so·cial class noun
a division of a society based on social and economic status

I experienced social class before I had a name for it, and I developed habits to address it without consciously knowing I was doing so. Some of those habits have lasted a lifetime.

For instance: The room is very large and filled with round tables covered with white tablecloths. It is likely in a restaurant or hotel banquet room. 

Or the room may be smaller, located in, say, a country club or perhaps the dining room of a large home.

Everyone is dressed appropriately depending on the type of event and the time of day.

Such places were not a part of my childhood.

Because these settings were unfamiliar to me in my early years I learned to walk a step or two behind others as I enter the rooms, watching what they do, a now unconscious habit I developed during my university years as I learned to navigate a new social world. 

Do people stand or sit? If standing, do they form small groups? What do the people in those groups talk about? 

When they sit what do they do first? When the meal is served, which fork do they use?

The first such room I remember entering was in my senior year in college when my high grade-point average led to an invitation from an honors society to a dinner at the town’s premier restaurant at which I had never eaten.

While the dorms at my university socialized young men by requiring that we wear jackets and ties for dinner on Wednesday and lunch on Sunday, I had had no experience with such formal dining.

I was watchful, not doing anything until someone else did it first, which was likely the beginning of my lifelong habit.

When I began college in 1964 neither my father, who hoped I would someday have a job to which I would wear a suit and tie, nor I, could have guessed what it would mean for me and for our family to leave a blue-collar life to live in a white-collar world.

Like many others who were the first in their blue-collar families to attend college with hopes of white-collar lives, I never again would feel fully at home in either world. 

In college and especially later as a teacher in an affluent Detroit suburb I began to occupy a strange new territory, a social and cultural limbo in which I had left one world to become a participant-observer in another, a cultural anthropologist in a kind of foreign land in which I felt like a perpetual outsider. 

In my new white collar world I spent time with people who usually assumed that my upbringing and early experiences were like theirs, a background that today might be called “privileged.”

In their presence I often felt like an imposter who didn’t understand the unwritten rules of my new world and whose false identify might be exposed at any moment by a mistake or what my white-collar self might call a faux pas. 

Decades later I came across a book that helped me gain a better understanding of the unease I often felt.

In Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, Alfred Lubrano describes the often invisible power of social class:

“Class is script, map, and guide.… It affects who we marry; where we live; the friends we choose; the jobs we have; the vacations we take; the books we read; the movies we see; the restaurants we pick; how we decide to buy houses, carpets, furniture and cars; where our kids are educated: what we tell our children at the dinner table.… In short, class is nearly everything about you.”

Social class was not a term I would have used in high school, although I had experienced it then in the school’s social strata and in the differences between my family and the family of my mother’s sister who were members of both the country and yacht clubs.

Similar to Lubrano’s description of himself in Limbo, I preferred to read books than to talk about cars and their repair, subjects of endless fascination to my friends.

I also knew from my first jobs (paperboy, bagger in a small grocery store, and summer employment in factories and as a milkman for summer residents of Lake Michigan cottages) that I most enjoyed work in which I had autonomy and used my head as well as my hands.

My friends, on the other hand, seemed quite content doing the jobs I found most oppressive and boring, like 8-hour shifts running a drill press in a small factory, a summer job that lasted just two weeks for me.

Like Lubrano, I sometimes wondered why I was so different from those friends and was troubled by that difference.

Lubrano says that for ”Straddlers,” the term he uses to describe those who are in limbo, "there was a moment, a specific place and time, when the difference between the class in which they were born and the ones above it were made clear to them.”

There may well have been a series of such moments for me:

Perhaps it was as an early teenager when the only way I could play golf with a friend at the country club to which his family belonged was to pretend to be his caddy until we were out of sight of the clubhouse. (Golf ultimately proved to be as uninteresting to me as car repairs.)

Perhaps it was being invited to “dinner parties” at which I felt distinctly out of place.

Perhaps it was when someone who serves others, such as a waiter or waitress in a restaurant, was not treated respectfully by my companions. (My mother was a waitress.)

Or it may have been more gradual as I learned that many of the things I talked about in my white-collar world, like movies or books, did not interest my blue-collar family or friends.

A benefit of the struggle to find a place in the white-collar world was that I knew I could live without its trappings and that I could start over, if need be, or, as a Straddler in Lubrano’s book explains it, "I was always willing to say, ‘Take this job and shove it,’ because I knew I could survive no matter what.”

Another benefit was that because I invented my life as I went along and saw most things from at least two perspective—blue collar and white collar—I had more independence of thought than others whose lives moved along largely predetermined lines.

I also found myself drawn to people who, like me, didn’t quite fit in, who had rough edges and a lack of pretense.

A doctor Lubrano quotes says “the patients he feels closest to are the ones who struggle to get somewhere, because he believes the struggle says a lot about a person." 

I felt that way as a teacher, which was probably one reason I spent several years teaching in an alternative high school.

While I chose to live in the Detroit area rather than Western Michigan where I was offered a teaching position in 1968, I resonated with Lubrano’s description of those who can never totally leave their origins behind. "Every once in a while,” he writes, “Straddlers have to go back and touch the place that launched them.... They need to go back to the world they left to see what's still there."

As a result, I made near monthly visits home in the 1970s and 80s, a practice that more or less continued until my mother and father’s deaths, visits that often took me on solitary car rides along the rural roads I walked as a child not imagining the good fortune that would lie ahead of me. 

And the challenges and unexpected learning that were yet to be.

To what extent did you have to navigate boundaries between social classes, race, and/or other factors?