The Other America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harris Beider ◽  
Kusminder Chahal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The Right

Widely stereotyped as anti-immigrant, against civil-rights, or supporters of Trump and the right, can the white working class of the United States really be reduced to a singular group with similar views? This book begins with an overview of how the term “white working class” became weaponized and used as a vessel to describe people who were seen to be “deplorable.” The national narrative appears to credit (or blame) white working-class mobilization across the country for the success of Donald Trump in the 2016 US elections. Those who take this position see the white working class as being problematic in different ways: grounded in norms and behaviors that seem out of step with mainstream society; at odds with the reality of increased ethnic diversity across the country and especially in cities; blaming others for their economic plight; and disengaged from politics. Challenging populist views about the white working class in the United States, the book showcases what they really think about the defining issues in today's America—from race, identity, and change to the crucial on-the-ground debates occurring at the time of the 2016 U.S. election. As the 2020 presidential elections draw near, this is an invaluable insight into the complex views on 2016 election candidates, race, identity and cross-racial connections.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 370-382
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
United States Today ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
1960S And 1970S

The conclusion looks at the implications of the failure to organize southern workers for the United States today and asks how successful southern organizing might have led to different outcomes. Foremost is the possibility that the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would have been much more powerful if more white working-class support had been enlisted. This possibility, which the book asserts was real, had the potential to make the contemporary social and political landscape of the United States vastly different.

The challenges of cross‑racial coalition building

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Harris Beider ◽  
Kusminder Chahal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Strategic Plan ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the possibilities of building cross-racial coalitions between the white working class and communities of color as the United States transitions from majority white to a minority white country. Fifty years after the campaign for civil rights and the passage of landmark legislation during the 1960s, there is little evidence of formal and sustainable cross-racial coalition building at the grassroots or grasstops level between the white working class and communities of color. White working-class communities wanted to engage with communities of color but did not have the means of engaging across racial boundaries beyond a superficial everyday level. Discussions between different communities were “soft-wired” and based on fleeting exchanges in informal spaces rather than becoming “hard-wired” in a strategic plan that can create a framework for coalition building. Stakeholders were largely ambivalent and occasionally hostile toward engaging with white working-class communities to build effective cross-racial alliances. Similar to white working-class communities in relation to communities of color, stakeholders found it challenging to engage with these groups.

Labor in the Time of Trump

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
The Right ◽  
Underlying Processes

This book critically analyzes the right-wing attack on workers and unions in the United States and offers strategies to build a working-class movement. While President Trump's election in 2016 may have been a wakeup call for labor and the left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the right have been building for at least forty years. The book shows that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. The chapters examine the conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Harris Beider ◽  
Kusminder Chahal
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
The Other ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
The World ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Mainstream Society

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how the term “white working class” became weaponized and used as a vessel to describe people who were seen to be “deplorable.” The national narrative appears to credit (or blame) white working-class mobilization across the country for the success of Donald Trump in the 2016 US elections. Those who take this position see the white working class as being problematic in different ways: grounded in norms and behaviors that seem out of step with mainstream society; at odds with the reality of increased ethnic diversity across the country and especially in cities; blaming others for their economic plight; and disengaged from politics. While the conventional narrative about Trump, and his relation to the white working class, has the benefit of being presented as a straightforward connection to a forgotten majority, the experiences and conversations collected in this book offer more nuanced and challenging findings about the other America. Indeed, the rise of Trump and the association with the white working class needs to be placed in the wider context of a surge in support for populism in many parts of the world. Ultimately, the book explores how white working-class Americans view race, change, and immigration.

Disability and the Right to Work

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 262-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Kavka
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Disabled Persons ◽  
Gold Medal ◽  
Foot Wall ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Deaf Individual ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Right

It is, perhaps, a propitious time to discuss the economic rights of disabled persons. In recent years, the media in the United States have re-ported on such notable events as: students at the nation's only college for the deaf stage a successful protest campaign to have a deaf individual ap-pointed president of their institution; a book by a disabled British physicist on the origins of the universe becomes a best seller; a pitcher with only one arm has a successful rookie season in major league baseball; a motion-picture actor wins an Oscar for his portrayal of a wheelchair-bound person, beating out another nominee playing another wheelchair-bound person; a cancer patient wins an Olympic gold medal in wrestling; a paralyzed mother trains her children to accept discipline by inserting their hands in her mouth to be gently bitten when punishment is due; and a paraplegic rock climber scales the sheer four-thousand-foot wall of Yosemite Valley's El Capitan. Most significantly, in 1990, the United States Congress passed an important bill – the Americans with Disabili-ties Act – extending to disabled people employment and access-related protections afforded to members of other disadvantaged groups by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

scholarly journals Trump Voters and the White Working Class

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Morgan ◽  
Jiwon Lee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Election ◽  
Community Surveys ◽  
The Public ◽  
Self Reports ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Election Studies

To evaluate the claim that white working-class voters were a crucial block of support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, this article offers two sets of results. First, self-reports of presidential votes in 2012 and 2016 from the American National Election Studies show that Obama-to-Trump voters and 2012 eligible nonvoters composed a substantial share of Trump’s 2016 voters and were disproportionately likely to be members of the white working class. Second, when county vote tallies in 2012 and 2016 are merged with the public-use microdata samples of the 2012-to-2016 American Community Surveys, areal variations across 1,142 geographic units that sensibly partition the United States show that Trump’s gains in 2016 above Romney’s performance in 2012 are strongly related to the proportion of the voting population in each area that was white and working class. Taken together, these results support the claim that Trump’s appeal to the white working class was crucial for his victory.

Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cottrell ◽  
Michael C. Herron ◽  
Javier M. Rodriguez ◽  
Daniel A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Right

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

Fathering Orphans

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie B. Ramey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Child Care ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Family Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Working Class

This chapter begins with the James Caldwell story, which brings the experience of fathers into sharp relief—a significant, and all but forgotten, aspect of orphanage history—as well as the broader history of child care, in the United States. While many orphanage children had living fathers, the institutional managers constructed “orphans” as fatherless, perpetuating a gendered and racialized logic of dependency. Yet for those men using the orphanages as a form of child care, their experiences as widowers differed from those of solo women with children. Furthermore, the experiences of African American and white working-class men were also quite different. Ultimately, the orphanages help reveal the extent to which each group of men was involved with the care of their children, as well as the connection between their breadwinning role and family life.

scholarly journals The Cultural Revolution and Its Legacies in International Perspective

2016 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. 632-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Lovell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Party Building ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractThis article explores the rhetoric and reality of the Cultural Revolution as an international phenomenon, examining (through published and oral histories) the ways in which it was perceived and interpreted beyond China. It focuses in particular on the diverse impact of Maoist ideas and practice on the counterculture movement of Western Europe and North America during the late 1960s and 1970s. Within Europe, Cultural Revolution Maoism galvanized Dadaist student protest, nurtured feminist and gay rights activism, and legitimized urban guerrilla terrorism. In the United States, meanwhile, it bolstered a broad programme of anti-racist civil rights campaigns and narrow Marxist-Leninist party-building. Despite Mao's hopes to launch a global permanent revolution, it appears that, over the long term, enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution in Western Europe, the United States and parts of South-East Asia helped to splinter the radical left and assisted the right in consolidating its power throughout the 1980s and beyond.

Donald Trump and the Legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (7) ◽  
pp. 651-674
Author(s):  
Dale Craig Tatum
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American History ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Bacon's Rebellion

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election was the biggest upset in American history. Trump propelled himself to victory by running a racist campaign that targeted the White working-class voters by assuring them that he would be their agent and would redeem the country on behalf their shared Whiteness by deporting Mexican immigrants, banning Muslims, and stopping and frisking African Americans. The racial wedge that Trump used was the result of the enduring legacy of Bacon’s Rebellion in the United States.

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