White Working Class, With a New Foreword by Mark Cuban and a New Preface by the Author: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

by Joan C. Williams

Resistance to my message in the United States has been fed, too, by a narrative that posits a zero-sum game between race and class. Interestingly, there’s no sense that one can’t support both trans rights and racial justice, or both immigrant rights and gender justice. So it’s unclear why racial equity and class equity are seen as mutually exclusive.

The Economic Policy Institute has shown that, though wages rose when productivity did in the decades after World War II, that ascent ended in the 1970s; if it had continued, wages would be twice what they are today.

The challenge is to explain to the white working class that they have gotten screwed not because they are white but because they are working class. The sooner we start, the better.

To focus on white working-class despair will lead well-meaning people to approach the white working class as they traditionally have approached the poor—as those “we have a moral and ethical obligation to help,”

But her read of white working class portrayals in pop culture has this pity vibe nonetheless.

Deriding “political correctness” becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites.

The working class doesn’t want to be examined like some tribe in a faraway land. They don’t want the kind of pious solicitude the wealthy offer to the poor.

we will keep making the same mistakes that have helped foster the populist, anti-establishment anger that welled up in the 2016 election.

What if the populist anti-establishment anger is justified but intentionally misguided to fuel intra-class strife?

Elites often pride ourselves on merit, and point out we work very hard. But so do hotel housekeepers. Let’s not forget that.

if you are part of the professional-managerial class, well, you’re an elite. Who composes this group? Americans with household incomes in the top 20% and at least one member who is a college graduate.

This lumps the Marxist petite bourgeois and PMC in with the true capitalist elite/bourgeois. This only reinforces the lack of working class identity for the PMC.

And so to better understand the white working class, readers in the elite will need to understand not only the parochial folkways of the white working class. They will also need to understand their own assumptions and truths as parochial folkways—traditions, behaviors, and ways of life—that make no sense to the white working class, because they make no sense outside the context of elite lives.

Yes, and also both classes have common folkways. We all kjke the Simpsons, for example.

Working-class African-Americans are more like the French (and unlike white working-class Americans) in their nonjudgmental “there but for the grace of God go I” attitude toward the poor, and their felt need for solidarity.

And if you cannot learn to be ‘smart’ but possess a strong back and a strong work ethic . . . [s]hould that be diminished to tiny wages with no benefits although the occupation be a societal necessity?

The wages-of-whiteness strategy protected the elite from a cross-race coalition of the disenfranchised. That’s the coalition America needs now: the interracial coalition for economic justice Martin Luther King, Jr., proposed a half century ago.

Many things we can’t change, but here’s one we can: we can communicate that we believe that the injustices experienced by working-class whites are ones elites have a moral obligation to address.

Here is where the overly-broad definition of elites gets slippery. Most of the PMC is not in a posktion to address these wrongs, hence not morally obligated to do so. Setting aside the classist assumptions of racism and finding common values that underlie disparate folkways upon which to build working class unity is all the upper-middle class can do.

But for the left to dismiss white working-class demands on grounds of white privilege . . . what’s the message? That white working-class people aren’t entitled to the American dream? Isn’t the right message that all Americans are, regardless of race?

Would working-class whites be so furious about “political correctness” if they were among those whose challenges were recognized? Not likely. We won’t know how much racism falls away until we stop insulting working-class whites and try including them within our ambit of responsibility.

Perhaps I've misunderstood the prior use of "responsibility." I agree that the upper middle class needs to change the frame of structural injustice, but I think addressing the broad working class common issues must precede race and other identity-specific disadvantages.

What they want is not a social safety net but a job.

What they want is a socially meaningful role. UBI is viable only to the extent we can decouple paid labor from social contribution. Regardless, no job should pay less than a living wage. Solving that problem would make more jobs appealing.

The solution is not to consign working-class men to the underpaid, dead-end jobs traditionally provided to women. The solution is to create up-skilled jobs for both men and women.

The first solution is to redistribute the value created by existing jobs more fairly between the true elite ownership class, the PMC, and the working class.

most Americans don’t know about the subsidies and benefits they receive from their government.

Two-thirds of Americans say government has a negative effect on the ways things are going in this country. But 56% believe the same thing about large corporations.241 This suggests a potentially useful theme for people interested in restoring faith in government. Americans need government to protect them against overweening corporate power.

I’m not suggesting that we abandon the social history curriculum completely. But we need to make sure all Americans know not only the ways our system has failed but also the ways it’s succeeded—if progressives want to keep the social gains we’ve made in the past 50 years.

The working class—of all races—has been asked to swallow a lot of economic pain while elites have focused on noneconomic issues: