Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams
Alfred Lubrano
Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2004

Shorter review: Go read this book. If you worked your way through school or are thinking about working your way through school, read this book. If you have ever worked for, under, or with someone, or have ever managed or will ever manage someone, who started in poverty and is now working as a professional in a library, go read this book. If you ever, in the course of working in a library, work with patrons who in any way want to or need to or are thinking about improving their life circumstances through education, go read this book. If you are a trustee who needs to better understand the library’s mission and the people it serves, read it. If you are in any way associated whatsoever with the culture of libraries and what we do and why we do it, hey, this book is important. Go buy it, ILL it, tell your boss it needs to be in your local professional collection, put it on your Goodreads list, go right now and then come back and we’ll talk about why.

Okay? Okay.

I’m following on – and still chewing on the themes from – this post. The first time I applied for grad school, when asked why I wanted an MLIS, I said, “I want to work in libraries for the rest of my life, and I can’t, I cannot make $9/hr for the rest of my life.” A perfectly honest and valid answer. (Still true.) And not enough. I didn’t get accepted, obviously.

It took another couple of years and participation in some intense career experiences – a building project and move, an ILS migration, stepping up and pitching in to cover for a colleague with a serious health condition – to tease out what I really wanted. I’ve talked about specific interests and goals elsewhere on this site, and that’s not really the point of this piece anyway, so I’m not going to rehash it here. But what it comes down to is: I want a seat at the table. I want a voice in the process. I want to participate in the exciting work of defining the modern library profession. And I became increasingly aware that I’m just not quite prepared for that work, and I haven’t been able to put my finger on why.

Lubrano’s book put it into perspective in a way I hadn’t conceptualized on my own yet. Lubrano, a journalist and the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, talks about people he calls “Straddlers” – those raised working poor who came up through education to middle- and upper-class, white-collar work and lifestyles. A former Air Force wife, I think of “Mustangs,” the military term for enlisted soldiers who subsequently went through officer training and received commissions.There are huge parallels. In both the civilian and military worlds, there’s a tendency for those higher up the social hierarchy to like you (or, at least, like your work ethic) but not necessarily respect you, and for those below to respect but not trust you. It’s a prestigious and satisfying accomplishment but a tough and lonely life, and your closest allies will often be people with similar backgrounds.

Things I did not know were class coded until I read this book:

• Silght overdressing. People who are comfortable with their station are comfortable dressing down; people who are unsure of themselves worry about others thinking they don’t know how to dress well.
• Impatience and frustration with the social components of labor – meetings, collaborations, networking, self-marketing, “mandatory fun” and after-hours camaraderie.
• Intense privacy and work-life separation. This goes along with the point above, but it also stems from a lifestyle of compartmentalization, of measuring one’s audience in every social interaction, and in valuing the preservation of a personal space where constant performance can be relaxed.
• Office housework. There’s been a lot of chatter in the aftermath of the Sheryl Sandberg article about how this is a gendered phenomenon, but it’s also class-based. There’s an elitism of humility in the upwardly mobile, a pride in “doing the work that needs done and not caring who gets the credit” that can and too often does devolve into self-defeating busywork.
• Being a “fast learner” and having strong observational and troubleshooting skillsets. This is how we survive and adapt, constantly. A Straddler will never be the first person to speak in a meeting, or order at a restaurant – he’s gauging the room first.
• Preoccupation with security, redundancy, and fall-back plans. The Straddler will be the one with the emergency savings account, the retirement fund, the polished resume, and be “keeping her hand in” doing some volunteer work in a labor field – Habitat for Humanity, a soup kitchen, a community garden – even when she’s in a secure job she loves.
• Investment in the culture of meritocracy. The Straddler may be a conservative bootstrapper, or a liberal social justice activist, but either way, there’s a burning desire for fairness, dignity, and opportunity for everyone, a valuing of education and hard work, and a contempt for entitled complacency.

Not knowing any better, I always thought that the difference between working-class and middle class had to do with the money you make, and the kind of work that you do. What I am learning, and what this book illuminates, is that the difference has more to do with how you work, your relationship to it, and and the space that work occupies in your life. And people who have crossed that conceptual boundary comprehend that in a way that people on either side of the boundary do not.

All of this adds up to a self-awareness, a lifestyle of constant reinventing, reevaluating, reexamining. The keyword is mobile. And there’s a reason that there are a lot of Straddlers in the profession, in both the degreed and para ranks. We’re the kids who read our way out, the kids who thanked our third-grade teachers and high school librarians at our college graduations, the “smart ones,” the ones for whom some library has always been home territory anyway.

But this is the thing we don’t articulate very well: paralibrarian work is solidly pink-collar, by necessity and definition. Paralibrarians have more in common with nurses, customer service workers, and private-sector clerks than we do with teachers and social workers and, yes, with librarians. Yes, we can do the work. Absolutely. I dare any degreed librarian to defend a claim that a para can’t do the technical work of librarianship just as well as an MLIS, given adequate training and support. And that’s the budget justification for de-professionalizing library spaces, a worrying and problematic trend that librarians fear for good reason. But para work, the work of professional clerks and support personnel, is deeply pragmatic. Paras are down in the weeds right along with the patrons we serve. And from where we are, we don’t have leverage.

This is what education gives us. This is the fundamental value of the MLIS: that in every library space, there’s at least one person who has been through the process and been transformed by it, who has the broader context, who has a nuanced understanding of principles of access and privacy and cultural competency, who fights the intellectual fights, who gives a damn about the theory, who can deconstruct her own biases. Who can talk to the money people and politicians in their own language, write a grant proposal or a letter to the editor or a robust policy. Who can run a meeting or own someone else’s meeting as the moment requires. Who can represent his home institution in the ongoing conversation of library visioning, and then bring those ideas and values and priorities shared back home to be put to work. This is why librarianship is and must be educated white-collar work. That’s the piece I was missing, and am missing, and that’s why I’ve come back around to grad school again, with a different and more mature perspective.

But it’s not enough. Do I think Straddlers make better librarians? I do. And this is why: because on top of all of that, they have a grounded empathy for and ease in the company of the working class, a strong work ethic, and a personal history of self-advocacy. I think that’s incredibly important in interacting with and advocating for the upwardly mobile within our patron bases and staffs, the people who, when they are seeking to improve or enrich their lives, come to the library.

And I think it’s incredibly important in interacting with and advocating for the non-mobile, too. Here’s the thing: most people never really move all that much from where they start, economically or geographically. They will live and die where they were born. And that is okay. It’s easy to forget, in our Pinterest culture of self-improvement and conspicuous consumerism, that there is actually nothing wrong with being working-class, and personal dignity, a basically decent standard of living, and access to information are not privileges one earns, they are fundamental human rights.

We meet patrons where they are and we let them tell us what they need. We do that better when we understand where we’re coming from, too.