Week 8 Reading Response

I think I am not the target rhetorical audience of either Horner and Lu’s work or the work of Mike Rose. The intelligence and literacy skills involved in working class lives/blue collar jobs is nothing new to me, as like Rose, a large majority of my family members work in these types of careers as: machinists, foundry operators, factory works, truck drivers, food service employees, warehouse workers, hairdressers, electricians, construction workers, carpenters, and technicians. The fact that the intelligence of laborers needs to be addressed as an area for academic study is something I find frustrating and upsetting, but in no way surprising. The frustration I felt in tackling this week’s readings, namely the reading by Horner and Lu, was akin to the frustration I felt as a freshman in high school reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and as a master’s student reading Bill Bye’s Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem. In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich goes undercover to prove that minimum wage is not a livable wage, and as a 14-year-old I remember thinking something so obvious should not have to be researched in this manner of journalistic/academic exploration and should not have been presented as though this was an original revelation. I supposed I am frustrated by the need to counter such uninformed assumptions and stereotypes in the first place. In Everything All at Once, Nye expressed surprise upon his “discovery” that many individuals in Appalachian coal country feel oppressed by and resistant to “King Coal,” large mining corporations, strip mining, mountain top removal, and pollution. I was raised in a family and community in which academics were perceived as an enemy elite that looked down upon and misunderstood the people and places that I loved. Reading these by Rose, who has a similar positionality to myself, and by Lu and Horner, who do not, both reminded me—though in different ways—why this sentiment is so pervasive in my home community.