would help level the playing field for women and people of color in professional jobs—
check them out at BiasInterrupters.org—also would help class migrants of all races.
Resistance also reflects the calls to abandon identity politics, forwarded by well-meaning
authors such as Mark Lilla.^3 Although I find much of Lilla’s analysis compelling, I and
many others find his call to abandon identity politics irritating. After forty years of largely
ineffectual diversity efforts, white men from elite backgrounds still dominate high-stakes,
high-status jobs at the top of every industry. So now we’re supposed to move on?
Class is an identity; let’s make it count. The harsh disdain of elites feeds working-class
anger. I am sometimes shocked by the response to my writings: “I wish all these [white
working-class] people would die, frankly... They are mostly obese and some of them
use opiates. They also have guns that they can kill themselves with. It can’t happen soon
enough for me,” one reader wrote me.
We’ve tried to work on other vectors of social equality while ignoring class. It hasn’t
worked. Predictably, the public discourse that depicts white men as privileged is
infuriating to blue-collar families in an era when noncollege men’s wages fell
precipitously. A lot more research has emerged documenting this since the initial
publication of White Working Class. The Economic Policy Institute has shown that,
though wages rose when productivity did in the decades after World War II, that ascent
ended in the 1970s; if it had continued, wages would be twice what they are today.^4 Raj
Chetty and his coauthors have documented that, while virtually every American born in
the 1940s did better than their parents, only about half of Americans born in the 1980s
do.^5 It’s no response to say that working-class whites only achieved the American dream
after World War II due to white privilege. That’s true, but irrelevant—surely the point is
not that whites deserved to lose access to the American dream but that both people of
color and whites deserve to gain access to it.
American workers know they’ve been screwed: they see it in rusted factories, despair
deaths, sped-up lives patching together part-time, dead-end jobs. The far right, with
considerable success, has encouraged whites to interpret their sharp loss of status through
the lens of whiteness, with a consequent rise in open racism.^6 The challenge is to explain
to the white working class that they have gotten screwed not because they are white but
because they are working class. The sooner we start, the better.
This lesson is not limited to the left: misdirected economic populism is not working for
conservatives either. The clearest example is Brexit. Cooler heads from both the right and
Preface