Some healthy competition

A few weeks ago, the NYTimes magazine focused an issue on walking around NYC (April 23, 2015). Contributors shared some favorite city walks, while other articles explored how NYC pedestrians and cars co-exist, and how much distance urban rats actually cover in their scurrying about the Big Apple.  A small collection of human New Yorkers were given fitness trackers to reflect the distance they cover on foot each day (see Sweeney, Camille. "City of 10,000 steps.").  Their short profiles in the paper edition of the magazine indicated how much of the walkers' daily walking distance was achieved often just by getting to and around work.  I found myself wistfully remembering my similarly pedestrian existence in Aix-en-Provence, France, where most of my errands were on foot, and even getting to the (single) family car required a walk down three flights of stairs and across a city block.  I didn't have to plan to walk, walking just happened.  Sometimes the walking was exhausting but overall walking everywhere enriched the social experience of getting to know a city and its people and customs (and it seemed to be good for my physical fitness too).

Back in the States, I am finding that more and more, I have to create reasons to walk and places to walk to because my daily life is so chair-bound as a professor or car-bound as my children's chauffeur.  The services that I need regularly are also no longer difficult to access without a car. I shop online, I renew licenses and turn in paperwork online.  A walk to the post office has become rare.  This hearkens back to the assertion made in a Slate magazine article several years ago, that walking has been engineered out of existence (see Vanderbilt, Tom. "The Crisis in American Walking, April 2012; I cited this in an earlier post on walking in France, A pied April 2012).  Indeed, without my standing date to walk for an hour with a friend several mornings a week, and occasional spontaneous walks, I am fairly inactive in comparison to my life in France or even to my life in Seattle a few years earlier when I walked my kids to elementary school every day.  In my current situation, I simply don't need to exert myself to accomplish daily life.  Unfortunately, this appears to be detrimental to my waistline (as others have also experienced).  Clever people at Northwest companies like Synapse, Nike, Microsoft must have seen this coming, because they have been hard at work at reconceptualizing walking, or re-engineering it, into a game-like activity, rather like a leisure sport. Now we can wear fitness trackers on our bodies--the currently popular ones are wrist bands--and try to meet daily goals (10,000 steps or about 4.5 miles is the goal on the Fitbit tracker, the one I took over from my spouse a few months ago).  Progress can be tracked by looking at the number of blinking lights on the wristband, or by checking the actual number of steps on a smartphone that is hooked up to the tracker by Bluetooth connection.  A strangely satisfying sustained vibration on the wristband indicates when the target has been met.  That alone is somehow motivating; NYC walker Chang who tried out the Fitbit for a week reported that she'd stand in her living room and do jumping jacks if she hadn't hit her 10,000 steps by the end of her day (see Sweeney above), and I've seen a funny picture on Facebook of my cousin's motivated wife going up and down the steps in her home one evening in an effort to meet her step goal.  My neighbor and I have been known to pop out together for a quick 350 step walk to meet our daily goals.  To appeal to Boy or Girl Scout types, some fitness trackers proffer digital badges and accolades when particular cumulative distances have been covered, while competitive types can share their distances on Facebook or become Fitbit friends, tracking and competing with each other via their smartphones. These same friends might even try to one-up each other by sporting the best Fitbit bling, or jewelry attached to the relatively ugly rubber wristbands. Designer Fitbit bling is available at Nordstrom, while less expensive alternatives can be found on Etsy: see mine below.

What makes this sociological?  For one, approaching the act of walking this way, as something that we do for fun (okay, maybe to achieve a relatively difficult to measure outcome--better health), and that is to be tracked, with the goal of the more, the better, is definitely a reflection of our time and of relative privilege.  It seems unlikely that our ancestors would understand why our fitness goals are to take as many steps as possible, when reducing the number of steps it would take to get somewhere or to accomplish some task has been a major goal for much of human history.  People in our society and outside it who are without access to good, reliable transportation, who must rely on a great deal of legwork each day, are also not likely to appreciate the attractions of counting daily steps for fitness. They may also not understand how fairly worthless markers like blinking lights and flashing digital badges are motivating.  They might better understand the motivation derived from competing with one's self or with other people, but even this motivation appears to be fairly flimsy, dependent on battery life. A friend and I have both admitted giving up on walking for the rest of the day on occasions when our fitness tracker batteries have run out!  We seem to have reached a point where we just don't see the point of continuing, if our steps aren't going to count towards our daily total.  I'm not sure what that says about me, but I'll ponder it as I work on my step totals over this long Memorial Day weekend, on a fresh battery charge.

La vie familiale

The U.S. academic and mainstream presses have been highlighting the significant social class differences in how Americans experience family life, and the distinctive outcomes that such experiences bring.  What we are seeing is twofold.  The middle is falling out of the middle class, in that the median income of the middle class is falling and the middle class share of the nation's wealth is declining (PEW Research, August 2012. "[video] Lost Decade of the Middle Class." Social and Demographic Trends).  As the the middle thins out, we are noting increasingly disparate family patterns at each end, in terms of coupling, childrearing, and life chances.  Families in the upper middle class and above are increasingly more likely to be led by married couples, and these families contain children who receive a great deal of attention and enrichment in their lives, thanks to the opportunities afforded by two incomes and the presence of two educated adults.  Families on the lower end of the social class spectrum, those slipping out of that shrinking middle section and below, are increasingly much less likely to consist of two parent households or to be created out of marriage, and the parents in such families are less well-educated, work in relatively unstable and low-paying service occupations, and struggle to offer children adequate educations let alone the chances to develop themselves in other ways.  A particularly poignant portrait of this is provided in Jason DeParle's article from this past summer (July 14, 2012, "Two Classes, Divided by 'I do'." The New York Times.).  The article collection that I use for my sociology of family courses (Public and Private Families A Reader, 7th edition, edited by Andrew Cherlin, 2013) reflects this shift as well, as there is a recurrent focus on the social class divide in family experience in many of the articles in the newest edition.

In France, distinctive family patterns by class are not immediately obvious.  People generally seem to dress well and eat well here, and la vie familiale (family life) seems relatively similar across social class.  Sure, there is a high divorce rate here too, and unmarried childbearing is not uncommon, but it occurs at the top and bottom (witness France's president!), and families with children, of all class backgrounds and parental structures, can and do receive broad financial support in France in the form of educational, food and other kinds of public subsidies (not to mention tax breaks for having kids in school).  This modulates the living standards and to some extent, life chances, giving a more uniform experience across the social classes.  Even children of single mothers or parents with relatively low-paying jobs seem able to outfit themselves in the latest skater gear, and  participate in extracurricular activities, purchase books, and may go on to public university (if they complete their compulsory educations, a spot is guaranteed), something we simply don't see across the board for U.S. children.  In our own experience here, we note that the soccer club fees we pay in France for one adolescent son are barely 10% of what we paid in Seattle, and the département (administrative region) in which we live provides booklets of vouchers for every middle school child which further reduce sports participation fees and the prices of tickets to movies or cultural performances (pictured above).  And then there is that high-quality, centralized public school system that most French schoolchildren attend, complete with a substantial four-course meal (the price of which can also be reduced), in contrast to the U.S. where school quality and school food vary greatly by state and community, further accentuating any class disadvantages that already exist. 

Yet, the French middle has also hollowed out a bit (see short video The Globe and Mail, Feb. 22, 2012, "Tough Choices for France's Middle Class"), and the 'social elevator' that was powered by earlier, more generous social programs and that created the attendant social leveling of the previous decades has slowed down during the current period of economic stagnation in France and elsewhere in Europe.  Will distinctive class patterns and outcomes become more evident among French families as a result?  The data will tell.  On the other hand, there are probably greater distinctions among French families than I can recognize, struggling as I am as a foreigner to read the social cues and understand the conversations around me.  I do sense the surprise of local acquaintances when we mention a recent trip to Paris, or the gently raised eyebrows of the staff when I pay our children's sport fees in full and before the deadline.  And I still think back to that conversation with my former driving school teacher during one of her cigarette breaks (I mentioned this also in a post last summer, Je ne sais quo ) when she emphatically pointed out the rigidity of the French class system, the fact that someone of the French lawyer 'class' would have virtually no reason ever to socially interact with or speak to someone like her.  By extension then, I have to suspect that as her children experience life from a similar social position and under challenging economic conditions to boot, class privilege and oppression will play an ever greater role in France too, in accentuating existing social patterns and determining family and personal outcomes.

Je ne sais quoi

During a break in my two-hour driving lessons this week, my driving instructor lit up a cigarette comme d'habitude (as usual) and asked me about sociology.  I explained to her in my limited French that one thing we do is look for patterns in social interactions and that many social patterns are in fact universal across societies.  She was skeptical and suggested that in France, the social classes are quite distinctive and separate from each other.  I suggested to her that all societies have social classes or social distinctions of some type, but that it is mostly in the details that the differences exist between societies.  This is perhaps the main point of most of my blog posts over the past 11 months.  Social or cultural differences exist, but by and large, culture itself is the same force in France as it is in the U.S. or anywhere else.

For example, this past weekend, we spent an entire day with French families, first at an all-day soccer tournament in another French riviera town, St. Cyr-sur-Mer and then at a barbecue in the evening among friends closer to Aix.  The language we spoke all day was not our own, but the interactions, the conversation topics, the way we spent our time were all very familiar.  We have found a new football club for next year with similar esprit d'équipe (team spirit) and inclusiveness as we had in Seattle.  The families all support each other, traveling, sitting and picnicking together at the tournaments we've attended.  Over the course of the past Saturday, we shared chairs, coffee, snacks, we cared for the coach's young daughters, and we even celebrated the end of the saison (season), with a team visit to the beach to cool off in the Med.  Later in the evening, our family attended a barbecue at my husband's colleague's home among friends we have met through him and his wife.  Like in Seattle, we shared stories, jokes, and observations over delicious food and good wine; the bonus was that we actually could follow some of the conversations better and participate more actively.

Both social events thus were very similar to our experiences at home, but in the cultural details they were different.  First, there is that way that the French have, to take things so easily, that je ne sais quoi (this means literally, 'I don't know what', and we use it to signify an undescribable quality).  The endless waiting at soccer tournaments is nothing new to us, but as we got into the afternoon, still under the unrelentless southern sun with some of us sitting on the bare ground, and with the lack of any posted information about the next matches or if we'd qualified for the remaining rounds, my family was beginning to get antsy.  Yet no one else was sighing, or rolling their eyes, and the kids, young and old, were amazingly patient over the long hours, entertaining themselves with our son's i-pod or playing different kinds of games with a soccer ball.  As we've noticed at many other tournaments, the French families seem to rarely obsess about time or the lack of information, good parking options or plentiful bathroom facilities.  They just shrug and patiently hang out.  I've seen this same je ne sais quoi at the grocery store when a growing line of shoppers stands expressionlessly while the little old lady at the front counts out her coins and slowly packs her grocery sack.  Even the cashier sits patiently.  Such nonchalance also extends to social evenings, where arrival times are never expected to be precise, we can bring something to share or nothing, and the meals begin and end late.  It seems our family is always the first to leave these evenings, this time departing the barbecue 'early', at midnight, just after eating dessert.  

I have a theory that the quality of taking things easily is related to cigarette smoking. Unlike in the U.S. where we encounter very few cigarette smokers in our social circles, there are many, many adult smokers here (and unfortunately young ones too), spread across all social classes.  I figure that almost half of the football parents smoke as does the coach (and he is not the only coach we know who smokes regularly), and on our other son's rugby team, I'd say half of the mothers smoke, and among our French friends outside of sports, perhaps one-third smoke.  My driving instructor smokes, and all along our street, rug merchants, tattoo parlor owners, hair stylists, and restaurant staff all stand outside for short smoke breaks many times a day.  Cigarette smoking is not looked down upon here; it is a cultural norm, and the act of smoking itself does force one to slow down.  Yet, because it's so common, I have begun to wonder if the effects of the nicotine in fact help foster the relaxed attitudes that the French have about schedules, parking, and waiting?  Because I've never been a smoker, I can't say for sure, but might the apparent cultural distinction be related to a physiological effect resulting from nicotine?  I say this, because I happen to know that despite the apparent casualness towards planning, the French families are just like our family friends in Seattle in that they spend time and energy preparing and organizing.  They prepare lovely meals for guests and have endless bottles of wine, they put together amazing salads and snacks for tournaments, they pack their cars with portable picnic equipment and parasols and even bathing suits for possible beach outings.  This is all a lot of work.  Maybe the smoking helps lower the stress of remembering the details?  Whatever it is, we are not planning to adopt the smoking habit ourselves, but I think we are beginning to learn to take things quite a bit more easily here.  That's a good thing, especially now, when the summer heat makes everything slow down anyway.

Les blogs

I know where the expatriate ladies do lunch in Aix.  Last week, my Canadian friend and I scored a table sans reservation (without a reservation) at a lovely restaurant adjacent to a fountain, and it became clear by the end of the meal that this was the place to have lunch, particularly for English-speaking expatriate women.  Is it because the wine is pink and chilled, and the waiters speak English? (Coincidentally, I posted a photo of this chilled wine in my previous post Rouge or rosé, and I describe a meal at this same restaurant last November on the night of the new wine release, see Beaujolais Nouveau.)  Or, it is because expatriates tend to connect with each other wherever they are in the world, and sometimes they just coincidentally converge on the same restaurants at the same time?

While I've not become heavily involved with the expatriate organizations in Aix, there are many of them.  I'm most familiar with the English-speaking organizations which connect primarily the large numbers of North Americans, Brits, and Down-Unders who are here.  These groups create a sense of community and serve as important resources among people undergoing similar experiences.  This is not unlike older immigrant communities that have served to integrate, support and even assimilate their members in new countries over the centuries.  In the West, I'm thinking of the Chinatowns and little Cubas or other international districts in larger cities.  In these communities, ethnicity or national origin and language have been the typical ties that have bound people together to share resources and information so that they can successfully forge new lives in their new homes.  The differences with the contemporary expatriate communities is that in these latter communities the members seem to be connected most closely by their social class backgrounds.  Most of the expatriates seem to be relatively well-educated, of middle to upper middle class, and their occupational roles have largely transferred laterally here.  These are people who have been able to find or create professional positions for themselves on par with what they left behind, and who are not starting at the bottom of the the social ladder like earlier and less privileged immigrants have often had to.  Even those who do not speak French well do fine here, because in a sense, their educational and social statuses trump their linguistic deficiencies; they know how to get information and learn quickly how to work the system, so they are able to hit the ground running. 

One particularly important tool for these expatriate communities is the use of online resources.  Certainly, such resources and online access are available to everyone these days, but many expats, because of their educational and social backgrounds, are particularly adept at using online tools to connect and seek information.  They may also have more time and access with which to log in most effectively.  Here and now, expatriates are emailing, twittering, texting, and blogging, as they connect to other expats like themselves, and these much more immediate ways of communicating have largely replaced the letters and phone calls that immigrants of the past had to really on.  (That's a wall of old mailboxes photographed in a passageway in Marseille several months ago.)  I am particularly aware of the expatriate blogging communities in France, but they exist all over the world.  While there are broader ones centered on Paris and in other large areas, I'm noticing in Provence and in other regions of France, smaller, tighter blogging communities of primarily Western, middle to upper middle class women sharing their experiences here, asking questions, telling some of the same kinds of stories (of the endless rosé, the escapades of the French villagers, the familiar frustrations with the French ways, etc.), and posting stunning photographs of quintessential French scenes.  Some of these women appear to have formed online friendships and avidly follow or link to each other's blogs.  (My little sociology blog here on which I'm recounting our experiences from a sociological perspective doesn't even register on these amazing networks of French-themed blogs.)

The concentration of women bloggers, especially American and English-speaking women married to French husbands, is notable, but they aren't alone; there are all kinds of other expat blogs, of Finnish women (and no doubt Spanish and Italian and...) living in France (is it the water, or the French men?), of Irish and Dutch expats farming organically or restoring houses in France, of Christians evangelizing the secular French, and so on.  This suggests to me that expatriates, even those who are well-educated and economically-privileged, have the same needs to connect socially with each other that many other earlier or less economically stable immigrants have.  The Internet facilitates these connections, by giving opportunities via les blogs (the blogs) to share and link and relate virtually.  Yet, sometimes virtual connections may not be enough, and we want face-to-face contact with someone who speaks our language.  Then, we rely on the French to facilitate our social connections, by doing what they do particularly well--providing us with good dining opportunities and delicious food and wine, at lunch or anytime.  With these we share our expatriate stories and experiences and renew our spirits for yet another day.  Santé! (Cheers!)

De l'eau

In this first week of January and the beginning of a new academic quarter, I present to my introductory sociology students the idea that the social meanings of things, experiences, and interactions vary, depending on the social context in which we find them.  This context depends on both time and place.  I use several substances to demonstrate how social meanings shift in different social contexts, one of which is water.  (The other is saliva, but I'll reserve that example for the classroom!)  I suggest that water, even though it is an essential substance for human existence, can mean different things, to different social groups, in different places, in different times.  For centuries, water, that is, holy water, has cleansed the spirits of Christians, while in agriculturally-dependent communities all over the world, water has been sacred because of its economic significance.  In contrast, in one particular West Virginia town, water is poison, the source of many ills, something to be avoided.  (See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html?pagewanted=all ).  Understanding the differences in how social beings see and interpret water or any other aspect of our world is one of the first steps in achieving what we call the 'sociological imagination,' or that sociologically way of seeing the world.  

Here's what we've noticed about de l'eau (water) in Aix, a town that has variously been described as a town of water; long ago, it was a town of Roman baths, and today, there are many fountains throughout town dating from later times.  The four along the main boulevard alone, (the biggest and dare I say, gaudiest, being La Rotonde), are evocatively described by American M.F.K. Fisher in her memoir Map of Another Town (1964).  Pictured here are two others: above, the one near our apartment on Place des Prêcheurs, and a second one at the north end of Rue Mignet.  These, and the occasional faucets one finds, are well-used especially in the spring and summer, by locals and tourists wiping their faces, getting their feet wet, chilling wine bottles.  I wouldn't drink from them, some are quite mossy, but I've read you can.  In Fisher's account, the waters were seen as curative, offering potentially purgative and other effects.  (I say, let's avoid drinking that water, especially today, as our family is in the grips of une grippe intestinale, a stomach bug, and there is no need for additional purging).  The water supply in general though is apparently pretty good and plentiful, and Allen heard there are two local water companies, one of which is better than the other.  I don't know which one we have, but we like the water in our new apartment although it too tastes more mineral-y than what we are used to.  All of the water in town seems to leaves mineral spots, so we have to use a special decalcifying cleanser if we want to get rid of the spotty effect in the tub or shower stall.

Commercial water is sold widely here, in those ubiquitous water bottles, and we carried water everywhere with us in reusable water bottles last summer.  Interestingly, the practice at sports' trainings here is for athletes to drink from a collective water spigot rather than to bring water bottles, and at our boys' soccer and rugby matches, each team has a basket of 10-12 water bottles that are carried to the sidelines by the coaches to be shared by the team members.  I strongly encourage my kids bring their own Camel-bak water bottles to practices at least, and I do see that a few French kids come with their own, but most do not, not even the men who come to the fields for pick-up games.


As for water sports, swimming is popular and is even part of the middle school physical education curriculum (our boys have suggested that French kids are good swimmers).  There are several public swimming pools in Aix, and the one nearest us is cold and deep (it's used for water polo), and it has a retractable roof for those many hot days.  There are many private pools in Aix, mostly outside of the old town, and in the surrounding neighborhoods where houses, and thus yards, are more common.  (I've looked, with the help of Google Earth.)  We city dwellers rely on the public pool, or we trek to the Mediterranean beaches (about 45-60 minutes away), for sublime dips into the sea and picnic dinners as dusk approaches but the heat persists.  Due to the astonishingly mild winter here, we even spent this past Boxing Day at une Xmas Beach party at St. Croix, even though none of us went swimming.
 

Water as a source of leisure takes us back to those Romans, for whom water was vitally important economically but also conferred social status.  Ruins from the Romans' big water projects are visible throughout Provence and the south, the grandest being the Pont du Gard aqueduct which provided water to the town of Nimes (that's Saku and Jori in November 2011, after we walked up one of the trails so we could look into the top of the aqueduct).  At the museum sited near this ancient water works, we learn not only how the aqueducts worked, but also how access to water was a sign of social prestige in Roman times, and how this access was achieved by exploiting human labor.  The exhibit suggests that the water usage by the upper classes was often quite profligate.  The small remaining trace of the Roman baths in Aix too reminds us that water was once truly a luxury item, reserved for the rich, supplied by the poor.  Sometimes, in our quest to see how social meanings shift, we also see the uglier qualities of human society, many of which never change.

Les vacances

The ability to have leisure time and how one uses it are both sociological indicators of social status. In France, nearly all workers are entitled to 5 weeks of paid vacation a year so the ability to have leisure time is not a good marker of social status here, but the distinguishing factor may be HOW one vacations. The current issue of the Paris Match (18-24 August 2011) shows paparazzi photos of 'Les Politiques en vacance' (French politicians and government officials on their traditional August holidays). Sunbathing and boating at Corsica and St. Tropez, both here in the South, seem to be the most popular vacation pursuits of these rich and famous.

Seaside or village holidays are popular for the French of all social classes though, and we joined thousands of middle class French on the traffic-laden autoroutes heading north to our own seaside holiday, on the Friday of the August long weekend. (Monday, August 15 is a holiday on par with U.S. Labor Day.) We made a pit stop in Paris to meet up for an afternoon with our Seattle soccer friends, the K-D family, and while Paris may have been empty of its residents as it famously is in August, it was full of tourists, with whom we stood elbow to elbow at the Trocadero overlooking the Eiffel Tower at dusk.

Our ultimate destination was Grandcamp-Maisy, a small fishing village in Normandie, along the D-Day beaches of World War II. I had booked a resident-hotel unit, and both the hotel and the campground adjacent to it were packed. French, Italian, British, Dutch families, many with grandparents, were laden with crates of food, beach towels, and supplies to wash dishes and clothes. Many of the French campers with semi-permanent sites had fishing nets, buckets, and bicycles. The woman at reception said to us as we checked in, ‘Just 3 nights then?’ Clearly, we were supposed to stay for a good week, with sufficient supplies. We caught on quickly though and extended our stay by 2 nights and I made a mental list of supplies for next time. Maybe then we’ll try the chambres d’hotes or gites, where one can rent rooms on farms or entire houses.

Most of the vacationers around us were focused on getting their daily catch of mussels and other shellfish and on wearing their nautical shirts around town, while the focus of our holiday was history. We wanted to see the area where Allen’s grandfather had arrived during the Normandy campaign, with the 8th Division, on July 1, 1944, when the fighting was still very active and deadly. While the horrors he experienced are unimaginable, we saw the site of the artificial harbor that he undoubtedly crossed as well as the thick hedgerows through which the war was fought here. We visited three different museums about WWII and the Normandy Campaign, in Caen, Bayeux and Grandcamp-Maisy, the American and German military cemeteries, and the German battery and memorial at Pointe-du-Hoc, and had lunch one day at Cherbourg-Octeville, a port city largely devastated by the war.

Such a heavy pursuit of WW II history was balanced with swimming, at the pool or in the English Channel (Omaha Beach despite its history as a gruesome battlefield is an extraordinarily beautiful beach called Vierville-sur-mer), with sightseeing, in the picturesque town of Bayeux where we saw the famous 1000 year old tapestry that depicts how William, Duke of Normandy became the King of England (remember the Battle of Hastings in 1066?), and with a great deal of eating. We sampled the local ciders and Calvados (apple brandy) and the delightful owner of La belle mariniére introduced us to the local oysters, shrimps and mussels.

Some French are still on holiday, but we ended our first French holiday this past Friday, with an 11-hour cross country drive through the Loire Valley and the center of France all the way to our new home in Aix. It’s quite hot here now, 31 degrees (low 90s), but we’re rested and well-fed and in good shape to slowly prepare for the start of school on Sept. 5. Let's hope that the French government heads are equally rejuvenated from their vacances and are ready to get back to running the country.

Est-ce que tu es prête, Anne?

In preparation for our grand French adventure, I've been reviewing my high school French by listening to a Radiolingua language podcast for the past 9 months (see: http://radiolingua.com/members/coffee-break-french/). In the 15-20 minute, coffee break-length episodes, Marc the teacher often begins the lessons by asking his student, Est-ce que tu es prête, Anna? (Are you ready, Anna?) Anna is invariably always ready to learn French, and I try to be ready with her.

We have much to do, to get 'ready' for our departure to France. People have been commiserating with us about all we must be trying to do, to get ready. A military wife friend who moves her family every two to three years sent an email many months ago wishing me well as I began the onerous task of sorting through (and discarding) the accumulated stuff of our lives. Just yesterday we sold one of our cars, and the buyers pointed out that we could check that off our list, of things we have to do to get ready. The more I've done to get us ready though, the more I realize how relative a concept readiness is, and how sociological it is.

For example, my family has the distinct privilege of having time and money to get ready to move. Our upper middle class social position gives us the luxury of choosing when we have to be ready, how we will go about it, and the conditions surrounding our readiness. We have a lot of choices and time. For months, I've been able to sort through our things slowly, deciding what to pass on to charity, what to discard, what to store, what to take along. I've had the time to find a good family to rent our home, and the time to find a good home to rent for our family in France. I have time to schedule our utilities and subscriptions to end or transfer seamlessly so that our family's credit remains intact and we won't have to pay extra for later installations. I think about the working class woman in our apartment complex in Concord, California, back in the early 1990s, who was being evicted and had to get rid of her dining room furniture in a hurry (lucky us) and who no doubt had trouble the next time she tried setting up utilities, or I imagine the migrant agricultural workers who have to follow the crop cycles for work, uprooting their families and parsing their spare belongings quickly each time (if they are lucky enough to have their families and any significant belongings with them). These folks are not always fully ready to move on; they often have to get rid of necessities, and their few belongings go with them in bags or single carloads. Setting up new housekeeping ends up costing them all over again because of their limited choices and timing. Those are very different experiences from how ours is shaping up.

Even the things that I'm parsing through reflect my privilege. That I have so many things that make my current space a home and that I can choose which items will go along in our new home is luxurious. (Such riches can also feel a little oppressive, as I noticed how liberated and spacious my newly-sparse family room looked last week, but that feeling too is a a middle class privilege. I am able to make the choice of whether or not I wish to consume or acquire things; things are of course the marker of 'making it' in U.S. society.) On the other hand, this accumulation of stuff also seems to reflect age or generational status, particularly when I compare the paltry one box of mementos each of my children are storing, (in addition to a few boxes of elementary school papers and artwork and some musical paraphernalia), and the items they are bringing. Some of their efficiency is clearly related to their generational position, as their music and personal contacts' information are all stored (and have always been stored) on little electronic devices, while I struggle with deciding what to do with old address books full of old family names and addresses, and notebooks of course materials that I won't take with me, but that I can't relegate to the trash or recycling heap (nor that I would take the time or have the inclination to scan electronically). I am clearly old-school and they are the 'it' generation.

Am I ready? Will we be ready when it's time to move? My middle class audacity says we will be ready enough, even if there is some scrambling in the last few days. And, will we be ready to learn French, when we arrive? On that score, we may have a lot more in common with the less privileged, as we won't have a choice!

President Obama, a new kind of black man?

Although the occasion of President Obama's inauguration is past, his journey to the presidential post is a remarkable one. In many ways, he seems to have transcended his race, and the media reports on the first few few weeks of his presidency have highlighted his family's rather typical upper middle class sensibilities. His children reportedly have to make their own beds and set their own alarms, and his wife shops at J. Crew and feeds her family healthy, unprocessed food.

In a piece by Elijah Anderson called The Melting Pot Reconsidered (2000) that I assigned for the last week of my course on social stratification, Anderson seems to have predicted the arrival of Barack Obama. In this article, Anderson offers an update to the argument made in the 1960's by Glazer and Moynihan who asserted that the U.S. was on the cusp of being a true melting pot, with ethnic identities finally weakening in relevance and assimilation being the order of the day. Anderson suggested that Glazer and Moynihan were in fact unrealistic, that ethnic and racial identities in fact remain quite important markers of distinction, both for the minorities themselves and for society at large. Instead of a melting pot, in the 2000's, we have a salad bowl.

Anderson notes the special case of African Americans for whom the path to assimilation to the American common identity has been especially difficult; for them, race remains a master status. Given this, black men, Anderson suggests, have generally either aggressively embraced their 'other' status as 'Race Men', or have rejected their racial roots, 'selling out'. More recently, a new alternative has emerged, that of a 'new type of black professional', whose race and roots are acknowledged, but whose professional or occupational status are more important to him or her. This has of course created reactions from within the African American community, that this too represents a rejection of African American identity.

I proposed to my students that perhaps President Obama represents the apex of the new type of black professional, whose racial background is an element of his identity, but is not as central to him as his professional experiences and position are. My students were not so sure. Some suggested that his multiracial background, orc his African roots (as compared to African-American ones) set him apart from the start, not really making him comparable to African-Americans in general. For others, he is maybe more identifiable as just another member of the small black middle class, (which itself may in fact be primarily composed of these new types of black professionals). Others noted that his wife may be the better example of the new type of black professional.

For now, Obama's path remains atypical of the African American experience in the U.S. But, does he represent hope for African Americans and their futures? For Americans with multiple origins? For all Americans? Anderson suggests that for each black man who makes it, there is a certain alienation from the group out of which he has ascended, as well as a failure to win true acceptance from the masses. The prize comes with some drawbacks, in other words. What about for Obama? He has 'made it', his election suggests that he is widely and truly accepted, but does his victory alienate those who may share similar racial and/or ethnic roots, but whose life experiences and attainments are very different?

Citation
Anderson, Elijah. 2000. "Beyond the Melting Pot Reconsidered." in Great Divides: Readings in Social Inequality in the United States. 3rd edition, ed. by Thomas M. Shapiro (2005). Boston: McGraw Hill, p. 264-270.