Kali Holloway has an excellent article up at Raw Story: Stop asking me to empathize with the white working class. Here’s just a bit of it:
[…] Trump stoked racial hatred, but he didn’t invent it, so stop acting like he did because it makes you feel good. The irony of this whole thing is that Trump knew better than a lot of “good” white folks—even recognized as well as folks of color did—how much white power and supremacy means to white people. From day one, he bet that it would be enough to get him elected. He ran a brilliant campaign, in a country where a brilliant campaign can almost solely consist of telling white people they might not be on top forever. He called it. Credit where it’s due.
The only surprise to come out of this election is how many, and how quickly, white people want us to empathize with the people who voted against our humanity, our right to exist in this place. Even before the election, the Washington Post actually had the audacity to berate us for not crying for the white working class. In the days since Trump won, the number of articles urging everybody to be cool to Trump’s America, to understand what they are facing, to hear their grievances, has added insult to injury. Bernie Sanders issued a statement saying Trump “tapped into the anger of a declining middle class that is sick and tired of establishment economics, establishment politics and the establishment media.” I read it at least three times and couldn’t find the words “white supremacy” anywhere in it.
Please miss me with all this nonsense. I’m not even going to get into how this is based on an easily refutable economic lie, especially since others have already spent precious time they’ll never get back breaking this down. But even if it was true—and I am well aware of what’s plaguing the white working class, from substance abuse to suicide to a loss of manufacturing jobs—I refuse to take part in the endless privileging of white pain above all others. (Martin Gilens, who has studied this stuff going way back, notes that when the media face of poverty is white, this country suddenly gets a lot more compassionate.) Latinos and African Americans remain worse off than the white working class—which is still the “largest demographic bloc in the workforce”—by pretty much every measurable outcome, from home ownership to life expectancy. Where are these appeals for us when we protest or riot against the systemic inequality we live with? Where are all the calls to recognize and understand our anger?
For hundreds of years, white people have controlled everything in this country: the executive office, Congress, the Supreme Court, the criminal justice system, Wall Street, the lending institutions, the history textbook industry, the false narrative that America cares about liberty and justice for all. But I need to understand white feelings of marginalization because a black man was in the White House for eight years? Because political correctness—a general plea for white people not to be as awful as they have been in the past— asked that white people put more effort into being decent than they felt up to? Because white folks didn’t like that feeling when politicians aren’t singularly focused on the hard times and struggles of their communities? Audre Lorde said (I wonder if that woman ever got sick of being right), “oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.” For a people who have shamed black folks for supposedly always wanting a hand out, for being a problem of the entitlement state, I have never seen people who so firmly believe they are owed something.
Let me pass along some advice black folks have been given for a long time: stop being so angry and seeing yourself as a victim, and try pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. That’s really all I have for you right now, this re-gifting of wisdom. […]
I’ll stand with Ms. Holloway here, and I stand by Iris, too. Over at Death to Squirrels, I said that my days of empathizing with cons of any stripe are over, and they are. White people have gone full court whiny now, wanting everyone to pat them on the head and say, yes, yes, you have it so bad, darling. No. Even liberal white people are getting in on the Whine Wagon. “But you have to be nice to them! They’re just misunderstood!” My response to that? The fuck I do, and the fuck they are.
Before I go on, the standard disclaimer: no, all white people aren’t awful. No, all white people aren’t unrepentant bigots. No, all white people are not willfully ignorant assholes. Yes, lots of white people get it.
This nonsense of “you must have empathy for them, you must!” needs to stop, right now. The people who voted Trump into the position of president-elect did so for specific reasons, but the primary one is exactly what Ms. Holloway said: power. White people are all about power, and they love their privilege. Of course they listened to a fucking gold-plated idiot who told them their power as Mighty Whitey was slipping. They’ve already felt that, and yep, they’ve been very upset about it, and grabbed onto Trump with a death grip in order to get firmly ensconced on top of the people pile once more. I have no idea why white liberals have latched onto the tone argument; Trumpoids have no interest in anyone being nice and understanding, they want obeisance and submission. They want to be what they always have been in this country – lords of the manor. They want to be able to spit, sneer, and be in a position of authoritative judgment of all others. White cons have no use whatsoever for white liberals, either, so that makes the tone argument even more inexplicable.
I’ll be 59 in a matter of days. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. Tumultuous times, rife with change, change for the better. There was such hope in the ’70s, people had such faith in the future. This is not what we were dreaming about. The 80s saw the serious rise of conservatism once again, especially Christian conservatism. I’ve been around for the whole thing, and decade by decade, cons have gotten worse, more extreme, more hateful, more spiteful, more poisonous. It’s not a surprise the white wall of conservative xianity took their one chance to power, nor is it surprising that white supremacists have wrapped themselves around Trump like a cloak. All that, I understand. I don’t like it at all, but I understand it.
What I don’t understand is this hand-wringing call for sympathy, tea and cookies. No. No, no, no. When have Christian Cons every had empathy for anyone except themselves? When have white supremacists ever had empathy for anyone except themselves? Christian Cons and white supremacists are evil people, perfectly willing commit themselves to evil to gain their goals. We’re dealing with one of those acts of evil right now. They did the proverbial deal with the devil in order to get closer to all the things they want, and what they want, more than anything, is to stomp people into submission, one way or another. They want to stomp all those feminist sluts into the ground, removing any sort of bodily autonomy, unless it happens to be their bodily autonomy on the line, natch. “No More Uppity” might as well be their battle cry, along with the requisite god, guns, and bible business.
I haven’t recovered quite yet, but to anyone who thinks that “you gotta be nice to them” is some sort of strategy or argument, I have one response: Fuck No.
Kali Holloway’s full article is here, highly recommended. Also recommended: https://twitter.com/drskyskull/status/796916965956874241
It disgusts me how many of my fellow white liberals have been doing elaborate mental gymnastics to argue that the election of an openly racist and misogynist candidate had nothing to do with racism or misogny. It’s the same thing I saw in the primary when straight white cis dudebro ‘progressives’ where lecturing us about how dedicating any attention or effort to issues that dont personally affect them is ‘identity politics’ that only distracts from the ‘real issues’.
I grew up in a tiny rural town in Texas, population under 1000. What you’d call Trump Country. Ya I grew up surrounded by poverty and substance abuse, but you know what else I saw growing up? Racism. Blatant shameless racism.
White liberals are trying to pretend these people were somehow tricked into thinking Donald Trump, a man who has devoted his entire life to crafting his persona of a filthy rich jackass, was a hero of the working class. Bullshit. These people aren’t idiots, they don’t seriously believe the guy flying around in a gold plated private jet cares about them. They might claim that if a reporter asks them, but it’s a lie. They voted for Trump because he promised to put those uppity minorities in their place. That’s why that whole ‘they’ll abandon Trump when he cant give them good jobs’ narrative is bullshit. They didn’t elect him because he promised jobs, they elected him because he promised racism and he looks ready to follow through on that campaign promise.
One group that never seems to come up in these analyses is the black working class. If you repeatedly associate “working class” with “white”, you may be (unintentionally) buying into the bigoted stereotype of hard-working whites versus indolent blacks. Black-white working class solidarity is a necessity to fight the crude politics of Trump (and those who follow him).
That whole “you gotta understand them”stuff sounds like a textbook abusive relationship:
-empathising with the abuser while dismissing the victims? Check!
-ignoring the past pain and only concentrating on the present? Check!
-gaslighting the victim about the abuse? Check!
-implied threats? Check!
polishsalami
Well, white working class are just ordinary people down on their luck, affected by globalisation, you know, while black working class have only themselves to blame…
polishsalami:
White working class is a dog whistle. When I was growing up, it was just the working class. “White working class” started being used, here and there, in the ’80s, when Reagan had been elected, and the rise of Christian conservatism got serious. It became more frequently used, until it reached the point that “the working class” equaled “whites only”.
I’m also wondering how the sheer number of people voting for Trump is supposed to be an argument that they cannot all be racist. I have no problem believing in 50 million racists
Giliell:
I don’t either. I think what a lot of people are missing is that someone doesn’t need to be an outright bigot in their day to day life to have voted for Trump. A lot of them aren’t, they do understand though, that they benefit from racist infrastructure, and they fear for the loss of white power and privilege. That’s racist, no matter how you slice it.
Thanks for this, Caine. In my weaker moments, I have thoughts of “Maybe this isn’t as bad as I think,” even though I fucking know better.
After this election, the Standard Disclaimer(TM) turns my stomach more than it ever has before. This is not aimed at the people who make the disclaimer, well not the non-white ones anyway, but the continuing expectation that they are needed and owed.
As you have said, many oh-so-liberal white people still need and expect to have their consciences eased. Those of us who try to recognize our privilege know who we are.
Czechamerican:
Yes, we do. And we are going to have to be more vigilant than ever, and we have a hell of a lot of standing up to do in the dark days ahead.
This is where Bernie Sanders got off to a horrible start with his campaign as well. He pushed the argument that he could make things better for the “middle class” (read “white middle class”). He claimed minorities would rise with them rather than acknowledge the overt as well as structural racism that is suppressing minority achievement. He seemed to learn a little, albeit slowly, but now seems to have forgotten any of those lessons.
@Caine
Yes, indeed. I am not a confrontational person, but I don’t think my dander has ever been anwhere near as far up as it is now.
Might not be a fun New Year’s Eve at the in-laws this year…
In the same vein, I think this guy’s FB post could use a boost. Offered without comment:
Watching this mess from across the border, so please forgive my observations as those of someone who is an outsider:
First off…it is horrifying. Please take everything I write in the context of absolute condemnation and disgust for anyone’s reasoning for voting for that man. He is awful, his propositions are horrifying, and the methods he endorses to accomplish them are ghastly. I cannot imagine what it must be to live wondering which of the people you know voted for such a person.
Secondly, it is the epitome of hypocrisy to suggest that a member of any marginalized group feel empathy or attempt to sympathise with their oppressor. No argument here at all, and anyone who does that should, frankly, quiet down and listen.
That said…I _do_ think that it is valuable for whites, for people who have family members or friends, or acquaintances, who voted for this monstrosity to open conversations with them from a position of empathy. Rightly or wrongly (and I would personally argue with vehemence for ‘wrongly’), these are people who think they have been silenced, mocked, and shouted at. That’s not a state of mind that anyone can learn in, and it is immeasurably crucial that they DO learn just exactly why and how their vote has done so much damage. I completely agree that the perspective they have on this is wrong…but being right doesn’t change anything.
I don’t know how much of the media coverage that we get up here is skewed, but everything we see about the politics in the US right now is so incredibly divided, it’s like there are two camps of thought, and the idea of discourse is utterly abhorrent to both sides, even on the smallest of things.
Alternative suggestion: cut their sorry asses out of your life and do something productive. When I talked about abusive relationships before, this is exactly what I mean: You’re putting the burden for making the others understand on the ones being abused. Abusive husbands also think that they’re being the mistreated party.
I have disdain for white conservatives, particularly those that say they voted for Trump for economic reasons. They failed extra hard to do their basic duty of treating their vote with a sense of responsibility.
I do not understand how anything gets solved by less communication and further entrenchment and isolation into sides. No one in a marginalized community should feel obliged to this, as I said, but it seems counterproductive to imply that attempting to change minds and keep communication open is an inferior ethical choice for those who are willing to attempt it.
Dywalgi:
It won’t work, and it’s the wrong thing to do. It’s liberals, and people who are active in social justice who have empathy, compassion, and care for others. It’s natural for people to say “engage that, be sympathetic!”, but it’s pointless. This is exactly as Giliell said, this is like facing an abusive spouse, who is convinced they are the victim, in spite of the fact they regularly beat the shit out of their spouse: “you didn’t have supper on the table, your fault I beat you up” and so on.
White, Christian conservatives are the same way. There’s nothing for them to understand -- they understand all they want to understand, which is that they’ve found a way to reach some of their goals in dominating and controlling others, or so they think. As I said, they are not the slightest bit interested in understanding, or sympathy, or anything else, because if one of them says “oh, I voted for him because jobs” or the like, they are lying.
I can certainly understand why you feel that way, Caine. I don’t, personally, however. There are certainly people whose opinions will never change, but there are a lot who will: but they won’t if there is no space to move from being wrong to being right in. Again…I don’t think it is anyone’s obligation but their own to get there, but writing off a whole group of people or assuming that they all share the same motivations seems perilous to me.
Every time I’ve heard the “you should be nice to them and talk to them” thing, it has never been accompanied by any specific approaches.
Also, I might agree with you if these people had voted in someone like Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan, people who are “palatable” bigots and can probably easily fool ignorant and lazy but well-meaning voters. But we’re talking about Trump. Everything was highly publicized and completely out there. They KNEW his views and they all heard his audio transcript from the bus. They voted for him because of the things he was saying about minorities.
Saad:
In some ways, this is so reminiscent of the atheism schism. I don’t see people who are advocating niceness going into the thick of Trump fans and saying “you need to be nice to liberals, you must understand them! You really need to reach out to them.” I don’t see anyone advocating niceness going into Stormfront or the Daily Stormer, or the other strongholds of white supremacy to tell them, well, you’re being a bit mean to liberals, and maybe you’re a bit mistaken about Trump.
Fuck that noise with bells on. A great many people in this lost country are fucking terrified, I’m one of them. I’m not about to serve up tea and cookies for those assholes who look at my people as though they were less than vermin. No.
Every single person who voted for Trump knew what they were doing, they were voting for a xenophobic, homophobic bigot, a rapist, a sexual predator, a con man, an open fraud, a sociopath, a climate change denier, and promoter of white supremacy. There is no way in any universe I’ll make nice with such people.
First off…it is difficult for me to read tone, and I hope that I am coming across as respectful, because I do agree with much of what has been said. If at any point my comments cross a line I cannot see, please tell me and I will stop. My interest is discussion, not poking a sore wound.
In reverse order, I think it is incorrect to assume that all voters are as educated in what is said and done in a campaign as one might like. If the only regular news source you get is talk radio and the headlines, it is absolutely possible to have no idea how damaging the politics of someone like Trump. Add to that the “support your team!” mindlessness that is encouraged in lower class voters toward pretty much everything from soda choice to sports…it is not hard for me to believe at all.
To the first…I think the most important component of it has to be giving the person space to distance themselves and see that they don’t share the views of the “brand” they’re identifying with.
I am going to stop here, because I get the feeling that I am not helping anything.
Dywalgi, take a very good look at the top photo here. This is happening everywhere as we speak. Hate incidents are at an all time high. I don’t need to understand these people, I already do. They are filled with hate, and want to be able to stomp all over people they see as lesser. I will not be nice to them.
I did not mean to suggest that you, or anyone, be nice, Caine, not did I mean to suggest that the people actively being racist, sexist, homophobic asshats are anything but despicable. I think I am miscommunicating terribly, and given the responses it is either that I am using the wrong words or missing something critical in my thinking. At any rate, I apologize unreservedly and am going to back off now until I figure out and fix whichever or both of those is wrong.
Changing people’s opinions is hard, and it’s highly debatable whether it’s worth the trouble.
Clinton did not lose this election because she failed to reach out to Republicans, crypto-Republicans, pseudo-Republicans, or any other species of Trump voter. She lost because the Dem vote was drastically down in several key states. If’ she’d got exactly the same vote in those states as Obama did in 2012, she would have won, despite any increases in the GOP vote.
We don’t need to understand why people voted for Trump (my current theory is “They’re Republicans, and he was the Replublican candidate”). We need to understand why people didn’t vote for Clinton. The drop in the Dem vote from 2012 was over 10% in four states, representing a total of 50 EC votes. It was over 20% in Iowa -- what the hell happened there?
Ooooh, a discussion! A rational, logical discussion about the potential virtues of people who knowingly vote for a racist, sexist, violent bigot. Sounds plausible.
Personally I’m all for the rifts. Those who want to are perfectly welcome to try and build bridges, but they will know who they are. Here is presented a perspective specifically saying that the author (that’s you, Caine!) has no time or desire to build these bridges. So why have that discussion here? Why not find some of those bridge-building people and talk to them about what can be done to further educate people who, according to all the evidence, don’t wish to be educated?
I call bullshit, since it doesn’t take much reading between the lines that a stance like ‘deport all the Mexicans’ or ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ are horribly problematic and bigoted to the nth degree. The issue isn’t that the headlines were particularly obscuring or difficult to parse; the issue is that the issues were obvious, and people still chose to vote for Trump.
Personally, I’m all for the rifts. It’s easier to build something this side of the great chasm if there isn’t anybody around actively trying to tear it down. At the very least, it provides time and space to fortify the position and make it more difficult to destroy at some later point in time.
rq:
Word.
Word, word, word.
Dunc:
No, we don’t. I know all the talking heads are going crazy with the post mortems, and making things out to be so complex, but they were very simple indeed. Those who voted for Trump, that’s been explained: bigots love him, white supremacists see him as their big chance, and white conservative Christians saw him as their one chance to regain power and repeal Roe v Wade. Basically, all the people who like fascism, they voted it in, because they assume they will be the perpetrators of fascism, not the victims.
Clinton won the popular vote. It’s the electoral college who put Trump in power. They have the ability to take that power away on Dec. 19th. I seriously doubt they will do that, but if they do, I expect we’ll be looking at another civil war. As for all the supposed liberals who voted 3rd party, wrote someone in, or abstained, that’s easily explained: spite. A lot of white liberals were feeling very spiteful over Sanders, and they voted their spite. They too knew what they were doing, but their personal spite and hatred were more important to them than doing the right thing. On both sides of the fence, you had humans at their worst, which has resulted in The United States of Fascism, welcome to the new nazism.
Nobody is stopping you. But I have a feeling how this goes: white liberals being all understanding for their bigoted family members while kicking marginalised people under the bus. What is needed now is resistance and sending a clear strong signal towards all Trump voters that their behaviour was unacceptable and that they caused great harm. If somebody who is not a capital B Bigot doesn’t get the message now but some pampering of their feelings they will only be emboldened.
Dunc
I’ve seen a lot of good arguments that it neatly coincides with voter suppression. Also for white liberals: fuck them. If they didn’t vote Clinton for some reason, they were OK with a Trump presidency. They were OK with the things happening now, the things Caine is posting. They cannot claim ignorance because they are not your “uninformed voters”: They knew Brexit happened when nobody believed it would and they knew that racist hate crimes raised 400% afterwards. They were OK with risking that.
rq
Quoted for motherfucking truth.
I have a hard time believing that 1 in 5 Democratic voters in Iowa and Ohio were Bernie-or-busters… Are we sure there wasn’t any vote suppression going on?
Of course there was fucking voter suppression going on, I even posted about it, FFS.
Ah, I see Giliell beat me to the voter suppression angle…
What this comes down to, for me, is that I am sick to fucking death of all the hand wringing analysis, all the people saying “oh, we really need to understand”, because we do not -- we already understand, it’s right there in fucking front of us all.
Fascism won. More people wanted that, and they got it by any means possible, including voter suppression.
As I wrote in the OP, this has been brewing for decades. Anyone with their eyes open could see this one coming, and now people want to pretend it’s such a fucking shock. I was in an extended state of terror over this election, hoping against hope, but you know, I knew. I knew what was going to happen. And if more people were honest, they’d admit that too.
I’m fucking terrified. All these fascists and nazis? They think I should be dead. They think all my people should be dead. They loathe the very earth which gives us all life. They will gleefully sign a death sentence on us all.
Caine @30: it was a rhetorical question.
@Dunc, just for example of voter suppression, Trump won my state by 410,000 fewer votes than were purged from the rolls. Probably a total coincidence that the voters purged were largely black, since black voters in NC are broadly Democrats. If even half those registered voters had been able to cast ballots, he’d have lost.
Caine, #32
Precisely. This election was incredibly simple to understand. And the resulting hate crimes are all incredibly simple to understand. We know exactly what’s going on. It’s totally white privilege for people to think something uniquely new is happening. Marginalized minorities have been experiencing these for many years; the frequency and openness of the hate has just increased. It’s only asshole white fake allies who are acting like there’s some weird nuanced reason Trump got so many votes.
Saad:
Exactly. And the rhetoric going around now is that liberals and minorities are the ones spreading hate.
I really don’t understand -- are white liberals really so stupid that they need more rhetoric and analysis to see through to the fascism? Or is it a way to blinker themselves into believing that something else out there is actually to blame, rather than a collective unwillingness to think about the actual consequences of voting for Trump (or, alternatively, simply not voting for Clinton)?
And especially after Brexit, and all the articles and analysis out there about the rise of fascism and echoes of Hitler -- the election was godwinned long before the result was known, but for some reason, that was okay, because somehow, by the power of white liberals, fascism wouldn’t come to power. Oh, but Hillary is totally the worst candidate, so uh sorry. Or something. But all the evidence was there, and the hand-wringing analysis smacks of the hyper-skepticism often met with when discussing things like sexual harrassment in progressive spaces: well, gee, how could this possibly happen to us, who could possibly have foreseen this result? We’re totally against this, this is totally not what we meant by protest voting! (I mean, it’s not the same, but it has the same flavour.)
Ah, I look back fondly at the Reagan years when my then workplace rapidly got taken over by newly-minted KKK members who fed on St. Ronald’s racism.
No, come to think of it, I don’t.
busterggi:
Neither do I.