an educated housewife from working-class Canarsie. “I don’t care about the color of a
person if they’re nice people. The black parents in the school programs I work with are
beautiful and refined people. They’re like us.” What drove these Canarsie residents crazy
were “ghetto” black people: “Flashy cars, booze, and broads is all they care about. They
don’t even want to get ahead for their families!” “Beneath the surface of apparently
racial judgments was the ineluctable reality of class cultures in conflict,” concluded
sociologist Jonathan Rieder.^145 I see what he was saying, but it’s not just a class problem:
associating hard living with African-Americans—that’s a brand of racism.
Whites who were antiracist, Lamont found, grounded their understandings of black
people in the view that there are “good and bad people in all races,”^146 believing that
hard workers of all races are equals. Said an oil company foreman:
No matter who you are at Exxon, you’re making pretty good money, so it’s not like
you’ve got a disadvantaged person. Their kids are going to good schools. They’re
eating, they’re taking vacations because of Exxon. You don’t see the division or
whatever, so Exxon kind of eliminated that because of the salary structure.... With
black people, you talk sports, you talk school, you’re all in the same boat.... You know,
you talk to the guy, and you went on vacation, and he went on vacation.^147
Note the consistent logic: if you live a settled life, you’re a good person.
To summarize, settled working-class whites, whose claims to privilege rest on morality
and hard work, stereotype black people by conflating hard living and race. Professional-
class whites, whose claims to privilege rest on merit, stereotype black people as less
competent than whites. There is no excuse for either kind of racism. Here’s the point:
privileged whites should stop justifying their refusal to acknowledge their class privilege
over less-privileged whites on the grounds that those “others” are racist.
I’m not denying that some people who voted for Trump are white supremacists. After all,
one of the few newspapers to endorse him was the newspaper of the KKK. Trump’s
campaign rhetoric included beyond-the-pale racist statements about Mexicans, proposals
to violate the Constitution by discriminating against Muslim immigrants based on religion,
and a promise to build a wall between the United States and Mexico.^148
Trump’s racism also helped him with some supporters who experienced his comments as
a delicious poke-in-the-eye of elites. To these supporters, Trump broke with political
correctness taboos in a daring way. That’s a dynamic our country can change—and has
- Is the Working Class Just Racist?