Who's Afraid of Working-Class White Men?
class, prejudice, and the election
He’s Al Bundy, Archie Bunker, or Homer Simpson. He’s Bob of Bob’s Burgers or the driveway beer drinkers on King of the Hill. He never finished college, never dropped his accent. His life’s ambition is to buy a speedboat; a goal he’ll probably never reach. Rural, urban, or suburban, he’s often the butt of the joke.
We laugh because he’s scary. He voted for Trump in 2020 and maybe sympathizes with the Jan 6th rioters. He probably owns guns. Maybe he’s a wife beater. Maybe he’s a Klan member. He’s the bogeyman of Liberals, because we don’t actually know him. The closest we come is hiring a plumber or handyman, whom we secretly find intimidating.
These, of course, are stereotypes. As Betsy Leondar-Wright wrote in her book, Class Matters, “On a deeper level lurks a fear that working-class white men are more sexist than other men and more racist than other white people.”
David Croteau puts it this way in his book, Politics and the Class Divide:
“Activists’ notions of ‘the working class’ tended to fall at extreme poles: either workers were the gloriously idyllic proletariat (who one day would smarten up and start doing their revolutionary duty) or they were stupid, fascistic hard hats for whom there was no hope (and who were the easy target of ridicule.) Either way, their working class bore little resemblance to the working class I knew.”
Where do these perceptions come from? Unlike age, race, or gender, class is one of the few categories you can still be blamed for. While it makes sense to protect people from discrimination based on their innate characteristics, economic class isn’t as changeable as many think. For all our talk of bootstrapping our way toward the American Dream, class mobility (the ability to improve one’s class status) has markedly decreased since the 70s. But solidarity with minimum wage workers seems thin on the ground—many of us act like fast food workers shouldn’t expect to be able to support themselves from this sort of work, even if it’s full-time.
Another reason for our negative perceptions about white working-class men? They don’t fit our neat stories about who’s oppressed and who’s not. Our culture likes binaries: Black or white, male or female, rich or poor, disabled or able-bodied. But identity is complex and intersectional. You can be privileged in one category and disadvantaged in another. So white working-class men can have the privilege of being white + the privilege of being male while being disadvantaged in terms of class.
I’ll admit that I’ve held negative stereotypes about WCWM. Blame my highschool bullies, or maybe the fact while I was raised comfortably middle-class, my mom was deeply ashamed of having grown up in poverty. It took me years to understand why she was so particular about only buying our clothes from department stores, why she sought out hobbies like classical music and ballet.
In a world that wants to paint you as nothing more than “white trash,” one must develop defenses: adopting a middle-class aesthetic is one, embracing respectability is another. Perhaps that’s why so many white working-class folks identify as evangelical Christians. In fact, 71% of white evangelicals do not hold a college degree. It makes sense to me that committing to a high-control religion is a way of burnishing one’s reputation—of saying “I may be poor, but I’m not trash.”
Most of the people in my various circles are college educated and white collar, and those few WCWM I know sometimes make me feel uncomfortable—they don’t have the same social mores as many in our Liberal bubble, they might make jokes about race. But I also know that they generally have more colleagues and friends of color than I do. So while they might not be up on the latest “correct” way of speaking, they’re actually living these relationships.
(This is the part of Liberalism that reminds me most of my fundamentalist days: it often feels like we care more about following the rules than actual relationships. Because policing other people’s language is a lot easier than interrogating your own prejudices.)
Maybe it feels a bit rich to empathize with white men when so many other groups have it worse. I get that. But if we care about truly loving our neighbors as ourselves, we need to learn to really see each other. That means learning to see past stereotypes and prejudices. It means interrogating the urge to assume the worst about someone. And luckily, empathy is not a finite resource—we can hold space and empathy for people of color and for working-class white folks.
When we really see each other, we’ll find things that surprise us. Yes, a majority of WCWM voted for Trump in 2020, but a third of them didn’t. If we keep an open mind, we might find these guys to be good allies in our fight for justice.
BONUS MATERIALS:
Had enough about white men? Check out the fantastic Substack, White Homework with Tori
Oh and, btw, amazing article. I was looking for a piece like this after having a very disheartening conversation online about seemingly progressive people.
Until people see poverty as a fault and individual failure the white working class man will always be treated as privileged white trash who deserves little empathy. Poverty is not a fault but a systemic failure. Also, the system we have does not necessarily prize honourable qualities. I am sorry in America there is this view. I am from Italy and, honestly, the average working class person here is far from racist or misogynist. It has been "disputed" a long time ago. They are too worried about making it to the end of the month. I grew up hearing about people who gave their lives to obtain the rights most workers (even middle class) take for granted. Poor people are resilient, they have to be.