CHAPTER 8
Is the Working Class Just Racist?
LET’S STATE RIGHT UP FRONT that racism is an issue in the white working class, and
it goes back a long way.
An ugly racial dynamic arose after the Civil War when Southern elites pitted the white
working class against newly freed black people by communicating that, although poor
whites might be “white trash,” at least they weren’t black.^134 By offering poor whites the
“wages of whiteness”^135 —the social dignity of membership in the dominant race—
planters made them more willing to accept wages and farm tenancy contracts that left
them dirt poor. This dynamic has a very long history, reaching right up to the present day.
Reuel Schiller’s 2015 book, Forging Rivals , showed that, since the New Deal, the
Democratic Party’s ambivalence about pursuing cross-racial coalitions generated laws
that drove African-Americans and whites apart.^136 “Trump was masterful at this,” mused
historian Suzanne Lebsock in an email to me, “stooping to race baiting to alienate
working-class whites from the black and Latino workers with whom they had the most in
common.”
The wages-of-whiteness strategy protected the elite from a cross-race coalition of the
disenfranchised. That’s the coalition America needs now: the interracial coalition for
economic justice Martin Luther King, Jr., proposed a half century ago.^137 It was a
difficult and controversial proposal for King then, and it hasn’t gotten a lot easier. But we
need to try. The first step is to ensure that we are not doing unconsciously what the post-
Civil War planters did intentionally: pit working-class whites against people of color.
Elite whites do this when they comfort themselves about racism by displacing the blame
for racism onto other-class whites. Julie Bettie, in her insightful study of working-class
girls, observed, “[O]ne marker of having progressive politics is displaying oneself as
antiracist, and this can, at times, unfortunately manifest as a demeaning of and distancing
from white working-class people, who are constructed as stupid and racist.”^138 Many
conservatives as well as progressives do this. Commented Jacqueline Ferrara* on my
HBR article, “Great article, but it will fall on deaf ears. The only acceptable narrative is
that those who voted Republican [in 2016] did so because they are racists, sexists, stupid,
or all three.”
There’s an element here of privileged whites distancing themselves from racism by
- Is the Working Class Just Racist?