Poor Whites Trashed
Why conservatives are talking about struggling white people the way they usually talk about black people.
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“If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas,” writes Kevin Williamson for National Review,
“and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and
alcohol addiction, the family anarchy. … The truth about these
dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.” His
colleague David French echoed the assessment.
“Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their
families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy
isn’t putting a bottle in their hand.”
Jamelle Bouie
In the past, this is how conservatives have talked about
struggling blacks. If inner cities and rural black communities were poor
and dysfunctional, it was because of cultural deficiencies, not broad
economic problems. With more effort, went the argument, they could
overcome economic isolation and social stigma. And the evidence was
success among low-income white Americans who’d overcome their station.
But now, more whites than ever are sinking toward the
bottom, living in the same conditions that have faced black Americans
for decades. And suddenly, conservatives are talking about them in the same way. We’ve seen this dynamic before.
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“The chief characteristic of Rag Tag and Bobtail, however, is
laziness. They are about the laziest two-clogged animals that walk erect
on the face of the Earth,” wrote Alabama lawyer and secessionist Daniel
R. Hundley in Social Relations in Our Southern States, a
widely cited volume published on the eve of the Civil War. “Rag Tag and
Bobtail” is Hundley’s moniker for the poor whites of the South, whom he
also calls “poor white trash.” He describes them as “working habitually
in company with Negroes,” and in some sense as being black themselves.
“Even their motions are slow, and their speech is a sickening drawl,
worse a deal sight than the most down-eastern of all the Down-Easters
while their thoughts and ideas seem likewise to creep along at a snail's
pace. All they seem to care for, is, to live from hand to mouth; to get
drunk, provided they can do so without having to trudge too far after
their liquor,” Hundley wrote. “We do not believe the worthless
ragamuffins would put themselves to much extra locomotion to get out of a
shower of rain; and we know they would shiver all day with cold, with
wood all around them, before they would trouble themselves to pick it up
and build a fire.”
Hundley is just one man, but there’s no question these attitudes were
common among the Southern fancy class. In one euphemism-rich passage in
an 1854 treatise, Henry Hughes, a Confederate colonel and sociologist,
wrote in aspirational terms of a system of American slavery in which all
races participate, a sort of “I Have a Dream” speech in reverse:
“Warranteeism without the ethnical qualification is that to which every
society of one race must progress.”
Among members of the elite, the teetering of the social structure
established by slavery was understood in part as a sort of blackening of
poor white people. There was something inherent in this class of white
people, the thinking went, that accounted for—and justified—their lowly
station and their “dysfunctional, downscale communities.” Class
anxieties had been racialized.
The fear among white laborers—North and South—had less to do with a
flattening of the lower social strata than it did with their outright
inversion. This was put to vivid political use. In the lead-up to the
1864 presidential election, the New York World—one of the most
pro-Southern papers in a generally pro-Southern city—published a series
of anti-Lincoln stories, editorials, and lithographs. One of them was
titled “Miscegenation Ball.”
In the top right corner of the illustration was a banner that read
“Universal Freedom. One Constitution. One Destiny.” In the background,
illustrators placed a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. And in the
foreground, a mixed-race group of white men and black women danced and
celebrated. The message was simple: If you re-elect Lincoln, you’ll make
miscegenation the law. A later lithograph, titled “Miscegenation or the Millennium of Abolition,”
was more explicit. Viewed from left to right, it depicted President
Lincoln bowing to a mixed-race couple (a black woman in dress and a
white man in formal wear), a black man and his black wife riding a
carriage drawn by a white man, and two black men, each embracing a white
woman. Again, there’s no question of the message: Under President Lincoln, this is America’s future.
It’s clear that, with these cartoons, the New York World was playing on the disgust of its white readers. But it was also playing on an old fear. Fear that America would become Saint-Domingue writ large. Fear that abolition would bring a world turned upside down,
as the hierarchy that placed whites on the top and blacks at the bottom
collapsed under the strain of war and emancipation. Lincoln won
re-election (thanks to a massive margin with Union soldiers that
required no small amount of coercion and intimidation),
but this racist fear would remain, grow, and curdle into violent anger.
Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a Confederate sympathizer
throughout the war. But he made his fateful choice upon hearing Lincoln
voice support for black suffrage. “That means nigger citizenship. Now,
by God, I’ll put him through,” cursed Booth as he stood in the audience. “That is the last speech he will ever make.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, this fear of racial inversion
would drive ex-Confederates to form anti-black militias and vigilante
groups, devoted to terrorizing emancipated black Americans and
re-establishing the old hierarchy. What Southern whites called “Redemption”
in the 1870s and 1880s, blacks understood as an attempt to re-enslave
them, or at least to keep them in conditions akin to slavery.
All of this gets at one of the key ideas in my look at Barack Obama and the rise of Donald Trump.
The ascension of a black American to the nation’s most prestigious
office—coupled with the worst economic downturn since the Great
Depression—produced a jolt of material and racial anxieties for
millions of working white Americans. In the past, whiteness brought a
measure of social stability. Even when poor, whites would never be at
the bottom of America’s hierarchy—they would never be niggers.
Suddenly, that wasn’t as true, as the downturn destroyed jobs and
brought “inner-city” social ills to white rural and suburban enclaves.
Moreover, the visible rise of a nonwhite elite (both black and Latino)
challenged notions of any kind of social superiority. Now, perhaps, they
were at the bottom, or close to it.
This isn’t the same fear and anger that put Lincoln in the grave and stopped Reconstruction from reaching its potential, but it’s related. It rhymes.
And while our period of economic crisis and rapid racial change is
different from previous ones, it has—like its forebears—sparked a
similar movement of the anxious and resentful, drawn from working- and
middle-class whites who view themselves as a bulwark against the
seemingly idle and dependent, even as conservative elites begin to view
them in the same way. We had Redemption. We had the second Ku Klux Klan. We had George Wallace. Now we have Trump.
The difference now is that this group of whites isn’t as large as it
was. And if the GOP weren’t so reliant on white voters—that is, if it
weren’t such a dysfunctional party—Trump might have stayed at the
margins. But the GOP’s extreme conservatism—inculcated and heightened in
the state houses and governors’ mansions where it has complete
control—and contempt for basic norms of politics has given Trump (and
Trump-like figures) space to grow and flourish. And while Trump is still a long shot for the presidency—the
larger American electorate is different from the Republican Party
base—that doesn’t mean he can’t do real damage to our political
institutions. With the outbreak of violence at Trump events around the
country—spurred on by the candidate himself—it’s already happening.
It’s hard to know where this leads. But if the past is any guide,
this backlash of anger and nativism will get fiercer before it burns
out—if it ever does. One thing is clear, however: These voters aren’t
entirely wrong. The inversion of status, or at least a dramatic decline
in status, is happening. National Review did us the service of
making that explicit. The big question—perhaps the single largest
question of American history—is whether this will inspire empathy and
fellow feeling with minorities or just become tinder for the ongoing
racial reaction.
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