Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

I was well into my teaching career before I ever heard the term “working-class academic.” If I remember correctly, it was in 2009 at a rhetoric-composition conference in Minneapolis, where I was speaking on a panel about community writing. Anyone who has been to these conferences knows that, when you’re not speaking, you go listen to other panels. It was at one of those where I heard the term. As I read more about this idea, it became clear to me that a working-class academic is basically what I am.

A working-class academic is just what it sounds like it is: a person who was raised in a blue-collar family, among blue-collar people and with blue-collar values, but who then sought a career in academia, which is a distinctly non-blue collar field. This decision often puts a person at odds with the community that raised him. As one article in the journal College Composition and Communication put it, working-class academics feel “dual estrangement and internalized class conflict,” a side effect of leaving one culture to live in another. Because of the nature of our work, the people from our upbringing – parents, siblings, former neighbors, old friends – often don’t understand, appreciate, or even approve of what we do or who we become.

Yet, despite this “estrangement,” my work as a teacher of English and writing is informed by my experience. When I talk to students about how grammar is a system, I use the human body and machinery as metaphors, and when I explain why following grammar rules is important, I relate it to traffic and sports. In sharing my belief that “writing is a tool for thinking,” as the NCTE puts it, I ask, Would you dig a hole, then go get a shovel? No. Then why would you think that you couldn’t start writing until you have everything figured out? Use the tools that are made for the job! A common question among working people – students and their parents – is: what good will this do me? Teachers have to be able to answer that question. My answer is: thinking clearly and communicating well are valuable in life, no matter what job you do. When ideas about writing are put into the context of everyday life, then what we do in an English class can be understood as useful skills.

The real-world value in academics is not always readily apparent, though, and some aspects of our culture reinforce the worst stereotypes. In a now-infamous set of remarks, the late Alabama governor George Wallace once called academics “pointy-headed intellectuals” who couldn’t figure out “how to park a bicycle straight.” Wallace’s political career was built upon his image as a champion of the working man, and to treat academics in this way was meant to affirm the working class’s negative bias against the teachers and professors whose assignments seemed useless in school. Creating an us-versus-them paradigm, Wallace wanted to contrast people with “common sense” against people with “book learning,” implying that a person can’t have both. This pandering to the lowest common denominator won him many votes, but it also pushed many Alabamians away from learning about things that could have actually improved their lives, like how politicians use rhetoric to influence people and how regressive tax structures hurt the poorest people. I’ve learned about these things by engaging, rather than shunning, intellectual pursuits and by combining “book learning” with real-world experiences from my working-class upbringing.

Today, I hear the Wallace-like prattling about us-versus-them, but this time it comes in the form of “college makes people liberal.” After Wallace’s heyday, the late-twentieth century saw remedies to severe poverty in the South, and many Southerners also found greater affluence and material comfort in cities and towns, just about the time that the suburban politics of the post-Civil Rights era were forming. Which led far too many people to a new kind of binary thinking: you’re either a conservative Republican with good sense or you’re a liberal Democrat who doesn’t “get it.” Combine the anti-intellectual sentiments of the past with anti-liberal sentiments of the present, and voila! Today, if a “good family” with conservative values sends a teenager to college, and that teenager comes home with new ideas— Oh no, those professors are not going to turn my kid liberal! But that’s not what’s actually happening.

As a working-class academic, I have seen this change from the inside, experienced it personally. Earning an English degree in the 1990s and a masters degree in the 2000s has broadened my horizons in ways that my parents never would have, would never have tried to, and didn’t embrace, and those changes in me led to differences of opinion among us. No one turned me liberal. What my professors did was show me ways of living and thinking that my upbringing never offered – and never would have – which led me to understand that ways of living and thinking unlike my own could be just as valid as my own. My education also helped me to understand that social issues, political leanings, and life choices are not as cut-and-dried as they might seem. Personally, I don’t think that’s so much “liberal” as it is American. That is, if we truly mean what we say about hard work, opportunity, and freedom.

The CCC article referenced above is: Borkowski, David. “‘Not Too Late to Take the Sanitation Test’: Notes of a Non-Gifted Academic from the Working Class.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 56, no. 1, 2004, pp. 94–123. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4140682.