the way they take on the role of the part-time fastfood worker and the part-time cellular phone salesperson, at the same time they negotiate personal and romantic relationships, family duties, plans to work white-collar jobs, try to follow their daydreams about getting ahead and becoming something more…
While they are wrapped up in all of this, they keep moving from job to job “horizontally” as Ray calls it—even though they almost always think their new job or promotion is in fact a result of their community college courses they are taking and their eye on planning their careers to achieve more. In other words, they make themselves happy, thinking they are “moving up” and getting closer to their dreams.
In reality, they are shifting simply to yet another service class job in which they think they excel because of their growing education and their firm commitment to aspirations to do more with their lives (than their parents and grandparents did). Having a much better life—with cash on hand always and few worries—is the place they want very much to be.
Escaping the damning and confining walls of the neighborhood (and the projects and the service class jobs and the retail stores and the burger joints) are constantly on their minds….
They construct images of higher and fancier cultures to belong to, such as a life with nice parties and a “good” bottle of wine.
The students are Black and Puerto Ricans, and other Latinos, who bounce between languages and dialects and vocabulary choices as they endeavor—most of them—to sound more like the professionals they think they can become—including career-minded professionals who speak good English and say clever things on their jobs.
Still through all their hard work, constant need to make enough money to get to their jobs and to their schools, plus deal with family pressures, plus try to figure out how to include boyfriends or girlfriends in their lives, they struggle to make it.
Ray focuses on the lack of assistance from the high schools, from the community colleges, and from the other institutions such as their workplaces and companies. Ray shows how higher education does a disservice to these poor students from this particular small city. Rigid and unyielding, the community college system—and the four-year schools too—are somewhat like steamrollers functioning on their own and seeping up (and over) students as they roll down the street, semester leading to semester leading to semester.
I found similar issues in the study I did for my dissertation—it comes down to some important questions… Is the main goal to get the steamroller down the street and around the corner? Or is the main goal to get the steamroller more customers, clients, and students to make the machine look better? Or is the main goal to protect the steamroller from accidents, rust, weather, and theft? Or is the main goal to create a beautiful, beneficial, and blessed street and a neighborhood of promise?
Knowing where the students fit into all the steamrolling may lead to questioning why we are champions of the steamroller. Maybe it should be a cart? Or a buggy? Or an SUV? Or a promenade down a beautiful, beneficial, and blessed street and through a neighborhood of promise?