Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.103.4.0503

2161-6302

Paul V. Murphy,

Service-Learning and Community Engagement

In this short and stimulating study, the philosopher Jennifer Morton treats upward mobility as a normative commitment and evinces a deep ambivalence about it. Casting her attention on college students, she trains an empathetic eye upon “strivers,” those working their way up from low-income or working-class families or people of color and first-generation college students who do not fit easily into what she identifies as “middle-class, often-majority-White, institutions—such as selective universities and corporations” (65). She argues that we do not acknowledge the often heavy “ethical costs of upward mobility,” which are the damage done to “relationships with family and friends, our connection to our communities, and our sense of identity” (4). Morton calls for reflecting on the reality of these costs in an honest way primarily through discarding our current “fundamentally dishonest” (15) narrative of upward mobility and replacing it with a “clear-eyed ethical narrative” (121). We need a narrative “that is honest about the true costs as well as the benefits of this enterprise” (13). In short, she calls for a re-write, and her book is an attempt to do this.Morton's unfailingly interesting study will engage most readers because of her conflation of different features of strivers' experience and the largely implicit critique of the individualistic narrative of American self-making that is woven throughout her analysis. After a brief introduction, Morton lays out in the first four chapters the ethical costs many students pay for upward mobility, the problems that strivers face due to sociological disadvantage and “cultural mismatch” (65) between themselves and their college peers, the way in which strivers engage in “code-switching” when moving between conflicting social environments, and the dangers of complicity in an ethically compromised system. Her final chapter suggests how to construct a new, more honest narrative of upward mobility and the brief conclusion lays out a surprisingly small-bore set of proposals to minimize and mitigate the ethical costs entailed, such as fewer prerequisites to help students manage costs and graduate earlier and pedagogical strategies that facilitate student community building.Throughout her analysis, Morton lumps together three problems that various low-income, minority, and first-generation college students face under the single rubric of ethical costs: a lack of money (which requires many to work, sometimes many hours per week, or go into debt); the culture shock many people of color and low-income kids experience when they encounter a predominantly white and middle-class culture at some institutions; and the pain some strivers suffer when they feel the need to pull away from family responsibilities and “drama” (for example, the need to take care of an ill or addicted family member or to provide financial support) that hold them down. These are, in fact, distinct challenges, not all of which affect all student strivers, nor all in the same way. The different problems blend in a confusing way in Morton's analysis. It is not clear, moreover, that a student who must work many hours to pay tuition and support a child necessarily needs a new narrative so much as more scholarships and increased financial aid.Morton's concern with narrative suffuses the book. Her methodology involved conducting twenty-eight interviews with strivers whom she has met or who found her as well as probing the experiences of the often working-class, first-generation students she teaches at the City College of New York in Harlem. She also draws on her own experience. Born in Peru to a teenage mother and largely raised by her grandmother, Morton defines herself through the immigrant narrative. Morton's mother and aunt migrated to Europe, eventually sending back money (made possible by her aunt's marriage to a wealthy man) that financed Morton's education at an “exclusive international school” in Lima. That experience led to her own emigration: She attended Princeton on a scholarship, which led to a doctorate at Stanford (2-3). A success story! More significant is Morton's narrative of her grandmother, who migrated from the small city of Arequipa in the Andean mountains to Lima in pursuit of a better life. Even after decades away from Arequipa, her grandmother remained deeply entangled in family affairs, often talking to relatives on the phone, sending money and clothing, and expressing concern about nieces she barely knew. Her grandmother, Morton points out, remained an Arequipeña throughout her life (138), even though physically distant from Arequipa itself.The moral of Morton's book lies with her grandmother. Low-income and immigrant strivers may lack financial resources, but they often come from intensely mutualistic cultures in which family, friends, and neighbors depend on each other and one sacrifices for the other with the expectation of future assistance. Morton cites the sociologist Annette Lareau who determined that working-class children become more deeply connected to extended family and neighborhood kids due to parenting patterns that differ from middle-class norms (49). The psychologist Nicole Stephens finds that many first-generation college students have internalized an “interdependent cultural model” that privileges one's relation to a community versus the “independent cultural model” more characteristic of students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds (66). In fact, the existence of tight-knit, mutualistic cultures in immigrants' home countries that lead to a more mutualistic working-class culture once they migrate to America are truisms of American immigrant and working-class history. This understanding underlays the shift in historical emphasis from “uprooted” immigrants bereft of support to “transplanted” ones who operate in cultural networks. As a generation of social historians who documented working-class cultures of resistance have shown, assimilation in the United States has often entailed navigating the mutualism of ethnic subcultures and the individualism rewarded by American capitalism.Morton's ethical analysis focuses on the goods one might lose rather than the choices one makes about those goods. The dilemma for her is not necessarily how her students choose between their studies and caring for a family member (for example, Henry, who briefly took in his addicted sister (30) or Gabriela, who lived at home part of her senior year at Princeton to care for her ill grandmother (79)) but rather that they are forced to do so. She uses the example of Jeron who grew up in a dangerous neighborhood subsisting on welfare and living in Section 8 housing. Eventually homeless, he was saved by a coach who set him on a path to college and success. Jeron cut himself off from his community in order to succeed: “The only way I could make it through college was if I left completely,” he told Morton (47). Morton sees the wisdom of Jeron's choice but is disturbed by the results. “Should Jeron have to put distance between himself and those with whom he grew up in order to find a better life for himself?” (51). She thinks not.Morton's point is that the decision to attend college and pursue a career promising financial rewards often entails moving out of a warm, tightly knit, and supportive community in pursuit of goals that could be deemed selfish. Yet, she does not discuss the ethical quandary in terms of choices and action but rather frames it as the loss of ethical versus non-ethical goods. Upward mobility tends to privilege “non-ethical goods”, such as financial security, material goods, and time, as opposed to “ethical goods”, among which she includes relationships with family, friends, and community or (mentioned only once) fulfilling work (23-24). For Morton, a good is ethical when it concerns “those aspects of a life that give it value and meaning” (8). She does not, however, demonstrate why family and community provide meaning but material success and security do not. Why are her disfavored goods not “ethical”? She also ignores the rewards that come with economic and career success—including competencies that might contribute to society as well as honor, esteem, power, and, yes, income and security—nor does she explain why these goods are inferior. Morton's normative judgments are unexamined, and the book presents a critique of self-centered and socially irresponsible individualism that is in many ways unstated.The critique is most apparent in her chapter urging strivers to resist “complicity” in the socioeconomic “structures” that limit the opportunities of low-income and working-class individuals (by which she means poverty, inadequate schooling, socioeconomic segregation, and lack of access to social services for addiction and mental illness). Successful strivers, she argues, “gain power that can be used either to resist or to entrench the structures that largely determine the ethical costs that have been the focus of this book” (99). There is much packed into this sentence, but Morton generally assumes the case for her position. Only on the matter of complicity does she foreground the question of moral responsibility: Will the successful strivers choose the middle-class world that requires so much sacrifice for them to attain or reject the “norms of middle-class workplaces and schools” that “tend to favor an independent cultural model that prizes assertiveness and individuality” (105) and return to the communities and culture from which they started? Even here, I phrase the dilemma as a moral challenge more pointedly than does Morton.Morton does succeed in expressing the ambivalence of those who strive upward. She empathizes with the regret and guilt that come from the severing of ties with loved ones. She rightly recognizes that there is a case to be made against upward mobility (26-32). She sympathizes with the South Asian immigrant Raja who had to overcome a cultural predisposition to deference in order to become the kind of assertive, self-confident student who excels in an American classroom (103-104). Why do we assume, she asks, that one model is better?In Emigrants and Exiles (1985), Kirby Miller argued that Irish immigrants told themselves the false story of political exile to cover the guilt of abandoning family and homeland for economic gain. Although American literature is rife with such narratives of the sacrifices and compromises that may come with social mobility and emigration, Morton seems to believe that the modern educational system tells students a morally uncomplicated story of education as the proper route to personal gain and success. She insists, instead, on a more honest accounting of the losses that she and her informants have felt, writing that we “must remember that individuals lead lives in community with others. … Much of the meaning in our lives is derived from our relationships with those around us” (161). For her, middle-class students do not pay as great a price as the strivers and likewise the communities from which middle-class students come are harmed less by their loss. She blames structural inequalities for this loss of ethical goods, but would not an honest accounting also point to the ethical choice strivers make? Morton, however, is not interested in criticizing upwardly mobile students. Rather she urges self-reflection and narrative-making as a therapeutic response to the ambivalence they feel. A “clear-eyed ethical narrative” (110) that recognizes the sacrifices and trade-offs entailed in mobility may allow strivers to maintain their connections with family and community and avoid complicity in what she sees as an ethically compromised culture.