scholarly journals A Review of the Popular and Scholarly Accounts of Donald Trump’s White Working-Class Support in the 2016 US Presidential Election

Societies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Multinomial Regression ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Group Position ◽  
Benchmark Datasets ◽  
White Working Class

Popular and scholarly accounts of Trump’s ascendency to the presidency of the United States on the part of the American white working-class use different variables to define the sociodemographic group because there is no “working-class White” variable available in benchmark datasets for researchers to code. To address this need, the Author ran a multinomial regression to assess whether income, education and racial identity predict working-class membership among white Americans, finding that income and education are statistically significant predictors of working-class whiteness, while racial identity is not. Arriving at a robust definition of “white working-class” in light of these findings, the paper next turns to a review of the extant literature. By retrieving studies from searches of computerised databases, hand searches and authoritative texts, the review critically surmises the explanatory accounts of Trump’s victory. Discussion of the findings from the review is presented in three principal sections. The first section explains how working-class White communities, crippled by a dearth of social and geographic mobility, have been “left behind” by the political elites. The second section examines how white Americans, whose dominant group position is threatened by demographic change, voted for Trump because of resonance between his populist rhetoric and their latent “racist” attitudes. The third and final section explores the implications of a changing America for native-born whites, and how America’s increasing ethnoracial diversity is eroding relations between its dominant and nondominant groups. The Author surmises by arguing that these explanatory accounts must be understood in the context of this new empirical approximation of “working-class White”.

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.

MULTIPLE GROUP THREAT AND MALLEABLE WHITE ATTITUDES TOWARDS ACADEMIC MERIT

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank L. Samson
Keyword(s):  
Grade Point Average ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public University ◽  
Minority Status ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
University Admissions ◽  
Grade Point ◽  
Group Threat ◽  
Multiple Group ◽  
Group Position

AbstractAs the White populace in the United States moves toward numerical minority status by 2042, how might Whites respond to impending threat of losing their dominant group position? In particular, how will Whites react at selective, elite universities, where Asians are increasingly prominent and other non-Whites are maintaining or capturing a larger share of enrollments? Drawing on group position theory, I test White commitment to meritocracy as a public policy, using a survey-based experiment (599 California adult residents) to examine the importance grade point average should have in public university admissions. Whites decrease the importance that grade point average should have when Asian group threat is primed. However, White Californians increase the importance that grade point average should have when thinking about group threat from either Blacks or Blacks and Asians simultaneously. Ethnoracial outgroup threat shifts White support for meritocracy in different directions.

The White Working Class

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Gest
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
The United States ◽  
Group Consciousness ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Political Economic

In recent years, the world has been re-introduced to the constituency of “white working class” people. In a wave of revolutionary populism, far right parties have scored victories across the transatlantic political world: Britain voted to leave the European Union, the United States elected President Donald Trump to enact an “America First” agenda, and Radical Right movements are threatening European centrists in elections across the Continent. In each case, white working class people are driving a broad reaction to the inequities and social change brought by globalization, and its cosmopolitan champions. In the midst of this rebellion, a new group consciousness has emerged among the very people who not so long ago could take their political, economic, and cultural primacy for granted. Who are white working class people? What do they believe? Are white working class people an “interest group”? What has driven them to break so sharply with the world’s trajectory toward a more borderless, interconnected meritocracy? How can a group with such enduring power feel marginalized? This perplexing constituency must be understood if the world is to address and respond to the social and political backlash they are driving. The White Working Class: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides the context for understanding the politics of this large, perplexing group of people. The book begins by explaining what “white working class” means in terms of demographics, history, and geography, as well as the ways in which this group defines itself and has been defined by others. It will address whether white identity is on the rise, why white people perceive themselves as marginalized, and the roles of racism and xenophobia in white consciousness. It will also look at whether the white working class has distinct political attitudes, their voting behavior, and their prospects for the future. This accessible book provides a nuanced view into the forces driving one of the most complicated and consequential political constituencies today.

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.

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.

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.

Racial Identity and Racial Attitudes Among White Americans

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew O. Hunt ◽  
Ashley V. Reichelmann
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
General Social Survey ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Five Dimensions ◽  
Theory Project

This chapter explores how five dimensions of white racial identity are associated with one another and with white Americans’ racial attitudes. Drawing on data from the 2014 General Social Survey Identity Module, we first examine the relationships among five aspects of whites’ racial identities: prominence, salience, private self-regard, public self-regard, and verification. We then examine the implications of these aspects of racial identity for whites’ reported and preferred distance from, stereotypes about, and support for policies designed to benefit black Americans. In so doing, we contribute to the long-standing identity theory project of demonstrating how identities shape other elements of social life, including the construction and maintenance of social inequalities. We also contribute to the growing research literature on “whiteness” and its implications for intergroup relations in the United States.

The Great White Hope: Social Control and the Psychological Wages of Whiteness

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Robert S. Chang
Keyword(s):  
Racial Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
White Racial Identity ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
White Population ◽  
Us Presidential Election ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Run Up

In the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, much has been made of the so-called “white working class.” Some credit or blame this group for the election’s outcome. Others warn against treating this group as monolithic. Yet despite any difficulties in defining this group and what might be ascribed to them, there appears to be an intensification of white racial identity among a growing segment of America’s white population. This article seeks to explore the dynamics of racial identity and racial contest and what they might presage for the possibility of achieving racial justice.

Race/ethnicity, discrimination, and confidence in order institutions

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 704-720 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuning Wu ◽  
Liqun Cao
Keyword(s):  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Group Position ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Practical Implications

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose and test a conceptual model that explains racially/ethnically differential confidence in order institutions through a mediating mechanism of perception of discrimination.Design/methodology/approachThis study relies on a nationally representative sample of 1,001 respondents and path analysis to test the relationships between race/ethnicity, multiple mediating factors, and confidence in order institutions.FindingsBoth African and Latino Americans reported significantly lower levels of confidence compared to White Americans. People who have stronger senses of being discriminated against, regardless of their races, have reduced confidence. A range of other cognitive/evaluative variables have promoted or inhibited people’s confidence in order institutions.Research limitations/implicationsThis study relies on cross-sectional data which preclude definite inferences regarding causal relationships among the variables. Some measures are limited due to constraint of data.Practical implicationsTo lessen discrimination, both actual and perceived, officials from order institutions should act fairly and impartially, recognize citizen rights, and treat people with respect and dignity. In addition, comprehensive measures involving interventions throughout the entire criminal justice system to reduce racial inequalities should be in place.Social implicationsEqual protection and application of the law by order institutions are imperative, so are social policies that aim to close the structural gaps among all races and ethnicities.Originality/valueThis paper takes an innovative effort of incorporating the currently dominant group position perspective and the injustice perspective into an integrated account of the process by which race and ethnicity affect the perception of discrimination, which, in turn, links to confidence in order institutions.

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