Is the White working class an angry, backward monolith—some 90 million bigoted Americans without college degrees, all standing around in factories and fields thumping their dirty hands with baseball bats? You might think so after two years of media fixation on this version of the aggrieved laborer: male, White, conservative, racist, sexist.
This account does White supremacy a great service in several ways: It ignores workers of color, along with humane, even progressive White workers. It allows college-educated White liberals to signal superior virtue while denying the sins of their own place and class. And it conceals well-informed, formally educated White conservatives—from middle-class suburbia to the highest ranks of influence—who voted for Donald Trump in legions.
The trouble begins with language: elite pundits regularly misuse “working class” as shorthand for right-wing White guys wearing tool belts. My father, a White man and lifelong construction worker who labors alongside immigrants and people of color on job sites across the Midwest and South working for a Kansas-based general contractor owned by a woman, would never make such an error.
Most struggling Whites I know live lives of quiet desperation feeling angry at their White bosses, not at their coworkers or neighbors of color. My dad’s previous three bosses were all White men he loathed for abuses of privilege and people, including himself.
It is unfair power that my father despises. The last rant I heard him on was not about race or immigration but about the recent royal wedding, the spectacle of which made him sick.
“What’s so special about the royals?” he told me over the phone from a cheap motel after working construction hundreds of miles from home. “But they’ll get the best health care, the best education, the best food. Meanwhile I’m in Marion, Arkansas. All I want is some chickens and a garden and place to go fishing once in a while.”
What my father seeks is not a return to times that were worse for women and people of color but progress toward a society in which everyone can get by, including his White, college-educated son who graduated into the Great Recession and for ten years sold his own plasma for gas money. After being laid off during that recession in 2008, my dad had to cash in his retirement to make ends meet while looking for another job. He has labored nearly every day of his life and has no savings beyond Social Security. He does bear some individual responsibility for those outcomes, in my view, but for decisions and behaviors that financially comfortable people make every day with far less consequence.
Yes, my father is angry at someone. But it is not his coworker Gem, a Filipino immigrant with whom he has split a room to pocket some of the per diem from their employer, or Francisco, a Hispanic crew member with whom he recently built a Wendy’s north of Memphis. His fury, rather, is directed at bosses who exploit labor and governments that punish the working poor—two sides of a capitalist democracy that bleeds people like him dry.
“Corporations,” Dad said. “That’s it. That’s the point of the sword that’s killing us.”
Among White workers, this negative energy has been manipulated to great political effect by a conservative trifecta of media, private interest, and celebrity that we might call Fox, Koch, and Trump.
As my dad told me, “There’s jackasses on every level of the food chain—but those jackasses are the ones that play all these other jackasses.”
Still, millions of White working-class people have refused to be played. They have resisted the traps of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and nationalism and voted the other way—or, in too many cases, not voted at all. I am far less interested in calls for empathy toward struggling White Americans who spout or abide hatred than I am in tapping into the political power of those who don’t.
Like many Midwestern workers I know, my dad has more in common ideologically with New York’s democratic-socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than with the White Republicans who run our state. Having spent most of his life doing dangerous, underpaid work without health insurance, he supports the ideas of single-payer health care and a universal basic income.
Much has been made of the White working class’s political shift to the right. But Donald Trump won among White college graduates too. According to the Pew Research Center in 2016, 49 percent of Whites with degrees picked Trump, while 45 percent picked Hillary Clinton (among them, support for Trump was stronger among men). Such Americans hardly “vote against their own best interest.” Media coverage suggests that economically distressed Whiteness elected Trump, when in fact it was just plain Whiteness.
Stories dispelling the persistent notion that racism is the sole province of “uneducated” people in derided “flyover” states are right before our eyes: A White man caught on camera assaulting a Black man at a White supremacist rally last August in Charlottesville, Virginia, was recently identified as a California engineer. This year, a White male lawyer berated restaurant workers for speaking Spanish in New York City. A White, female, Stanford-educated chemical engineer called the Oakland, California, police on a family for, it would appear, barbecuing while Black.
Among the thirty states tidily declared red after the 2016 election, in two-thirds of them Clinton received 35 to 48 percent of the vote. My White working-class family was part of that large minority, rendered invisible by the Electoral College and graphics that paint each state red or blue.
In the meantime, critical stories here in “red states” go underdiscussed and underreported, including:
Barriers to voting. Forces more influential than the political leanings of a White factory worker decide election outcomes: gerrymandering, super PACs, corrupt officials. In Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Kobach blocked thirty thousand would-be voters from casting ballots (and was recently held in contempt of federal court for doing so).
Different information sources. Some of my political views shifted when my location, peer group, and news sources changed during my college years. Many Americans today have a glut of information but poor media literacy—hard to rectify if you work on your feet all day, don’t own a computer, and didn’t get a chance to learn the vocabulary of national discourse.
Populism on the left. Today, “populism” is often used interchangeably with “far right.” But the American left is experiencing a populist boom. According to its national director, Democratic Socialists of America nearly quadrupled in size from 2016 to 2017—and saw its biggest one-day boost the day after Ocasio-Cortez’s recent primary upset. Progressive congressional candidates with working-class backgrounds and platforms have major support heading into the midterms here in Kansas, including the White civil rights attorney James Thompson, who grew up in poverty, and Sharice Davids, a Native American lawyer who would be the first openly lesbian representative from Kansas.
To find a more accurate vision of these United States, we must resist pat narratives about any group—including the working class on whom our current political situation is most often pinned. The greatest con of 2016 was not persuading a White laborer to vote for a nasty billionaire with soft hands. Rather, it was persuading a watchdog press to incompletely portray the American working class. The resulting national conversation, which seeks to rename my home “Trump country,” elevates a White supremacist agenda by undermining resistance and solidarity where it is most urgent and brave.
Author’s note: About a month after publishing the above essay, the New York Times published the follow-up below, under the headline “Our Blind Spots Often Hide the Truth About America,” with their editor’s note at the top.
Editor’s note: An op-ed by Sarah Smarsh, “Liberal Blind Spots Are Hiding the Truth About ‘Trump Country,’ ” received more than fifteen hundred comments from readers. Here are a selection of the comments, which raised questions that we put to the author.
Mary V., Virginia: I had a conversation last week with a woman I had recently met. We were talking about the importance of supporting women in all types of roles—as professional chefs, doctors (she is an emergency-room physician), and throughout all levels of society, including politics. I casually mentioned how cool I thought it was that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had won her race in the Bronx. My companion’s demeanor immediately changed, and she flatly replied, “As a Christian and a capitalist, I have absolutely no interest in anything that socialist has to say.”
The speed with which this happened was both startling and disturbing. Our friendly conversation was wiped out in a matter of seconds by her swift application of labels—her own self-identification, and to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
Q: To what extent do labels prevent productive dialogue?
Sarah Smarsh: A couple of years ago, over beers at a bar in Texas, my dad—a White construction worker from rural Kansas, described in my piece—shocked me by saying, “If you get past everything you’ve been told and really read up on it, ‘socialism’ doesn’t sound all that bad.” Soon after that, a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, won the Democratic caucus or primary for president in twenty-two states, including our home state of Kansas.
Not everyone is so open-minded. The weaponization of terms such as “feminist,” “liberal,” and “socialist”—and thus the vilification of those who claim those labels—has long been a successful strategy for preserving power. Labels always oversimplify, but at their worst they dehumanize: “illegals,” for instance. You are right to be disturbed by the negative charge with which your acquaintance said “that socialist.”
Diminishing a perceived opponent or an inconvenient fact through name-calling—say, “fake news”—is a hallmark of the current Republican administration, but dangerous labels work in all directions. Envisioning a “red state” as a field of “deplorables” leads some self-righteous liberals to say those states “get what they deserve”—as though everyone suffering for lack of Medicaid expansion voted for their conservative state officials, as though everyone even gets to vote. In most states, the losing political party receives 30 to 40 percent of the vote. Those millions of people, along with the disenfranchised, are no more represented by their state administrations than liberals nationally are represented by our current president. Calling their home “Trump country” is thus a childish misnomer.
Labels even err when self-ascribed. Into my early twenties, I inaccurately called myself “conservative” with little understanding of what that meant. One of the most destructive assumptions we make in political discourse is that people’s parties and votes align with their beliefs. In fact, a better indicator of political behavior is one’s place, culture, and social group—conditions we’re born into, by no virtue or fault of our own.
Productive dialogue requires that we set aside our assumptions about other people and places and refuse to reduce them to labels—even ones that they themselves embrace. We must remain vigilant against easy, reductive frameworks, perhaps especially those that appeal to our own biases.
Leonard Ray, Baton Rouge, Louisiana: I live in the area that you might think people describe as “Trump country” (our state voted 58–38 for Donald Trump). To be honest, most of the White people I know don’t have many African-American neighbors… sometimes coworkers, yes, but many times not even that. “Trump country” (as well as “non-Trump country”) isn’t exactly racially integrated to a great degree… there are pockets where it is, but not many. So I’m not sure there’s much opportunity to be, in a personal sense, mad at coworkers or neighbors of color.
Q: You say your father works alongside minorities, but what about people who have few interactions with people outside their race?
Smarsh: I grew up mostly in a small town that was overwhelmingly White. The handful of students of color were embraced—not because White students were liberally minded, I think, but because by virtue of our shared home a minority student was “one of us.” As the researcher Brené Brown has written: “People are hard to hate up close. Move in.”
I am certain, however, that some of the White students in my hometown who loved their individual Brown peers harbored racist views about those minorities as a group. Similarly, my father’s positive working relationship and friendships with laborers of color does not preclude him from racist thoughts or actions.
Where the limitations of individual experience beget tribalism, we might summon the power of information and education to help us transcend our own groups and narrow visions of the world. What if An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, were required reading in a public school’s social studies curriculum? What if public college were available to everyone, tuition-free? One doesn’t need a degree to know the difference between love and hate, right and wrong. One does, in a world of racist messages, need unbiased facts to form a worldview that does not favor Whiteness.
While we work toward systemic justice and integration, we can strive at the individual level to break free from our proverbial bubbles. My humble attempt at this involves attending public events, celebrations, and church services in communities outside my own, and following and reading people of color, whose wisdom for answering your question likely exceeds mine.
Sean C., Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada: Sarah Smarsh’s article is one part anecdotal and one part wishful thinking (it would be nice if economic populism was the key to reaching Trump voters). There has been extensive polling and social science assessment of Trump voters, and White racial grievance is overwhelmingly the biggest predictor of support for him. Indeed, White racial grievance has been driving the White working class toward the Republicans since the 1960s. She is correct to note that Trump also won plenty of White college graduates, but that is a different issue, as the well-off have always supported Republicans. It’s easy to see what they get from Trump—a big tax cut.
Q: Are White racial grievances deciding factors for higher-earning Trump supporters as well, just more easily hidden in their votes for a tax cut?
Smarsh: I agree that motivations among different income brackets of White Trump voters surely differ, but only in the version of power they seek to preserve. Ultimately, though it might be harder to see in one group or another, they all reap both racial and economic advantage.
However, your point is misplaced here. You seem to be responding, as did a number of commenters, as though I wrote a piece about Trump voters—a group that has, by my estimation, enjoyed too much attention. I wrote instead about people like my White, working-class family who are presumed, based on their place and identity, to be Trump supporters but are, in fact, something else—apathetic or disenfranchised nonvoters, Democrats, newly minted democratic socialists, independents.
As I wrote, “I am far less interested in calls for empathy toward struggling White Americans who spout or abide hatred than I am in tapping into the political power of those who don’t.”
Yet from another comment recommended more than thirteen hundred times: “To the author: If your father and good people like him hate unfair power, corporations, and bosses that exploit workers, then wouldn’t supporting Trump be against their own interests?” To which I answer, yes, it would. That’s why the people I wrote about don’t support Trump.
This dissonance between my story and a large portion of the reaction (Me: Not everyone in “Trump country” is for Trump. Them: Then why are they all for Trump!) proves the point of my piece—that the dominant narrative about much of our country is not just inaccurate but willfully blind.
Lissa, Virginia: “The trouble begins with language: elite pundits regularly…” This article gives all of us a lot to ponder. But I cannot get past the number of times I have written a comment asking for an explanation of the word “elite” in the context in which the word is used in a specific article. Extrapolating terms incorrectly and otherwise generalizing is at the core of what Sarah Smarsh is arguing. She begins by doing the very thing she goes on to lament. I don’t want to take away from her very real points, but the word “elite” is one of the words that has been misused as a tool for division and often as a tool for deriding high levels of education.
Q: Does the term “elite” get misused and applied too broadly, just as “working class” often is?
Smarsh: The term “elite” is successfully leveraged by conservative propagandists seeking to cast coastal liberals as condescending snobs. A native of rural Kansas, I’ve lived in blue urban places, where some of my dearest friends and most staunch professional advocates reside. Having straddled that cultural divide, as a writer and citizen, I resist the stereotyping of either side.
However, objections to valid class critiques—feeling outraged when working-class people express their grievances toward wealth without pausing to point out all the virtuous people who possess it—often strike me as the class equivalent of Whites accusing people of color of reverse racism, or men accusing feminists of misandry. The prevailing narratives of our media and culture operate in service to those male, White, or financially comfortable people who claim equal offense. So we must listen with particular concern to the protests of those for whom inaccurate portrayals represent not just distasteful generalizations but economic and even mortal danger. If articulating that injustice comes with an edge of anger, well, try being on the losing end of a narrative every day of your life and see how patient it makes your language.
My piece uses the term in question once: “elite pundits regularly misuse ‘working class’ as shorthand for right-wing White guys wearing tool belts.” Here I am describing political commentators who hold the immense privilege of being called upon for their opinions in national media. That is, by definition, an elite platform, and its rarefied stature is relevant to my discussion of classist narratives. I’m not generalizing but rather specifying a real power structure in our country.
Steve Paradis, Flint, Michigan: I wonder what the newspapers are like in Wichita, Kansas. I grew up watching my parents reading the daily paper and picked up the habit from them. Front to back page, too, just as it was delivered, scanning every page, even the boring local stuff about zoning boards and school board meetings. That same paper now has about three pages of local news—mostly crime or mayhem—and the obits. The rest is homogenized stories from the various wire services; the paper itself is a mid-state edition covering about a hundred-mile radius. That means the local political news coverage is gone, and there’s only a page or two of state news. So you don’t see your life in the paper anymore, no more than you see on television, broadcast, or cable. You don’t see yourself or people like you in the media, and it’s easy to think that the media doesn’t think you matter.
Q: Does your father seek news outlets different from that of other working-class members of his community? Does he feel he is incorrectly portrayed by more “liberal” news outlets?
Smarsh: Like most newspapers in midsize cities, the Wichita Eagle staff and print product has shrunk since my childhood in the 1980s and ’90s. I grew up at the tail end of the newspaper era and still “take the paper,” reading it front to back each morning. I was a member of the last class of my journalism school to receive an old-fashioned newspaper training before the digital era altered curricula toward “media convergence.” The demise of local news was the backdrop of my early career, increasing my awareness of how a dearth of local reporting resources is inextricably woven into today’s divisive political climate.
My piece names disparate information sources among the electorate as one of the most overlooked influences on political ideologies, party identification, and voting habits. I have spent much of my career developing strategies to counteract that civic media crisis. It’s one reason that I still live in my home state of Kansas rather than a major media center—a sense of responsibility to live in the place about which I write.
Coastal media is often criticized for inadequate “parachute journalism” into Middle America, but it shouldn’t be New York’s job to understand Nebraska. Nebraska understands Nebraska. I am sure that state is teeming with qualified journalists who still have local contacts and understandings, who were laid off in the last fifteen years, and who would gladly report for duty if someone paid them to do so.
Until then, as you say, people there and in so many places are left with wildly biased and polarized social media “silos,” national outlets that rarely mention their home, and—if they’re lucky—cash-strapped local outlets for their information. For those in rural America, I know firsthand, the resulting sense of not just isolation but misrepresentation and even invisibility is profound. That’s shifted some in the last few years, but now when they’re written about, it’s all Trump or opioids or economic despair.
There’s a lot more to those communities. There’s joy, heroic community problem-solving, and even some liberals. To remain unseen and unheard in national conversation is an invalidation. It’s no surprise that some might be suspicious of “the media” and vulnerable to messaging that journalists aren’t trustworthy.
As for my dad, he believes his best news source is folks on the ground—his fellow construction workers on job sites, locals in line at gas stations, and, as he traverses the Midwest and South for the next job, cashiers he chats up at the grocery store. He makes a point of asking them what’s going on in their communities and what they think about current events, and he shares his information in kind. Even with a daughter for a journalist, he most prizes stories straight from the mouths of those who live them. So do I. As he put it when I asked him, “I get my news from the people I talk to, not Sean Hannity.”
Liz, New York City, New York: As a native Arkansan, I so deeply appreciate what Sarah Smarsh is saying about seeing the complexity of people’s experience, and the urgent necessity for working people of all races, sexes, and locations to band together. As an adopted New Yorker, I felt stabbed by the word “elite,” which has become a catchword by which conservatives dismiss and disparage everything that folks in this great city think and feel.
I am a queer theologian, a single mother of two who works three jobs and, like most New Yorkers, struggles every month to pay the exorbitant rent. I am nearly desperate for a movement to take hold along the lines Smarsh describes: those of us who struggle refusing to be duped by the powerful and wealthy forces that pit us against one another for their own gain, seeing one another as we really are, as we really struggle, as we really hope and dream for a better life, for all of us. For that reason, I’ll tamp down my visceral reaction to the unfortunate word “elite.” Ms. Smarsh, thank you for this eloquent piece. We have more in common than even you may know, and I hope we can keep building that mutual understanding.
Q: What would you say to those who feel hidden behind a label?
Smarsh: I told my dad to never read the comments, but he did—and yours was the one he wanted me to read. It moved him deeply, so I’ll let him respond: “This person is what the world needs. I am inspired by her grit, determination, hope, unity as an answer. Her life should not be like this in America.”