The Despair of Poor White Americans

I)  The original underclass - often mislabeled as white working-class voters by politicians and pollsters

        Typically used to define anyone without a four-year degree

        describes over a third of the electorate

totally ignores differences in geography, ethnicity, and culture

2) label actually a kind of Stock story where they are envisioned as salt-of-the-earth citizens, living and working in wide open spaces between coasts 

        CONNOTES VIRTUE/INTEGRITY

3.    Actually, it is the less privileged white Americans in crisis

    a. social breakdown of families and community, much like that which impacted African Americans decades earlier

b) rates of out-of-wedlock births and male joblessness rising sharply.

c) rising mortality rates (including suicide) among middle-aged whites

d) opioid addiction

II) On the Right we find Barely suppressed contempt characterized much of this commentary

1. Often treated with scorn, these low-income, mostly white Republican voters were mostly responsible for Trump's first victory.

2) even in the face of unrivaled economic growth, they are described as dysfunctional

3) Ignored is the reality of the closing of factory towns, mills

4) all fueling theories of Orientals stealing our jobs

5) White American underclass seen in the midst of a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and heroin

6) they find relief in Donald Trumps speeches

III) And on the left we find similarly harsh conclusions

1. what is driving the rising mortality, drug and alcohol abuse is a despair over loss of their perch in the country's racial pecking order 

as stated by Josh Marshal a liberal commentator: 

what is happening here is the perceived and real loss of the social and economic advantages of being white.

2. The implication is that the people undergoing these problems do not deserve our sympathy, 

it is of their own doing, either they are lazy people caught up in self-pity or they are sad cases consumed with racial status anxiety and animus toward nonwhites passing them on the ladder

3) Each analysis reflects their bias and a disdain for poor Whites who are also their fellow Americans.

IV) Some of the criticisms from the right do not understand the typical Trump voter

1.    exit polls show that the base of Trump support are not the white underclass.

2. In places like Appalachia, where turnout was the lowest in the country, Trump's support more likely higher up on the economic ladder

V) alternatively, criticism from the left liberals is actually rooted in racial envy -it fails to understand the fact that neither Blacks nor Hispanics are flourishing.

a. all the time when there is an African American president, in the midst of the Great recession that hit minorities worse than whites.

VII) Two new books -one a well-researched historical account and the other a memoir provide some important insights

1) the gloomy state of affairs among white Americans at the lowest levels should not have been a surprise. Solutions to their crisis will depend upon closing the gaps that our ignorance reflects.

VIII) Nancy Isenberg's book -White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America argues:

    1. White lower class played prominently in the development of the colonies 

    2) the stock stories that developed primarily characterized them in terms of waste and refuse.

    3) For England, the New World offered vast stores of natural resources

    4) a place to deposit their dregs of society, a giant workhouse where wandering beggars (wandering children) the exportable poor could be dispatched, 

5) When they arrived in Virginia, they were characterized as England's spleen and liver that were being drained of the ill humours of the body, to breed good blood.

        a) Early settlers included many thieves, vagrants, Irish rebels, known whores and an assortment of convicts.

6) One early Stock Story -America's founding myth -was that the trip and "independence magically erased the British class system. Where all colonists -indentured servants and merchants, landowner and clerk (all but the African and Native American) were now put on the same playing field as equals.

The reality is that the ruthless class order in Jamestown was reinforced, where one woman returned from 10 months of Indian captivity was told that she owed 150 pounds of tobacco to her dead husband's former master and would have to work off the debt.

7) Similarly, the Puritans were obsessed with class rank -membership in the Church and its core elect were granted privileges all the while ignoring that some of its early settlers in Massachusetts were nonreligious riffraff

8) A North Carolina constitution -probably coauthored by John Locke, designed to avoid erecting a numerous democracy -envisioned a nobility of landgraves and caciques (German for princes and Spanish for chieftains) and a court of heraldry to oversee marriages and preserve pedigree.

9) Class distinctions were preserved in the allotment of land

    in Virginia in 1700 indentured servants had virtually no chance to own any, and by 1770 less than 10% of white Virginians owned more than half the land.

in 1729 North Carolina -colony with 36,000 people, there only 3,281 listed grants, and 309 grantees owned nearly half of the land

land was principal source of wealth, and those without it had little chance of escaping servitude.

considered a stigma of landlessness, a mark of white trash that from then to even this present day. 

Not jut a Southern Dynamic, but the term squatter traces to New England, and later called the Swamp Yankees who carved out homes on others' land and had to be chased off and have their homes burned.

founding Fathers such as George Washington believed that only the lower-class people should be foot soldiers in Continental Army

Thomsa Jefferson envisioned publich schools only for educating talented students "raked from the rubbish" of the lower class, and believed that ranking humans like animal breeds was perfectly antural.

"The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals.  Why not that of man?

John Addams believed that passion for distinctions was powerful human force "There must be one, indeed, who is the last and lower of the human species."

10)When we gained independence, the white underclass and its future dependents were fully entrenched.

    a) Found everywhere, but particularly in North Carolina where many whites denied land in Virginia settled in the south of the Great Dismal Swamp -called the first white trash colony (Isenberg)

b)William Byrd II a Virginia planter, described them as suffering from "distempers of laziness and slothful in everything but getting children"

c). North Carolina's governor described his own people as "the meanest, most rustic and squalid part of the species".

11) Isenberg -argues that the underclass were considered to be a new bred of humans, proliferated as poor whites without property spread west and south.  they became known as crackers, squatters, and no better than savages. Their children raised in the woods like brutes wrote one Swiss born colonel in the colonial army in 1759.

1810 ornithologists ( one who studies birds) Alexander Wilson described the grotesque log cabins where lowly a patriarch typically wearing a defiled and torn shirt. 

12) Thomas Jeferson's granddaughter came back from an 1817 excursion with her grandfather and spoke of the "half civilized race who lived beyond the ridge.

13) The 1830 country produced the first Cracker Dictionary to document the slang of poor whites. 

14) Although some poor whites became famous, and lauded by politicians (Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson) -backwoodsmen, authentic, and strong...the pendulum always swings back to white trash

a. The term first appeared in print early 1821

b. became popular 3 decades later, referring to people with "tallow skin" and habit of eating clay. (Tallow  -a person with pale or yellowish complexation, indicating illness or lack of vitality..sickly, unhealthy appearance. page 6 )

c. George Weston in pamplets circulated in 1856 warned of the Poor Whites of the south sinking deeper and more hopelessly into barbarism with each generation.

    1. a separate breed, species which challenged nation's vision of equality and inclusivity.

    challenged the notion that whiteness was an automatic badge of superiority, a guarantee of homogeneous population of independent, educable freemen...and the ideals of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

15. Early 20th century U.S. engulfed by eugenics craze =began to look with revulsion at the degenerate, poor whites particularly those in the South

Teddy Roosevelt worried about the germ protoplasm, and Oliver Wendal Holmes issued a Supreme Court ruling calling for the forced sterilization of a poor Virginian named Carrie Buck, deemed a moron.

16. But Isenberg, with all her historical accuracy, still makes some distortions.  She confuses regional distinctions within white lower class, blurs the contemporary liberal theorizing about white despondency.

her account increasingly focuses on the South, without squarely addressing why this was chosen and the implications of this choice.

to adequately discuss the white underclass in or near slaveholding areas..we must understand how poor whites and enslaved African Americans were related, you must understand how slavery impacted upon the labor available to poor whites, and how it impacted poor whites attitudes regarding work...think about it...who did the work..and who worked at the lowliest of work..who was shut out of jobs. ..

Defenders of slvery argued that it spared the lowliest toil and kept poor Southern whites a step above their Northern counterparts.

This ignores those whole sections of the countryside where poor whites lived without any blacks nearby, such as Appalachia...

Thus ignored are the separate group of Scots Irish -hard during, hard scrapping brawlers in the borderlands of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Northern England who cherish their freedom, and who want nothing to do with coastal elites. And therefore settled in the Appalachian hills in the mid-18th century..Isenberg dismisses this but does not provide any clear alternative..

there is a distinction of those Scots-Irish who avoided the slaveholding planters in the Deep south, and the cavaliers of the Tidewater region of Virginia and created their own new state -West Virginia as a form of resistance...Cavaliers refers to the descendants of English royalists who emigrated to the Tidewater region of Virginia during the 17th Century, during the English Civil War. Often very wealthy and aristocratic..

this tradition in Appalachia, as well as their populist tradition. Explains the long time it took for them to shift from Democrat to Republican than other areas in the Deep South..

Here racism is fueled more by a suspicion of the other rather than firsthand experience with blacks and competition with them

To focus exclusively on Southern poor whites means that you fail to see this, and you wind up missing how political sentiments on issues such as welfare and crime aren't as racially motivated as liberal assume. But on the fear of competition and loss of status and jobs with cheaper labor.

With the 1970s, a new sense of ethnic pride emerged and was associated with the redneck identity... an upgraded self-image prefigured the elevation of the white working class in the years to follow.

as we enter the 20th century Isenberg's account ignores the structure of poverty, and focuses on pop culture ..Hee Haw, Here comes Honey Boo Boo and celebrity politics tammy Fay Bakker, Bill Clinton and Sara Palin -and devolves into persistent contempt for the white underclass...

18.  This brings us to J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

Vance's story amounts to a composite of one family's experiences with all the worrisome trends affecting poor white Americans.

   -Vance's family straddles those hillbilles who remained in Appalachia and those who left to work in the Midwest.

Those are now struggling across the postindustrial flatlands.

he still has relatives in Breathitt Conounty, Kentucky...where he still feels connected..

but he discusses for most of the book the small manufacturing city of Middletown, where his grandparents moved decades ago and where he grew up.

b. Vance fully embraces the Scots-Irish Appalachian ancestry as a distinct breed of low-income Americans who brought their fighting ways to wherever they went.

c. talks about his maternal Mamaw, who forced a man to eat her panties at knifepoint for leering comments, or when she set Papaw (her husband) on fire for coming home drunk.

d) is trying to understand how the hillbillies became so poor..

His answer -poor choices. He talks about his mother, Mamaw, who could have been a wonderful student and successful. But instead of going through five different marriages, she drank heavily, became addicted to painkillers, and stole from her job as a nurse. 

e. vance survives this through tough love he recieves from Mamaw..who sees in him a chance of redeeming her own parenting failures with b"ev..his grades were good enough to et him into Ohio...but he went into the Marines because he wanted to learn discipline..he spent time in iraq where he matured and gaine perspective, upon leaving the military he went on to excel at Ohio State. He was admitted to Yale Law School. from there a court clerk, then a principal in an investment firm in Sanfancisco..and now Vice President of th eU.S.

He attributes this to choices, personal decisions, and the avoidance of cultural decline..

He acknowledges that many of his family, and those in Appalachia, Middletown,a nd the rustbelt were trapped in a shrinking world as industry folded, and along with it good jobs.  and many began to doubt American meritocracy..

But he also attributes social decline to a weakening of moral fiber and work ethic..he argues that some have learned to play the game of the welfare system.

It was/is this resentment. Watching some on welfare buying food with food stamps, but also beer, wine, and cigarettes in a case. While some were struggling just to get by, while working hard and hoping for a better life..

He watches a drug-addict neighbor buying t-bone stakes, while he works every day, paying taxes, and can barely buy food for himself. While Uncle Sam treated someone else..

He ignores the fact that while he considers himself a self-made man, he looks down on the white trash of others while forgetting his own parents..and he himself existed on federal government checks and welfare..

But while he in the book does not totally blame the government for these ills, he still believes that the government can't cure these ills, the community of hillbillies must wake the hell up and take control of their fate..

Vance is tired of the quick fixes and the total dependence on the government to solve all our problems. We must understand that some of our fate is a consequence of the choices we make.

The problem..however is that individual choices will not fix all the problems..the erosion of American manufacturing, the shifting of jobs offshore reflects the colobaration of both government and corporations..these and the weakening of organized labor..

These helped undermine the social fabric of places like Middletown..and the decline of the coal industry..as well..

solutions..we must deal with the addiction problem...we must work to bring back ral jobs. We must understand that as we hold people accountable, we must provide them the opportunity to succeed.

If we consider the New Deal, as discussed by Isenberg. We see projects like the Resettlement Administration, which moved tenants to better land and provided loans for farm improvements. We see the Tennessee Valley authority whcih transformed =training centers.  and entire planned towns..where hill children went to school with engineers kids..

..but the question still looms do we encourage people to move or do we invest in the ommunities...

Still, we see that to disregard the lower classes does not mean that they go away... Over time, the higher educated have become far more likely than those lower down to climb the ladder to better-paying jobs.

so what is driving the high level of despair leading to significant increases in substance abuse and suicide..racial anxiety and antagonism..certainly is present. But also is the general decline that saturaes the town..in which medical supply stores and pawn shops dominate the main street. While Victorian homes crumble and are unoccupied..

A hopelessness. As the social and other media presents a image of large numbers of minorities moving up the social ladder while they watch their lives crumble Infront of them..while they must also take care of parents or even grandparents...while being considered primal scorn.

and it is this dismal dispair that Donald Trump tapped into among poor whites struggling to just exist..and why he has targeted immigrants and foreiners..