From the Suwanee to Egypt, There's No Place like Home

PMLA ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Cynthia Ward
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Seraph On The Suwanee ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) and Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985) feature white working-class women negotiating class hierarchies in rural communities. Despite present-day critics' putative concern with class and demonstrated interest in Hurston's other works, particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), both novels have been largely ignored by the critical establishment, in part because readers lind it difficult to identify with the main characters. Comparing the critical receptions of Seraph, The Beans, and Their Eyes reveals that the mechanism by which readers identify with imaginary characters is constituted by middle-class reading practices. While a sympathetic audience emerged for Their Eyes, one is not likely to appear for the other two novels, which expose the class-bound roots of the literary construction of identity, meaning, and reality. In addition, Seraph and The Beans point, however obliquely, toward a vernacular notion of home that resists middle-class commodification.

White Working-Class Women and the Race Question

1998 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 80-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Other ◽  
White Trash ◽  
White Writers ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness David Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are white men, Negro men, and Mexican men in this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”

White Working-Class Support for Trump

Contexts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Cherlin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Community Study ◽  
Reverse Discrimination ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
White Working Class

Why do working-class Whites support Donald Trump? The accepted explanation points to racial and ethnic resentment and anxiety about immigration, with economic factors secondary. Based on a community study, the author argues that feelings of reverse discrimination and anti-immigrant sentiment reflect both racial and economic factors. This article explains why it is difficult to conclude that either factor was more important than the other.

Misfortune and resilience: a community study of women

1984 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. Bebbington ◽  
E. Sturt ◽  
C. Tennant ◽  
J. Hurry
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Psychiatric Disorder ◽  
Community Survey ◽  
The Other ◽  
Community Study ◽  
Vulnerability Factors ◽  
Vulnerability Model ◽  
Working Class Women

SynopsisA community survey of psychiatric disorder carried out in South London enabled the authors to investigate the ‘vulnerability model’ proposed by Brown & Harris (1978). In the current study none of the ‘vulnerability factors’ proposed by Brown & Harris fulfilled the requirements of the model. It was, however, found that working class women with children seemed particularly prone to develop minor psychiatric disorder in response to adversity. A similar result is apparent in the analyses of the earlier authors. A number of studies now published give some support to the vulnerability model using what are broadly measures of social support, but there is little corroboration using the other variables proposed by Brown & Harris.

Working-Class Culture as Political Participation: Reading Trump as Revolt Against a Middle-Class Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-132
Author(s):  
Liberty Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Communication Style ◽  
Deep Foundations ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
White Working Class

The 2016 election cycle and ensuing presidency of Donald Trump has been attributed in large part to his support among working-class whites (Gest 2016, p. 193; Tyson and Maniam 2016). Their reasons for support, however, are open to interpretation. This article will suggest that elements of Donald Trump’s public communication style and ethos align with elements of working-class culture, language use, and knowledge construction. Trump’s anti-institutional, anti-government rhetoric reifies these components of working-class culture because of institutions’ and government’s deep foundations in middle-class culture, language use, and knowledge construction—and the working-class’s, especially the white working-class’s, alienation from these institutions, with the result being anger or apathy (Lareau 2003; Jensen 2012; Gest 2016). These values are often embedded in a master narrative that defines white working-class life as one of victimization (Hochschild 2016; Gest 2016; Cramer 2016). The article next suggests that Trump’s oft-used rhetorical framework of not just immigrants as threat, but of immigrants as protected and valued by institutions that overlook white workingclass concerns (Gest 2016), opens up one possible persuasive framework to legitimate Trump’s xenophobia and racism through white working-class attitudes.

Disparate Recoveries: Wealth, Race, and the Working Class after the Great Recession

2021 ◽  
Vol 695 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Fenaba R. Addo ◽  
William A. Darity
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Net Worth ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Consumer Finances ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Relationship

What does it mean to be working class in a society of extreme racial wealth inequality? Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we investigate the wealth holdings of Black, Latinx, and white working-class households during the post–Great Recession (pre–COVID-19) period that spanned 2010 to 2019. We then explore the relationship between working-class and middle-class attainment using a wealth-based metric. We find that, in terms of their net worth, fewer Black working-class households benefitted from the economic recovery than white working-class households. Among white households, the working class saw the greatest increase in wealth in both absolute and relative terms. Working-class households were less likely to be middle class as defined by their wealth holdings, and Black and Latinx households were also less likely to be middle class. For Black households, racial identity is a stronger predictor of wealth attainment than occupational sector.

The Law’s Betrayal

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Willford ◽  
S. Nagarajan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The Other ◽  
Important Class ◽  
Indian Community ◽  
Legal Decisions ◽  
Cultural Displacement ◽  
The One ◽  
Deep Sense

This chapter focuses on the professionals of the Tamil population. A cultural displacement, as experienced by the Indian middle class, has produced its own narrative that was subsequently hijacked by Malay “extremists.” This sense of betrayal among the Indian middle class is important because their narrative of victimization takes cohesive ideological shape in a form that disseminates to the working class through the work of activists, politicians, writers, NGOs, and lawyers. Through this, one sees an important class dialectic within the Indian community that is divisive, as well as signs that recent legal decisions and events have exacerbated a sense of insecurity. Ultimately, a deep sense of political betrayal within this elite class is producing nostalgia for a nonracialized Malaysia on the one hand, and a consolidation of Indianness on the other.

Working-Class Women, Middle-Class Women, and Models of Childbirth*

2018 ◽  
pp. 442-455
Author(s):  
Margaret K. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

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.

scholarly journals Mockery and Morality in Popular Cultural Representations of the White, Working Class

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayne Raisborough ◽  
Matt Adams
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Strategic Orientation ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
New Class ◽  
Class A ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Class Distinction

We draw on ‘new’ class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often presented as those of humour and fun, simultaneously generate for the middle class a certain distancing from those articulations. The plays of articulation and distancing, we suggest, allow a more palatable, morally sensitive form of distinction-work for the middle-class subject than can be offered by blunt expressions of disgust currently argued by some ‘new’ class theorising. We will claim that mockery offers a certain strategic orientation to class and to distinction work before finishing with a detailed reading of two Neds comic strips to illustrate what aspects of perceived white, working class lives are deemed appropriate for these functions of mockery. The Neds, are the latest comic-strip family launched by the publishers of children's comics The Beano and The Dandy, D C Thomson and Co Ltd.

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