Williams - White working class : overcoming class cluelessness in America

WHITE
WORKING
CLASS

WHITE
WORKING
CLASS

Overcoming
Class Cluelessness
in America

Joan C. Williams

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

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Copyright 2017 Joan C. Williams
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To my children,
with hopes for their future

Equality means dignity. And dignity demands a job and a paycheck that lasts through the week.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have been repeatedly mocked for trying to explain how my neighbors feel and why they feel the way they do. Racism, sexism, and a fear of both Islam and Latin[os] are present. So is a fear of not being able to feed children, not being able to take care of elderly loved ones, not being able to maintain dignity in the face of layoff after layoff. Yes, Im sick and tired of humoring the white male working class. That doesnt mean their economic and political concerns should be ignored. It doesnt mean its OK to laugh at us for trying to maintain our rural lifestyle. Some of us live on land that our great-great grandparents cultivated. Final point: my family is multiracial, and I am full of rage, fear, and heartbreak over the dangers that many of us are now in because of this election. My fellow liberals should have listened to those of us they call hillbillies, rednecks, hicks, and toothless idiots. They should have understood we dont live in a fly-over state; we live in our home.

Erin Brown

Contents

Why Talk About Class?

MY FATHER-IN-LAW GREW up eating blood soup. He hated it, whether because of the taste or the humiliation, I never knew. His alcoholic father regularly drank up the family wage, and the family was often short on food money. They were evicted from apartment after apartment.

He dropped out of school in eighth grade to help support the family. Eventually he got a good, steady job he truly hated, as an inspector in a factory that made those machines that measure humidity levels in museums. He tried to open several businesses on the side, but none worked, so he kept that job for 38 years. He rose from poverty to a middle-class life: the car, the house, two kids in Catholic school, the wife who worked only part time. He worked incessantly. He had two jobs in addition to his full-time position, one doing yard work for a local magnate and another hauling trash to the dump.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he read The Wall Street Journal and voted Republican. He was a man before his time: a blue-collar white man who thought the union was a bunch of jokers who took your money and never gave you anything in return. Starting in the 1970s, many blue-collar whites followed his example.

Over the past 40-odd years, elites stopped connecting with the working class, whom prior generations had given a place of honor. Think of the idealized portrayals of noble blue-collar workers in post offices across the country, painted by artists of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. (My favorite WPA mural is in Coit Tower in San Francisco.) Or of Tom Joad in John Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath (1939), or Terry Malloy in the film On the Waterfront (1954). Elites worked hard to understand working-class mens striving and their pain.

Class consciousness has been replaced by class cluelessnessand in some cases, even class callousness. Emblematic of this reversal is All in the Family, one of the most popular shows on television between 1971 and 1979. The central blue-collar character, Archie Bunker, represented a new and unflattering contrast to his long-haired, liberal, and enlightened college-going son-in-law. Archie was narrow-minded, coarse, ignorant, sexist, and racist. This image came from the core of the progressive elite: Norman Lear, the series producer, who later founded People for the American Way. The 1990s brought Al Bundy, the dimwitted womens shoe salesman on Married... With Children, and Homer Simpson, who epitomized stereotypes of the working-class man as crude, He works as an inspector at a nuclear power plant, his laziness an ever-present danger to the environment.

With rare exceptionsBruce Springsteens lyrics come immediately to mindthis offensive portrait reigns today. Its unbecoming for a country that prides itself on a commitment to equality.

An entire booka different one than minecould seek to explain why this shift occurred. But the upshot is simply this: during an era when wealthy white Americans have learned to sympathetically imagine the lives of the poor, people of color, and LGBTQ people, the white working class has been insulted or ignored during precisely the period when their economic fortunes tanked. The typical white working-class household income doubled in the three decades after World War II but has not risen appreciably since.

In an era when the economic fortunes of the white working class plummeted, elites wrote off their anger as racism, sexism, nativismbeneath our dignity to take seriously. This has led us to politics polarized by working-class fury. Were voting with our middle finger, said a Trump supporter in South Carolina. If Trump fails to rejuvenate Flint, Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohioand he probably willthings could turn even uglier. Thats saying a lot.

To focus on white working-class despair will lead well-meaning people to approach the white working class as they traditionally have approached the pooras those we have a moral and ethical obligation to help, to quote a well-meaning colleague. This attitude will infuriate them and only widen a societally unhealthy class divide.

Instead, I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America, this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding political correctness becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites.

I dont like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened.