With the fall of Jim Crow and the rise of neoliberal “free trade,” labour mobility, investor rights and austerity programs, there was a shift in the language that Anglo Americans used to talk about race and class. And it was one with which I had a pretty direct, visceral experience. At the beginning of the 1980s, based on the “one drop rule,” I was a black kid “passing” for white. By the end of the 1990s, I was a white man.
Not all acts of passing were understood to deceptive or intentional. Lots of people who, according to the law and the census, were black effortlessly passed in Anglo American society. Back then new friends, employers and political associates were necessarily more curious about one’s family, home town, etc.; those ubiquitous wallet photos of the late Cold War were not just commemorative; they were defensive. They were props that did not just burnish one’s reputation as a family man or devoted wife but as a full member of white America.
As I has said elsewhere, the reason race remains with us is that it is dynamic and adaptive, always changing in ways that maintain its relevance and apparent descriptive power in our interactions.
The 1980s and 1990s were a time of fundamental economic and social transformation the world over, with the rise of neoliberalism and the ideological hegemony it exerted over all political formations, from Margaret Thatcher’s Tories to Tony Blair’s “New” Labour to Boris Yeltsin and other former East Bloc commissars turned neoliberal “reformers.”
An important aspect of this a phenomenon known as the “Rust Belt.” The fact is that industrial employment in both the manufacturing semi-periphery comprising places like Michigan and Ohio, and in the extractive periphery comprising places like Chile and British Columbia, high wage manufacturing employment had been in decline even in the 1960s and 1970s. But the brunt of these job losses had been experienced by non-white workers, Indigenous bush workers in BC, mestizo miners in Chile’s Atacama Desert and black industrial workers in the American heartland.
The massive increases in poverty and unemployment among Indigenous and black workers had been blamed on supposedly too-generous welfare programs of the Great Society, the government housing projects, lack of “role models” for racialized male youth, the counterculture and, of course, drugs. But really it was just a mass of job losses due to off-shoring, deindustrialization and mechanization being experienced first by the least white workers. White workers disproportionately kept some of the last remaining high-wage, unionized, industrial jobs while non-whites were over-represented in early layoffs.
However, as Anglo American society moved through the second half of the 80s and into the 90s, there was simply no way to confine the masses of industrial layoffs to, amplified by the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in 1988 and NAFTA in 1993, to non-whites, who had been pushed out of most recent industrial work already.
Worse yet, while the layoffs of the 1970s and early 80s had taken place in the context of an expanding welfare state, as the 1980s layoffs wore on, they took place in the context of a contracting one. There was no massive increase government housing; instead, governments were selling off the housing they had built for the poor. There was no increase in welfare; instead, governments began rolling-out new income austerity programs that prohibited people from receiving government benefits after a fixed period, even if they had no alternative income source.
It is in this context that the term “white trash” took on a more expansive meaning, seeming to wholly blot out its previous one. While it is true that many of the poorest white industrial workers in the American Midwest and Southern Ontario had, just like their former black co-workers, migrated from the former Confederate States of America in the early twentieth century, the new primary usage of the term “white trash” made no distinction among the white working class people for whom the layoff notices finally came.
Beginning in the 1990s, “white trash” took on the definition it has largely retained up to the present day. It referred to working class white people clearly bearing the stigmata of poverty, worn clothes, residence in a manufactured home, unemployment, dependence on government assistance and the afflictions that we often problematically associate with these things, depression, poor nutrition, addiction and family breakdown.
Charismatic religious movements that are especially appealing to those in poverty also became part of the stereotype. Andrew Chestnut’s work on this subject is very important, showing that subscription to movements that believe strongly in faith healing and other unscientific medical interventions is concentrated among those who lack access to medical services due to poverty or remoteness. Following Chestnut’s line of reasoning, we can also see an interest in school vouchers and charter schools is likely to be concentrated among those who lack the financial resources of those who enroll their children in private schooling but wish to deliver things private not public schools are designed to deliver.
As we presided over massive increases in working class unemployment, rapid declines in wages, as men were forced out of industrial work, and the concurrent evisceration of state programs designed to provide support under those circumstances, we began to build our contemporary “they had it coming” narrative.
The white working class had it coming, the story goes, because they voted for the wrong people, an absurd assertion given that austerity and off-shoring were enacted by every political party, irrespective of its position on the political spectrum. We added to that a lack of commitment to education and self-improvement, even as postsecondary tuition fees and other costs massively increased.
Furthermore, as class analysis came to be rejected by formerly socialist and social democratic parties and came to be replaced by “intersectionality” and other theories of oppression that deny the importance of class, a new theories of the virtuous and unvirtuous poor began to develop, whose full elaboration we see today in a pile of retconned nonsense called “critical race theory.”
If one ignores class but emphasizes the role of race and gender identity as the sole loci of discrimination and oppression, one can create a film negative of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” cliché. People with boutique sexual and gender identities and people of colour have an excuse, a justification, for poverty. But straight working class white people have no excuse. They are all, after all, awash in “white privilege.”
Journalists, commentators, analysts and comedians associated with the political left increasingly replaced the powerful and wealthy with rural, working class white people as the butt of their jokes. And the term “white,” whether modifying “trash,” or, more politely and increasingly frequently, “working class,” exculpated these individuals from accusations of “punching down.” The white working class were not the largest chunk of an oppressed working class but were, instead, comfortable people who had squandered their “white privilege.”
This reached a crescendo with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Not only had Trump the temerity to focus his message on America’s white trash, he praised key aspects of their culture, with its do-it-yourself-ism, its autodidacticism, its religiosity, etc., despite the supposedly self-evident backwardness of these things.
More tellingly, when 58% of America’s white working class voted against Trump they were singled-out and blamed for his victory, whereas, middle- and high-income white women, a majority of whom had voted for him, were not. This condemnation and blame-shifting was perfected by Ta Nehisi Coates and the Afro-pessimist intellectual school which argued that, despite the fact that a majority had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, America’s white trash were so sexist, so racist that they never had and never would vote for a black person, a woman or anyone else their bigotry told them to hate.
While Coates produced an emotionally satisfying narrative of political impotence and futility that met the psychological needs of 2017, it applied too broad a brush to too large a portion of the population to have any practical utility. For reformers, it offered no solutions; for political careerists, it offered no opportunities.
And that is why, since 2017, we have been seeing a slow return to the prior definition of white trash. Sure, America’s white working class is all over the place; but there are especially benighted, especially stupid, especially backward, especially bad people who form the core of the Trump movement.
Actual scholars of the Trump movement, who use ethnographic data and analysis are pretty clear on who the core of the movement are: local notables: the guy who runs the monthly prime rib dinner for the Elks Lodge, the woman who runs the local scholarship fund for the Parent Advisory Council, the president of the local chamber of commerce or board of trade, the treasurer of the local hospital association. These individuals are the backbone of the Trump movement because their ability to function as mediators of financial aid in their communities is threatened by an expanded social safety net and by expanded bureaucracies mediating access to essential but privatized services like healthcare. But that is not who is depicted as the core of the movement.
The core of the Trump movement, the most backward, the most irredeemable came to be understood as the original white trash. From 2017-2020, progressive journalists and academics took innumerable trips to Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi to interview the poorest Trump voters they could find, to unlock the absurd liberal non-puzzle of people “voting against their interests.” (As though anyone anywhere votes based on a personal financial calculus derived from political parties’ election platforms!)
The key to the Trump movement, journalists and scholars decided, was not to be found in the Scranton Board of Trade or the Kenosha Rotary Club but in the most rural, most remote, most impoverished communities in its poorest states.
And it is at this point in this essay series that we begin to circle back. These communities have the distinction of retaining a greater portion of what I referred to in part two as “migrant worker culture,” a set of related subcultures that have been strongly influenced by Indigenous and Métis traditions, in addition to significantly over-representing Indigenous descent relative to the rest of America.
I am not arguing that all or even most people in rural Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi are of Indigenous descent but I am arguing that they are the most culturally and genetically influenced by Indigenous culture and history. And that this influence is an un-verbalized assumption the vast majority of Americans still carry with them. Suspicion as to the incomplete whiteness of these folks has never really gone away.
And what is worse is that this assumption interacts with a novel obsession of progressives, that of racial transparency. It is as though, when modifying “trash” or “working class,” in the progressive lexicon, the word “white” is actually an expression of suspicion, of incomplete belief in these people’s whiteness. Why that should suddenly matter to progressives, who, until recently, were the least racist Americans, and what the opposing set of ideas about whiteness to which this belief reacts are will be covered in Part Five, as we begin our journey back to the 2022 Trucker Convoy.
