Class

September 12, 2017 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Race AND Class, Then and Now

The events that took place in Charlottesville and the President’s refusal to denounce white supremacists has led many to interpret current political tensions as rooted in racism, particularly among the white working class. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, KI affiliate faculty member Sherry Linkon discusses how the film Detroit, portraying the 1967 uprising in Motor City, and the white supremacist march in Charlottesville both reflect the intersection of race and class. Prof. Linkon insists that to make lasting social change, we must advance both economic justice and racial justice.

Yet, as Tom Sugrue has noted, the history of racial tension in Detroit began long before the riots, and it was always entwined with economic struggle. In the opening animation sequence of Detroit, we are reminded that the Great Migration of African Americans was driven by the economic hope of factory jobs, not by – or at least not only by – a desire to escape the Southern racism. African Americans coming to the city in search of good jobs faced segregation and discrimination, patterns that Angela Flournoy captures well in her 2015 Detroit novel, The Turner House. But as Sugrue has shown, both racial divisions and economic inequality grew when Detroit’s factories moved out of the city to suburbs like Warren and Livonia. The African Americans who burned buildings and looted businesses in 1967 were frustrated not only by racial prejudice but also by economic limitations, even though, as Sugrue points out, they were not “the poorest or the most marginal. It was folks who were slightly better off and slightly better educated and more tied into the city’s labor market than the poorest residents.” Detroit’s history reminds us that conflicts over race are often also class conflicts.

Fifty years later, African Americans still lag far behind whites economically. They have higher rates of unemployment, poverty, and incarceration, less access to good health care or education, and lower rates of home ownership and less wealth. When we say that Black Lives Matter, we’re not talking only about the right to be safe from police violence. We’re also talking about the right to earn a living, to have access to decent health care, to get a good education, and to vote. Like the African Americans who rioted in Detroit in 1967, African Americans today – along with many other people of color – have good reason to be angry, frustrated, and doubtful about the integrity of government officials, elected or employed.

While racism clearly exacerbates class struggles for African Americans, we also need to understand how class and race work together in shaping the ideology of white supremacism. Most working-class white people are not neo-Nazis, or do they identify with the alt-right. But it seems likely that many of those who claim that whites are the most frequent victims of discrimination, that immigrants are taking “our jobs,” and that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization are motivated in part by a sense of economic vulnerability. As Bryce Covert wrote in The New Republic, the “ethno-nationalist agenda” is, to a large extent, “about protecting white jobs and white people.” That some of the alt-right’s violence, blame, and bigotry comes as response to the economic shifts of the past fifty years, which have undermined the economic stability of so many working- and middle-class people, does not excuse it. But economic anxiety plays a role here, and just as with the economic and social struggles of people of color, some of that anxiety (though clearly not all) reflects real changes. Wages have stagnated, job security is hard to come by, home foreclosures continue, and pension plans have defaulted. These struggles affect not only people displaced from industrial jobs, but also many in the middle class. Indeed, like the African Americans who rose up in Detroit in 1967, many in the alt-right are employed and educated, and these groups are actively recruiting on college campuses.

Unfortunately, that the alt-right and many of its targets share class interests doesn’t offer much reason to hope. Don’t expect a multicultural working-class revolution any time soon. Instead, as Keri Leigh Merritt pointed out in a piece on the Moyers & Company blog recently, the elite are once again using divisions of race and ethnicity to foment conflict within the working class and distract us from their machinations. In his infamous interview with the American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, Steve Bannon sneered that he had manipulated the left into staying “focused on race and identity,” allowing conservatives to claim ownership of the economic agenda. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., suggests that this may explain Trump’s refusal to indict the alt-right: “dividing Americans along racial lines while fueling a fight on the left over identity vs. class politics will leave him a winner.” The pattern is reinforced not only by Trump’s nationalist economic rhetoric but also by the narrative, too often supported by those on the left, that blames the white working class for Trump’s election. And it is echoed in the insistence of some progressive commentators that the sole explanation for Trump’s popularity is racism.

Read the entire post and check out other Working-Class Perspectives posts on our website.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-17 academic years, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon, who authored this post. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 44 posts that were read over 128,000 times by readers in 189 countries.

June 12, 2017 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Have We Been Had? Why Talking About the Working-Class Vote for Trump Hurts Us

Much of what has been said about Trump’s support from working-class voters is either false or unproven. Even worse, flawed analyses reinforce damaging conservative narratives and undermine worker solidarity. In this week’s Working-Class Perspectives post, Allison L. Hurst calls for a more inclusive understanding of the working class in America.

First, who really put Trump in the White House? The short answer is, many of us did. I don’t think we will have the full answer for quite some time. We still don’t have any data on occupation and the 2016 vote. We can look at American National Election Studies (ANES) data from November 2016, however, to compare the vote by income and education. The top bars on the chart below show all ANES respondents, the second whites only. Trump had the edge among white people without a college degree, although less so among middle-income voters than the poor or the rich (he did really well among rich white men without a college degree). This is a small sample, however, one that doesn’t include any poor whites with a college degree (who do in fact exist!)

This data doesn’t show the white working class overwhelmingly in support of Trump. Not more than half of the working class even voted, so to say that the “white working class” gave us Trump seems more than a little overstated.

Second, elite hand-wringing about the vote plays right into a narrative long spun by conservatives to mobilize resentment among those who feel analyzed and scorned, so as to shift attention away from actual conservative policies. Decades ago, conservative writer Samuel Francis claimed that the New Deal was nothing other than “a power grab by the liberal elite, whose life-styles, aspirations, and values” were “Bound together, rationalized, and extended by what may be called the ‘cosmopolitan ethic.’” Francis emphasized the “open contempt” this ethic held toward “the small town, the family, the neighborhood, the traditional class identities and their relationships – as well as for authoritative and disciplinary institutions – the army, the police, parental authority, and the disciplines of school and church.”

Clinton’s election narrative echoed these ideas. She wanted liberals to see this election as a referendum on race and inclusion, and anyone who was against her was deplorable or being used by deplorables. As Sharon Sullivan has argued, “one of the main ways that white class hierarchies operate is through the production and display of white middle-class moral goodness.” Have you noticed how infrequently rich whites are called out for being deplorably racist?

Honestly? This election wasn’t a referendum on anything. We had no good candidates to choose from. We didn’t choose either one of them. Millions of Americans sat out the vote (or were pushed out, but that is another story). And each of the millions of people who did had their own reasons for casting their vote. Most likely we’ll never be able to get to the bottom of how much racism, sexism, and other prejudices motivated voters in this election. (On a side note, is it really that surprising that a critical mass of white people respond to racist dog whistles?) Yes, we need to try to understand the attraction of a strange man who seems to appeal to our worst instincts and desires, but not at the risk of failing to come together to continue the fight for a better world for all of us. Politicians manipulate. Let’s stop focusing on who is manipulated and why and focus instead on making sure this doesn’t happen again.

I would suggest that the main reason we are currently focused on the working-class vote, and not, say the professional-managerial vote, or the rich white male vote, is because these people are respected to make decisions. In contrast, pundits and analysts have always questioned ability of working-class people to make decisions. This is just another way the educated left is playing into a conservative narrative of condescending liberal elitism.

Here’s the problem as I see it. If Trump’s supporters came from all sections of the (white) American electorate, the narrative of working-class support of Trump diverts us from the real story, which is much more ordinary. One party — a party that denies climate change, that wants to rollback protections for workers and the planet, that is willing to sacrifice millions of lives to the Moloch of economic growth — has managed to suppress its opponents’ votes (the majority of poor and working-class people do not vote), spin a story of a liberal media being out of touch with “regular Americans,” and lead kind-hearted but possibly naïve liberals everywhere to once again fear the (white) working class. Neat trick. any Leftist coalition will be destroyed by fear and mistrust.

Read the entire post and check out other Working-Class Perspectives posts on our website.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-17 academic years, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 44 posts that were read over 128,000 times by readers in 189 countries.

February 21, 2017 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Neil Gorsuch and Religious Liberty: Class Dismissed

Neil Gorsuch was nominated to be a Supreme Court Justice largely because of his concern for religious liberty. Yet as Ken Estey explains in this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Gorsuch has prioritized the religious freedom of large corporations over the religious rights of thousands of their workers.

Hobby Lobby has over 500 stores and almost 13,000 full-time employees, and Mardel has thirty-five Christian bookstores and almost 400 employees. The owners, David and Barbara Green and their three children, believe that “human life begins when sperm fertilizes an egg” and that it is “immoral” to “facilitate any act that causes the death of a human embryo.” The application of the doctrine of religious liberty here means that the religious beliefs of five corporate owners take precedence over the beliefs and interests of nearly 13,400 workers in 535 stores across the country. Further, the ruling grants religious freedom to the corporation, giving it legal status as a “person” whose rights must be protected as well. The court reasoned that as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires, generally, that the “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” and that “[s]uch corporations can be ‘persons’ exercising religion for purposes of the statute.”

Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion focuses, in particular, on the Green family. Affirming the reasoning of Judge Tymkovich above, Gorsuch emphasizes the importance of the Green family’s religious claims to the exclusion of any other parties, including their entire work force for whom access to low or no-cost contraceptive services could have very favorable consequences, morally, economically and otherwise.

Read the post in its entirety and explore other Working-Class Perspectives posts on our website.

The Working-Class Perspectives blog is brought to you by our Visiting Scholar for the 2015-16 academic year, John Russo, and Georgetown University English professor, Sherry Linkon, who authored this post. It features several regular and guest contributors. Last year, the blog published 44 posts that were read over 128,000 times by readers in 189 countries.

October 11, 2016 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

WCP: Shakespeare and Working-Class Students: The Value of Irrelevance

Many first-generation students attend college to get out of the “working class” both economically and culturally. In this week’s Working-Class Perspective, Tim Francisco warns that prioritizing job readiness in the classroom can compromise the intellectual proficiency that working-class students seek in higher education and perpetuate hegemonic systems of inequality.

The seminar discussions further revealed that, for some, educating working-class students means teaching differently from how we might teach the sons of lawyers or stockbrokers. We want to validate the perspectives from which many of us come and accommodate the pressures our students face. This is well and good, and even politically and/or morally right, but it can sometimes also lead us to avoid rigorous methodologies, which in turn could hamstring those we aim to propel forward. Several participants said they felt pressured to teach less theory, for example, or to relax writing assignments or adjust grading criteria, all in the name of helping students complete their degrees and thus improve their economic opportunities. Of course, working-class students (like most students) do see college as a vehicle for upward mobility, but many also see college as a means of feeding their intellectual curiosity, and this is often more precious to them than to students of privilege.

Read the post in its entirety and check out other Working-Class Perspectives posts on our website.

April 4, 2016 by Kalmanovitz Initiative Leave a Comment

CHATLANI: Intersections of Race and Class in the Environment

Shalina Chatlani (SFS ’17) interns for Industry Dive and is an Undergraduate Writing Fellow for the Kalmanovitz Initiative. We are proud to host her blog posts on our website, including this thoughtful piece about the intersection of race and class in the environment.

Senator Bernie Sanders’ recent release of a campaign advertisement on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) brought national attention to the plight of migrant farmworkers in Florida–a situation that highlights the significant, but often underrepresented, connection of environmental injustice with civil rights and workers’ rights.

I wrote extensively about the CIW for the Kalmanovitz Initiative a year ago, but my research primarily focused on the similarities between civil rights and labor rights movements for blacks and hispanics in the Southern United States. Nonetheless, weaved into the narratives were some striking details that not only shed light on deplorable working conditions of the farms, but also the devastating health effects of environmental negligence:

“Florida’s tomato fields, it turns out, violate “all elements of sustainability,” and only produce a product by pumping the “soil full of chemical fertilizers” as well as “more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides.” Unfortunately, workers in the tomato fields bear the burden of these horrific environmental conditions. The toll that workers face is staggering, and it is the result of the poor circumstances in which the tomatoes are grown. For instance, the chemicals that tomato pickers are exposed to on a daily basis lead to “eye and respiratory ailments, exposure to known carcinogens, and babies born with horrendous birth defects.”

All throughout the United States, environmental concerns plague workers. Whether the scenario ranges from breathing in the exhaust fumes to becoming exposed to cancerous carcinogens via chemicals on farms, the environment plays an important role in the relationship between socioeconomics and race. The reality is that low-income and minority communities often face a disproportionate share of environmental costs. As a report from the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University notes:

“People with low incomes and inadequate access to health care may also be disproportionately exposed to environmental contamination that threatens their health.”

It’s true there aren’t a lot of studies that say exactly this: low-income workers bear a significant portion of environmental pollution and its consequences. Yet within all the literature on environmental injustice there sits within the lines a glaring, unignorable link.

A recent blog post on the the KI’s Working-Class Perspectives page highlights how occupational hazards and stress can lead to a number of ills, such as cardiovascular disease and mental health disorders. The CIW migrant laborers on farms clearly face the environmental hazards of chemical use on the job, and they have appealed to civil rights groups about it.

The evidence of inequity in the workplace is chilling and angering: low-income workers not only continue to face a considerable number of workplace dangers, but also suffer from health concerns. The following realization sends even more chills down the spine: when low-income minority workers go home, the environmental hazards often remain.

There are many examples to pull from, but let us just consider one for now: air pollution.

Recent studies show that non-whites are more exposed environmental pollution than whites. Moreover, further research concludes that air pollution tends to be disproportionately centered in low-income, minority group communities.

Industries might not set out to torment underprivileged Americans with hazardous air toxins. However, the reality is still that “minorities [receive] nearly 40% more exposure to deadly airborne pollutants than whites,” according to a study from 2014. Not “meaning” to adversely affect minority communities does not excuse the industries, state enforcement, or the EPA’s handling air pollution in low-income areas.

In fact, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced in 2015, largely in response to an increasing number of complaints, that its 2016 enforcement report would investigate specific concerns of minority and low-income communities about “possible violations of environmental and civil rights laws resulting from improper generation, storage, transfer and siting of toxic materials by public utilities and other sources near minority residential areas.”

Low-income communities, typically forced to live in undesirable neighborhoods close to coal factories and high-traffic roadways, continually face the environmental and health consequences of highly NO2 concentrated air. According to study, as cited in an article from Common Dreams:

“The health impacts from the difference in levels between whites and nonwhites found in the study are substantial. For example, researchers estimate that if nonwhites breathed the lower NO2 levels experienced by whites, it would prevent 7,000 deaths from heart disease alone among nonwhites each year.”

This means low-income, minority group workers – who are already dealing with issues of finding proper work and keeping their lives afloat – must also deal with the consequences of environmental degradation such as asthma and heart disease when they return home.

The health effects of air pollution in communities can saddle citizens with extravagant health care bills, compromise their ability to perform their jobs, and cause unwanted stress that only adds to the pressures they might feel from unfavorable working conditions. For this reason, literature on the American working class must pay more attention to the correlations among race, socioeconomics, and environmental injustice.

You can read more from Shalina on our website.

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