On the 2016 election and cultural divisions
A lot of sources explain the election of Donald Trump as the WWC (white working class)’s response to rural/suburban economic decline and cultural elites’ indifference to said decline. I could link y’all to fifty think-pieces and Facebook rants about that. Some of them are really well-done. The Intercept and GOPLifer’s are worth reading, as is New Republic’s analysis of female voters.
I think that interpretation is valid. As someone who grew up in the South I’ve seen that anti-elite resentment firsthand. A significant % middle-class and college-educated Southerners still consider themselves apart from the ‘cultural elite.’
But interpretations that starts from this categorization of “WWC” versus “cultural elites” also miss a great deal (Patrick Thornton’s essay on RollCall touches on this point) On a demographic level it fails to acknowledge the people who have cultural recognition, but relatively little power (I define power as capital resources). Many POC, immigrants, and queer people fall into that category. It fails to acknowledge people who are not WWC, but live in WWC towns and neighborhoods.
When we say WWC in Appalachia, or the Rust Belt, are suffering, it does not mean non-WWC in these regions are thriving because they are non-WWC. I’m a fairly privileged POC, immigrant, queer woman from the heart of Trump country. My privilege stems from my parents making enough money to pay my college tuition. Which in turn, stems from the highly transferrable job skills my dad learned in engineering school. It does not stem from being a person of color. It does not stem from being queer.
Also want to point out that the very qualities that make a person alien in rural/suburban/WWC communities can make them desirable in culturally elite circles. On campus I’ve literally gotten a free dinner for being queer and Asian at the same time. I’m expected to enjoy reading books. In high school, kids made fun of me for all these traits.
Fuck tokenism, fuck those shallow corporate initiatives to seem gay-friendly or minority-friendly and the Oreos ads with rainbows on them but I understand that people feel a need for positive recognition. And if they can’t get it from the communities they grew up in, of course they want to leave. Of course we’d rather move to a big city where there’s more of us, enough of us to form a neighborhood or even elect a congressman if we’re lucky[1]. Or we seek approval w/ the cultural elites.
The same tight-knight sense of community that gives some folks a source of comfort in the impending economic apocalypse, alienates others.
[1] There are more Asians in Chicago than there are people in Knoxville. Let that sink in.
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