Near the end of his life, the
great civil rights and anti-war leader and democratic socialist Martin
Luther King Jr. wrote that the “real issue to be faced” in the United
States was “the radical reconstruction of society itself.” These words have
never been truer than they are today, when the profits system threatens to end
livable ecology in the historical near term.
It will be difficult, if not
impossible, to carry out King’s reconstruction without backing from millions of
white people in what is still very much the world’s most powerful state. While
the U.S. population becomes less Caucasian with each decennial census, the nation
is still supermajority—69 percent—non-Hispanic white. The nation’s physical and
related political geography is whiter still, thanks to a political system that
overrepresents America’s disproportionately white rural and exurban regions and
states.
How might a U.S. left that
mattered—currently nonexistent, thanks in part to its hyper
identity-politicized alienation from everyday white people (not
a new problem)—find a place in white America? How could it do that without
dropping its principled and undebatable opposition to racism, ethnocentrism and
nativism?
I am an anti-racist, leftist
historian and journalist who grew up in an unusually integrated and liberal
big-city neighborhood and has spent many years living in predominantly white
and rural counties. Thanks to a retrospectively welcome failure to achieve
lasting professional-class success, I have spent a good share of time employed
alongside (and talking politics with) “white working-class” people in the
“heartland.”
Here, for what it’s worth, are
12 recommendations for how my fellow leftist progressives might understand and
communicate with “flyover zone” whites in ways that further our goals without
sacrificing our commitment to racial, ethnic and gender equality and
environmental sanity and without pushing middle-American and
noncollege-educated white folks further to the right:
1. Drop the notion that you/we
don’t need a lot of white allies to advance leftist goals. King knew better
than that. So did the Black
Panthers, who worked to help working-class whites, Latinos, Asians and
Native Americans build organizations that would merge their specific
ethnocultural identities with a “proletarian” people’s struggle against
capitalism and imperialism. King placed a big emphasis in his last years on
fighting with and for poor
and working-class people of all colors against the economic injustices
of capitalism. (He had no romantic illusions about people of color and a few
white allies being able to transform America alone. He would have been
horrified by the position of the blustering white “radical,”
violence-fetishizing and infantile-leftist Weathermen, who decided in 1969 to
write off pretty much the entire white U.S. population as reactionaries. The
Panthers rightly rejected the “anti-white chauvinist” Weatherman standpoint as
idiotic.)
2. Avoid blanket statements
about “white people” and “white America.” People on the left rightly bristle at
broad racialist and sexist generalizations about blacks, Latinos, Asians,
Muslims, Arabs, females, immigrants, gays, lesbians and transgendered people.
We should also avoid sweeping statements about all U.S. whites, who are torn by
their own sharp socioeconomic, ethnic, partisan, political and ideological
differences.
3. Avoid saying insulting and
condescending things about nonmetropolitan and working-class whites—stuff like
presidential candidate Barack
Obamariffing on how rural whites “get bitter, cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton telling rich New York City campaign donors that Donald Trump’s
white, rural and noncollege-educated backers were “a basket” of racist,
nativist, homophobic and sexist “deplorables.” Clinton’s sneering comment was
vote-getting gold for the white nationalist Trump campaign, which printed up
“Adorable Deplorable” T-shirts and bumper stickers to use in key battleground
states. (Clinton recently doubled down on her progressive neoliberal contempt
for stupid middle America by saying
this to an elite, globalist gathering in Mumbai, India: “If you look
at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump
won. I win the coasts. But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the
places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won
the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward” … and lost to
people who, “You know, didn’t like black people getting rights, don’t like
women, you know, getting jobs, don’t want to, you know, see Indian-Americans
succeeding more than you are.” That was a raised middle finger from a superwealthy,
arch global corporatist to all the supposedly pessimistic, slow-witted, racist,
sexist and generally retrograde white-hick losers stuck between those glorious
enclaves—led by Wall Street, Yale and Harvard on the East Coast and Silicon
Valley and Hollywood on the West Coast—of human progress and variety [and GDP!]
on the imperial shorelines. Think right-wing media picked up on that elitist,
multicultural, globalist insult to the white heartland? You betcha!)
4. Academic and other elite
professional-class “progressives:” Please don’t brag about your advanced
degrees, your next book publication, your next sabbatical, your latest European
vacation, your small teaching load, your latest fine dining experience, your
favorite French wines or the fancy and expensive college or university to which
you are sending your children. Working-class people don’t like hearing about
you enjoying your class privileges and related educational attainments. It’s
the overeducated and know-it-all professional and managerial classes, not the
capitalist 1 percent, whom working-class people most
commonly and regularly confront and seeas the agents of class privilege and
humiliation.
5. Take a low-paid and
low-status job during this current tight-job market expansion. This will help
you get a sense of the difficult and underappreciated work that tens of
millions of supposedly privileged white Americans do every day: sweeping out
parking garages, emptying bedpans, cleaning offices and bathrooms, driving
trucks and buses, operating forklifts, waiting tables, making telemarketing
calls, mowing parkways, laying foundations, extracting obstructions from
production lines, filing medical documents and the like. (To make up for how
you are adding to the wage-cheapening reserve army of labor, do your best to
organize a union if one does not exist where you work, and make sure to pay
union dues if you are in a union-protected job in a “right to work” state.)
6. Stop thinking or saying
that all white America voted for the Trump. There were 156 million non-Hispanic
whites eligible to vote in the 2016 elections. Trump got 63 million votes.
Pretend that every single one of Trump’s voters was a non-Hispanic white. We
know that’s not the case (Trump got 28
percent of the Latino vote, 27 percent of the Asian-American vote and 8 percent
of the black vote, along with 57 percent of the white vote). But even if we
imagine that every single one of Trump’s voters was a non-Hispanic white, it
would mean that Trump was backed by just 40 percent of the white electorate.
That’s hardly the whole “white
tribe united” (to quote the noted black and neoliberal
“Afro-pessimist” Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trump’s white supporters).
7. Don’t deny that candidate
Trump’s economic populism (however disingenuous) was part of his attraction to
rural and working-class and other whites who voted for him. Yes, as numerous leftist
analysts (myself included) have noted, Trump’s appeal to those voters rested
significantly on white nationalist racial identity. But it also relied on his
economic-nationalist promise to honor the “forgotten” American heartland
working-class by restoring the lost Golden Age of American manufacturing and
economic “greatness.” Trump showed himself far more adept—to say the least—than
the establishment neoliberal Clinton when it came to tapping the economically
populist sentiments of the majority white and majority working-class
electorate, most of which has less than $1,000 in its bank accounts while the
top 10th of the upper U.S. 1 percent has as much wealth as the bottom 90
percent. Trump was no normal Republican 1 percent candidate. As Thomas Ferguson,
Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen recently
explained:
In 2016 the Republicans nominated
yet another super-rich candidate—indeed, someone on the Forbes 400 list of
wealthiest Americans. But pigeonholing him as a Romney-like Richie Rich was not
easy. Like legions of conservative Republicans before him, he trash-talked
Hispanics, immigrants, and women virtually non-stop, though with a verve
uniquely his own. He laced his campaign with barely coded racial appeals and in
the final days, ran an ad widely denounced as subtly anti-Semitic. But he
supplemented these with other messages that qualified as true blockbusters: In
striking contrast to every other Republican presidential nominee since 1936, he
attacked globalization, free trade, international financiers, Wall Street, and
even Goldman Sachs. “Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to
politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing
but poverty and heartache. When subsidized foreign steel is dumped into our
markets, threatening our factories, the politicians do nothing. For years, they
watched on the sidelines as our jobs vanished and our communities were plunged
into depression-level unemployment.” … In a frontal assault on the American
establishment, the Republican standard bearer proclaimed “America First.”
Mocking the Bush administration’s appeal to “weapons of mass destruction” as a
pretext … He even criticized the “carried interest” tax break beloved by high
finance.”
Such populist-sounding
rhetoric was part of how and why Trump defeated Clinton, who, the authors note,
“emphasized candidate and personal issues and avoided policy discussions to a
degree without precedent in any previous election for which measurements
exist.” At the same time, Trump would have lost many of his white working-,
lower- and middle-class votes to his Democratic opponent had the Democratic
primaries and caucuses not been rigged
against Bernie Sanders, who ran passionately against “the billionaire
class” without the noxious racism, nativism and sexism that colored Trump’s
campaign. Sanders might well have defeated Trump by mobilizing working-class
voters of all colors, including white ones. (Whether a President Sanders could
have done anything is another matter.)
8. Stop accusing U.S. white
working-class people of “lacking class consciousness” just because the
multibillionaire Trump did better than multimillionaire Clinton with
noncollege-educated white voters. Many affluent and white, nonworking-class
Trump voters lacked the allegedly class-defining college degree. Millions of
working- and lower-class U.S. white citizens didn’t vote at all, as is common
among lower-income Americans. The democratic socialist Sanders (currently and
quietly the most popular politician in the country) would have done far better
than both Clinton and Trump did with working-class white people in the general
election. At the same, Trump tapped white working-class anger at the globalist
financial and corporate elite (Goldman Sachs, et al.,) but also at the more
liberally inclined and professional and managerial classes, whose position and
meritocratic ideology is, according
to historian Thomas Frank, the real face of class privilege and authority
that working-class people grate under on a regular basis.
9. Don’t exaggerate the white
privilege payoff in capitalist America. The income and especially the wealth
gaps between non-Hispanic U.S. whites on one hand and U.S. blacks (whose median
household net worth is 13 times lower than that of whites), Latinos and Native
Americans are horrific. But those disparities do not change the fact that a
vast swath of the U.S. white population lives below the threshold of a
minimally adequate standard of living. The median white U.S. household income—$71,300
a year—is below the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) rigorously calculated
no-frills basic family
budget—$ 74,004—for a family that comprises two parents and two children in
the relatively cheap, 89 percent
white Iowa jurisdiction of Muscatine County.
Things look much worse for
white privilege when you drill down further in the census data. In the nearby
university enclave of Iowa City, the EPI’s basic family budget for the
same-sized household is $87,836. In the 93 percent white Muscatine County seat
city of Muscatine, median white household income is $51,801, equivalent to just
70 percent of the EPI’s basic family budget for a family of four. Or take the
93 percent white upstate Michigan town of Sheboygan (5,000 people). Median
household income there is $27,206, just 37 percent of the EPI’s basic
family budget ($72,875) for Sheboygan County. The same basic story is evident
across countless predominantly white towns and counties in the U.S heartland.
Three years ago, Harvard
sociologist Robert D. Putnam’s rigorously researched book, “Our
Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” showed that social breakdown among
low-income whites in the age of neoliberal capitalism was mimicking tendencies
long said to characterize the black “underclass”: high rates of out-of-wedlock
births, widespread male joblessness, endemic addiction, violence, elevated high
school dropout rates, and more. Then came news of surging opiate addiction
among working-class white Americans and of rising mortality rates fed by
suicide and substance abuse among middle-aged white “surplus Americans.” The
leading cause for these rising white “deaths of despair” cited by those who
discovered them in the data is the collapse of the labor market for
working-class people. Clearly the “wages
of whiteness” are no ticket to the middle-class American dream for
much of white America, a considerable portion of which has been rendered poor
and replaceable by automation, de-unionization, globalization, the shredding of
pensions and the poverty of the U.S. welfare state.
10. Appeal less (or not at
all) to guilt over white privilege and more (or entirely) to white
working-class people’s self-interest in interracial solidarity with black,
Latino, Asian and Native American working-class people on behalf of the many
against the nation’s wealthy few—the American oligarchy—in making the case for
racial, ethnic and gender equality and civil, immigrant and gay rights. People
with small savings accounts struggling to meet basic costs in a virulently
unequal nation with a weak social safety net and a shortage of decent-paying
jobs are not likely to respond warmly overall to outsiders who tell them how
“privileged” they are by the color of their skin. Their bank accounts and more
say different. They are getting shafted, and they know it. It’s better to talk
about:
● How the real agents of their
despair are not immigrants or urban people of color but the parasitic,
exploitative and obscenely rich, class-privileged, capitalist 1 percent, the
nation’s unelected dictatorship of money.
● How that capitalist employer
and ruling class has long
cultivated the racial and ethnic (and other) divisions within the
working-class majority to maintain its immoral and now environmentally lethal
profits and power.
● How white working-class
people and working-class people of all colors and ethnicities have always done
the best for themselves when they reach out across those divisions to form
powerful unions and other grass-roots organization to fight the rich and
powerful.
● How the “psychological
wage” of whiteness—the sense that you are someone special and entitled
just because you are white—is lame, self-defeating pseudo-compensation for
economic exploitation by rich people.
● The many and remarkable
moments when black and white North American workers joined in common struggle
against capitalist exploiters, compelling the white ruling class to respond
with strategies of racial divide-and-rule. “Since the 17th century,” Viewpoint
Magazine editor Asad Haider has reminded us, “resistance to racial
oppression and [resistance to] capitalist exploitation [in North America] have
gone hand in hand,” led by militants and workers of all races who have
understood that a racially divided working class cannot prevail over the
wealthy few.
11. Drop any assumption that
any but a small number of heartland whites have been given reasonable
opportunities to know much if anything about the reality of racial oppression
in 21st-century America. Beyond the appalling hyperconcentration of many
millions of black Americans in communities that are shockingly devoid of
resources and opportunities for advancement, contemporary racial segregation
renders real black experience frightfully invisible to the nation’s white
majority. Thanks to the quietly but deeply persistent problem of U.S.
racial apartheid, much of white America’s image of black America is fed by
wildly distorted and dichotomous media images of spectacular black success (the
Obamas, Oprah and numerous superstar black athletes and entertainers) and black
“underclass” criminality. To make matters worse, racist mass incarceration
brings hundreds of thousands of young black urban felons into hundreds of
rurally situated prisons, putting white prison personnel in highly unpleasant
and conflictual contact with contemporary capitalist racial oppression’s most
hardened victims—not a good mix for racial healing and understanding, to say
the least.
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