Those Other White People
For some white liberals, anti-racism is a smokescreen for class prejudice.
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This is a guest essay written by Leighton Woodhouse, a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
One of the most pathetic spectacles of contemporary liberal culture is white people trashing other white people for being white.
I understand the motivation, which is transparent: to show your #allyship by disowning your own “people” and renouncing the supposed status attached to your racial identity — a small, heroic act of race treason in the struggle against white supremacy.
But as everyone knows, in reality it entails none of those things. In the elite, overeducated liberal circles in which this dynamic is ubiquitous, there is, if anything, a negative status attached to being white, so you sacrifice nothing by disassociating yourself from whiteness.
Moreover, the people you castigate are not your own; they’re exactly the opposite. They’re the people you want everyone around you to know have nothing to do with you, your values, and your social standing. They’re those other white people.
I once read a somewhat cynical account (I wish I could remember where) of the progressive movement in New York at the turn of the 20th century. At the time, the United States’ power elite was dominated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs).
But many Jews had also found prosperity in New York. Residing primarily on the Upper East Side, these Jews were part of a wave of migration from Germany to the U.S. that had begun in the 1840s, spurred by antisemitic persecution in the Old World.
These prosperous German Jews watched the next wave of Jewish immigrants — poor, largely Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe — with concern and alarm. The Yiddish-speaking Jews who clustered in the tenements of the Lower East Side were dirty, crude, and visibly foreign, and, as such, threatened to further inflame the antisemitism the German Jews had been subjected to by the WASP elite for decades.
A combination of compassion, embarrassment, and anxiety motivated an army of affluent German Jewish wives to make the trek downtown to work to assimilate these Eastern Europeans as quickly as possible — in part to erase the blight they had brought upon the precarious image of the American Jew.
I suspect something similar is happening now with educated, urbane white people and their uneducated, exurban, and rural white counterparts. The analogy, of course, only goes so far. Unlike with the Jewish progressives, there’s no compassion whatsoever at work in the way affluent and middle class white people regard poor and working class whites; there’s no will to shape them into “respectable” versions of themselves; and the motivation to shun them doesn’t come from some deep anxiety about mounting anti-whiteness. The embarrassment and condescension, however, is there in droves.
When college-educated, city-dwelling white people express their deep disdain for White America on Twitter, they don’t have their educated white spouses or their white kids or their white co-workers or their white roommates from college in mind. They’re talking about the white underclass — the new unworthy poor.
Like the affluent American Jews at the turn-of-the-century, white elites on both the Left and the Right are eager to wipe the stain of their vulgar ethnic cousins off of themselves. But unlike the progressives, they’re not interested in assimilating them; instead, they are interested in relegating them further into the margins as an alien class of potentially treasonous compatriots.
“White privilege” and “white supremacy,” when intoned by white liberals in reference to low-income whites, operates much the way that “welfare queen” did when intoned by white conservatives in reference to poor blacks in the 1980s. The latter was a trope with which to dismiss the non-white poor as undeserving of our compassion and generosity.
“White privilege” serves the same function for low-income, uneducated white people, as does the sneering dismissal of “economic anxiety” as a factor in white working class people’s embrace of Republican (faux) populism. It implies that if you’re white and poor, you have only yourself to blame for your misfortune. Who else is responsible if, with all the chips stacked up in favor of white advantage, some white people continue to fail to ascend into the middle class?
But poor white people have been losing ground for decades, and for reasons not dissimilar to those that have kept many non-white people mired in poverty: deindustrialization and drug addiction. Middle-aged, uneducated whites are the only demographic in the U.S. in which mortality is on the rise, in large part due to an epidemic of suicides and overdoses.
In 2019, for example, the state with the highest drug overdose rate in America was West Virginia. That same year, white people had the second-highest drug overdose rate in the country, surpassed only by Native Americans. As the journalist Alec MacGillis pointed out, “social breakdown among low-income whites” has begun “to mimic trends that had begun decades earlier among African Americans: Rates of out-of-wedlock births and male joblessness were rising sharply.”1
MacGillis quoted Josh Marshall of the media outlet, Talking Points Memo, making what’s become a typical liberal diagnosis of the problem: “Let’s put this clearly. The stressor at work here is the perceived and real loss of the social and economic advantages of being white.”
Josh Marshall is the son of a marine biologist. He attended a private college prep school in Southern California which currently has a $37 million endowment and charges $32,000 in yearly tuition for its day school students and $45,000 for its boarding school students. He went to Princeton for college and Brown for grad school before founding a company that brings in millions of dollars in annual revenue.
And yet Josh Marshall’s analysis of what’s killing poor white people at a rate more than 20 points higher than the national average is distress over the loss of their “white privilege.”
Inadvertently, Marshall’s take on the anomie of poor white America reveals something about the realignment of the Democrats from the working class to the college-educated professional managerial class. Marshall, a paragon of the latter, is a thought leader in the “Pod Save America” wing of the Democratic Party (traditionally the liberal party in U.S. politics).
What does his Ivy League liberal ideology have to offer these people?
Little but thinly veiled class contempt and victim-blaming. At one time, when trade unions were strong and globalization had not yet destroyed America’s industrial base, liberals’ political values and policy goals were well-aligned with the working class.
Today, it should be no more surprising that low-income white voters have abandoned a Democratic Party shaped by elites like Marshall than it is that black voters have historically had so little interest in voting Republican (traditionally the conservative party in U.S. politics).
To the left of Marshall it’s even worse. Among progressives, policies are routinely crafted specifically to exclude poor and working class white people (and, increasingly, Asians), who are perceived as less deserving of assistance thanks to their inherited racial privilege.
The wholesale abandonment of the concept of social class on the Left has reached the level of absurdity at which poverty is perceived as purely an outcome of identity-based discrimination. If you’re poor but not a member of a protected class, you’re not really a victim. It’s the old Anglo-American tradition of ranking the poor by their level of moral entitlement, but dressed up as social justice.
This is the Left’s version of the racial grievance politics that the Right has been practicing for generations. Liberals are rightly disgusted by these racist tactics when they’re deployed by their political adversaries, but are blind to them when they come from their own side. That’s because, unlike the Lee Atwater “dog whistles” the Right routinely sounds, the Left’s classist version is not cynical; it’s expressed entirely in earnest.
It’s what you’re left with when your ideology has been utterly deprived of a materialist foundation, and has been transformed by the elitists who have hijacked your movement into a tool to legitimate the existing social and economic hierarchy, rather than to subvert it.
“The Original Underclass.” The Atlantic.
 | A guest post by
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Race is entirely a social construct but it isn’t.
Gender doesn’t exist but I want to switch mine.
Jews are white but light skinned Hispanics who look white are not. Asians are people of color but they’re not.
Being even an eighth ethnic is ethnic just like when there were octaroons but we’re not being like those people.
Black people are highly racially diverse but they’re not.
We should help the neediest people but let’s mostly implement policies to boost certain ethnic middle class upper middle class and even rich.
The only way to help people is to move them to posts they don’t deserve.
The white underclass and black underclass and Hispanic underclass and Native American underclass who are the worst off don’t exist. But know that they’re all oppressed there’s not even the slightest possibility culture and choices enter the equation at all and the white underclass are not in this collective. They exist for our mockery.
Ethnic minorities and immigrants with no connection to slavery in America or oppression that somehow overwhelms the oppression of other ethnic groups in early America are still oppressed
Women are also oppressed and should be elevated to posts they didnt earn but white women are sus unless they write books on their own fragility and hit the lecture circuit charging
astronomical self flagellation fees.
I like ethnic jokes. Sometimes people recite them with nasty intentions which is never comical but ethnic humor as humor can lighten the mood and societal tension. Poor whites you can still ridicule and it’s not even a micro aggression. And Israel is a good punching bag. I will never forget what Don lemon did on a newscast referring to poor whites. I cannot imagine what would’ve went down had a newscaster done this routine with poor blacks. It wasn’t even funny. It was just mean spirited. To paraphrase triumph the insult dog it was ethnic jokes without the everything. He had a long horrid record of really serious offenses (like sending a threatening email) but it took him calling older women washed up to get sacked. My favorite part was when said google it. If you put the question to AI which has been programmed to be inoffensive to a point of silliness he would’ve gotten the correct answer.
I like the article but I do think you err in your premise. I do think elite white leftists are often bashing themselves and their contemporaries. Some genuinely mean it. Others are just conforming. And others are fearful. There was a bone chilling article in the wsj by a professor who’s very old so he had the luxury of speaking his mind. It’s sad he felt the need to list his anti racism bona fides but this is the world now. Here’s the comedy. His team wanted to elevate someone to a short list for being black. That was ok. Mentioning race to elevate someone was ok. The professor said politely he liked the candidate but that he didn’t meet the level of others and shouldn’t be elevated for being black even though it’s good to try to diversify. Kafkaesque tribunals followed and it’s worth finding the article to read because the reason the elites can be bashed is they’re not elite unless you define elite as high earning. Many of our elites produce little but toxic ideas. And the ones who are productive don’t seem to value the environment that allowed for that productivity. Yay socialism! I was just discussing with my spouse today and it was beyond shocking- the Soviet Union didn’t have wheelchairs despite the enormous number of vets. Go look up what was used. Russia built nukes but couldn’t manage wheelchairs. Americans need to understand the distortions that happen when society isn’t free. But ours in an age where money grows on trees and everyone is entitled to everything and if that doesn’t happen it’s because of the greedy. I do think that elites to some extent want to inoculate themselves against beheadings by talking the talk of wealth gaps and devil corporations. That they’re more often than not talking about themselves is lost on them. I’m rambling horribly but let’s just sum it up that there’s no coherence to DEI and white privilege and related ideologies. And I won’t ever sanction racism no matter how it’s packaged. People forget it’s always packaged they just like this packaging and they think they’re above it that they of the past were entirely benighted not human like them.
I've said for years, it's all about class, not race. But hell, society didn't listen to me. So, I agree with a lot of what you say. I will add this though: if things are bad for one group or another, whatever the reason, where is the leadership within those communities? Especially if this has been going on for 40 years or so. C'mon. Get your acts together; support each other. And having said that, we recently paid visits to Lucid and Mercedes car dealerships; aside from us all potential customers were black. So there has been progress. I for one do not feel guilty for being white, Jewish, or educated. I've had some advantages, for sure. More than many, not as much as sum. It's about what you do with what you've got. No?