ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that working-class culture is genuine in the sense that it has an internal coherence that is separate and distinct from middle-class culture; has positive value both in itself and for American society; and vitally contributes to the shaping of middle-class life and culture even as it forms itself within and around that dominant culture. Contrasting careers versus jobs, becoming versus belonging, the author shows the evidentiary and logical flaws in the common professional middle-class assumptions that there is only one genuine or valuable culture and that the working-class has either a deficit, a dominated, or a residual culture that is a disability which can only be overcome by adopting middle-class ways. Besides sometimes being politically toxic, such class cultural blindness leads middle-class professionals to misunderstand their own culture and to underestimate the social, political, and economic potential of America society.
