Reaction of the Working-Class Families
The Driver Family (white girl/working-class) Wendy Driver, Ms. Driver, and Wendy’s stepfather Mack all vehemently objected to the book. The complaints were largely about the interpretation of events and a representation that made them look bad. For example, during my interview with Wendy, she focused on a passage in the book (p. 208) where her parents are described as listening to her but not turning her statements into a teachable moment. She read aloud from the book, in heated tones:
[When she asks] her family members, one by one, if they knew what a mortal sin is, her mom says, “Tell us what it is. You’re the one who went to CCD.” . . . [They] looked at her as she spoke but neither acknowledged her answer. They waited her out and then returned to watching TV.20
Then, speaking angrily, Wendy told me:
First of all, I know for a fact that my mother would never say anything like that to me. They would tell me, like I said, to go get the book and we will, you know, find it, and if they don’t find it, that you can call my grandma and find it. . . . They wouldn’t blow it off and sit there and just watch TV. When it came to CCD, school work, any kind of work, they took it serious. They just never blew it off the way the, the book is saying.
Wendy felt the portrayal suggested that her family ignored her: “So you’re basically saying, I’m standing there speaking and they’re going like, ‘Yeah, okay. Sure, yeah,’ and watching TV. And basically ignoring what I’m saying.”
Similarly, in the description of the racialized character of their family, Wendy complained that I wrote that they drove past a mall to go to one in a white neighborhood (p. 204). She felt that made the family look racist:
Basically [you are] saying we’re a white family that would rather go to the mall farther away than the closest mall because there’s no black people there. We didn’t go to one mall because they were all white or because it was all black.
She also noted that she had had a Black friend in elementary school.
In addition, in Unequal Childhoods, the terms working-class and poor frequently appear in the same sentence. Wendy found that juxtaposition profoundly insulting:
It made it seem that we were working class but then again we were poor. I’ve never considered us poor. My mom had a roof over our heads and food on the table every night for us since I was little. I never remember my mom ever telling me, “We can’t have dinner tonight,” because we didn’t have no. . . . Maybe sometime we wouldn’t want what she had in the refrigerator, and like, “Mom, can we go out this week?” “No, we’re kind of short this week.” “Oh, ok. Well, let’s eat spaghetti or something.”
Wendy felt that the book erased the differences between working-class and poor families, and that this made her family seem poor.
The most upsetting piece, however, was the portrayal of her mother’s role in her schooling. Wendy was certain that her mother had been very active in fighting the school. She fundamentally rejected the book’s version:
It says right here, it says that the teacher said she was very loving, but “they are disappointed in Ms. Driver’s failure to take a more active, interventionist role in Wendy’s education.” [p. 209] My mom stuck around. . . . My mom—I mean, my teachers, I know none of my teachers would say that because my mom [was] fighting with the teachers.
Wendy was insistent that her teachers would not have characterized her mother that way:
I can remember all my teachers in grade school. And I cannot imagine any of my teachers saying that about my mom. Maybe they’d be like, “She’s a bitch,” because she comes up too much, or maybe, “She’s a nag,” because she’s always constantly on the phone with them. I mean my mom in high school had a fight with one of my teachers because she [the teacher] didn’t want me to graduate, she didn’t want me to be there. And she fought with them every day. I mean, I just cannot imagine any of my teachers saying that.
Wendy’s mother and stepfather, in different ways, also expressed anger and disappointment with the way they had been represented in the book. Ms. Driver denied that she felt obligated to take her children to the emergency room lest they be turned in to protective services. Wendy’s stepfather was livid over the family portrait, in part because he perceived his wife and stepdaughter as having been injured by the book. Similarly, in her conversation with me, Ms. Driver focused more on how worried she was over Wendy’s reaction to the book and less on her own feelings.
The Taylor Family (African American boy/working-class) As I did with all of the families, when I called Ms. Taylor to schedule an interview, I said that I wanted to “come for a visit” to see how things were going. I added that I wanted to do a follow-up interview, for which she would receive an honorarium. Researchers are required to create complex paper trails (e.g., interview consent forms, receipts for honorariums), but interviewees typically have only their recollections of events. As I did with all of the families, I subsequently sent Ms. Taylor a summary of her reaction to the book. She objected to what I had written, particularly (as she alludes to below) to a statement that she had found the visits to be “fun.” Per her request, I have withdrawn my summary of her reaction to the book. With her permission, I have substituted her email message to me (edited slightly for length and punctuation). She summarizes the position expressed by many of the families: her family was misused.
Hello Annette,
Unfortunately, I do not wish to have anything that I’ve said [about my reaction to the book] printed. . . . In fact, you did not come to visit, but instead you came to further observe me and my family for your own gain, and you did it under false pretense by calling it a visit and, once inside and settled, pulling out your tape recorder.
Your observation is just that, your own, and when you put it in print it becomes factual to others who may read it, and that is unfortunate.
I did not allow you to come into my home and judge my family because I thought it would be fun. I did it because I somehow believed, as a very young mother separated from her husband and scared to death of what in the world would become of my children’s future, that you may somehow have been able to help us.
You, on the other hand, were only in this for your own reward. So, if you want to print something, print what I really feel and print it in my writing and from my perspective.
By the way, here’s another suggestion for the researchers of the future: If you want to complete research on families from different backgrounds, cultures, races, and educational levels, do it with fairness to all and include people from those backgrounds to help understand just what is going on, because if you have never been there, you can’t begin to understand what is there.