White Working Class

by Joan C. Williams

Michèle Lamont, the sociologist who wrote the single best book on working-class Americans;

The first step is to recognize elite folkways as just that: folkways, not “good taste.” Many habits of the professional elite—from artisanal religion to a life of self-actualization—require a college education. America doesn’t provide that, so we need to take the working class as we find them. We don’t fault the poor for failing to value the same things the professional class values.

For elite men, ambition and a strong work ethic are “doubly sacred . . . [as signals of] both moral and socioeconomic worth.”83 Work, in some sense, is their religion.

Among the professional elite, where the coin of the realm is merit, people of color are constructed as lacking in merit. Among the white working class, where the coin of the realm is morality, people of color are constructed as lacking in that quality.

if you live a settled life, you’re a good person.

To summarize, settled working-class whites, whose claims to privilege rest on morality and hard work, stereotype black people by conflating hard living and race. Professional-class whites, whose claims to privilege rest on merit, stereotype black people as less competent than whites.

redress. Historian Thomas Haskell’s elegant study documents how slavery went from being seen as an unfortunate-but-unavoidable reality to being seen as a pressingly unethical outrage. Quite abruptly in the eighteenth century, slaves were included in Europeans’ ambit of responsibility.

Doesn’t white working-class people’s sense of entitlement to decent jobs reflect white privilege? Sure it does: even during the glory days, when blue-collar whites’ wages were spiraling up, and the FHA was helping them buy homes, those jobs and houses were not equally available to African-Americans.168

Another crucial step is to apply to the white working class the kind of analysis applied to other groups who face structural disadvantage.

As working-class people, they value stability and tradition—including gender traditions—rather than gender flux.

“up-credentialing”—

In 2007, the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction cost taxpayers four times as much as

Section 8 public housing subsidies,229 but knowing that is the province of specialists.

Publicizing to working-class Americans how they themselves benefit from government programs needs to be a major priority. Not just for liberals: my sense is that many moderate conservatives now feel that hostility to government has gone too far. We need a bipartisan campaign to educate the American public about the positive roles that government plays in their lives. There are two major themes that will appeal to the white working class (and many others): keeping them safe and ensuring economic stability.

When you show up for Thanksgiving dinner, you don’t shove your political views down Aunt Josie’s throat; that would signal to her that you don’t value your relationship with her. And it would signal to your family that you don’t value your relationship with them.

Anyone who truly values healthy families should support the choices of adults who don’t want children.

This framing won’t resolve the conflict, but at least it deflates the argument that abortion rights are anti-family.

Police work is hard and dangerous work most of us aren’t qualified to do.

their politicized view of structural class inequalities has been replaced by a sense that unions protect good jobs for the few, while capitalists provide good jobs for the many.

“Pollution is the sacrifice we make for capitalism,”

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,”289 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites.

This is the quote that caused me to buy the book

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. Another key message is that elite truths don’t make sense in working-class lives. Working-class truths do, and my hope is that I’ve provided a window into why. If we’re not going to provide elite lives for the broad mass of people, neither can we expect them to embrace elite truths.

Once the elite cast the white working class outside of its ambit of responsibility, the elite did what elites do. They ignored those who print their New York Times, make their KitchenAides,290 tell them at the doctor’s to undress from the waist down. The professional class first stopped noticing, and then they started condescending. Class cluelessness became class callousness.

I remain hopeful. Reckless alpha-male posturing, I suspect, will work about as well as it usually does: fine in the short term but poorly in the long term. Meanwhile, we need to begin the process of healing the rift between white elites and white workers so that class conflict no longer dominates and distorts our politics. We need to begin now.