White Working Class Quotes

“It's a blue collar thing... Middle-class kids are groomed to fly away, and they do. The working class likes to keep its young close to home. Tearing a working class person from the network that defines their life is a far heavier lift than insisting that a Harvard grad move to Silicon Valley. The professional elite values change and self-development; working-class families value stability and community. The professional elite associate change with challenge, excitement, opportunity, and innovation. But for families, a few paychecks away form losing their homes and stable middle-class lives, respect for stability reigns supreme.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“If Clinton had a likability problems, Trump had an unlikable epidemic--but it didn't matter. Likability is optional for men, but it's mandated for women: if a women isn't nice she is a bad person. A man can be unlikable and still be seen as a man to be reckoned with. Trump was a real man. Clinton? A nasty woman.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“The notion that women belong at home while men went out to work emerged in the nineteenth century, from the beginning it was the key way that elitist distinguished themselves from the working class. A man's ability to support his family signaled his status. Having a stay-at-home mom became something the working class aspired to. In the second half of the twentieth century, the U.S. attained the breadwinner-housewife ideal for two brief generations. By the twenty-first century, a new generation had lost the ability to sustain the ideal they had seen their parents and grandparents achieve. Small wonder many felt bereft.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Hochschild points out that "virtually all those I talked with felt on shaky economic ground... They also felt culturally marginalized.." Their traditional views were held up to ridicule by the national media; they felt belittled and besieged. Referring to people like this as "deplorables," as Hillary Clinton did during the campaign, is not a great way to win them back.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“The ideology of natural growth prevalent among the poor and working class contrasts with the " concerned cultivation" of the professional elite. The older children's schedule set the pace of life for all family members.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Americans tend to associate marriage with the white picket fence--stable home, stable life. If you feel that stability is attainable, you wait until you have it before marriage and kids. But if Americans feel that is not a practical goal, or an extremely long-term and aspirational one, they tend to not marry. The decline in marriage is a symptom of the working class's economic decline--not, as some argue, it's cause.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Looking down on religion is a commonplace form of modern snobbery. I think it's silly. Personally, I don't believe in God but I do believe in religion. Religion helps me sit quietly, listening to beautiful music, among a group of people trying to be their best selves. I am offended by the likes of Richard Dawkins--so dismissive of sincerely held beliefs.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“The professional elite also values hard work, of course—but it’s different. To working-class members of all races, valuing hard work means having the rigid self-discipline to do a menial job you hate for 40 years, and reining yourself in so you don’t “have an attitude” (i.e., so that you can submit to authority). Hard work for elites is associated with self-actualization; “disruption” means founding a successful start-up. Disruption, in working-class jobs, just gets you fired.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“The decline of vocational education has meant that American employers can’t depend on a stream of employees with the specific skills they need. Employers have responded by “up-credentialing”—requiring college degrees for jobs that do not require college-delivered skills—as a way to weed out those who lacked the smarts or self-discipline to complete a college degree. This up-credentialing has two bad effects. Using college as a proxy for diligence and smarts, of course, disadvantages working-class kids who are smart and diligent but not college grads. It also means that a significant proportion of college grads do jobs that don’t really require college. As a result, a quarter of college grads and advanced degree holders will work for a lower median wage than associate degree holders.204”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class, With a New Foreword by Mark Cuban and a New Preface by the Author: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“In 1970, 90% of 30 year olds earned more than their parents at the same age; by 2014 only half did.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Not surprising, then, that most working-class women don't aspire to do "men's work." Instead, they invest more of their identity in family in a very gendered way.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Trump won among white working-class women by 28 percentage points; if Clinton has won even 50% of their votes, she would have won the election.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Many working class women have the same kinds of pink-collar jobs their mothers did, but their husbands don't have the same kinds of blue-collar jobs their fathers did. As a result, their families are in precarious shape economically. It is in these women's self-interest to get these jobs back. The Tea Party women Hochschild met in Louisiana based their politics on "their roles as wives and mothers--and they wanted to be wives of high-earning men and to enjoy the luxury, as one women put it, of being a homemaker.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Unlike in nonelite families, children of the elite are taught to not prioritize family: Lareau describes a child who decides to skip an important family gathering because soccer is "more of a priority.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“All of this explains why Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president to truly understand white,working class, ended "welfare as we know it." He understood it was political poison to allow poor women to be stay-at-home moms while Mike's family tag-teamed it's way to exhaustion.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“A friend from Atlanta remarks, "Why did people vote for Trump? All they want is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath cinderblock house. But now they are losing those homes." The working class worry that opportunities for a settled life are slipping away.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Poor married mothers (60%) are more than twice as likely to be at home full time as married mothers in the middle (23%). Nearly 60% of working-class mothers work full time; only 42% of poor moms do. In families with children in center care, 30% of poor families get subsidies ; very few working-class families do (about 3%).”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“My sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free childcare for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn't pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some kids' moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from the local mall. My sister-in-law was livid.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“Instead, I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

“I focus on a simple message: 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,”6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding “political correctness” becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. I don’t like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. 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 class7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. A few words”
― Joan C Williams, White Working Class