How the Left Can Gain Footing in White America
By
Paul Street
From Truthdig
Iowa Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cathy Glasson, right, speaks to Iowa
fast-food and hospital workers outside Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds' office during
a protest following her Condition of the State address in January at the
statehouse in Des Moines, Iowa. (New York World-Telegram and Sun /
Wikimedia)
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 Obama riffing
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
see as 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.
