Blue Collar Brilliance Essay

In the essay, “Blue Collar Brilliance,” Mike Rose, a UCLA professor, uses a series of personal experiences to justify the level of intelligence of blue-collar workers in comparison to the stereotypes they are viewed by. His reasoning for this is that, “If we think that whole categories of people–identified by class or occupation–are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations” (283). He uses the examples of his mother Rosie and his brother Joe to illustrate what he perceives as the exceptional intellect of blue-collar workers. Rose begins the essay by talking about his mother Rosie who is a waitress at a restaurant. He details the way she does her job mentioning: how she can monitor all of her customers while carrying out a normal conversation, read the attitudes of her cooks and customers to provide the best service, and converse with everyone in short abbreviated language that others would not understand. While she never attended school, he says, “There isn't a day that goes by in the restaurant that you don't …show more content…
His early years of middle school and high school were rough until a high school English teacher helped him turn things around. She taught him to see the value of education, and to see it as a means to a career. He managed to get in to college and eventually ended as a professor at the University of California Los Angeles. Mike Rose’s brother Joe was not as fortunate as him. He left school in the 9th grade to join a railroad company and eventually a car manufacturing plant. Similar to Rosie, Joe learned things at the plant that could not be taught through schooling. Instead of how to add and subtract matrices, Joe learned how to streamline a product production; instead of memorizing past political conflicts he was innovating the way paint is applied to cars. Rose’s message to us is that what Joe was learning was not less substantial than what other individuals learn in school, it was just