“Not what it used to be”: Schemas of class and contradiction in the Great Recession

Anna Jefferson

Economic Anthropology, 2015, vol. 2, issue 2, 310-325

Abstract: type="main" xml:id="sea212033-abs-0001"> The U.S. housing crisis and Great Recession (2007–9) significantly exacerbated 40 years of rising inequality in America. Widespread concern about the “struggling middle class” epitomizes Americans' anxiety about inequality and the country's claim to great nationhood. This article provides ethnographically grounded analysis of the restructuring of class experiences and discourses in Michigan in 2009 and 2010, from the perspectives of homeowners facing foreclosure and of nonprofit housing counselors who mediate between homeowners and their banks. First I examine homeowners' downward mobility, then I turn to all participants' analyses of the American class system. Most homeowners facing foreclosure emphasized their fall from the middle class to poverty or an in-between status like “middle working poor.” Such complex self-locations are not only about class shame or the inadequacy of American class discourse; they are also about maintaining citizenship status. When Michiganders identify as “middle working poor” and other permutations, they struggle to reconcile downward mobility with claims to current rights and their own history as the emblem of the American middle class. Homeowners and housing counselors also tied current class polarization to the long-term decline of the manufacturing economy and American greatness. Their perception that being middle class is “not what it used to be” underscores the ongoing importance of the mid-20th century to definitions of the middle class as financially secure. These experiences show simultaneous angst over and normalization of inequality. Because of the centrality of middle-classness to affirmative citizenship in the United States, the hollowing out of the middle class is experienced as a citizenship of lack and contradiction.

Date: 2015
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