In White
Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Harvard
Business Review Press, 2017, 192 pages, $15.31/13.49) Joan C.
Williams has written a challenging, persuasive book helping to answer
questions often asked by people seeking to understand why and how
Donald Trump won election as President of the United States by
gaining the votes of people who seemed to have been voting against
their own interests. In presenting her argument, Williams details how
to coalition of liberal intellectuals, workers, and minorities has
been broken because of their emphasis on identity issues and their
loss of touch with the values and lives of the struggling people in
the white working class. More important, she delineates how the
Professional Managerial Elite (which she calls PME) has lost touch
with the lives of those who do the work, blue collar Americans.
Furthermore, she argues, that by dismissing this group as uneducated,
fundamentalist, and racist, liberals and progressives have lost
their loyalty and denigrated the values and beliefs that once formed
the core of our society.
The chapters of this cogently argued
lively presentation, carefully supported by numerous citations, and
garnished with sufficient anecdotes, personal experiences, and
quotations, asks a number of questions that people comfortably
ensconced in middle class, professional positions often ask about
those whose family values, work ethic, and religious beliefs appear
to be cutting them off from the success that the professional elite
is enjoying. Chapter headings include:
Who Is the Working Class?
Why Does the Working Class Resent the
Poor
Why Doesn't the Working Class Just
Move to Where The Jobs Are?
Why Doesn't the Working Class Just Get
with It and Go to College?
Thse chapters ask whether the working
class is just racist and sexist, explaining that while racism and
sexism surely exist, the answers to these questions are much more
nuanced and difficult than common argument has suggested. By forming
chapters as questions, Williams encourages developing deeper
understanding and more wide ranging discussion of how these questions
may be answered. She always cites solid research leading to
alternative approaches to solving the problems suggested.
While arguing that racism and sexism
still exist and are powerful factors in our society, Williams says
that Americans are deeply uncomfortable with the concept and
discussion of social class - its meaning, economic sources, and
effects on our attitude and behaviors. She argues that not until
liberals are able to re-connect with white, working class voters will
they be able to consistently win presidential elections again. She
holds that identity politics strike right where working class people
are uncomfortable and afraid. Thus gender, race, sexual identity, and
religious conviction stand as difficult touching points. She strongly
acknowledges these differences while suggesting strategies for
discussing the issues in ways that make crossing of difficult
barriers more easy.
She points out that many social and
political postures of white working class voters and others are not
racism, but fear. Fear of the unknown creates misunderstandings and
confusing disjunctions in contemporary society. Especially poignant
is Williams' demonstration that racism exists in all of us, but
manifests itself differently through the application of class-based
stereotypes. Her examples hit home to any thoughtful reader with the
genuine power of recognition.
White working class families are more
generally associated with more closely knit families, often for
economic and convenience reasons growing out of providing mutual
support in a difficult and demanding living and working world.
Elites, however, place their self concepts and advancement on
mobility, college educations, and self-satisfied sophistication
setting them apart and above. Basic questions like “Why don't they
move to where the jobs are” or “Why don't they go to college, get
educated, and move up?” are answered by understanding the values
concerning family, religion, and work maintained by those in the
white working class. The dilemmas created for those Williams calls
“class migrants,” people who move from working class into
professional and technical ranks, are heart rending in the
descriptions of how people learn social and economic cues that mark
them as different from their background, and then must deal with the
dis-jointures they discover in being separated from their background
and heritage. The term “fly over country,” which passes as
sophisticated wit among the elite is deeply insulting to those who
see that country as “Home.” By dismissing large parts of the
country, and the values and hard-working lives of those who live and
seek to work there, the sophisticated coastal elites are simply
insulting and alienating those they need to understand most.
Williams examines the kind of
educational approaches, short of obtaining a college education, which
would lead to appropriate employment in manufacturing for today's
working class. She explores several approaches which would involve
labor unions, schools and community colleges, and local manufacturers
in training and empowering workers to become gainfully employed,
while recognizing that older forms of heavy industry dependent on
large employee populations are unlikely to return. Williams couples
this with the family values and work ethic which would be reinforced
by such arrangements. When placing racism, sexism, and fear of both
Muslims and Latinos beside the greater fear of the inability to meet
family obligations in the face of ongoing layoffs, she argues that
its little wonder that white working class Americans were attracted
by the promises of Donald Trump, no matter how blue sky they may turn
out to be.
Joan C. Williams
Professor Joan C. Williams is a
Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Hastings Foundation Chair, and the
Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of
California Hastings College of the Law. She is a graduate of Harvard
Law School, earned a Master's Degree in City Planning at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her completed her
undergraduate degree in history at Yale University. She has written
over seventy law review articles, including one listed in 1996 as one
of the most cited law review articles ever written. Her work has been
excerpted in casebooks on six different topics. She has been
described as having "something approaching rock star status”
by The New York Times.
Joan C. Williams in White
Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Harvard
Business Review Press, 2017, 192 pages, $15.31/13.49) has
written a readable, scholarly book about class, race, and gender.
Some might consider that feat to be an oxymoron, but this volume
performs a great service for anyone wishing to understand the
phenomenon of Donald Trump's election and appeal to the range of
voters he attracted. Williams manages this feat with a style that is
both thoroughly analytical and warmly human, sprinkling her text with
personal anecdotes and well-chosen examples taken from thoughtful
people crossing many of the fault lines separating Americans from
achieving mutual understanding. Both in the amount of information
this book provides and the tone in which it is written, this book
provides a service for scholars, policy-makers, and general readers.
It make a genuine contribution to the discussion.I received the book
as an digital download from the publisher through NetGalley. I read
it on my Kindle App.
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