Preface
It’s been quite a ride. In the 18 months after the publication of White Working Class , I
spent more time in the halls of Congress than I did in the 25 years I lived in DC. The full
range of Democrats and progressives, from Joe Biden to Nancy Pelosi to Bernie Sanders
to Kamala Harris, listened to me with apparent attentiveness. I addressed both the House
and the Senate committees in charge of Democrats’ messaging. I knew I was making
progress when one congressman asked me fervently, “Do you know that two-thirds of
Americans don’t have college degrees?” When I first started spouting that statistic, no
one in my circle would believe it. Everyone they knew had college degrees.
To my surprise, the book also has been influential outside the United States, wherever
people are trying to make sense of economic populism. There’s a Japanese edition, and I
have addressed legislators from the House of Lords in the United Kingdom, as well as the
Danish and Dutch parliaments and policymakers and journalists from the European
Union, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and France.
With the train wreck that is Brexit, pundits in the United Kingdom are especially
obsessed with trying to understand working-class anger, ranging from the Guardian to the
Financial Times.
Not surprisingly, the growing acknowledgment of the role of class resentment in
contemporary politics has been accompanied by resistance. Acknowledging social
privilege is never fun, and acknowledging the influence of social class is particularly
unsettling to a global elite convinced that its success reflects merit, not privilege. People
tend to resist whenever their core identities are threatened.
Conversations with Europeans reflect a long tradition, only recently withered, of class
analysis, from Marx to Gramsci. The United States lacks this tradition, and it shows.
Resistance to my message in the United States has been fed, too, by a narrative that
posits a zero-sum game between race and class. Interestingly, there’s no sense that one
can’t support both trans rights and racial justice, or both immigrant rights and gender
justice. So it’s unclear why racial equity and class equity are seen as mutually exclusive.
They aren’t. My own research on engineers found that while only one-third of white men
report discriminatory standards, two-thirds of people of color do.^1 Race is important in
professional jobs, but so is class. As one reader wrote to me, “Being a ‘class migrant’ is a
struggle that never seems to end.” The research backs her up. One study found that men
from elite backgrounds received invitations to interview at top-ranked law firms at more
than 12 times the rate of their equally qualified, working-class peers.^2 Measures that
Preface