Learning to Labour

Ethnography

‘I’m a kid from the 0(00) 1–15

! The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1466138118780869
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contributions of Willis’s
cultural production
perspective in Learning
to Labour
Kathleen Nolan
Princeton University, USA

Abstract
In this essay, the author discusses the enduring significance of Paul Willis’s theorizations
of cultural production and social reproduction as delineated in his classic work, Learning
to Labour (1977). She reflects on the ways Willis’s theory informs her experiences as a
high school teacher and, later, as an ethnographer examining school policing in the
Bronx. The author uses data on her research participants’ experiences of schooling,
the police, and the labour market within the context of neoliberal capitalism, ghetto-
ization, and the intensified use of police force to show how a cultural production lens
can provide important insights into the collective and spatialized experience of racial
and class oppression. Further, the author argues that despite intensified repression in
schools attended by poor and working class students of colour in US ghettoized areas,
the transformative impulses within non-conformity signal a cogent social critique and
can become a springboard for political action.

Keywords
school policing, urban education, cultural production, social reproduction, race

In the late 1990s, I was teaching high school in a high-poverty, Spanish-speaking

immigrant neighbourhood in the South Bronx in New York. The building where
I taught was a dilapidated former Catholic elementary school heated by a coal

Corresponding author:
Kathleen Nolan, Teacher Preparation Program in American Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
08540, USA.
Email: kmnolan@princeton.edu
2 Ethnography 0(00)

burner. When the weather turned chilly, the noxious stench of sulphur from the
burner would fill the classroom. One morning a small boy pushed open one of the
few heavy wooden windows that had not yet been boarded up or nailed shut to let
in some fresh air. Before we could blink, the window came crashing down like a
guillotine nearly taking off the boy’s hand. A few of us gasped. Another boy
silently stood up, took a large dictionary off the shelf, and propped the window
open. I thanked the young man and without another word, we began our lesson.
Looming in the distance, beyond the broken windows, was a large gleaming white
structure, the newest and most striking building in the area – a youth prison. Some
of my colleagues would ‘joke’ that if a student did not behave, he or she would end
up there. While I resented those teachers for saying such a thing, it certainly seemed
true enough that the more alienated students were from the classroom experience
and the further behind grade-level they were, the greater the chances that they
might indeed find themselves incarcerated.
The youth prison across from the school extended a block to the west. At that
intersection, there was a MacDonald’s on one of the far corners and a US Army
recruiting centre on the other. During those years, I spent considerable time think-
ing about those four corners and the relationship between the under-funded school,
the fast food restaurant, the recruiting centre, and the youth prison. What did this
configuration of institutions at an intersection in one of the poorest urban districts
in the United States reveal about that particular historical moment? And what was
the relationship between these particular uses of urban space and the goings-on in
my classroom? Around that time, a friend handed me a copy of Paul Willis’s
Learning to Labour. He told me that this book – about white, working-class
boys attending school in an industrialized British town in the 1970s – could help
me make sense of the spatial configurations of the post-industrial Bronx, what
those configurations represented, and my students’ daily lives at school. And
indeed, despite the very different historical and social contexts, the book provided
an important framework for situating my experience as a teacher within the larger
community where I worked and for understanding the impact of external forces on
daily life at the school. In the simplest of terms, I came to see some interesting
parallels between Willis’s lads and some of my own students with tenuous relation-
ships to the classroom who, like the lads, exhibited what might be called a counter-
school culture. Having a ‘laff ’, winning space, and adopting modes of dress that the
school viewed as representing ‘street culture’ (and thus deemed antithetical to aca-
demic pursuits), for example, appeared to be as important for some of my students
as they were for the lads as a means of collective self-expression. I also observed
that the students’ resistance to school conformity often became more pronounced
as they shed their new immigrant’s naı̈ve hope and came to understand their place
in the American racial and class order. In this sense, they expressed at least an
implicit understanding of the myth of meritocracy – that, no matter how hard they
worked, not only had the school failed them but that the political economy in
which they lived may very likely relegate them to low wage work, a future in the
military, or perhaps incarceration – as represented by those four corners.
Nolan 3

In this essay, I argue for the enduring significance of Willis’s theorizations of

cultural production and social reproduction as delineated in his classic work,
Learning to Labour (1977), by reflecting on the ways his theory informs my own
experiences as a teacher in an under-funded Bronx high school and as an ethnog-
rapher examining the processes of criminalization through policing and disciplin-
ary practices in a similar Bronx school attended by black and Latino/a students,
which I call ‘Urban Public High School’ (UPHS). The ethnographic work has been
documented in my book, Police in the Hallways (2011), for which Willis, generously
and brilliantly, wrote the foreword. Clearly, there were vast differences between the
experiences of Willis’s lads who could count on industrial jobs and whose lives were
not so heavily shaped by the looming presence of the criminal justice system and
my own research participants who contended with devastating unemployment,
racism, and mass incarceration. Looking across these distinct historical contexts,
however, helps to reveal the continuing relevance and applicability of Willis’s
theory across time and place.
Additionally, I argue against scholars who take issue with Willis’s seminal the-
oretical contribution, claiming it ‘valorizes’ oppositional cultures, particularly in
the contemporary context of pervasive urban violence (see Devine, 1996, for exam-
ple). I argue instead that the theory and method in Learning to Labour, rather than
valorizing violence, continue to provide an important foundation for critical ethno-
graphic work that seeks to better understand what the cultural practices of
oppressed groups tell us about the historically specific structural forces with
which they interact. Moreover, there is no celebration of oppositionality for its
own sake; rather, the theory and method allow for an excavation of the critical
logic embedded in cultural production. Certainly, the oppositional cultural prac-
tices of contemporary youth in the US and around the world take on different
meanings than the lads’ as they interact with and against a particular, and different,
set of dominant ideologies, institutional practices, and political economic circum-
stances. But the fluid and dynamic nature of the theory Willis offers allows for, or
rather calls for, revisiting it in other contexts. Specifically, the central components
of the contemporary US context that I describe include the post-industrial, neo-
liberal political economy, the American racial project and ghettoization, the puni-
tive turn in crime control and school discipline, and the intensification of dominant
discourses around personal responsibility and achievement.

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
4 Ethnography 0(00)

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 understand-
ings 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 specif-
ically, 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 ethnog-
raphy 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 cre-
ative 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 pro-
duction 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, the-
orizations of social reproduction that mainly aimed to show how schools corres-
pond 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 dis-
investment 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 para-
digm 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
Nolan 5

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 insti-
tution 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 asso-
ciated with urban street culture.
Although structural and institutional changes have occurred, shifting the pro-
cesses 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 com-
munities, which have experienced massive de-industrialization, persistently high
6 Ethnography 0(00)

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 poli-
cing 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 gener-
ations 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 commu-
nities 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, com-
petition, individual ‘freedom’ and personal responsibility (Duggan, 2012). In educa-
tion, the discourse of personal responsibility has translated into a ‘no excuses’
mantra that posits poverty is not an excuse for academic under-achievement – pla-
cing 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 neighbour-
hoods, 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).
Nolan 7

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 discip-
linary 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 pro-
gram 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 con-
trast 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
8 Ethnography 0(00)

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 fun-
damental 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 empha-
sizes 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 limi-
tations 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
Nolan 9

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 con-
structively 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 atten-
tion 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 forma-
tion that I turned my attention more explicitly onto the students’ collective aware-
ness 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 experi-
ences 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.’
10 Ethnography 0(00)

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.

What I found most interesting about Jermaine’s statement is that he immediately

refers to the local economy when asked broadly about job opportunities, and
expounds, without my prompting, on the experiences of exclusion among black
residents ‘around here’. At one point in our conversation Jermaine looked straight
at me and said, ‘You know, I wake up in the same damn place every day. It’s not
like I go to sleep and wake up in Heaven.’ He also seemed to like to remind me
every so often when we spoke that the Bronx was not like the Hamptons.
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.’

Wanda also described a spatialized experience of policing. For example, she once
explained that youth in the Bronx are subject to stops on the street ‘for the smallest
things’. She described how young people would stay indoors at the end of the
month because they feared that police officers had to meet monthly summons
quotas, and young people, like herself, if not careful, would accumulate hefty
fines for small infractions, such as loitering and littering. Here, I believe
that Wanda understood that I, a white woman, walked the same streets daily,
but with a much different experience of them. What she wanted me to understand
was the collective experience of poor and working-class youth of colour in
the Bronx.
Nolan 11

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 employ-
ment – the students had more complicated relationships to academic pursuits than
the lads had. UPHS students lamented the lack of meaningful classroom experi-
ences 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 alter-
natives 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 incarcer-
ation) 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
12 Ethnography 0(00)

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 gen-
eration of resistance theorists shifted their attention onto the empancipatory poten-
tial 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 trans-
formative 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 polit-
ical 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 work-
ing-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 prac-
tices 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 asso-
ciates ‘ghetto’ with unacceptable behaviour (Harris, 2014). Instead, the students
exhibited keen insight into the ghetto for what it is and has been – ‘in neighbour-
hoods 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.

Regarding the first part of his statement, could this not be due to the ever-evolving
structural circumstances and never-ending creative cultural responses to each histor-
ical moment? Concerning the second part of his statement, it seems that this is the
Nolan 13

perpetual dilemma of the critical ethnographer. But in the context of police repression
and criminalization, it becomes imperative to offer alternative understandings. Indeed,
I would argue that we are in an historical moment when it is absolutely essential to
excavate the hope that lies within the social critique of young people like Duane,
Wanda, Carlos, and Jermaine. When researchers dismiss the transformative potential
implicit in transgressive cultural practices, no matter how distasteful or repugnant they
may seem to the white, middle class, they are both disconnecting cultural practices
from the structural conditions that give rise to them and writing off the creative energy
and humanity of racially and economically oppressed youth.
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 popu-
lar 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.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

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Author Biography
Kathleen Nolan is a lecturer in the Program in Teacher Preparation and the
Program in American Studies at Princeton University. She teaches courses related
to urban education, inequality, education policy, and pedagogy. She is the author
of Police in the hallways: Discipline in an urban high school (2011, University of
Minnesota Press).