I’m old enough to remember when both The Cosby Show and when Rosanne premiered on television. Originally airing in 1984 the Cosby Show was a breakthrough in its portrayal of an upper middle-class Black family. Not only were the mom and dad a doctor and a lawyer but their parents (the grandparents) were white-collar professionals, their friends were Black white-collar professionals, and they expected their kids to become white-collar professionals. Bill Cosby turned out to be a rapist. But the show was still groundbreaking. Rosanne was also groundbreaking. If the Cosbys were all about Black excellence (with an underlying veneer of respectability politics) Rosanne, airing four years later was its opposite.
There were lots of great (though often incredibly mean humored) shows during the eighties. But most of the families portrayed were white and middle-class to upper class. If the moms worked (assuming they weren’t dead or missing. For some reason TV loves this trope.) it was because they wanted to, not because they had to. Rosanne turned this on its head. The characters, larger than life physically and in personality, may have played to some of the stereotypes about poor and working-class whites but those stereotypes were never played for laughs. They were real in a way you didn’t see a lot of anywhere on television by the mid to late 80s.
Too often then and now, and especially when it comes to reality tv, poor white folks are portrayed in much the same way as are poor folks of color. They are shown as lazy, ignorant, and uneducated. People who lack jobs, who are abusive and violent. Plus, they get nailed as hypocritical bigots spewing hatred while praising the Baby Jesus. From Married with Children to the antics of Honey Boo Boo to the perps on Cops these stereotypes are exploited and reinforced in countless media portrayals.
In fact, there have always been white people, even in the South, doing the right thing. Political cooperation between poorer whites and Blacks has a long and radical history that includes class dissent. During the Civil Rights era many white people sacrificed their lives. White Kansas pastor James Reeb died of head injuries after being cruelly beaten by white segregationists. Vilola Liuzzo, a white woman from Tennessee, was murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Selma. Jonathan Daniels, a white seminarian from New Hampshire, died when protecting a Black teenager from a shotgun blast in Hayneville, Alabama. There have always been people who stood up against an unjust system even when that system was skewed in their favor.
In “The Original Underclass: Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has” published in the Atlantic and ProPublica Alec MacGillis reviews two books on white poverty. One of them was Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance. The other was White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg. From antebellum days to the present the poor, white and nonwhite, are vilified for taking government aid. And they tend to join in on the scorn as soon as the aid has lifted them up much like Craig T. Nelson in the infamous 2009 clip these folks will proclaim, “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anyone help me out? No!” It becomes a tale of hard work and ingenuity.
In Vance’s book, he would have it that anti-welfare resentment is not racially motivated but the response from readers to the MacGillis article, clearly illustrates it is still impossible not only to disentwine race and class in America, but that the elite’s goals of racial divisiveness hold firm. Of those published, all by self-described poor whites, all compared themselves to communities of color. Mostly to Black communities. All disparaged those communities.
Vance writes that the white poor of the circle in which he grew up feel and act as if their choices don’t matter. Why wouldn’t they feel this way? The lower classes have been alternatively demonized or ignored for as long as the United States has existed. More recently, however, low-income whites are suffering many of the same experiences as African Americans. Men are put out of work which makes marriage seem like less of an option. But because people be peopling babies keep getting born. At the turn of the century this was aggravated by meth addiction. Mortality rates rose as this became opiate addiction and still no-one cared until opiate addiction spilled into “good” homes.
In Vance’s memoir he writes about how he would look in resentment at the FICA line on his paycheck while his drug addicted neighbor, content to live on the dole, feasted on steaks Vance was too poor to buy for himself. The abandonment of the Democratic Party, the party that was seen by the white poor and working class as supporting such government largesse, was due in large part to this sort of bitterness. But many of the reasons that life is so much harder for poor white Gen Xers and their Millennial and Gen Zed children have to do with the government protections put in place after the Great Depression being stripped away or torn down by the courts. There are more monopolies now than there were before the “too big to fail” collapses of Republican Recession. Organized labor is weak and weakening under the combined assault of government and multinational corporations.
Fatalism has people looking backward with nostalgia as they embrace the idea that things were much better in an earlier time. This is not untrue. I’ve written a bit about how much it sucks to be poor and white but it’s still better than being poor and not white. Many would like to strip race out of the class conversation in the US. One of the most compelling arguments for why not to do this is a review of the New Deal. Projects like the Resettlement Administration moved poor white folks to better land and offered loans. The Tennessee Valley Authority tackled major issues like flooding, providing electricity, and replanting forests. Their work underpinned development of much of the South but the training centers and planned towns were almost entirely to the benefit of struggling rural whites. But that was long ago time.
In modern times inequality takes many forms. In the last couple of generations access to opportunity in America has been closed off. Current income inequality in the U.S. is worse than it has been in more than half a century. When the Republican talking heads speak of urban elites, they are not wrong. The money is isolated on the coasts and in big cities. The cities are expensive but per capita income in those cities is 50%, double, or even higher than the national average. As rural areas have been hollowed out those left behind find themselves with fewer and fewer options.* One of the few things worse than poverty is isolated poverty.
Acknowledging the status of poor and working-class whites throughout our history means acknowledging the false narrative of the American dream. Embracing the lie allows us to minimize and generally disregard the white poor. Ignoring the deep, entrenched, generational poverty that can exist in white communities allows us to also ignore problems of inequality.
Sources
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/us-elections-2016-who-can-vote/index.html
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jul/02
https://www.vpr.org/post/how-enslaved-woman-sued-her-freedom-18th-century-massachusetts#stream/0
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/02/vermont-slavery-ban/7200493/
https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/vermont-1777-early-steps-against-slavery
http://www.mrheintz.com/how-many-signers-of-the-declaration-of-independence-owned-slaves.html
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/poor-whites-have-been-written-out-of-history-for-a-very-political-reason
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/books/review/white-trash-by-nancy-isenberg.html
https://medium.com/@ebruenig/the-undeserving-poor-a-very-tiny-history-96c3b9141e13
https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/
https://www.ushistory.org/us/5b.asp
https://journals.openedition.org/mimmoc/2777?lang=en
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/indentured-servitude-in-the-colonial-u-s/
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/30/633891473/why-its-time-to-retire-the-disparaging-term-white-trash
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/08/01/605084163/why-its-still-ok-to-trash-poor-white-people
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/origin-white-trash-class-still-issue-u-s
http://picturethis.museumca.org/timeline/depression-era-1930s/political-protest/info
https://livingnewdeal.org/glossary/tennessee-valley-authority-tva-1933/
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html
- Covid19 may alter this reality. The disease has taught many that their jobs can be done from home and that home can be anywhere. Housing prices in San Francisco have already begun to drop as folks seek out high speed internet in more genial, and affordable, climes.