Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

by Sarah Smarsh

When I found your name, in my early adulthood, I don’t think I’d ever heard the term “white working class.” The experience it describes contains both racial privilege and economic disadvantage, which can exist simultaneously. This was an obvious, apolitical fact for those of us who lived that juxtaposition every day. But it seemed to make some people uneasy, as though our grievance put us in competition with poor people of other races. Wealthy white people, in particular, seemed to want to distance themselves from our place and our truth. Our struggles forced a question about America that many were not willing to face: If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?

Mom and Dad had their first fireworks stand the year Reagan was reelected—selling American pride in a field next to a two-lane blacktop while think tanks sold “trickle-down” economics. It’s funny that both of their children were born weeks before an election that Reagan won. We would be able to map our lives against the destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills. Historic wealth inequality was old news to us by the time it hit newspapers in the new millennium. That’s the difference among the person selling the fireworks and the one watching them sparkle in the sky from a public park on a work holiday and the one watching them from a nice apartment in a city high-rise. You live in different Americas and thus have different understandings.

Unlike so many people of my generation, I did get a good life for my hard work and know-how. In addition to what I might have earned, there were strokes of grace along the way that I can’t take any credit for. Somehow I ended up with a better situation than my parents had. But the American Dream has a price tag on it. The cost changes depending on where you’re born and to whom, with what color skin and with how much money in your parents’ bank account. The poorer you are, the higher the price. You can pay an entire life in labor, it turns out, and have nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, even: debt, injury, abject need.

Grandpa Arnie loved working the land not for the price of wheat per bushel but because smelling damp earth at sunrise felt like a holy experience. Dad loved building something beautiful out of good lumber not for the paycheck but for seeing his own creativity turned into a sturdy, useful structure. The pleasure that Mom got when she sold a little house in Wichita wasn’t just for the small commission but for the tears in the family’s eyes when she handed them the keys. Work can be a true communion with resources, materials, other people. I have no issue with work. Its relationship to the economy—whose work is assigned what value—is where the trouble comes in. My family’s labor was undervalued to such an extent that, while we never starved or went without shelter in a chronic way, we all knew what it felt like to need something essential—food, shoes, a safe place to live, a rent payment, a trip to the doctor—and go without it for lack of money.

The person who drives a garbage truck may himself be viewed as trash. The worse danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it. A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you. Working in a field is one thing; being misled by a corporation about the safety of a carcinogenic pesticide is another. Hammering on a roof is one thing; not being able to afford a doctor when you fall off it is another. Waiting tables is one thing; working for an employer whose sexual harassment you can’t afford to fight and risk a night’s worth of tips is another.

In the United States, the shaming of the poor is a unique form of bigotry in that it’s not necessarily about who or what you are—your skin color, the gender you’re attracted to, having a womb. Rather, it’s about what your actions have failed to accomplish—financial success within capitalism—and the related implications about your worth in a supposed meritocracy. Poor whiteness is a peculiar offense in that society imbues whiteness with power—not just by making it the racial norm next to which the rest are “others” but by using it as shorthand for economic stability. So while white people of all classes hate or fear people of color for their otherness, better-off whites hate poor whites because they are physically the same—a homeless white person uncomfortably close to a look in the mirror. A higher percentage of people of color are poor. Meanwhile, population numbers being what they are, in the United States there are more white people in poverty than any other group. These two facts exist simultaneously and are not in competition, but the way our country talks about class and race would have you believe that only one of them can be true.

America has an idea that people in poverty make sketchy decisions, but everyone does. The poor just have less room for their errors, which will be laid bare in public for need of help. The teenager’s child will eat free school lunch on the taxpayer’s dime; the drunk will beg on a sidewalk; the gambler will quickly go into debt and need bailed out.