Is soppressata on the syllabus?

I see lots of folks are clowning David Brooks off of his op-ed about education and social mobility today. Usually clowning David Brooks is important work, but people are pointing at this graf and laughing, but dude has a point: 

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.*

Clumsy? Yep? Patronizing? Totes. But the previous graf provides some context" "I was braced by Reeves’s book, [about barriers to social mobility] but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent." Like it or not, if you work in higher education, you work in the social capital business. One of the many things that Penn history grad student Stephanie McKellop writes about w/candor and power is what these informal barriers look like from the other side. For academics who are comfortable with soppressata, etc, one takeaway is to make the effort to make meals you share w/ students/colleagues, etc, accessible. 

This is tricky territory, to be sure. It is not the job of a mentor of college or grad faculty to play Henry Higgins to a student's Eliza Doolittle, but there are forms of cultural competency that some students bring to the table, literally, that others do not. It's easy to sneer at the idea of a BA or MA or PhD program functioning as some kind of finishing school, because we didn't read all those books and write all those articles so our students could rack up tens of thousands of dollars of debt so we could tell them which fork to use, but pretending that every student enters a university with the same level of familiarity with the social spaces that being there will entail is about the same as insisting you "don't see color." 

The ethical imperative that comes out of this is a tricky one, and one that is easy to fuck up, as I am sure I have done many times. It's easy to a) over-explain something to a mentee, or b) leave them in the dark as you negotiate a menu or a meal you are sharing with them. At least, I think, it's worth trying to  do what you can to manage social spaces to minimize these difficult moments. 

Back in the spring of 2016, there was a sitin at my campus. I turned up with Korean tacos to show my support. With some help from Cinetrix, the condiments were labelled, which made them a little bit more accessible. In retrospect, I wish I'd provided a little bit more information and translation here. Korean food has not gotten a lot of traction in rural SC, and a little bit more effort on my part would have made the choices clearer to the hungry people I was trying to feed. 

*The question of why Mexican is accessible and Italian is fancy is worth pondering too. 

Comments

[Petra Cosgrove-Tremblay]

Italian isn't fancy.. But it's not the Italian that is problematic.. It's the type of sandwhich shop. Everyone knows salami.. But not everyone knows that soppressata is a form of cured meat similar to salami..

I agree that the writing is a little heavy handed, but... the "foodie" standards of the upper middle class, as tasty as they are (and they ARE tasty), do a great job of delineating a sense of belonging, or not.