‘I’m a kid from the Bronx’: A reflection on the enduring contributions of Willis’s cultural production perspective in Learning to Labour

Reading Learning to Labour

As a high school teacher in the late 1990s, reading Learning to Labour gave me a lens to help make sense of the circumstances in which I was working. It sharpened my understanding of the central role of social class within the project of public education, particularly in an era and in a country where class consciousness is so weak, and with the notion of social critique being embedded in student resistance. Willis (1977: 60) writes, ‘The state school in advanced capitalism, and the most obvious manifestations of oppositional working-class culture within it, provide us with a central case of mediated class conflict and of class reproduction in the capitalist order.’ This idea gave language to some of my own implicit understandings as I pondered the social reproductive functions of school and also came to see the school as a contested space where class antagonisms played out. More specifically, what resonated with me was the notion that the students’ non-conformity – for those who displayed it – constituted a form of resistance that held at least implicit insight into the shortcomings of the school to provide a guaranteed path toward upward mobility.

When I began my doctoral studies in the early 2000s, I was drawn to ethnography because I placed high value on what we could learn from lived experience, and I had deep interest in the questions I had been contemplating for years about the relationship between the quotidian experiences of my students, the institutions in which those experiences occurred, and the macro-structural forces mediated through those institutions. For me, Learning to Labour provided one of the best models of ethnography and theorizing largely because it starts with the cultural productions of the research subjects. Willis defines cultural production as the creative use of discourse, meanings, materials, practices, and group processes to explore, understand, and creatively occupy particular positions in sets of material possibilities (1981: 59). Culture, then, is posited as relatively autonomous from social structure and, thus, ripe with possibility. Moreover, within the cultural production of the lads lies a cogent, albeit partial or implicit, social critique. Willis (1977: 119) uses the term ‘penetrations’ or rather the ‘impulses within the cultural form towards the penetration of the conditions of existence of its members and their position within the social whole’. Such impulses speak to the potentially transformative nature of cultural production, but the lads’ penetrations, Willis observes, were limited by their affirmation of manual labour, rejection of mental labour, and other ideological blocks, such as their racist tendencies, and thus not immediately emancipatory.

These ideas are what had been missing from previous, more deterministic, theorizations of social reproduction that mainly aimed to show how schools correspond to the social structures of society and how dominant ideologies act upon subordinated classes. Willis’s focus on cultural production within the context of a mediating institution – the school – provided both a means to make invisible social forces more tangible and to locate potentially transformative paths within cultural forms. For me, oppressive social structures took form in the clear signs of disinvestment in the public school, the looming presence of the youth prison, the plethora of fast food restaurants in the area, and within the prevailing educational policies and practices of the day. Yet I believed in the critical insights, creativity, and emancipatory dreams of my students, and I believed in the potential of the classroom as a liberatory space.

Along with the students’ cultural productions, the school and its teaching paradigm were also key to Willis’s analysis. In the foreword to Police in the Hallways, Willis (2011: x) writes, ‘Learning to Labour takes institutions seriously and analyses the lads’ culture not as an elementary socialist form of working class culture but as a culture produced through differentiation of the paradigm then on offer’. Indeed, Willis examined in fine-grained detail how the school served as a mediating institution against which the lads’ creative cultural productions took shape and acquired meaning. For the lads, the shop floor culture provided a contrasting model to emulate. For my students and later my research participants, the shop floor was almost entirely non-existent and, thus, did not serve as a cultural model. Instead, the students who I came to know in the Bronx would often adopt what was considered a ‘street’ identity. Few were actually involved in serious crime or what might be considered ‘hardcore’ street life (Dance, 2002). Nevertheless, many students adopted a style of dress, manners of speaking, and ‘attitudes’ that marked them as members of a particular social and geographic world that countered school norms. They also sometimes participated in mundane adolescent conflict that, while not usually serious, would utilize a language and interactional style associated with urban street culture.

Although structural and institutional changes have occurred, shifting the processes of differentiation, Willis’s theory remains relevant. Willis offers a fluid approach that will yield unique findings at different historical moments. He wrote in 2003, for example, within the post-industrial context stripped of the promise of entrance onto the shop floor, that resistance spins freely without the context of any socially imagined future. Oppositional cultural forms, within post-industrial despair, likely signify deeper disaffection. Moreover, it becomes even more difficult to link students’ oppositional culture to any emancipatory project (Willis, 2003). Even in Learning to Labour, Willis (1977: 154) projects into the future as he proposes that ‘as structural unemployment becomes a permanent feature in this society and some sections of white youth are forced into long-term unemployment, there may well develop a white ethnic culture of wagelessness’. This ‘culture of wagelessness’, he argues, might very well take on features similar to the cultural practices of West Indian immigrants who, unlike the lads, were confronted with pronounced labour market exclusion, or another example might be the (white) punk rock culture that was emerging around the time Learning to Labour was published. The emphasis on the shifting nature and meanings attached to resistance suggests to me the continued efficacy of the cultural production lens within new times and different places.

A new time and a different place: Neoliberalism, race, and the punitive turn

The broad context for my study of school policing came about through the radical global shifts that have taken place over the last four or five decades toward a (racialized) neoliberal political economy, characterized by the celebration of free market enterprise, privatization of public goods, and cuts in social spending (Harvey, 2007). In the US (and elsewhere), scholars have observed that neoliberal policies have led to intensified economic stratification across racial lines and have had a particularly devastating economic impact on racially segregated urban communities, which have experienced massive de-industrialization, persistently high unemployment and under-employment rates, the growth of a low-wage service economy, and sharp cuts to social service programs (Lipman, 2013; Omi and Winant, 2014). A further feature of the neoliberal capitalist project has been a punitive turn in crime control, which has led to a dramatic rise in incarceration rates (Alexander, 2012), and the popularization of aggressive forms of street policing in economically ravaged, racially segregated neighbourhoods (Alexander, 2012; Taylor, 2016) as a response to the social contradictions of the time. Highlighting the grossly disparate impact of neoliberalism across racial lines, Omi and Winant (2014: 211) propose that neoliberalism is, at its core, a racial project as much as a capitalist accumulation project. These are the conditions in which my research participants cultivated their worldviews and constructed their collective identities.

There have also been major changes within educational policy and practice under neoliberal capitalism. As capitalist entrepreneurs seek expansion into new markets, urban public schools have been a primary site of private investment. Additionally, we have observed, increasingly, over the last two decades a shift away from a focus on the social structural causes of low educational attainment and the emergence of a heightened emphasis on internal factors, in particular the teacher’s ability to raise standardized test scores (McGuinn, 2014). These changes represent a new racial project in education. The racial projects of previous generations centred on goals such as segregation, assimilation, discipline, containment, and a racialized labour market. Schools today may very well continue to facilitate these kinds of projects, but we now also have unprecedented levels of privatization, and the education of poor and working-class students of colour in urban communities has come to be viewed by capitalist ‘education entrepreneurs’ as a source of their own profit (see Au and Ferrare, 2015; Burch, 2009).

Neoliberalism gains legitimacy through dominant discourses around choice, competition, individual ‘freedom’ and personal responsibility (Duggan, 2012). In education, the discourse of personal responsibility has translated into a ‘no excuses’ mantra that posits poverty is not an excuse for academic under-achievement – placing the responsibility for achievement squarely on the students and their teachers and shifting the focus off structural barriers. Additionally, there is a heightened emphasis on personal, or consumer, choice, mainly through the proliferation of charter schools. ‘Choice’ in the neoliberal framework is celebrated as a lever for creating equal access to ‘good’ schools (as market forces compel the ‘bad’ ones to close down).

Another related discourse is ‘college for everyone’. ‘No excuses’ charter schools that are attended solely by students of colour in high poverty urban neighbourhoods, for example, make 100% college enrolment an explicit part of their mission (Golann, 2015). Even in the so-called failing public schools with dropout rates often around 60%, such as UPHS, there is a strong focus on college. In fact, students in my study would almost always mention college when I asked what they intended to do after high school. Interestingly, though, the statement would often be made in the negative: ‘Well, I don’t think I’ll go to college’ (Nolan, 2011). This negative response reveals the students’ penetrations into the conditions of their own existence, or more specifically, the structural realities that make higher education entrance, or completion, unattainable for the vast majority of the poor and working class. Surely, these changes have shaped the contemporary urban public school into a new kind of mediating institution that interacts with young people’s identity construction in historically specific ways.

Along with these changes, two disciplinary paradigms have emerged as a major aspect of the institutional context of schools in high poverty, racially segregated areas. The first is the highly regimented, behaviourist strategies of ‘no excuses’ charter schools (see Golann, 2015; Goodman, 2013) that are bound up with the intensified achievement ideology. The second is the punitive, zero tolerance disciplinary approach, often combined with school-based policing which, like ‘no excuses’, gains legitimacy through a discourse of personal responsibility. (One simply chooses to conform or not, with the consequences for not conforming being suspension or entanglement with law enforcement.) In Police in the Hallways, I describe a school policing program that was explicitly modelled after New York City’s order maintenance street policing program. Premised on the ‘broken windows’ theory, the program utilized targeted heavy policing focused on low-level violations of the law (or rather low-level school infractions) in an effort to mitigate more serious disciplinary incidents. Although, the policing program at UPHS was a rather extreme example, similar programs and other punitive practices have become widespread in the United States, particularly in schools in high poverty, racially segregated areas.

What I found at UPHS was that as the police often became the first line of intervention in minor disciplinary matters, students’ transgressions – even minor ones – were criminalized. For example, students would often get stopped in the hallways of the school for wearing a hat or not making it to their classroom before the bell rang (both considered minor, ‘level-one’ school infractions). Efforts to explain themselves or any display of indignation at what was perceived as an unfair ‘stop’ would often result in the student receiving a summons and getting arrested for ‘disorderly conduct’. Such disciplinary practices stand in sharp contrast to school disciplinary practices prior to the era of mass incarceration and the popularization of order maintenance policing – both in the United States and in Britain – when educators handled student misbehaviour and, even when the police were called, incidents did not so quickly get defined as ‘police matters’. Recall, for example, the incident in which the lads’ antics led to the school head calling the police. The frightened lads attempt to evade the officer only to eventually be caught, brought to the head’s office, admonished, and forced to apologize. There was no criminalization of the lads’ behaviour. In contrast, the contemporary US urban public school with punitive discipline and policing merges with the nation’s crime control project. Subsequently, the school becomes complicit in the production of an economically excluded criminalized class.

Police in the Hallways also attempts to reveal the logic in students’ transgressive behaviours, including their resistance to police officers (often expressed through their refusal to hand over their ID card). My analysis was greatly informed by Learning to Labour as I was interested in the students’ sense-making and their implicit (and sometimes very explicit) insights into structural hierarchies and the myth of meritocracy. I was also interested in the psycho-social rewards students received by refusing to conform to school norms and expectations, often when years of inadequate academic and social supports had left them unprepared for grade-level academic work. Willis (2011), reflecting on his own read of Police in the Hallways, put it this way: ‘Students experience their oppression through the fundamental mediations of current educational forms and how they react, collectively and culturally, to their immediate situational problems, finding dignity and human traction in those reactions’. Yet, in my final analysis, Police in the Hallways emphasizes more so the changing role of the public school within the current political economy and context of a societal culture of control than the role of cultural production in the process of social reproduction.

The critical race and class consciousness of kids from the Bronx: A cultural production perspective

In an effort to help bridge the two prevailing, but often only superficially linked, critical frames in educational research – the neo-Marxist reproduction-resistance lens and the critical race theory lens – I returned to my original data to consider how my research participants exhibited a class consciousness and racial identity, and the nature of the relationship between them (Nolan, forthcoming). In doing so, I drew on Willis’s cultural production perspective because of its usefulness in revealing the social critique embedded in the students’ sense-making and cultural practices. Critical race theory (CRT), which aims to uncover the counter-stories and perspectives of people of colour, has offered an important critical lens for understanding racism in education in the US and elsewhere. While race becomes central to such analyses, critical race theorists are interested in the ways racism intersects with other social differences, such as class and gender. In its entrance into educational research, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) point out the limitations of Marxian class analyses and expound on the structural and material dimensions of racism. However, it has also been argued that even the best intersectional work within CRT does not incorporate Marxism’s problematic, that is, the fundamental analysis of capital (Leonardo, 2013: 35). It seems to me, then, that in order to gain insight into the relationship between race and class, or political economy, a particularly useful point of departure is cultural production rather than policy. And indeed, I found keen insights about the relationship between racial and class oppression in the students’ sense-making and cultural practices.

Jermaine, Duane, Wanda, and Carlos – four representative UPHS students – all had disciplinary records and had accumulated a number of court summonses and arrests, both in and out of school. By all accounts, the school deemed these four students as part of an oppositional culture that was antithetical to academic success. Carlos and Wanda, however, were only superficially, or sporadically, involved in street life and crime. Carlos, in fact, had spent much of his time constructively working in a daycare centre as part of a summer youth employment program and helping to care for his grandmother after school. Both Carlos and Wanda intended on going to college, and Carlos was able to articulate a clear and potentially attainable career goal of becoming a children’s social worker. Duane and Jermaine, on the other hand, were more heavily involved in gangs and admitted some petty criminal activity to me. This diverted some of their attention away from academic pursuits and a clear vision of future employment. Nevertheless, even these two, with their more tenuous relationships to the classroom, made efforts at engaging in the classroom and wanted to graduate from high school.

For these students, matters of race and class were often conflated within their statements and it was within this conflation that their critical consciousness really came to light. I identified two inter-related narrative strategies that they used to discuss their experiences and cultural practices at the intersections of race and class. First, students provided an integrated critical ‘race-class’ (Leonardo, 2013) analysis through the use of a collective frame. Willis notes that the logic of individual interests is different from the logics of group interests (1977: 128), but I had not fully fleshed that out in Police in the Hallways. In wasn’t until I systematically considered the relationship between class consciousness and racial identity formation that I turned my attention more explicitly onto the students’ collective awareness and its transformative promise for overcoming the individualistic, bootstraps mentality of neoliberal capitalism.

Secondly, the students utilized spatial terms to describe their experiences in the labour market, in school, and with the police, and these spatial terms implied a collective, place-based experience that was raced and classed. For example, they would often make references to ‘neighbourhoods like ours’ (almost always plural) when I had not explicitly asked about their neighbourhood experiences. Or they would begin a description of their career aspirations by saying, ‘where we live…’ or ‘around here’, and then to be sure the white researcher with whom they were speaking understood, they might add, ‘you know, the ghetto, the hood’. It became clear to me that these spatial terms and phrases worked simultaneously as race and class markers. It is true that the students’ statements tended to address more explicitly race rather than class. However, it could be argued, as Stuart Hall (1978) notes, that race is the modality in which class is lived.

Below are a few illustrative examples of the ways students framed their experiences in collective and spatialized terms as they reflected on their experiences in school, on the street, and within the job market. When I asked Jermaine – the most structurally marginalized student among these four – about jobs one day in a small office off of the cafeteria, he responded by saying: ‘Around here, the job is picking up a gun.’ Then quietly, looking out the window, he added, ‘There are a lot of jobs out there, like McDonalds, fast foods, sneaker stores. It’s not really a wide variety, but it pays at least for our standards.’

When I asked him about what he’d like to do after he finished school, he replied that he didn’t know. Then, he continued:

It’s just a lot of things that make you think: is society actually fair? Even when you look at the fire department that we have here, how is this? This is a highly black populated area, but we have an all-white fire department. Like a lot of youth don’t think like that. I wonder.

When I asked Duane – who had been recruited into a gang before he reached his teen years – about future employment, he stated, ‘I sure as hell don’t want to be a cop.’ I must have looked surprised because he quickly added, ‘No joke, when I was little I wanted to be a cop.’ He explained that after some bad experiences with law enforcement on the street at a very young age, he had changed his mind. It is interesting, though, that law enforcement was one of the few models he had, and after he lost that vision of a future, he was unable to articulate another career goal. He only shrugged when I asked him again. ‘Shit, I’m almost 17,’ he said in a low voice, ‘and I don’t know what I want to do.’

In relation to school experiences, Wanda, a bright 18-year-old who desperately sought some kind of ‘program’ that might help her graduate, once had this to say:

I really wonder why my mother’s paying tax. Because basically she’s paying tax and we still live in a shitty world if you really think about it. And yet the people Upstate, they live high Upstate. Their schools are nothing like this. People Upstate like my friend, she compares this school to a regular crack head building, I swear to God. Because her school up there, they have homecoming games, they’ve got programs, I mean kids up there want to learn.’

Carlos – a young man with a learning disability who had grown frustrated with school but continued to make attempts at getting through his classes as he hoped to go to college – frequently referred to himself as ‘a kid from the Bronx’ to explain his style and experiences. We would listen to his favourite Hip Hop and Reggaeton music, which he would use to narrate what it meant to him to be growing up in the Bronx where labour market exclusion and interactions with the police were major themes. Since that time, Carlos has been in and out of college, taking classes part-time and stopping to pick up some low-wage work. The last time we spoke, over 10 years after I first met him, he was still living with his mother and still hoped to finish college in order to pursue his career goals.

The students’ collective awareness around race and class and their insights into the significance of their racialized class positons within the context of the heavily policed ghetto (and ghetto school) were striking. Without necessarily knowing the full history of the racialized economic and containment functions of the ghetto (see, for example, Muhammad, 2011), they set their own stories within that history, making penetrations into the conditions of their existence as members of what might potentially be called an emerging racialized revolutionary class (Leonardo, 2013). They were not at that point (yet), but thinking about my conversations with them and their keen social critiques in this way assured me that they, indeed, had an understanding that the school would not, nor was it designed to, transform the racialized class structure.

Yet, there are always so many lived and historical contradictions. For one, within a heightened discourse around personal responsibility, achievement, and college for all – along with the lack of a clear vision of post-high school employment – the students had more complicated relationships to academic pursuits than the lads had. UPHS students lamented the lack of meaningful classroom experiences that they imagined were offered in other schools, perhaps Upstate. In fact, even Jermaine and Duane, as tenuous as their relationships were to the classrooms, yearned for classroom experiences where they would be welcomed and engaged in content that was meaningful to their lives and their future. Although the school held the belief that a young person with baggy pants and a baseball cap or a red bandanna (potentially signifying gang affiliation), or a tough ‘attitude’ for that matter, was not orientated toward academic success, the students did not view their cultural practices or style of dress as antithetical to school success. They desired to succeed in school because there were virtually no attractive alternatives offered within their political economic context. So they held out hope that school might direct them into some kind of viable employment ‘if only’ (Nolan, 2011). What the students did reject was a particular kind of schooling paradigm – one that was more about social control (and preparation for incarceration) than preparation for a productive future.

Oppositional culture and resistance today

When Marxist resistance scholars, including Willis, were critiqued for purportedly valorizing oppositional cultures and violence, critical educational theorists seemed to shy away from analyses of oppositionality at the risk of either pathologizing youth of colour or appearing to minimize the seriousness of violence. A new generation of resistance theorists shifted their attention onto the empancipatory potential of a wide range of cultural practices. For example, some have examined the resistance strategies of high-achieving students (O’Connor, 1997) and the processes through which poor and working-class youth of colour become engaged in transformative political action (Cammarota and Fine, 2010; Tuck and Yang, 2013). These were important extensions or re-imaginings of Willis’s and other theorists’ early work. Cammarota (2008), for example, builds directly on Willis’s cultural production perspective when he argues that a focus on cultural production lays the groundwork for a pedagogy of praxis that could take young people beyond the limits of their own cultural worldviews and direct them into transformative political activity.

Yet, critical scholars in education also may have been compelled to return to analyses of oppositional culture in an era when even minor acts of disruption and non-conformity have become constructed as criminality. We are also charged with excavating the contradictions in the school’s current politics of respectability, which works to accommodate neoliberalism by suggesting that poor and working-class people of colour need only to adhere to white, middle-class cultural norms to gain entrance into the market economy (Harris, 2014). In this context, it becomes important to unearth the meanings embedded in counter-cultural practices that are constructed by the school and other formal institutions as criminal and self-destructive when, indeed, a particular aesthetic or demeanour are neither. For the students in my study, the construction of their identities in collective terms pushes back against the fierce individualism of neoliberalism and speaks to both their critical race and class consciousness. Their use of spatial terms and their identification with a particular place – the ghetto – also asserts a collective racial and class identity and pushes back against a politics of respectability, which associates ‘ghetto’ with unacceptable behaviour (Harris, 2014). Instead, the students exhibited keen insight into the ghetto for what it is and has been – ‘in neighbourhoods likes ours’, where jobs are scarce and the police are plentiful.

A certain observation of Willis’s from his foreword to Police in the Hallways remains with me. He writes:

I do not think that anyone has gotten really adequate theoretical and procedural answers for understanding how cultural responses relate to external structuring forces, and there is always the danger of seeming somehow to ‘blame the victim’ for self-limiting, apparently self-directed behaviors rather than attributing everything to the automatic results of outside domination.

As Cammarota notes, a pedagogy of praxis, in schools and within the broader community, can harness that energy and move transgressive cultural production toward transformative politics. Of course, in an era characterized by an intensified investment in police force and incarceration, a disinvestment in public education, militarization, and a low-wage, service economy – as reflected in the four corners around my old school – it is difficult not to return to more deterministic frames that pre-dated Willis. Schools attended by poor and working-class students of colour today are increasingly repressive and pedagogically controlled. They not only serve to reproduce the intensified economic and racial divides of neoliberal capitalism, but they often work to produce a criminalized class. Nevertheless, as Willis (2011: xi) notes in the foreword to my book, ‘It is not good enough for social scientists to wind up effectively in a position where the only thing to do Monday morning [in the classroom] is to wait for the revolution.’

Surely, recent urban street rebellions against police terror and the growing popular resistance against white supremacy, neoliberalism, and fascism embody the creative energy and transformative visions of young poor people of colour in US urban areas and elsewhere. And there is the potential for teachers, even within the repressive contemporary urban school, to create ‘sites of possibility’ (Weis and Fine, 2000) where the transformative impulses within non-conformity can become a springboard for political action.