Here we encounter something quite strange: figures such as Sanders, who tend both to prioritize the fight against economic injustice above that against racial injustice and to believe the latter to be largely a consequence of the former than a separate species of its own, end up defending that view by speaking in a way that contradicts it. Indeed, if we believe that economic systems oppress people by sorting them into social classes, then how can an entity such as the white working class even exist? By distinguishing the white working class from their non-white counterparts, one admits that racial identity and power trumps class position, even though one intends the exact opposite.
The class reductionist approach undermines itself in another way. Typically, those sympathetic to this view would respond to my critique by describing the purportedly high rates of racism among “working class whites” as a scheme concocted by upper class capitalists to prevent poor whites from realizing that their economic interest lies in solidarity with non-white people. One eradicates racism therefore not so much by denouncing racism but by explaining to working class whites why voting Republican or supporting the economic status quo would be bad for their pocketbook. For this reason, class reductionists believe that Democrats lose the working class white vote because they do not know how to talk to them; they are patronizing, removed, and smug.
However, while this approach positions itself as the ally of the neglected and race-shamed white working class, it ironically perceives poor whites as too stupid to know what’s good for them. It differs on this score only in relying upon a different set of “elite” saviors to come to their rescue.
Here is the pivot:
We need to stop repeating this lie that white supremacy is not in the self-interest of any class of white people. We further need to ask ourselves why we cling to it so dearly and why it provides us such comfort. In truth, white people have not been duped; our support for white supremacy reflects not just a flaw in our thinking, but a perversion of our wills. We do not endorse white supremacy because we do not know any better; we believe that white supremacy is good because we want to believe it so. Misinformation and poor logic qualify more as consequences of our attachment to white supremacy than its underlying causes.
Commitment creates its own reality.
Vanderbilt is a historically Methodist divinity school, having been founded in 1875 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
And this commitment to white supremacy is equally held in Northern unions as it is in Southern churches. Thus the FOP.
Good grief.
Thumbs up from me. Great article.
Which brings me to this:
The Democrats Are Screwing Up the Resistance to Donald Trump
Has any legislation of significance not required the support of white racists?
Could Obama have been elected without white racist support?
Not a troll question – meant seriously.
Uh, when did Sanders use the term “white working class?” Or even, much to my displeasure, “working class?” Didn’t always use “middle class?” Not that economically that was an opt term, but for convenience sake because that’s how those above those on the lowest rung on the income ladder describe themselves. (And upper middle income and even lower upper income also self-describe as middle-class.)
“I think that there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business,” Sanders said. “It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”
“…when you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or you get dragged out of a car.”
http://www.snopes.com/bernie-sanders-institutional-racism/
I know what it’s like to be poor. I know what it’s like to hungry and cold. I know what it’s like to be physically assaulted because of the color of one’s skin.
I don’t know what it’s like to be hassled on the street or dragged out of a car. I was raised to show respect to authority. For self-preservation if for no other reason.
One serious problem is that white working class is not specifically defined. According to exit polls whites without a college degree are a specific group, but are not subgrouped into making under $30k or $30-50k. Those groups were polled but not broken down by ethnicity. This has been the great conflation of this election creating confusion between writers that never address this problem in the polling. I don’t have a college degree, but I make over $50k. Am I considered WWC?
To a great extent, it is self-defined on the one hand and other-defined on the other hand.
It is functionally self-defined in the idea of people working 60-70 hours a week trying to make ends meet and envious of those receiving government assistance (or angry that they require government assistance). But generally they self-define as the middle class that is getting the short end of the stick and resent the label “white working class”.
It is explicitly defined by sociologists attempting to make an operational definition of what “blue collar” used to mean, and drawing from among other places C. Wright Mills’s study of that name. And that leads to all sorts of contortions with income definitions, occupation definitions. And pulls in lots of philosophical baggage from the Marxists and anti-Marxists and neoliberal economists.
From a Marxian perspective, the definition is white people who are neither their own bosses nor independent workers. It is the worker vs. the capitalist. While the functional relationship between the person who does not have the freedom of setting the terms of his own productive activity and retaining the surplus productivity he produces and those that do remains a visible part of the economy, even that view has been complicated by conventional and legal permutations like independent contractors who are really tied to only one customer and other forms of monopsony labor.
These days a college degree has become irrelevant but it is used to put down the smartypants who took the trouble and financial risk to go to college. In rural areas, this is a label used for the kids from their own community who went away, made good, and never came back and are appalled with what they see when they visit. The resentment is either from being considered a lesser than the successful.
Are you white working class? It likely depends of the control you have over your economic circumstances. And who you take orders from.
Increasingly it is a term of putting people down in order to show one’s sociological correctness in terminology. The photo with the Bernie quote did that. It was the fact that the word “ghetto” was used to identify the redlined communities of black people. But it also associated a certain class of white people by image as being functionally black.
I can understand why an effort to sabotage Sanders’s attempt to unite blacks and whites of the 99% resulted in insulting both blacks and whites along an understood racial divide.
“To a great extent, it is self-defined on the one hand and other-defined on the other hand.”
-TarheelDem
“Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, “On the one hand…on the other…””
Harry S. Truman
Your post while informative does not address the lack of a common denominator when Sanders and Grimes speak of WWC. Neither clarify their descriptions, so we have no idea if they are referring to the same subset. I have no idea how any progress can be made when we fail to use mutually accepted terms. Essentially, we are just talking past each other until that agreement can be made.
Exactly. And that is why it is poor political rhetorical from any ideological perspective. It is a 19th century and mid-20th century holdover when the working class that was beginning to have any political power at all was indeed white. Now, 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts, it is just the working class–the folks who have to take the boss’s orders. And who the boss is becomes very complicated in a you’re-on-your-own economy.
There is in fact no common denominator. But, Grimes makes the point that there is a class of people who self-define based on who they are not – not the boss, not black, not …as white working class with the emphasis on “white” and others who will still claim to be middle class, and their economic, social, and cultural circumstances are pretty much the same.
There are black working class people too. They comprise most of the black people I know. And all the Latinos.
Exactly the point of the article I posted. What makes people add “white” to working class as a demographic? What exactly makes it different?
The article’s answer is the presumption of white supremacy as an easily frustrated expectation, rather than an ideology, that prevents a solidarity politics with blacks and Latinos.
The author obviously sees it happening in Nashville as well as other places.
I think it’s because non-whites focus their politics on race while whites focus more on economics. Race enters to the extent that they feel that non-whites have an unfair advantage. IMHO when Affirmative action supplanted Equal Opportunity is when that started. You can argue all you want about how Affirmative Action was right and just but white workers saw it as a playing field tilted against them. Personally, I think playing fields should be level and two wrongs do not make a right, but I’m coming to see that MLK’s dream of a world where people would be judged on the content of their character not the color of their skin was an impractical dream. Some one will always be on top because of their color. Simply put, I don’t want to be on the bottom. Somebody’s going to scream RACIST at this post, but I assure you and other rational people that this state of affairs causes me great sadness.
This witch hunt in wake of November 8 is just ripping the scabs off wounds I naively thought were long healed.
Affirmative action is equal opportunity. White workers were encouraged by bosses to see it that way. Managers did not want to change what they were doing. Affirmative action always was under the law a level playing field. Bosses played with it to increase white resentment in order to try to reverse the law.
Are you on the bottom? In what way?
Those wounds never have been healed because there was resistance of white bosses never to heal them. There was positive action by other white bosses to heal them. And there was reaction by minorities placed into positions of hiring authority to act as a offsetting employer for all of the white resistance. But there were other minority bosses who were fair within the limits of the normal boss-employee contradiction.
In addition, organizations have cultures that even multiple levels of management cannot deal with. Discrimination in hiring, promotion, and firing is indeed a real issue with managers. In a corporation of 90,000, I heard a third-level manager (two levels above team supervisor) say (cubicle walls are thin, dontcha know) “I am not going to hire a woman or a n*gger no matter how many times they send me to Affirmative Action class.” Minority and women workers there heard that tirade. He was never disciplined. No one filed suit that I know of. The corporation lost billions in the IT burst. It disappeared from this area as an employers.
Also in the late 1960s, my uncle in Morton Grove IL, a union worker in a local factory, a large machine mechanic, would never go to the Loop of Chicago “because of the crime”. I lived on the West Side of Chicago and was commuting daily to Evanston and back at the time. What he thought was going on wasn’t what was actually going on.
Scabs aren’t healing. Not only that, employers have used racial antagonism and cross-racial scabs to break up worker solidarity in busting unions. Only since Ronald Reagan busted PATCO have unions started having the cross-ethnicity solidarity to prevent being played by employers.
The post isn’t racist, but the institutions that you continue to participate willingly or unwillingly in are perpetuating rather than ending racism and reducing racial tensions. People are problematic, period. People with various forms of PTSD are more problematic. Financial, experiences of racial attack, criminal attack, being a veteran of war–all of these create forms of PTSD that put chips on people’s shoulders. Look back through the wounds and assess what actually happened with the perspective of distance in time.
This is exactly not the time for us to withdraw back into our isolation and refuse to talk and deal with each other.
Of what?
There is an old Southern racist joke that goes like this. A neighborhood desegregated and the first black resident moved in. He goes and knocks on his new neighbor’s door and announces to his stunned neighbor, “Hi neighbor. I’m better than you.”
His bemused neighbor asks, “How is that, neighbor?”
The new neighbor replied, “I get to live next to a white man, and you’re stuck living next to a n*gger.”
That joke was told by white people to white people around 50 years ago. I hope you see where the blatant failure of logic and reality is.
What makes one on top and what puts one at the bottom?
You write:
In theory, yes. In practice? Not so much.
I am sure that other people here have watched in their own work field as “affirmative action” brought kneejerk reactions from employers that resulted in people lacking certain skill sets and/or simple intelligence were given jobs over well qualified people of European ascent because they were minority members. And this includes females over males as well. I certainly have.
Is this a necessary evil?
I really do not know.
If the U.S. truly implemented “affirmative action” on the educational level, how many generations would it take for economically depressed groups of people of all races and cultures to naturally enter the job market on an equal footing with the ensconced…mostly European…working and middle classes? I do not know that either.
Just sayin’…so far the triple-barreled results of affirmative action have been:
1-Helping minorities…including females…get better paying work
2-Making it harder for members of heretofore privileged middle classes to get work hat would sustain their middle class position
and
3-Making the overall working culture a number of percentage points less…effective. Efficient.
This last point is undeniable in my own working culture as a musician. When minority members broke through the segregationist working musical culture in NYC, those who made it actually improved that culture. Why? How? They had to be better by a long shot than their white competition. I came up a generation later than that…it began to happen in the late/40s/early ’50s…but I knew, worked extensively with and in many respects was a student of the two minority musicians who broke the color barrier in the NYC recording and Broadway businesses, Joe Wlder and Victor Paz. Both were outstanding musicians and both were “Jackie Robinsons” for those that followed.
However, as PC/affirmative action hiring became essentially the law of the land, the quality of those hired began to drop as a result.
I have personally heard complants from workers…and seen in some instances…the same sort of thing on any number of levels of the working world. particularly in educational administrative systems.
I ask again…is this a necessary evil? Ron Paul has said over and over again that it is not, that preferential hiring only results in more stratification and separation of the races.
Again…I do not know, myself. I work on a “excellence” level with all hiring in which I am involved, but since the musical idioms in which I mostly specialize are pretty much all “post-racial” in terms of makeup…at least they are in the large cities…affirmative action is a moot point. I will add here that the inclusion of female musicians has lagged way behind, but over the last decade that has improved a great deal. Even that is not so much about affirmative action as it is a cultural sea change…mass media culture-disseminated…that encourages young women to dedicate themselves to becoming musicians in previously almost 100% male-dominated idioms like the Pan-American styles I play.
Outta time…gotta go to work. More later, maybe.
AG
The key point. Doing affirmative action in a way that made white workers angry was exactly how employers resisted ending their own discriminatory practices, which really depended on networks of referral instead of the formal personnel process. Employers intentionally hired people they knew would fail or hired people into PR jobs to deal with the other minority employees, or the evasions of actually not discriminating were often quite clever.
And yes, white workers got played over and over and blamed the new hires for not knowing what they learned on the job with the help of mentors into the way the company functioned.
The reason that judges ruled for affirmative action is that they thought that affirmative action by forcing interaction over time would provide that sea change. And when jobs were plentiful and incomes rising even slightly, they did. The current reaction is to the rising inequality and you’re on your own economy.
You seem like the kind of person who is a generous with offers to mentor new folks to the genre as they are to demand excellence.
To much of the judging that minorities (or women) fail on the excellence scale is from mindless formal scores that get circumvented when the boss wants to do something anyway. Good that culture is catching up in your field; that mostly eliminates affirmative action lawsuits unless someone is flush with money to pay lawyers. The best case of the current situation is that culture will catch up to most of the creative fields.
But there are those with a vested interest (and not just lawyers) in keeping discrimination alive and never settled. Bosses or clients still do the hiring, and there are some real dillies in that category who have more power than they can responsibly use.
We might be about to see a public demonstration of that in action.
Problem is that when this occurs in most industries, the worker-bees work together to make sure the incompetent boss looks good until they fail of their own incompetence and another boss takes the helm. In some organizations, managers will hire other incompetent managers because they are sycophants or to punish a working unit that could not completely cover up the previous boss’s incompetency. Sometimes they use an “affirmative action” hire of a black manager to do this.
I’ve not worked in many post-racism organizations, but when I’ve lucked into one it is a refreshing atmosphere of trust and confidence that gets reflected in the social interaction of the work unit. And part of it is honest discussion about when the legacy of racism and discrimination shows itself in some habitual practice or tone or figure of speech. People have to be told to back off in such a way that they don’t shut down completely and other people have to make changes in their attitudes or habits of speech or some other semi-conscious behavior and to stop thinking that slights are “deliberate” or even consciously recognized as slights.
Presently, employers are staffing retail in our area according to the demographics of the stereotype of the city or county. Mostly older white female workers and younger black female workers. White men are seen not to do retail unless they are despearate (and that creates stereotypes of issues that might not be there) and black men are stereotyped as unreliable except for a small number of the kiosk style retailers or those (athletic wear) interested in attracting black men as customers. It has just noticeably shifted toward more polarized hiring, even replacing entire previous staffing.
Slight criticism, THD. I’ve noticed, especially since the election, sometimes you write in such an analytical way that I can’t tell what your actual point is, and I’m not sure a lot of others can either.
Yes, factually and analytically I agree with everything you’ve said here. I just don’t know what you’re getting at. Reading the thread I get the uneasy feeling that we may be talking at cross-purposes, everybody recognizes the topic but not your thesis. Or maybe they do — but I don’t.
Are you saying that it’s wrong to talk of the “white working class”?
Are you being super-marxist and saying there IS no “white” working class, just “THE working class”?
Are you familiar with the issue of “nationalities and social democracy”? It arose especially among socialists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They agreed that the fact that you were a socialist didn’t mean you had to pretend you didn’t have a nationality. They found ways of working together.
We in America actually have more of a concept of one nation than they did. Surely our various groups can work together to fight fascism? That’s what Bernie Sanders is about.
It’s the refusal to recognize that white people are also part of the working class that has caused so many of them (a) to be ignored and (b) to find a home on the right. Which is absurd.
Is there no such thing as the “black middle class” either?
Or maybe I’m just not getting your point. Which is what I started out by saying.
Actually, I’m being closer to the idea that ethnicity (reduced to race in 20th century) is used as a marker for a complicated class structure of legalized exclusion.
I am also pointing out the fact that through assimilation a lot of people have no ethnic identity but “American” and are resentful of people who insist on ethnic identities.
White people do not self-identify with the “working class” because of the way that socialism and communism were framed beginning in the immediate post-World War II era that featured McCarthyism, investigation of union corruption, and media celebration of the new suburban middle class. That trend followed the arc of Richard Nixon’s rise to power. In many parts of the country “working class” is “Communist talk”. White people themselves are insulted by that characterization in some areas; they have self-relocated to the right only in response to Civil Rights legislation and anti-Vietnam war opposition.
The right wing has so set up the framing that it is impossible to get one set of white voters to cross back to where their parents or grandparents were 70 years ago.
Also that for the South, Grimes has it right; the decision of white supremacy comes before being offended by the “working class” label and all the stereotypes that come with it (and are by the 1990s celebrated as “redneck culture”.
Tarheel…please give me some concrete examples that back up the following statement.
I have never personally experienced this and it seems to me that continued practices of this kind would simply result in companies that did such things eventually bottoming out and failing. I do not often think of myself as naive, but maybe I am in this instance.
AG
I witnessed this a lot over 40 years in different organizations mostly in the South. A number of them slipped enough to fire the black guy for cause and use that as an excuse to profile all blacks. And the whites in the department got to tell the tale about the failed affirmative action hire. Some other organizations did indeed run themselves into the ground with that practice of eventually got slapped down by courts. But the white employees still got to tell the tale about unqualified blacks (in the South until quite recently, that was “all blacks” as far as some white employees are concerned) and how affirmative action imposed quotas (a misreading of how the courts use statistics to analyze patterns of systematic discrimination.
It is a narrative that has hurt us as a country and was invented, at least in Southern states, to gain white voters. Just like they used school vouchers. Seeing how deep that has gone into normally progressive thought is a bit distressing.
Well, no, the terminology under discussion is “white working class”. As your first sentence above recognizes before the second one disappears it: “It is the [white] worker vs. the capitalist.”
Similarly for
No, it only “likely” depends partially on that. It definitively depends on whether you’re white. If not, you can’t be “white working class”.
A discussion of the meaning and significance of “white working class” (including its role in the election outcome and also going forward) requires that the significance of “white” in that formulation be kept front and center. As I’ve been absorbing and mulling the outcome, I’m increasingly convinced that nothing is as important and clarifying as the “white” in “white working class”. The explicit appeals to, specifically, whites’ deplorable bigotry was the key factor that put Trump over the top. It was not economics. This is clear from the fact that the “white working class”‘s non-white economic cohort resoundingly rejected Trump.
And yes, what it says about this country that that proved a viable path to the Oval Office is a horror to contemplate.
Exactly the point of Grimes, and I agree.
Nice to be a nonperson.
Personhood really does transcend ethnicity and other social markers.
Since she’s in the dept of theological ethics, I assume she’s going in a direction of exploring the benefits, to the adherents, of white supremacy even when not explicitly espoused with the goal of moving people away from white supremacy beliefs. Very interesting seems to me, because she’s getting at the “why do ppl vote against their own interests?” question via defining “interests” more broadly,
i,e, that when interests are more broadly defined they’re not voting against their interests
The methodists were one of the first integrated denominations in the usa though eventually the first independent Black denomination was founded within them (richard allen)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Allen_(bishop)
Yep, and in the 1790s, the bishops briefly tried to end slavery by persuading church members to free them through manumission in Virginia and North Carolina. There are church records and court records of manumission. But by the Civil War, the denomination had split, many clergy and bishops were slaveowners, and after the Civil War, in the cities across the South, Methodism became the middle class (merchant and factory owner, doctor and lawyer) downtown church (all white) and the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church became the church of the black business community. There was a parallel in Baptist and Presbyterian churches after the Civil War. The United Methodist Church in 1964 tried to reinstitute the beginning of that reunification and integration. It still has not reached all local congregations although there are an increasing number of integrated congregation in the South. There are increasing numbers of evangelical and pentecostal integrated congregations in the South.
yes! indeed the Protestant Episcopal Church was the only major USA denomination that did not split around the Civil War (and that’s not a good thing that it didn’t).
I’ve been ideologically on the same page as Assistant Professor Grimes for most of the same reasons for a while now with regards to Republican Whites and the ‘Agency-Denial’ wing of The Left.
That said, I will admit point blank to not giving much of a rats ass in prior thoughts on the subject to the entirety of why Republican Whites are predominantly White Supremacists, even though I have also thought for some time that White Supremacy is often a means to it’s own ends for White Supremacists. Just a case of failing to realize that 2 and 2 are not separate numbers, but parts of a whole.
I thought “Misinformation and poor logic qualify more as consequences of our attachment to white supremacy than its underlying causes.” was especially profound.
I really am impressed and confused by parts of Assistant Professor Grimes work. That someone came out and actually said that the “Voting against one’s interests” was BS because it wasn’t looking at the whole picture AS WELL AS pointing out that it’s all kinds of arrogant elitism and authoritarian for certain parts of The Left to think that
and therefore
because it is obvious that they
is impressive merely because someone actually said it, but it confuses me that it actually needed to be said at all!