Weekend reads: Alex Perez on why journalism needs cultural adjacency

The media is out of touch. A failure to understand class is the culprit.

Gilles BASSIGNAC/Getty Images

This week at Lean Out, we’re highlighting the lack of working class voices in our politics and media. So, I was excited to come across today’s essay — originally published at Persuasion — which tackles this very topic. Alex Perez is a Miami writer and cultural critic. In this excellent piece, he explores the experience of navigating between working class and elite worlds. I’m pleased to be able to bring it to you today. — TH

When I was thirteen or fourteen, my best friend, a first-generation Cuban-American kid like me, told me about the weekend he’d spent shooting hoops at his Little League coach’s house. My friend was shocked that his coach had a basketball hoop, and automatically assumed that he was filthy rich. My family wasn’t dirt poor, but we certainly didn’t have a basketball hoop, so I also thought the coach was loaded, some kind of Cuban Rockefeller; if he had a pool, we might’ve assumed he was royalty or a major drug dealer, such was our backward understanding of class and money back then. I know now that the coach was no higher than lower middle class, but my buddy’s frame of reference, just like mine, had been formed in a world in which lousy graphite backboards signified the highest levels of American affluence and luxury. 

I find the story hilarious now, but I often think of it when I’m writing a cultural piece because it reminds me of the major differences between the elite media class and the rest of the country it reports on. Through talent, hard work, and savvy, I now find myself in between worlds—not quite elite but not quite on the absolute cultural fringes where I grew up. I jokingly call myself elite adjacent, but what I really mean is that I’m a marginal figure, adjacent to many scenes but not quite a solidified member of any. This adjacency, a product of my working-class upbringing and my rising up the cultural ranks, informs all my writing. It brings with it an understanding both of how deeply baked-in class is to people’s identity and of the fluidity with which people navigate class—that so many people are constantly straddling different social worlds. To put it bluntly, I understand poor people far better than my elite peers who mostly grew up rich and are disconnected from the lower classes; on the other hand, I’m close enough in status to the tastemakers that I’m able to publish in their magazines, go to their events, etc., while still remaining in close contact with the other side.

This sense of adjacency is rare in journalism now. The profession, once semi working-class, is now dominated by people who can afford exorbitantly expensive journalism degrees and have the luxury of taking on unpaid internships in which valuable connections are forged. The absence of journalists from “adjacent” backgrounds is troublesome because it creates blind spots in news coverage and often results in depicting lower classes and people of color as aliens. Of course, to the cultural elites, they often are aliens. So much of the Trump coverage over the last half decade or so, for instance when attempting to explain his appeal to a growing number of Hispanics, takes on the point of view of elite mystification. They’re constantly mystified, which then forces them to conjure up dubious theories that serve the function of easing their mystification. Working-class Hispanics can’t possibly like the brutish Trump, they think—they must be under the spell of disinformation.          

Race, in particular, tends constantly to be talked about in a clinical and disconnected manner: the idea is to “study” people from different races instead of trying to understand them at their level. There’s often an obsession with words surrounding race—which is to say that it’s all theoretical. When you’re adjacent to many cultures, however, your friends from different backgrounds are merely your friends. There’s no talk of tokenism or “diversity” because your friends are actual living, breathing humans.          

Adjacency lends to pragmatism, a word I don’t often hear in elite parlance. When you’re constantly in between worlds, having to navigate disparate social scenes, you develop a natural pragmatism. This pragmatism, often developed at an early age as a defense mechanism, becomes the guiding principle of the adjacent person. If you’re hanging out with an unsavory character, for instance, and you don’t want to get your ass kicked, you go with the flow. You might disagree with this person, but opposing theories don’t register with this kind of guy. To paraphrase Mike Tyson: Everyone’s got a theory until they get punched in the face. Those who have the luxury of strictly trafficking in the comfort of theories never face the possibility—literal or not—of getting punched in the face. Pragmatism, not ideology, is the way to go—this is how one must maneuver in a world in which theories or fashionable ideas hold no sway. 

The lack of an understanding of pragmatism explains why so many articles about the “downtrodden” or people of color resort to insulting theoretical premises; this is why people are always “voting against their interests” or why Hispanics are suffering from such mysterious ailments such as “multiracial whiteness.” One of the preeminent examples of this elite blind spot and lack of understanding of pragmatism was the elevation of Cuban-American Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio to the status of mastermind and the new face of Hispanic right-wing extremism. I kept reading article after article about this, all trying to use Tarrio to understand the right-wing drift, but to me, the Tarrio situation was far easier to understand—he was a Miami scammer who’d found his new grift. This should’ve at least been entertained as a possibility, but to upper class elites the theories that assuage mystification are always more compelling than the nuances of the actual person.

The relative absence of the adjacent figure in mainstream media—whether on the progressive or conservative side—has resulted in a sterilized environment, of two bubbles perpetually battling each other. It’s always been difficult for the adjacent figure to penetrate the elite world, but as the two bubbles have consolidated in their mutual obsession with each other, the marginal critic has been squeezed out. The difficulty lies in the ability of the adjacent figure to navigate disparate social scenes with the necessary authenticity to be allowed entry. He must understand the norms and nuances of elite culture, while simultaneously keeping a foot in the lower classes. It isn’t a matter of merely code-switching, as the differences between elite and non-elite go beyond conversational differences; it involves the far more difficult task of status switching—navigating between the rich world and the poor world. The adjacent figure, in elite spaces, may look the part and even sound the part, but something will always be slightly off. Maybe he still doesn’t know which fork to use or how to feel comfortable around old money. When the journalism world was slightly more working-class, the status switch wasn’t as difficult to navigate, but now a lower-class outsider must be attuned to the perpetually shifting language rules and norms. It probably isn’t worth the work for the outsider, and so he tends to leave, and the bubble consolidates again. Meanwhile, the status switch upon returning to the non-elite-world is just as jarring. 

Still, challenging as it is, this perpetual fish out of water feeling is crucial to the worldview of the adjacent figure. Most of my days are spent going back and forth between American status levels. My work as a cultural critic guarantees adjacency to the American elite, but my first-generation status and day-to-day life in Miami keeps me firmly on the other side. This cultural schizophrenia animates my work and keeps me pragmatic and honest.

The adjacent figure can get a clear grasp of the varying absurdities that govern American life and how the chasm between the elite and the non-elite grows with every passing year. These figures are rare, but their reemergence in the public discourse is a necessity if we want to truly understand what’s going on in the country.

Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. His Substack is Musings From the 305.