Slacking, Sufficing, and Sociability: High School Girls, White Middle Class Culture, and the Reproduction of Inequality

• In Event: 111 - Regular Session. Class Cultures

Abstract

In explaining the reproduction of inequalities in the contemporary United States, scholars tend to focus on the attitudes and practices of, and cultural and material resources available to, members of groups located toward the top and/or bottom of the country’s socioeconomic hierarchy. This trend is especially pronounced in studies of youngsters navigating educational opportunities.

This paper, in contrast, focuses on the attitudes and practices of a group whose material and cultural endowments locate them in the “mainstream” of U.S. society. Based on observations of and interviews with college-bound, white middle-class girls in their final year of study at a well-funded suburban high school, it shows that these self-proclaimed “slackers” and “regular kids” have a culture of sociably sufficing. These girls distance themselves from upper middle-class “overachievers” and working-class and poor “losers” alike. The class-based affinities and aversions of their culture inhibit the girls from making choices that might lead to downward mobility. However, these affinities and aversions also inhibit the girls—even those their school district identifies as “gifted”—from using their school’s ample educational resources to maximally augment their cultural capital and thereby enhance their prospects for upward social mobility.

Author

• Michele Lee Rossi, University of California-Berkeley