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I wasn't able to find a photographer's name
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Article by me, below, about recent research into "deaths of despair" among American whites, especially poor whites. Article first appeared in FrontPage magazine here. Article relates contempt for and hostility to poor whites to the Bieganski stereotype.
"Deaths
of Despair" and Left-Wing Hostility to Poor Whites' Narratives.
Where
there Is No Vision the People Perish
In March,
2017, Anne Case, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public
Affairs at Princeton University, and her husband, Sir Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate,
gained much media coverage for their work. They reported that death rates are
rising among those American whites who are classified as "working
class," "non-college educated," or simply "poor." Suicide,
drug addiction, and alcoholism cause a significant enough number of these anomalous
deaths that the researchers dubbed them "deaths of despair." There is
no similar rise in death rates among Europeans in roughly comparable
socioeconomic cohorts, or African Americans or Hispanic Americans, whose death
rates are improving.
Case
and Deaton are economists. They seek the cause and the solution to the problem
they describe in facts and figures. I seek the cause and any potential solution
to "deaths of despair" in narrative: in the stories that people tell
about themselves, and the stories their opponents tell about them. Abundant
examples of warring narratives are readily found in the comments sections of
online discussions of Case and Deaton's work.
In The Atlantic, the most popular comment is from an anonymous "middle-aged
white man." He wrote,
"We feel downtrodden, but we don't
even get to use the language of the oppressed since we're universally acclaimed
as the oppressor. And we don't even get to take on the role of an oppressor
since we're powerless. We used to be breadwinners, but now we're not. We used
to be fathers, but more and more often our kids aren't with us. We're certainly
not the heads of household … We've abandoned religion, so there's no hope of a
reward in the next life. We have no faith in a government who doesn't seem to
care about us … the world has passed us by and doesn't need or want us anymore."
Responses
to this plaintive confession are unsympathetic. Posters allege that poor whites
are racist, ignorant, lazy, junk-food eating, beer-swilling opiate addicts who
cause their own problems by voting Republican.
One
April, 2016 Salon headline reflects the attitude: "We
Must Shame Dumb Trump Fans: The White Working Class Are Not Victims."
In
December, 2016, after Markos Moulitsas advised his readers to
rejoice over coal miners losing health insurance, The New
Republic suggested,
"Liberals Should Try Not Having So Much Contempt for the Poor."
Case
and Deaton's work on "deaths of despair" among poor whites is a
challenging topic for me. As my fingertips hover over a silent keyboard, my
guts begin to twist and my breath becomes shallow. I am poor and white. My
father mined coal and carried rich men's bags at a country club. My mother was
a cleaning woman and factory worker. My grandparents, in the Old Country, were
peasants. There are no princes, bishops, or admirals in my family tree. There
are lots of folks who withstood Nazis, Soviets, kulturkampf, and czars. As a
child visiting Slovakia I met an aunt who was gang raped by Red Army soldiers
and I saw the beaten, animal look in the eyes of my loved ones when talk turned
to the Nazi occupation.
By merely
mentioning left-wing prejudice against poor, white people, I risk being
demonized as a flesh-and-blood embodiment of the very stereotype I am
attempting to reject. I must be a KKK member. Silencing me earns the silencer
points as a Politically Correct knight – not in white – oh, no, not in white –
but in multicultural armor.
There
isn't even a name for what I am trying to describe, no "Islamophobia,"
"transphobia," "looksism," or "ableism." Liberal
contempt for poor whites is the hate that dare not speak its name. What do you
call someone who chooses to condemn people he dislikes as "white trash,"
"rednecks," "Bohunks," "honkies," "crackers,"
"hillbillies," "greasers," "trailer trash," "Okies,"
or "knuckle-dragging-wife-beater-t-shirt wearing Neanderthals"? Possibly
you call him "professor," "author," "congressman,"
"minister," or "late night comedian." Maybe you call him
"Mr. President." During his successful, 2008 presidential campaign, Barack
Obama told wealthy donors in San Francisco that poor whites are bitter xenophobes
who cling to guns and religion. One blogger
paraphrased Obama's message as, "Vote for me, you corncob-smokin',
banjo-strokin', chicken-chokin', cousin-pokin', inbred hillbilly racist
morons."
Yes,
right-wingers support cutting government programs, and right-wingers can be
snobs. But a right-wing person's ideological adherence to small government,
free market principles, or even merely his own fist tightening around his
earnings that the taxman craves to requisition is one thing. What I have felt
in encounters with some-not-all leftists is something different. While the left
protects some groups with speech codes and concepts like
"microaggression," ugly slurs against poor whites are met with
laughter – or a sense of righteousness. Not only is it okay to mock poor
whites; doing so elevates the virtue status of the speaker. Why? Left-wing
hostility to poor American whites is not caused by mere chance, but by real
conflicts in how left-wingers and poor whites tell their respective stories.
During
the mass immigration c. 1880-1924, the left passionately courted coal miners,
steel smelters and garment workers. Marx wrote, "Workers of the world,
unite!" but these immigrants didn't want to identify as workers. They
identified as Poles, or Italians or Americans, or Catholics. And they didn't
especially want to unite with other workers. In spite of robber barons' harsh
treatment, the immigrants wanted to succeed at capitalism, not overturn it. Marx
wrote that religion is the opiate of the masses, but these immigrants clung to
their faith.
I
tasted some of poor white's rejection of leftists' unrequited love back in the
1980s, when I was a fellow traveler with Manhattan's card-carrying communists.
"Don't you see," a comrade instructed, "when chivalrous Polish
men kiss your hand, they are silently demanding that you use those hands to
wash dishes?" Being a Polish-American woman who runs a clean home is a
cherished part of my self-identification. I could never adopt his ideal of a communist
woman, who, apparently, is anti-dish-washing.
I
repeatedly pelted my comrades with this question: Marx taught that the onset of
the dictatorship of the proletariat was an historical inevitability. Communism
was so appealing to the workers that humanity would eventually evolve into the
workers' paradise. And yet, no one was less interested in bringing on communism
than the workers themselves. Communism smashed "bourgeois" values.
Free love, violence, and sedition were all morally acceptable. But in left-wing
thought, there was original sin, and that sin was rejecting communism. American
workers were not only uninterested in reading my comrades' free pamphlets,
American workers, by ignoring Marx and living by capitalist and Christian values,
were deeply immoral.
My
comrades replied to my question by identifying themselves as the
"vanguard," a more advanced and more enlightened version of the
working class. It was the vanguard's job to bring the workers into alignment
with the party. They were, in short, an intellectual and moral elite whose goal
it was to educate, lead, and save American workers. Working class Americans
were not yet quite smart, moral, or trustworthy enough to run their own lives.
The vanguard's self-definition condemned American workers to a contrasting
definition: "You reject us because you are stupid."
The
left realized that poor whites were not embracing them. They moved on to more
revolutionary populations. Poor whites were abandoned for blacks.
Harvard
sociologist Orlando Patterson, himself a black man,
remarks that young African Americans, as a group, perform worse than other
groups academically, and yet they have among the highest self-esteem. Why?
Their positive self-image "has powerful support from some of America's
largest corporations." Drugs, crime, sexual conquests, and hip-hop music
earn blacks "a great deal of respect from white youths." American
culture has worked hard to elevate the self-esteem of African Americans, and to
marginalize any critique of them. When poor whites attempt to adapt to and
succeed in American capitalism, leftists dismiss them as contemptible,
counter-revolutionary suckers. Patterson describes powerful whites rewarding
blacks for playing the role of the outlaw. Blacks who don't play the outlaw,
from Booker T. Washington to Sidney Poitier to Ben Carson, are derided as
"Uncle Tom."
The
left has shown that it can abandon blacks, too, and move on to even more
revolutionary Muslims. In 2010, black journalist Juan Williams said that when
he sees passengers in Muslim garb on airplanes, he gets nervous. NPR fired
Williams for this comment. NPR's president, Vivian Schiller, publicly stated
that Juan Williams, because he fears Muslims on airplanes, requires the
ministrations of a psychiatrist.
The
left's self-definition as a vanguard who is leading the less enlightened masses
to a Utopian future plays into another, related reason why the left has such a
problem with poor whites. It's a blunt and primal urge: everyone wants someone
to feel superior to. African Americans traditionally supplied that need in the
US. The Civil Rights Movement rendered taboo overt displays of
white-over-black. The need to feel superior to someone did not disappear. Poor
white people filled the gap. Two kinds of poor white people, Poles and
Southerners, were selected as epitomes of everything that was supposed to be wrong
with the entire class.
UC
Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes described how Polak jokes suddenly became
popular in the 1970s, shortly after the previous decade's Civil Rights
advances. Dundes wrote, "Lower-class whites are not militant and do not
constitute a threat to middle-class white America ... with the Polack [joke]
cycle, it is the lower class, not Negroes, which provides the outlet for
aggression and means of feeling superior."
Poet
Lloyd van Brunt is from the south. He, too, saw the Polak joke as an expression
of contempt for all poor whites.
"Unlike
blacks and other racial minorities, poor and mostly rural whites have few
defenders, no articulated cause ... And they have been made to feel deeply
ashamed of themselves – as I was. This shame, this feeling of worthlessness, is
one of the vilest and most self-destructive emotions to be endured. To be poor
in a country that places a premium on wealth is in itself shameful. To be white
and poor is unforgivable ... That's why I call them the Polish-joke class, the
one group everybody feels free to belittle, knowing that no politically correct
boundaries will be violated ... trying to hide some shameful secret, some deep
and unreachable sense of worthlessness ... is the legacy of America's poor
whites."
This
culture-wide treatment of poor whites as inferior is so powerful poor whites
resort to it themselves. As a graduate student, I worked on the Polak
stereotype. One day I was seated at a staff table with other university
personnel. One of my peers proudly remarked that she had received her degree at
one of the best universities in the South. The following words popped out of my
mouth, "'The South' and 'best university' cancel each other out."
Everyone
at the table laughed, except for the Southern woman. Her face fell. I had hurt
and humiliated her in public, and no one at the table had the sense to come to
her defense, and to chastise me.
It
took me years to recognize that in the same way that my fellow Americans had
been brainwashed into unquestioningly accepting prejudice against Polaks like
myself, I had been brainwashed into unquestioningly accepting prejudice against
all Southerners.
Not
only did I feel it was acceptable to make such a nasty comment to a peer and
friend, I felt righteous doing so. I had been brainwashed to locate the sin of racism
in the South. By making fun of a Southerner in public, I was avenging Emmett
Till. More on this point, below.
White
working class culture, or cultures, are simply different. My grandparents
didn't speak English. Two of them could not read or write. I've been hungry
enough that I think throwing food away is sinful. In a million, similar, small
ways, I am culturally closer to other low class whites, from north or south of
the Mason Dixon line, than I am to middle class people.
Rich
liberals have learned, at least publicly, to interpret black people's cultural
differences as "different not worse" and often "different and
better." Black people are soulful, musical, good athletes. Illiterate
black grandmothers are griots, warehouses of unique tribal wisdom. Illiterate
white grandmothers are slobs, proof of poor whites' inferiority.
When
I served in Peace Corps in Africa I saw this romanticization and exoticization
of non-whites run amok. I knew a volunteer, a daughter of two Ivy League
professors and a descendant of Mayflower arrivals, who hired an African man to
clean her house, because, as she told me without any hesitation, she enjoyed
watching his scantily clad, heavily muscled black body performing domestic
chores. She was a thoroughgoing political liberal.
Recently
a wealthy, liberal friend remarked to me how much she admires and envies black
and Hispanic women's body attitudes. "They parade their fat in
midriff-baring tops and spandex tights, even if they have cellulite." She
found this beautiful. For herself and her family, this friend maintains a
strict regime of diet and exercise. She keeps her husband and children slim
with Fitbits, a fridge full of wilting kale, and, affixed to household surfaces,
notes recording weights, exercise routines, and optimal food choices.
This
romanticization of "people of color" may have reached the point of
self-parody in the opening sentence of best-selling author Emma Donoghue's 2017
book, The Lottery Plus One: "Once
upon a time, a man from Delhi and a man from Yukon fell in love, and so did a
woman from Jamaica and a Mohawk woman. The two couples became best friends and
had a baby together. When they won the lottery, they gave up their jobs and
found a big old house where their family could learn and grow." This
fantasy would lose its allure if it were about "cisgendered," working
class whites. Who wants to read about Stan and Heather and Frank and Jane, who
work at Walmart and live in Buffalo?
Having
black friends earn points for rich liberals. Poor white friends earn scornful
glances and inquisitorial questions: "Slumming?" Once I visited a friend's
summer home. His spinster aunt was weirdly protective of her handsome young
nephew. Every vocabulary word, every item of clothing, every food choice, made
me feel like a witness in the dock giving high-stakes testimony to prove a case
I never really understood. I had never eaten lobster; indeed, I had never been
on premises where lobster was served. I tasted and it found I didn't like it.
Scandalous! I went to bed early. I heard my friend's "liberal" aunt
harangue him, in a voice certainly loud enough for me to overhear. "What's
this all about? What's she doing here? She is not our type. She lives in New
Jersey. And not the desirable part. I've never heard of anyone like us living
there." I rose at dawn and left, truncating my visit. John and I had been
friends for a year – but I had never met his family, nor visited his exclusive
zip code. John's aunt won. We never spoke again. I've not eaten lobster since,
either.
With
the power of the new invention, TV, the Civil Rights Movement tarnished white
supremacy. TV brought police dogs and lunch counter hooligans into American
homes and changed how we assessed Jim Crow. Rejection of American racism was
propelled with America's horror over Nazism's crimes committed in the name of a
master race. We came to understand racism as America's original sin. We needed
a scapegoat – someone to be blamed for that sin. Empowered whites chose poor
whites as that scapegoat, as their trash receptacle. Numerous observers,
writing in the 1970s, noted how popular culture was beginning to insist that
racial prejudice was a phenomenon to be found exclusively among poor, not rich,
whites. These observers also pointed out that when it came to real, measurable
behavior and attitudes, poor whites were no more racist than rich ones. Sociologist
Richard Hamilton's "Liberal Intelligentsia and White Backlash,"
which appeared in Dissent in 1972,
sounds like it could have been written today. "In the world view of
liberal intellectuals, those persons who share decent and humane values form a
tiny minority standing on the edge of an abyss … there are so few people who
share those values." Not included among those who share decent values are
"the dangerous white working class." Hamilton cited a series of
opinion polls proving that working class whites are not the bogeyman that the
liberal intelligentsia were making them out to be.
In
Archie Bunker, Norman Lear, a Hollywood producer, put race hatred in the mouth
of a fat, cigar-chomping, working class slob in Queens. South of the Mason-Dixon
line, somehow slavery and Jim Crow became, not a blot on rich white landowners,
but on the kind of poor white sodomizers, idiot-savant banjo virtuosi, and
inbred cannibals and serial killers who inhabited the Grand-Guignol fantasies
of Deliverance, Prince of Tides, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Racism has
been contained – in the bodies of poor whites. Like hazardous waste, we must be
quarantined.
Of
course there are racists among poor whites, as there are among rich ones. But
liberals use a distorted, self-serving metric to differentiate between racist
and non-racist. When it comes to how one talks about race, there are
differences between poor whites and rich, white liberals. In this instance,
poor whites are again defined, not as black people might be, as
different-but-equal or even different-and-superior, but rather as
different-and-sinister.
I
have lived among black people all my life – my childhood next-door neighbors
and playmate were black, and I live in a majority-minority city now. To me,
black people are no better or worse than anyone else, and I employ no
conversational kabuki to talk to or about black people. There are no Magical Negroes
in my narratives.
"A
conservative is a liberal who has been mugged," quipped Irving Kristol. Given
statistical realities, poor whites are more likely to have been victims of
black crime than rich white liberals. There is an historic, silenced narrative
in New Jersey. Many Italians, Jews, and other immigrants' children, all of them
over fifty years old, have recounted to me detailed narratives about their
family arriving in the US, struggling to reach home ownership in Newark,
Paterson or Camden, and being driven out after their white child was singled
out for a beating by black bullies, or their store was burned, or their street
hosted a National Guard tank. They know these details of their biographies are
taboo, so they merely speak these stories, and never commit them to print.
These stories are whispers, and when the tellers die, they may leave no trace.
In
print, in official narratives, in college classrooms, in journalism, all of
these working class Italians, Jews, and Irish are simply racists. When blacks
began to move to northern cities, those city's white residents engaged in an
historic "white flight" whose only motivation was white supremacy.
The official story is that poor whites are ignorant racists who remade American
demographics and ruined American cities with their irrational hatreds.
Economically
better off and liberal whites are more likely to have had ancestors who owned
slaves, killed Indians, or exploited natural resources. They may have had black
servants. They are more likely to suffer from white guilt. As Shelby Steele
describes, rich and liberal whites expiate their guilt by becoming the
magnanimous saviors of blacks. They do this through government programs like
welfare and affirmative action. They assume that all whites should feel as they
do – that high taxes and government programs are the only non-racist approach.
Poor
whites are much more likely than rich whites to experience any of the goods of
life – home, wealth, achievement – as coming after lifetimes of hard work,
delayed gratification, self-sacrifice, and stoically swallowing biblical
amounts of insult, frustration, and disappointment. Poor whites may conclude
that African Americans' surest route to advancement is through right-wing
solutions like a work ethic rather than through left-wing solutions like
government handouts. Given this, poor whites are likely to be positioned as the
philosophical and economic opponents of rich white liberals' narrative of white
guilt and its expiation through paternalistic government programs.
I
have never seen my rich, white, liberal friend "Tom" interact with a
black person. I've attended parties at Tom's house with dozens of guests, all
of them white. Tom proves his virtue by adopting stilted speech codes when
discussing black people.
When
I say to Tom that I think that LBJ's Great Society may have damaged the black
family and developed a crippling dependency, Tom reacts as if I had said,
"Let's go lynch someone." He has concluded that I am a hardcore white
supremacist because I question welfare. Tom doesn't give me enough space to
mention that I reached my conclusion at least partly by reading the work of
black economists, Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams.
Poor
whites cannot tell their own life stories in a left-wing environment. If they
attempt to do so, poor whites must be silenced, or, most generously,
"corrected."
I
attended college decades ago, shortly after the Civil Rights successes of the
1960s, and during the rise of the Polak joke, and the evil redneck Southerner
as the most reliable go-to cinematic villain. Deliverance was released in 1972, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, and The Deer Hunter, about a bunch of working class, rust belt Bohunks
who are somehow single-handedly both responsible for and victims of the Vietnam
War, was released in 1978.
Like
a lot of poor whites, I attended a "non-selective" school. We worked
as waitresses, gas station attendants, and landscapers, took a shower, and went
to class. Our professors, with Ivy League degrees and attitudes, held us in
open contempt. In English classes, we were assigned to read, of course, the canon:
Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Hemingway. We were also assigned to read works newly
appearing on college syllabi, like The
House on Mango Street, about Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, and The
Color Purple. Our professors divided the world into elite whites and
struggling, noble "people of color." I was never assigned anything
that reflected the life I or my friends lived. There were no struggling white
people on our syllabi. No one like my mother who worked two minimum-wage jobs:
running a noisy, stinking wick machine in a candle factory during the day and
cleaning offices at night. My mother told me that she once saw a police officer
kick my downed father in the stomach. This story could not be told at college; in
the professors' world, only black men were ever mistreated by police. There
were no white girls like me who worked full time as nurse's aides, attended
school full time, and got straight A grades. No, I enjoyed "white
privilege," the equivalent of a comic book hero superpower, that magically
protected me from all harm and delivered into my lap whatsoever my heart
desired.
My
friends and I survived on contraband wordsmiths we passed around with urgency,
as if they were bits of bread in a distant prison. I didn't learn of Anzia
Yezierska, Jean Shepherd, Jack Kerouac, Bruce Springsteen, or Dorothy Allison
from teachers; I learned about them from friends, and they kept me going. When
I mentioned to my betters how much their work meant to me, I was given little
lectures about why their work was not "art."
If we
told our stories, our professors' stories, about rich, empowered whites and
struggling, noble minorities, would crumble. We poor, white college students
were not allowed either sympathy for our struggle nor pride in our successes.
If we had to work menial, minimum-wage jobs, it was because that was all we
deserved. If we got A grades in spite of lives that left us exhausted and
tuition bills that left us eating potatoes for a week, we got those A grades
because we were privileged.
The white
privilege dogma receives religious defense. Even for the purposes of
discussion, it cannot be questioned. Somewhere some poor white person is trying
to tell a liberal that he had to defy odds and work very hard to acquire
everything that he has. In response, the liberal screams, "Oh yeah? Well,
slavery was much worse!"
The
poor white person might respond, "I know. I've read Frederick Douglass' Narrative. I've also read John
Guzlowski's Echoes of Tattered Tongues, about
his Polish parents' enslavement under the Nazis. Have you? I've read about the
Muslim Slave Trade that, in time, geography, and number of victims, dwarfs the
Atlantic Slave Trade. Have you? I've read about my ancestors, who were serfs
until 1861. Have you?"
The
liberal, as sure as night follows day, will respond, "You are a
beneficiary of structural racism!" "White privilege" and
"structural racism" are no poor white person's superpowers; rather, they
are rich liberal's kryptonite; they exist to erase poor whites' biographies.
Leftist
dogma locks poor whites into the bottom rung of a human classification system
as rigid as the Darwinian hierarchy of species. Given how
"privileged" poor white people's lives are, given "structural
racism" that greases their chutes to pots of gold, if a white person has
not succeeded, that person must be especially worthless. Right-wing people who
invest in the Horatio Alger narrative do not imprison poor whites in such a
rigid system. They believe that if we try hard, we can make it. Right-wing
people, in my experience, unlike liberals, have no ideological need to silence
poor whites' mention of their own struggles, or poor whites' pride in their
accomplishments.
Finally,
of course, contempt for religion supplies rich liberals with yet another a
Politically Correct excuse for their contempt for poor whites. Not all liberals
are wealthy or atheist, and not all poor whites are religious, but atheism is more frequently found among high-income
people, and religiosity is correlated with poverty.
Bill Maher has said that religion is "stupid and dangerous," and that
Americans' belief in the Bible is "proof that this is a stupid
country." Maher called the God of the Bible a "dick." Richard
Dawkins compared religion to smallpox. Sam Harris called Christianity an
"engine of stupidity." Christopher Hitchens said that people who
believe in Jesus Christ would believe in anything. The Bible provides the most
important, life-affirming narrative for millions of poor whites. To rich white
liberals, the Bible is the opiate of the people and a seal of poor whites' stupidity.
Rich
liberal contempt for poor whites is not a victimless crime. Richard
D. Kahlenberg has shown how Affirmative Action programs, meant to
elevate African Americans, victimized poor whites – and disproportionately
aided rich and middle class blacks, including recent African immigrants whose
ancestors never experienced antebellum slavery or Jim Crow. Marie Gryphon makes the case that
Affirmative Action has done more harm than good to African Americans. Princeton
sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that
"diversity" "punishes poor whites." Diversity
programs are designed in such a way that poor whites and white Christians are
underrepresented on elite college campuses. George J. Borjas, the Robert W. Scrivner
Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, has
shown that recent immigration trends have hurt poor whites.
I'm
no Nobel-Prize winning economist. I don't know if any of the above cultural
trends and hostilities contribute to shortening the lives of Case and Deaton's
subjects. Whoever wants to address "deaths of despair," though, must
at least take these trends into consideration.
