Dean isn't stupid. He made an EMF detector out of a Walkman! He probably dropped out of school, but he's a born tinkerer and knows a lot about electronics, mechanics and chemistry. He's downright nerdy, but he calls Sam (who is actually a lot less nerdy) a geek and a nerd because he studied a lot in school, whereas Dean was reading "Popular Mechanics" and the like and blowing off school.
But a lot of self-educated lower class people are not stupid. Ever seen October Sky (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/)? I had friends like the kids in that movie growing up, although they were not AS poor because we lived in Charleston, which is the largest city/town in West Virginia. Yet people think I am stupid when I let my accent show, or when I speak "plainly".
Dean is just about right to me. He's clearly been raised to be couth--a lot of us are. (I am somewhere between lower class and middle class--my mother was lower class, my father not.) My first husband was working-class, he was a cable installer, I married him when I was 19. He and I are still friends and he's very couth, he's kind of nerdy even, but he doesn't, you know, know which fork to use at a big fancy party or how to speak in the way that highly "educated" people speak even though he took every course they offered at his high school, got A's in most of them and worked his way through State College.
I don't think lower class people are more racist than upper class people; I think when they are, they don't ask trick questions and shine it up and hide it with code. Also there are things that lower-class people say that get taken for racist that really in my opinion that aren't, like the kerfuffle over someone in SPN fandom saying "in a coon's age"--the word 'coon' in that phrase refers to a little animal with a mask and a ringed tail that gets in your garbage can and scares your cats. I know some people were offended and felt she was being racist because she didn't swear never to say it again, but she felt that as long as she was talking about a little animal there was no reason not to use that word, it was using it for people that was wrong. (FWIW, I agree with her there--using pejorative terms for people is wrong, using animal names that have been turned pejorative for the actual animals is okay.)
Of course I get into trouble on both sides of the class divide, because I'm from a mixed class family and I can switch registers. Sam Winchester can do that and does do that and it doesn't get him in near enough trouble. *g* (My formal prose tends to involve British spellings and locutions and I do have a master's degree--but it's not in gender or race studies.)
In my experience there is loads of anti-immigrantism, racism, sexism and every other kind of ism in the upper classes. They're just much more polite about it. Working class people, fwiw, are frequently picked on for their "tone", just as people of colour are, because they tend to speak in ways that are perceived as plain, tactless, loud, bossy and tacky.
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But a lot of self-educated lower class people are not stupid. Ever seen October Sky (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132477/)? I had friends like the kids in that movie growing up, although they were not AS poor because we lived in Charleston, which is the largest city/town in West Virginia. Yet people think I am stupid when I let my accent show, or when I speak "plainly".
Dean is just about right to me. He's clearly been raised to be couth--a lot of us are. (I am somewhere between lower class and middle class--my mother was lower class, my father not.) My first husband was working-class, he was a cable installer, I married him when I was 19. He and I are still friends and he's very couth, he's kind of nerdy even, but he doesn't, you know, know which fork to use at a big fancy party or how to speak in the way that highly "educated" people speak even though he took every course they offered at his high school, got A's in most of them and worked his way through State College.
I don't think lower class people are more racist than upper class people; I think when they are, they don't ask trick questions and shine it up and hide it with code. Also there are things that lower-class people say that get taken for racist that really in my opinion that aren't, like the kerfuffle over someone in SPN fandom saying "in a coon's age"--the word 'coon' in that phrase refers to a little animal with a mask and a ringed tail that gets in your garbage can and scares your cats. I know some people were offended and felt she was being racist because she didn't swear never to say it again, but she felt that as long as she was talking about a little animal there was no reason not to use that word, it was using it for people that was wrong. (FWIW, I agree with her there--using pejorative terms for people is wrong, using animal names that have been turned pejorative for the actual animals is okay.)
Of course I get into trouble on both sides of the class divide, because I'm from a mixed class family and I can switch registers. Sam Winchester can do that and does do that and it doesn't get him in near enough trouble. *g* (My formal prose tends to involve British spellings and locutions and I do have a master's degree--but it's not in gender or race studies.)
In my experience there is loads of anti-immigrantism, racism, sexism and every other kind of ism in the upper classes. They're just much more polite about it. Working class people, fwiw, are frequently picked on for their "tone", just as people of colour are, because they tend to speak in ways that are perceived as plain, tactless, loud, bossy and tacky.