Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America

by Chris Arnade

This is especially dangerous because the back row has been left with little to take pride in that doesn’t need credentials. For those who don’t have the resources, personality, or desire to get an education, there is little left that values them.

There are fewer and fewer jobs to take pride in, the religious life is viewed as illogical, and

local pride is said to be provincial. There is another option: racial identity. That opt...

Much of the back row of America, both white and black, is humiliated. The good jobs they could get straight out of high school and

gave the stability of a lifelong career have left. The churches providing them a place in the world have been cast as irrational, backward, and lacking.

The communities that provided pride are dying, and into this vacuum have come drugs. Their entire worldview is collapsing, and then they are told this is their own fault: they suck at school and ...

For those born into well-connected communities, there is plenty of support and a long history to draw from to navigate the path. For those born outside these communities, there is little guidance. It’s about not just money but having the time and access to needed information. Many children have no idea about the rules, language, and expectations of education (something needed to navigate the path) because they don’t know anyone who went to college. Other children are overwhelmed early with caring for older family members or dealing with the problems of adults. Some children are tasked with parenting the parent—a responsibility that denies them the time to dedicate to their own education. The educational meritocracy is a well-intentioned system designed to correct massive injustices that enslaved, demeaned, constricted, and ranked people based on the color of their

skin, sexuality, and gender. Yet in attempting to correct a nasty and explicit exclusion, we have replaced it with an exclusion that narrowly defines success as all about how much you can learn and then earn. It is a system that applauds itself for being a meritocracy, allowing anyone to succeed. Implying that those who don’t choose this path, who can’t or don’t pick up and move constantly, who can’t overcome the long odds, are failures and it is their own fault. They are not smart

enough. You didn’t make it out because you suck. That is humiliating. It is all the more frustrating because the new system is still unjust and slanted against minorities, relegating them to second-class citizens, rejecting them at birth. Few minorities are born into communities or fa...

For them, the rejection, frustration, and humiliation aren’t new. They have long been subjected to the cruel ...

subjected to demeaning and amoral conditions—legal and illegal, large and small—simply based on their race and place of birth. It has made getting an education and a decent job and building a meaningful life a long shot overcome only with immense focus or immense luck. Then, if they fail at the long odds, they are told it is their fault. Their fault for being lazy, dumb, or whatever the speaker feels the...

morally weak, prone to illegal behavior, or just dumb. This has made growing up in places like Selma, Milwaukee’s North Side, East New York, o...

People respond to humiliation in different ways, but the most common response is to find a source of pride wherever possible, even if that means in places the status quo doesn’t approve of. It means trying to find a community ...

means a place that doesn’t demand...

Drugs are one of them. Bars, drug traps, and crack houses offer communities that don’t care about your past, your failures, or the color of your skin. As long as you join in, shooting up or taking a hit or swallowing the pills, it is all OK. They also offer a numbing salve from the pain of humiliation. It is a reck...

Many churches offer that, especially Pentecostal and e...

They offer a community with few barriers of entry, regardless of someone’s past. The only requirement is a desire to reform, to live a different way, to accept a set of rules on how you live your life and how you expect others to live. They also provide a place in the larger world. You may not be valued ...

Living in the place you grew up doesn’t require credentials. It’s a form of meaning that cannot be measured. Family doesn’t require credentials. Having a child is an action that provides meaning, immediate pride, and a role, especially for the mother, who can find value in raising a family. There are other non-credentialed forms of community that come with far greater stigmas but can appeal to anyone frustrated enough. Racial identity is one, providing a community that doesn’t require any credentials beyond being born. Like drugs, it is rightly stigmatized, but also like drugs, it can appeal to the...

For frustrated whites, it is especially easy because it offers a community with a long (and ugly) historical legacy, boosting its sense of importance. It also o...

In the back row, it can feel as though everyone is sinking, making it the perfect environment for the politics of blame. That all anyone does is throw out a few lifesavers, providing an escape to a small group, makes it even more appealing. That the lifesavers are seen to unfairly go to minorities via affirmative action makes it even easier. Affirmative action is the right short-term way to try to deal with the long history of structural racism, yet if everyone—black, white, Hispanic—is sinking, it can feel unfair. If it is more about getting a larger share of a shrinking pie than a larger share of a growing pie, then it can inflame hate. Donald Trump, in 2016, exploited the dangerous and easy appeal of racial identity. He offered frustrated and angry whites a community wrapped in a political movement that didn’t require credentials and claimed to value and, most of all, respect them. Trump talked their language—rough, crude, and blunt. He addressed their concerns, built around frustration, humiliation, and anger. He acknowledged their p...

It is more about who you know, not what you know.”

You got to understand, when you don’t have anything, respect is all you have.”

All were union members, and all are quick to list the benefits that came from their union. “I was part of the longest strike in US history. Lasted twenty years. Union kept me afloat during that time.” Unlike George and his friends, they support Trump, and their language is rough, blunt, and filled with racial slurs and jokes:

Thirty years later, standing in that neighborhood, I look back and see Preacher Man and the others praying and see people striving for dignity in a harsh world. I see mothers working minimum-wage jobs, trying to raise three children alone. I see a teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman abused by a father addicted to whatever. I see

Preacher Man living across the tracks in a beat-up shotgun shack or low-income housing or whatever, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little. My teenage self had been a judgmental know-it-all, yet even understanding that now, I was right to have left my hometown. I wouldn’t have been comfortable living there. It wasn’t about Preacher Man, who had been the least of my frustrations. It was the broader community and what they valued and how they saw themselves and me. The back row

wasn’t for me, and it just wasn’t who I was. I valued science, and I valued different living experiences, and I believed I valued the true equality of all races. A community built on non-credentialed value—place, faith, and race—didn’t work for me and excluded me. It excluded and excludes many, many others in far worse ways, many in the neighborhood I was now standing in. My hometown was still deeply segregat...

was exclusive, but it at least strived for racial inclusion. Put simply, my hometown’s intolerance didn’t fit my intolerance. My intolerance, like ma...

We have created a system with economics as the central form of meaning and material goods as the primary form of valuation. In this system, education and credentials are central to economic success. We have created a society that is damningly unequal, not just economically but socially. We have said that education is the way out of pain and the way to success, implying that those who

don’t make it out are dumb, or lazy, or stupid. This has ensured that all those at the bottom, educationally and economically—black, white, gay, straight, men, and women—are guaranteed to feel excluded, rejected, and, most of all, humiliated. We have denied many their dignity, leaving a vacuum easily filled by drugs, anger, and resentment.