The Ghost of Hillary Clinton
Reviewing Joan C. Williams’ 'White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America'
There’s an interesting bit in Mark Cuban’s foreword to Joan C. Williams’ White Working Class (WWC), where he seeks to correct the view that Trump’s supporters represent a white working class at all. “They’re the middle class, by the way”, he parenthesizes.
Williams seems to contradict this seven pages later, establishing in the preface that the challenge motivating this book was “to explain to the white working class that they have gotten screwed not because they are white but because they are working class.” Based on this, Cuban misses or at least disagrees with the central point of the book: it does not seek to debunk the idea of a white working class base of support for Trump and his policies, but rather to understand what motivates these voters.
While Cuban’s apparent divergence from Williams’ thesis may seem strange, his sentiment is echoed by statistician Nate Silver who wrote an article back in 2016 challenging this idea of a Trump base of low-income white voters. In this he explains that Trump supporters’ median income was above both the national median and that of Clinton supporters in most states.
Williams addresses this narrative again more directly in the second chapter, reminding us that Trump supporters’ median household income of $72,000 is still below median working-class income if we accept her definition of ‘working-class.’ A footnote makes it even clearer: Trump primary voters’ median income in the swing states of Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin was $61,000, $62,000, $64,000, and $69,000 respectively.
Part of this disagreement stems from Williams’ innovative definition of what it means to be working class. For most of us the working class is synonymous with lower income, while for Williams and her editor it essentially means the people in the middle of the income distribution, between roughly $41,000 and $132,000 a year. It also speaks to substantial deformations in what some might assume to be the bell-curve of U.S. income distribution: while the median household income of Williams’ middle class (the middle 53%) is $75,000 a year, the national median is $56,000. Based on these figures we can infer an income distribution that is fairly heavily weighted towards the second quartile, with a long tail on the upper end; an indication of what Williams has elsewhere referred to as the ‘missing middle’ in American incomes.
Williams says this change in terminology was motivated by what she saw as a misconception of what the term ‘middle class’ even referred to: she describes people making anywhere from $22,000 to $200,000 thinking of themselves as middle class. While she admits part of this can be explained by the general discomfort the professional-managerial left has with seeing themselves as upper-class, in my opinion it also has to do with the kind of people Williams talks to. Anecdotally, people I’ve asked tend to view the middle class as starting at around $80,000 in household income.
This term ‘missing middle’ was also used by Williams in a 2010 report The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict, which highlights the dearth of studies on what it calls “solid middle income families.” Because of this the report relies on a database of union arbitrage cases to examine work-life conflicts, which means examples of police, warehouse workers, and nurses seeking to overturn firings on the grounds that they were being made to choose between their job and caring for their children.
The report also describes how low-income mothers are three times more likely to be at home full time than middle-income mothers, hypothesizing that “this inability to sustain the traditional breadwinner-homemaker split may be a source of regret for men and women alike.”
While the report notes “families in the middle have seen a sharp decline in their standard of living since 1973, fueled by wage losses suffered by men,” it offers essentially nothing in the way of an explanation save for an almost embarrassingly naïve observation: “This slower income growth is in spite of the large uptick in women entering the workforce, which all else being equal should have led to much faster growth in family incomes. Rising women’s employment, however, coincided with sharp declines in male wages.”
Leaving aside the interesting differences in roles of lower-income versus middle-income mothers, one might be forgiven for concluding from this report that the rise of women in the workforce has brought little – if any benefits to precisely those women it was initially intended to help. Such a takeaway, however, is not addressed, as the report focuses on the effects of economic disruptions rather than the causes. Perhaps then we can expect a more exhaustive and critical look at this question in Williams’ later work, like in this book for example? While the topic of female disillusionment with the workplace is addressed in WWC, it is framed in terms of jealous, abusive men: “what working class women see is that blue-collar jobs with good pay are heavily gendered as male; men ensure they remain so through severe sexual harassment of women who try to enter...Not surprising, then, that most working-class white women don’t aspire to ‘men’s work.’”(75)
This is not the only theme shared between the 2010 report and WWC. The report explains how “studies of poverty, typically focused on welfare-to-work women, dramatically over-represent single mothers and families of color, and dramatically under-represent whites, divorced fathers and low-income married families.” It seems reasonable then to see WWC as a fresh coat of paint on a methodological narrative Williams developed over a decade ago. I should add here that the book is also essentially an expansion on a 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review.
Where WWC stands out, however, is in its characterizations and indictments of the professional class, in which the author sees herself. Published while the globalist smoke cloud of the 2016 election was still lingering in the air, the book is replete with commentary on the coastal elite mindset as trenchant and sober as one might hope from a Clinton campaign staffer. Williams describes the ‘folkways’ of the professional class as centered around novelty and signaling initiative. They seek approval via subverting norms and “embracing the edgy” while “the white working class seeks social honor by embracing the traditional.”(33)
Much of the meat of Williams’ commentary is her characterizing the particular brand of bigotry found in the professional-liberal worldview, which I’ll get to later, but we also get some tasty medicine in the form of post-campaign autopsy: “Instead of mobilizing themes that could have appealed to working-class men and women,” she laments, “the Clinton campaign stuck to two main talking points: that Clinton had the resume to be president and Trump was unfit to lead. Straight out of the playbook I, myself, helped to write.”(79)
What are these themes, you might ask? I identified two. The first is training these men and women for the jobs of the future: “wind turbine techs, cartographers, and ambulance drivers”(94) are some of the careers she identifies as both growing and appealing to the working-class. The second is more emphasis on the beneficial effects of government aid. “It’s time for some spending to point out all the ways government at every level, and particularly the federal government, helps the have-a-littles, not just the have-nots.” Previous marketing in this area focused on low-income recipients, which Williams sees as hurting both the have-a-littles, who lose sight of what they are already getting, and the have-nots, who are stigmatized.
This sounds like a plan, but it’s also disconnected from what she has previously acknowledged: what the working-class really wants is what both the lower and upper income brackets already have, and what the dual-earner household took from them. Williams appears to elide the contradictions between what seems like an obvious desire on the part of ‘working-class’ women (not just the white ones) to have that traditional homemaker role, and her obvious desire to smash the racist patriarchy. She explains how “having a stay at home wife became something the working class aspired to,”(76) while neglecting to examine how the now-working wives might feel about the situation.
Perhaps the most convincingly-argued passage in WWC is when Williams eulogizes the “meaningful dream” of professional women to see Hillary Clinton “breaking the ‘highest, hardest glass ceiling’”(73) of the presidency, and how “gutted” they were at her loss. “In her they saw a woman who, like themselves, had been forced to walk the likability/competency tightrope, who had often put her husband’s career ahead of her own needs, and who, over and over again, had been held to a vastly higher standard than less qualified men.” She quickly recovers, asking (herself?): “can you explain why a white working class audience – male or female – should care about it?”(74) The next paragraph recounts an Appalachian woman at a Tea Party rally explaining that she was “voting to save her boyfriends job.”
One encounters this dissonance throughout WWC: Williams is fine with offering just enough quotes and statistics to furnish a baseline contrarian narrative, but refuses to look seriously at any implications that contradict her elite feminist priors. When it comes to addressing the realities of how women in the working class actually feel about being the breadwinner, Williams instead slides back into discussions of workplace harassment and fragile male egos. “If the Clinton campaign had spent more time talking about Trump’s sexual assaults and less time talking about the glass ceiling, they would have been far better off,”(77) she declares, as if this were obvious from her previous line of argument. It really isn’t; right after telling us about the Appalachian woman, Williams quotes a nurse saying “If I turned down every candidate who objectified women… I’d vote for no one.”
That “less anxiety has been expressed on the gender front”(131) after “women just suffered an historic setback” is simply “ironic” rather than a devastating refutation of one of her central theses. Important to note: though it’s clear she’s referring to the Trump presidency, she doesn’t actually say this. This might have something to do with the unemployment rate for women reaching historic lows during his term: 3% in September 2019, with women making up the majority of workers for the first time in a decade. While this does constitute evidence of absence with regards to Trump’s malice towards women, it’s not clear whether Williams would see this as positive with regards to her thesis that politicians should start appealing to the ‘folkways’ of middle-income voters. Why not? Because she refuses to look directly at the elephant in the room that is working class women’s reluctance to give up the homemaker role. In so doing, she gives the impression of not knowing or caring what these women actually want, and engages in the same erasure of which she accuses so many other pundits and politicians.
While Williams is all for “men of all classes developing new and healthier masculinities,” she once again refuses to expand on how such a goal might be achieved. This might, ironically, have something to do with the nature of the issues facing the white working class as Williams describes it. She explains that, for the working class,
being a good man had been redefined as jobs left the community. Back when the mill was going strong, being a good man meant providing for your family; if you went out and drank with the guys and slapped the wife around a bit – not a problem. No longer. As jobs became scarcer, and more and more men were permanently unemployed, families redefined being a good man as being a good father, which was defined in terms of contributing to children’s care, and keeping off drugs and alcohol… At the other end of the class spectrum, a survey of Harvard business School MBAs found that elite men still have fairly traditional views of whose career should take precedence… Elite men can talk of gender equality because they know in their bones that their careers will deliver them dignity (male varietal). Economic power, both inside the family and in the society at large, is their trump card.(82)
This quote is useful because it demonstrates the logical gap at the heart of Williams’ argument: redefining what makes a good man is something she clearly wants, and it was a direct effect of the loss of the typically masculine jobs in the American industrial base. But there’s no reason to believe families at any income level would agree with her.
Let’s talk about Trump some more. At a rally in late 2018, while touting the historic gains made in women’s employment during his term, he expressed contrition: “I let you down… I am so sorry. What can I do?” This cryptic statement was taken by some as sarcasm, or perhaps an ironic jab at leftist politicos like Williams who relentlessly impugn his character and motivations. We might also interpret this as an awareness of the same tension at play not just in this book, but in narratives about prosperity in modern America. Whether they like it or not, young women are a large part of the American workforce. At this point they are more educated and qualified than their male competitors, and gains made in American jobs will necessarily mean more women at work. Whether this is something they, or Trump, actually want is another story. Any serious assessment of the wage stagnation in the middle- and working-class would include not just the effects of globalization, but also the feminist push to get women out of the homes and into the workforce. Recognizing this would mean tossing out decades of political narrative, and it would also mean recognizing the true driving force of these “new and healthier masculinities.” This is clearly not something a coastal elite like Williams is prepared to do.
And really, who can blame her? It’s a touchy subject, and the implications aren’t pretty. It would be worthwhile, though, to get an idea of the motivations involved, to find someone a little more willing to get down in the rhetorical dirt. What is really the issue with these straight white men that want these jobs so bad? What’s at stake here?
Thankfully, there’s no shortage of books nowadays about the many issues with white people. I didn’t even have to read that one about fragility (I really didn’t, honest) to find a more direct look at what whiteness means for the professional class in America.
White Privilege by Shannon Sullivan, chair of the philosophy department at UNC Charlotte, is described by the publisher (Polity) as a “forcefully argued book” that “offers practical solutions for eliminating white privilege and building a fairer society.” In lieu of a proper review of the whole book (it’s small, and she repeats herself a lot), I offer you a summary of the final chapter, titled “White people should figure out how to help people of color.”
Sullivan begins the chapter by addressing how the altruistic goal of “helping black people” is not as effective at achieving racial justice as some might think, and outlines a seemingly more selfish way to appeal to white people, as a means of getting their “skin in the game” in reducing white privilege.
The idea of getting white people to use their privilege to help people of color is based on an idea of white people’s ‘good will’, and is just another “unconscious exercise of white domination and condescension in disguise.” “If you are a white person,” she immediately adds, “you probably reacted pretty strongly to that claim.” (She’s white, by the way.) This is because acts of charity, while of some benefit to the recipient, do nothing to address the structural inadequacies that she feels caused the inequities in the first place, and instead solidify white people’s position as benevolent benefactors.
This kind of racially motivated charity is also ineffective since it simply cannot be sustained; even the most guilty of whites will grow tired of giving things away out of the goodness of their heart, while the oppression continues, relentlessly. She instead suggests shifting the focus away from moral commitments to political ones. Political commitments motivated by ideals of justice or equality have more traction and potentially also more sticking power, but they also can risk remaining in the abstract, leading to inactivity or even actions that harm rather than help.
Sullivan asks us to imagine a game of monopoly, where one player has joined the game several rounds after the rest have already begun playing. Someone watching the game might think the late player was less skilled or lucky, while in reality they were just late to the game. Such is the plight of the African-American in 2019. “Deeply concrete justice” she says, would have to deal with the “nitty-gritty details of history” in order to address this.
The fundamental problem with relying on whites’ abstract notions of goodness to help blacks is that at the end of the day white people don’t care as much. They don’t have as much riding on the outcome, Sullivan says, and they can always just stop with little negative effect on their lives. The really effective way to get white people involved is to make them hurt.
White people must be made to feel that continued racial inequality will affect them on a personal level. “Not an abstract, generic kind of hurt, but real pain: emotional, psychological, physical, interpersonal.” White people's experience of pain because of white privilege should be “a byproduct of and a motivation for their struggle.” White privilege must be “dehumanizing for them too.”
Here Sullivan asks the reader to consider the ways in which they might be hurt if white privilege were allowed to continue. She points to the “almost neurotic compulsion” felt by a white woman fighting for desegregation in the 50s as an example, but ultimately floats the question of why some people feel skin in the racial justice game, and others don’t (or just feel it in a more kin-centered, cis-racial way), only suggesting that the change will happen after an “urgent, concrete experience.”
While that might feel like a call to action, she does not expand much further. This passage is followed by a half-baked reference to Auschwitz, the point of which is lost on me (perhaps I haven’t been hurt enough), and connections are drawn to the thoroughly-discredited Stanford Prison Experiment. Life in America, for her, is like this ‘experiment,’ and it leaves white people “awful” and “warped” which she seems to feel is its own punishment.
Sullivan opts instead for leaving it up to white people to look at themselves and “get out of the way of people of color, who know how to care for themselves and their communities and don’t need white people tripping them up or telling them how to live.” She points to Sweden, and how what was once thought of as the Nordic miracle, the utopia of multicultural socialism, prosperity, and happiness, depended on “most if not all” Swedes being white. The recent increase in both immigration and anti-immigrant political sentiment in that country is evidence that more ‘work’ needs to be done.
Sullivan doesn’t identify the economic strata of whites to which she refers, but we know from Williams’ categorizations that it’s mainly the upper-class professionals that will see themselves as antiracist benevolent caregivers, while “displacing the blame for racism onto less-privileged whites.”(60)
While I would hesitate to assume Williams shares Sullivan’s beliefs about white privilege, it is notable how Sullivan’s prescription fits neatly into the holes in Williams’ description. What can certainly be said is that both authors want to make it clear that white supremacy is not just a tool of the uneducated or the right-wing. Williams categorizes working-class whites as valuing “morality and hard work,” and therefore “stereotype black people by conflating hard living and race. Professional-class whites, whose claims to privilege rest on merit, stereotype black people as less competent than whites.”(63) Sullivan makes her arguments with less political tact, but Williams’ artful smoothing over of the causes and desires inherent in white working class struggles make more sense when seen in the context of a fundamental desire to settle an intersectional score.