White Working Class, With a New Foreword by Mark Cuban and a New Preface by the Author

by Mark Cuban

  Is this just “false consciousness”? Not really. The working class just wants what the professional elite already has: jobs that sustain them in their vision of a middle-class life. “The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend wrote me right after Trump was elected.

  A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Nor is minimum wage. Working-class men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15/hour instead of $9.50. What they want is a job that paves the way to a modest middle-class standard of living. Trump was the first politician in a long time to promise that. Many voters deeply appreciated the fact that at least he understood what they need.

  Conclusion

  THIS BOOK DESCRIBES a relationship gone bad: that between the white working class and the PME. Empathy’s a good place to start, but remedying this relationship will require more. Like all good family therapy, it will require not just that the family “troublemaker” learn to behave. What’s amiss is the family dynamic that cast the “troublemaker” in that unhappy role. Changing that dynamic requires change on the part of the family members who are “not in the wrong.”

  It’s 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,”289 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. If you like what that dynamic is doing to the country, by all means continue business as usual.

  I don’t, for two reasons. 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 class now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. Another key message is that elite truths don’t make sense in working-class lives. Working-class truths do, and my hope is that I’ve provided a window into why. If we’re not going to provide elite lives for the broad mass of people, neither can we expect them to embrace elite truths.

  Once the elite cast the white working class outside of its ambit of responsibility, the elite did what elites do. They ignored those who print their New York Times, make their KitchenAides,290 tell them at the doctor’s to undress from the waist down. The professional class first stopped noticing, and then they started condescending. Class cluelessness became class callousness.

  Much anxiety has been expressed about whether bringing the white working class into focus will mean that privileged whites will stop caring about racism. I think that remedying the relationship between the professional elite and working-class whites will actually help people of color. I recall a conversation with Angela Harris, an African-American law professor whom I was trying to interest in a joint conference on class. Angela, with her inimitable candor, told me I was describing an issue among white people. Implicit: not her business, but I should get on it. White-on-white crime, opined another friend in critical race theory.

  Ignoring and belittling the white working class is not a constructive move vis-à-vis people of color. I suggest a different approach: one that condemns racism and builds an interracial coalition for economic justice. If you don’t like how a family member behaves, the best approach is to assume that you need to establish a different relationship with them that brings out their better self. Typically that requires you to be your better self, too.

  Less anxiety has been expressed on the gender front. This is ironic, given that women just suffered an historic setback. But sometimes an insistent focus on gender is not the best way to help women. Remedying the relationship between the PME and working-class whites will stop misogyny from being seen as a delicious poke-in-the-eye of the powerful.

  I remain hopeful. Reckless alpha-male posturing, I suspect, will work about as well as it usually does: fine in the short term but poorly in the long term. Meanwhile, we need to begin the process of healing the rift between white elites and white workers so that class conflict no longer dominates and distorts our politics. We need to begin now.

  Acknowledgments

  Sarah Green Carmichael, my editor at Harvard Business Review, is the only reason I wrote my original Election Night article or this book. She clearly knows better than I do what I should write and when I should write it. She also knows how to improve my writing so it’s readable. I owe her.

  This book was written under hydraulic time pressure, and yet four people took time out of their busy lives to read it and give me comments. Suzanne Lebsock took a lot of time, saving me from gross errors of fact, judgment, and taste. It is not every author who gets a MacArthur-certified genius as a writing coach, historical consultant, and proofreader. I am humbled that this book got such close attention from someone whose writing skills far exceed my own.

  Jennifer Sherman, whose work I admire and rely on a lot, also gave me unvarnished comments just when I needed them. So did Shauna Marshall, whose anxiety that focusing on the white working class will reinforce racial hierarchy I did not fully allay, but I tried. Thanks, too, to Michael Mensah for reaching out to discuss the racial dynamic in Trump’s election.

  Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul of the Center for Equitable Growth recalculated, on short notice, median incomes and other data so I could update definitions of the professional elite and the working class; I really appreciate their work. My agent, Roger S. Williams, of Roger Williams Agency, is the best agent a girl could have. Lisa McCorkell stayed up until 2:20 am to give me crucial comments and feedback, and then she and Marina Multhaup worked 24/7 to make the cites spic ‘n span (and accurate). Also supporting this large undertaking were Sonia Marton and Saima Ali. Hilary Hardcastle, my library liaison, provides the expert librarianship that has transformed my research life. Thanks to Frank Furstenberg, Nina Segre, and Linda Bialecki for reviewing the book on short notice. Thanks, too, to two old friends who helped me find stuff quick: Chris Foreman and Dorothy Ross.

  My husband James X. Dempsey not only read this book and gave valuable comments; all of my thinking about the white working class reflects 40 years of conversations with him. My mother-in-law Ruth Dempsey kept my spirits up as only she can do. And my children kept me centered and down to earth. I love them very much.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. Joan C. Williams et al., Climate Control: Gender and Racial Bias in Engineering? Center for WorkLife Law and Society of Women Engineers, October 2016.

  2. This study used the résumés of 80 higher-class and 78 lower-class men; the candidates were identically qualified. It found that 16.25 percent of the higher-class men received interview invitations, but only one lower-class man did. Lauren A. Rivera and András Tilcsik, “Class Advantage, Commitment Penalty: The Gendered Effect of Social Class Signals in an Elite Labor Market,” American Sociological Review 81, no. 6 (2016): 1097–1131.

  3. Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: Harper, 2017).

  4. Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity–Pay Gap,” August 2018, https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/.

  5. Raj Chetty et al., The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940, NBER Working Paper No. 22910, 2017.

  6. The number of the crimes reported to the FBI increased by 17 percent from 2016 to 2017, FBI, “2017 Hate Crime Statistics Released,” November 13, 2018, https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2017-hate-crime-statistics-released-111318. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 56 percent of Americans say President Trump has made race relations worse; 65 percent say it is more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views, with 45 percent saying this has become more acceptable. Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, and Kiana Cox, “Race in America 2019,” Pew Research Center, April 9, 2019, ht
tps://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/.

  7. Richard Feloni, “High-Profile Investors Like Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, and Meg Whitman Are Flocking to a $150 Million Fund Nurturing Startups in Overlooked American Cities,” Business Insider, February 6, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/rise-of-the-rest-steve-case-jd-vance-2018-1.

  8. James Manyika et al., Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation, McKinsey Global Institute, December 2017.

  9. Emily Badger et al., “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” New York Times, March 19, 2018.

  10. Kristi Berner, “Can Businesses Help Fix the Incarceration Crisis? Columbia Business School, April 30, 2018, https://www.8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/columbia-business/can-businesses-help-fix-incarceration-crisis.

  11. Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000): 116–128.

  Chapter 1

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married..._with_Children; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Simpson.

  2. Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers, America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 11. Teixeira and Rogers call the white working class the “forgotten majority,” because “we haven’t heard much about them of late and . . . they are . . . about 55 percent of the voting population” (p. x).

  3. Ann Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, no. 49 (2015): 15078–15083; J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016), 51.

  4. Noah Bierman and Lisa Mascaro, “Donald Trump Supporter in South Carolina: We’re Voting with Our Middle Finger,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-na-trump-south-carolina-20160216-story.html.

  5. Olga Khazan, “Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair,” The Atlantic, November 4, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/boomers-deaths-pnas/413971/.

  6. Forsetti’s Justice, “An Insider’s View: The Dark Rigidity of Fundamentalist Rural America,” alternet.org, November 22, 2016, http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/rural-america-understanding-isnt-problem.

  7. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972).

  8. Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0.

  Chapter 2

  9. Sam Grobart, “Everybody Thinks They’re Middle-Class,” BloombergBusinessweek, September 15, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-america-divided/middle-class/.

  10. “How Close Are You to the Top 1%?” cnn.com, http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/.

  11. Joan C. Williams and Heather Boushey, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle,” Center for American Progress (2010): 3, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2010/01/pdf/threefaces.pdf.

  12. For a description of the methodology used to calculate the income medians and ranges for the poor, the professional elite, and the working class, see Williams and Boushey, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict” (data and method appendix), 74. Many thanks to Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth for updating these figures with 2015 data obtained from the 2014 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (dollar values adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index Research Series available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

  13. Rachel Zupek, “15 Jobs that Pay $70,000 per Year,” cnn.com, August 27, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/08/27/cb.jobs.that.pay.70k/index.html?iref=nextin.

  14. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Outlook Handbook: Police and Detectives,” U.S. Department of Labor, https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detectives.htm.

  15. Williams and Boushey, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict,” 3 (figures updated with 2015 data). Many thanks to Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth for updating these figures with 2015 data obtained from the 2014 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (dollar values adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index Research Series available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). One note: I follow the convention of sometimes referring to the working class as “blue collar,” although many have pink-collar jobs (as dental hygienists or “the girl” in the front office of the tire shop) or low-level white-collar jobs (as postal worker, receiving clerk, salesperson of paper goods to restaurants). The low-level white-collar jobs are gleaned from Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  16. Willams and Boushey, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict,” ii. Many thanks to Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth for updating these figures with 2015 data obtained from the 2014 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (dollar values adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index Research Series available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

  17. Nate Silver, “The Mythology of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support,” FiveThirtyEight, May 3, 2016, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/.

  18. In fact, the median incomes of the Trump primary voters in swing states are close to the $64,000 median income we found for the missing middle in 2010: Michigan (Trump voters’ median income: $61,000), North Carolina ($62,000), Ohio ($64,000), and Wisconsin ($69,000). In the primary, relatively wealthier Republicans mostly voted for Marco Rubio ($88,000) or Dennis Kasich ($91,000). Trump voters’ medians were a little higher in Florida ($70,000) and Pennsylvania ($71,000). See Nate Silver, “The Mythology of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support,” FiveThirtyEight, May 3, 2016, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/.

  19. Nate Silver, “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, November 22, 2016, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/.

  Chapter 3

  20. For a complex answer to this complex topic, see Mark Pauly, Adam Leive, and Scott Harrington, “The Price of Responsibility: The Impact of Health Reform on Non-Poor Uninsureds,” NBER Working Paper 21565 (2015).

  21. Joan C. Williams and Heather Boushey, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict: The Poor, the Professionals, and the Missing Middle,” Center for American Progress (2010): 9, https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2010/01/pdf/threefaces.pdf.

  22. Other books that get at this problem are Joseph T. Howell, Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1972); and Maria J. Kefalas, Working-Class Heroes: Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

  23. J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016).

  24. Lillian B. Rubin, Families on the Fault Line: America’s Working Class Speaks About the Family, the Economy, Race, and Ethnicity (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 94, 96–97.

  25. Williams and Boushey, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict,” 7, 9, 36.

  26. Ellen E. Kossek, et al., “Family, Friend, and Neighbour Child Care Providers and Maternal Well-Being in Low-Income Systems: An Ecological Social Perspective,” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 81 (2008): 370.

  27. Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and
Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 19–20. Andrew Cherlin argues that working-class guys now embrace self-actualization rather than self-discipline (Andrew Cherlin and Timothy Nelson, “The Would-Be Working Class Today,” in Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America, ed. Andrew Cherlin [New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014]). No doubt some do. As hard living has claimed a larger percentage of the white working class, more working-class whites may well eschew the self-discipline ideal documented by Michèle Lamont and many others. Yet I remain convinced that its aspirational hold remains strong for settled working-class families.

  28. Alfred Lubrano, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (New York: Wiley, 2005), 16–17.

  29. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, 2000, 1.

  30. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, 75, 91, 92, 113, 123, 156.

  31. Julie Bettie, Women Without Class: Girls, Race, and Identity (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 15.

  32. Howell, Hard Living on Clay Street, 257.

  33. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men, 27.

  34. Kefalas, Working-Class Heroes, 12.

  35. Joan C. Williams, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 165.

  36. Jennifer Sherman, Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 126.

  37. John Tierney, “For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It,” New York Times, December 29, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/science/30tier.html.

  38. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, 92; Linda Gorman, “Is Religion Good for You?” National Bureau of Economic Research, http://www.nber.org/digest/oct05/w11377.html.

  39. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, 94.

  40. Jonathan Gruber cited in Vance, Hillbilly Elegy, 92.

  41. Suzanne Lebsock, “Snow Falling on Magnolias,” in Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections, ed. John B. Boles (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 291.