Dear Brocialists: You’re not helping
I remember when Donald Trump won the GOP nomination. My mother — a white working class feminist — called me on the phone, shaken.
“He’s going to win, you know. He’s the only one of them who could win.”
My mother is an avowed socialist — not the story the media likes to tell about the white working class, but a more common one than you think — and anti-racist, and unlike the white middle class intelligentsia she knew what was coming. Maybe because unlike them, she’d actually spoken to a poor white person sometime in the last 10 years.
Now is the part where I consider it my obligation to point out that Trump’s average supporter in the primaries had an income of 80 thousand dollars a year, and that the poorest whites vote Democrat more consistently than any other group of white people, even in this election when there was frankly little reason to do so. It’s working class and lower middle class whites, particularly in rural areas, who turned up for Trump. In the past week, I’ve seen liberal journalists and academics brush away any attempts at class analysis by blaming racism, sexism, and homophobia. There is an element of bourgeois snobbery at work in this analysis, and it raises the hackles of working class white voters. At the same time, I’ve seen white university educated leftist commenters make the claim that it was entirely about class and nothing else.
Both analysis are reductive, and neither are helping.
If you have never lived in a small town or in a manufacturing town, it’s hard to explain the genuine desolation people throughout the Rust Belt and the Appalachians feel. I grew up in a town where it wasn’t safe to drink the water, where an ambulance could take more than an hour to get to an emergency, where the hospital turned off its lights to save on electricity costs, and where by the time I graduated high school I personally knew four people who had died of opiate overdoses. Domestic violence was the rule and not the exception. We had 8 churches and no grocery store, and appallingly high rates of diabetes. These are communities that are under genuine existential threats, who have been complicit in white supremacy but have failed to make the gains under neoliberal globalisation that the white middle class has.
Smarter people than me have written about the radicalisation of young white men online. I can’t write about male alienation or Christian alienation or any of the other elements of toxic sludge that led us here. What I can write about is white alienation, and what happens when we dismiss the valid economic concerns of a bunch of “rednecks” and “racists”.
When I started university I had already spent many years involved in activism and the labour movement. My mother was a union organiser, and I had traveled a little bit (within Canada) and unlike most of the people from my hometown, I had met and spoken to a Black person. I had something of a grasp on white privilege and supremacy, and as a gay disabled woman I understood the ways privilege seems invisible to you until it is taken away. My point is, I was the best possible audience for liberal race and gender politics, and even I found some of it difficult to swallow. I would never have said so out loud, but hearing first and second generation Canadians whose clothes cost more than my mother’s car label me as their oppressor smarted. These were the children of international business people, whose parents funded their lifestyle completely. How could I be in a position of power over them when my family had regularly used food banks? What “privilege” could be found in my shared bed with my mother and brother, hiding from the cold and from yet another drunken assault by my stepfather? They threw money around like water and made fun of how uneducated I sounded when I mispronounced a word that didn’t fit naturally in my working class rust belt drawl.
I didn’t develop a nuanced understanding of class and race and gender overnight. It took a lot of reading and a lot of exposure to socialist writers of colour to get there at all. The first time I read an article by a writer of colour acknowledging that poor whites are also oppressed I was genuinely moved. My previous exposure to race politics had suggested that if I was going to be a good anti-racist ally I would have to cut myself off completely from my community. Instead, I found a century of works by predominately Black female writers that spoke of how the white working class is oppressed and manipulated by the white bourgeoisie into maintaining white supremacy. It was a revelation.
I’ve seen middle class white journalists accuse rural working class whites of “voting against their own self interests”, but if you live in West Virginia and the mines have closed and your family has been devastated by foreclosures, welfare cuts, and heroin overdoses, what do you have to lose?
Raise your hand if you are a good liberal or a good leftist who has nonetheless voted for a Democrat or a Liberal, holding your nose and ignoring their complicity in drone strikes, war, and global capitalism. You probably morally abhor those things, but you like the rest of their platforms or you consider it your moral duty to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Put your hand down. Now you know how so many working class whites voted for Trump, even if they personally found his racist, xenophobic, and sexist rhetoric appalling.
The left did this to itself. At some point in the last half century, it stopped speaking to people it didn’t consider politically acceptable. By dismissing the white working class as bigoted, it justified making no attempts to reach out to them or to undermine classist systems of oppression. The destruction of the labour movement meant that working class whites lost one of their only tools for political engagement and activism.
White leftists from working class backgrounds: this is our problem to fix. We didn’t start it, but it follows nicely in the tradition of centuries of the rich using our bodies to fight their wars and clean their houses. If you’re an academic, bougie-lefty type now, it’s your job to make sure that the voices of the poor and dispossessed are not excluded from leftist organizing. If you’re still living and working in predominantly white working class communities, it’s your job to ensure that your organising is founded on anti-racist, feminist, and anti-homophobic principles.
I’m from a long line of working class white women. I know how to scrub the floors and clean up the messes caused by wealthy whites. And so it’s on us to once again pour bleach on bigotry and wipe the tears off the bourgeoisie. Our collective survival depends on it.
