When I saw that the Wisconsin governor was openly attacking White working class folks last month in Wisconsin I was floored.
Why?
Because the White working class, historically, has exercised significant official political power in the US. Read Richard Pearlstein’s Nixonland for more on this. (Rob do you know of any other contextual pieces on the history of the White working class?)
Labor or Work is organized by gender and race, so this means that your gender and race shapes, constrains and structures the kinds of jobs that are available to you.
This is why most African American women were domestics until the 1970’s, this is why many of the IT folks in the Bay Area Indian, this is also why the chief executives of most Fortune 500 hundred companies are White men.
This morning reading the New York Times my antenna were zapped when I read an op ed article about young kids who are both college educated and under and unemployed.
In a society organized by and for men, this is significant.
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24 year old Matthew Klein writes in The New York Times,
The cost of youth unemployment is not only financial, but also emotional. Having a job is supposed to be the reward for hours of SAT prep, evenings spent on homework instead of with friends and countless all-nighters writing papers. The millions of young people who cannot get jobs or who take work that does not require a college education are in danger of losing their faith in the future. They are indefinitely postponing the life they wanted and prepared for; all that matters is finding rent money. Even if the job market becomes as robust as it was in 2007 — something economists say could take more than a decade — my generation will have lost years of career-building experience.
We are not talking about the lazy negro men or women narrative, nor the undocumented Latino men and women narrative, which are both popular narratives around work and unemployment in mainstream media. We are talking about a narrative from a young white man.
If the young people in this country began to connect their plight to the plights of young unemployed people, in other parts of the world, we may arguably see a change, that only those us of us who walk by faith and not by sight, have sensed would occur since 2007.
Do you think that it is significant when young White men and women question a system that historically has favored many of them?
What does this mean to young people of color?
Isn’t this opposite of the narrative of apathy that we often see used to describe young people?
Is your rent paid?
That’s a recipe for revolution. Political historicists have said it time and time again. You marginalize too many, and they stop sticking within their racial barriers and reach across the isle. The differences become similar. The whole idea of race difference is for some to benefit while others do not. If whites are no longer seeing the benefit of their whiteness and are forced to see themselves as everyone else (remove the privilege) then change happens.
@Kandeezie: Revolution? I hope so and if the Tea Partiers self proclaimed revolution counts, that no doubt another one is coming.
Short of a revolution, tho, I at least got a good feeling more and more people will be waking up and staying woke.
I keep coming back to the way the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña framed it: everyone’s going to have to learn how to live like artists been living pretty much always.
This ain’t romantic, as a big part of it is the frustration of financial uncertainty, constant side hustle, lacking health care, and many of the other realities that most of the country already lives under daily. This is the part that I hope will lead the way Kandeezie predicts, with whites and other privileged folks seeing themselves among many once again or for the first time.
But I also think it means people can’t expect to be bought off as easily. Big money jobs are usually big money because they know they aren’t giving you soul sustaining work or even intellectually challenging work. With that trade-off less and less available I’m seeing more people able to engage in community building work and creative work as if they had the benefit of artsy, leftist, white educated parents like mine. Cuz right now, work’s work and people are less quick to question why the first one in their family to get a college degree is doing lower-paying community work instead of rocking a six figures corporate job.
Course their is still gonna be hiccups like big mouthed white dudes like me coming in and try to shift things to a new whiteness as norm, just a slightly weirder whiteness. My bad for still spouting that transcendent whiteness hype and slipping a little over-valorization of my upbringing. My upbringing being a benefit for me, but certainly no kind of exclusive road to valuing oneself outside of economic worth.
Renina,
A couple of titles that jump to mind:
Rightward Bound edited by Bruce Schulman & Julian Zelizar (it’s a collection of essays–you may really like Bethany Moreton’s essay “Make Payroll, Not War: Business Culture as Youth Culture”)
State of the Union by Nelson Lichtenstein (best book on the postwar history of labor I’ve read)
To Serve God and Wal-Mart by Bethany Moreton (about how Wal-Mart’s christian business philosophy fits with white christian working class women’s worldview)
American Babylon by Robert Self (a history of postwar Oakland, the rise of San Leandro and Alameda County, and how working class white folks went from working with black folks to the respective rise of the new right and the black panther party)
Jeff Cowie’s new book “The Seventies” also does a good job of doing a cultural history of how the working class portion of the new deal order shifted its alliance to the new right.
The premise of this blog is off slightly. Labor unions, as presently constructed, are phenomenons of the twentieth century, not historical entities. Labor has not always been organized and in-favor of the workers. We have seen in America & Europe the rise of very powerful unions, but these same unions derive their power only from favorable market conditions and surpluses. When times are hard, and they’re the hardest now, the justification to gut these aging and consistent drains on CEO’s and stockholder’s pockets becomes easier to sell to the public.
Labor unions have never seen a glory age in this country and large companies have always loathed their unions. It took major catastrophes, like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, for company owners to listen to workers fears and needs.
Right now we are seeing the emergence of astronomically-wealthy CEO’s and their push roll back the twentieth century. They’re not and never have been interested in securing a future for young people, regardless of their race.
The worst thing that has happened to white people since the founding of this murderous nation is allegiance to the ideal and empty-promise of whiteness.
No doubt, if a young white man had the wherewithal to navigate through America’s hierarchy and carve out a slice of the pie, then their was always a place for him because the people on top understood to make a great fortune you had to abide and adhere to certain savage rules of capitalist exploitation, and white skin made it that much easier to identify a similar path to wealth. Basically, their is NO ONE with great fortune without blood on their hands.
The grave part is that non-whites have, at increasing rates, since the 1980’s “financialization” of markets, bought into whiteness or as it referred to
commercially “The American Dream.” It’s logically progression–from the affluence presented on Bill Cosby’s show, and Michael Jordan’s re-branding of the negro brute, and exploitation of rags to riches, misogynistic and glutenous, rap star story, and Clinton and Bush’s inclusion of blacks in key government positions, and adulation of prostitutes and the cult of weave amongst black girls, to finally the Nobel “Peace” Laureate Barack Obama–blacks have bought and got fatter and sicker off this high fructose version of the “Big Apple Drink.”
Thus, young people who spend their time regurgitating school lessons and reciting the pledge of allegiance never wake up from their 22 year slumber and realize that this game is based mostly on bloodlines and partly on talent and skill.
Creativity is not taught in school. Individualism is what is substituted for creativity. University systems throughout America are doing exactly what their former CEO turned college presidents want them to do. Produce the new wave of the future–college educated unskilled workers.
Thanks for the platform Renina
Hey Sdot80,
Thank you for stopping by and sharing. I have a question and a few comments.
1. What do you think the premise of my post is?
2. Labor unions have never seen a glory age in this country and large companies have always loathed their unions.
=====
Do you see a connection between the post war boom and the historic struggles of labor unions in the 30’s and 40’s. If not, read Nixonland…or American Babylon by Robert Self, which Rob has listed above.
I also believe that James Boggs has a PDF of his book American Revolution (I believe that is the title) online somewhere.
I look forward to your response.
-R
1.) I thought the premise was that you were “floored” by the attacks on young white males by their elders, which is somehow historically significant now, and that the weakness of labor unions today has left the typical college student with feeling of hopelessness.
But maybe I’m off…
Yes, there is a connection between the struggles of the 30’s and 40’s and the post war boom, but only in the sense: America’s post war boom coincided with American imperialism. Unions have served as key components in allowing the public to “drink the American democracy kool-aide.”
FDR Deal and the formation of large private unions kept workers, public and private, from walking out of mechanized, unskilled, and pointless tasks that would eventually become so technical, robotic, computerized machines took their jobs, leading to increasingly bleak outlook for college educated workers now.
Essentially, all I’m saying is that America has always run on fascists principals, but in attempts to distance it’s brand from the Nazi’s overt genocidal brand, belief in strong unions, via worker’s constitutional rights to protest, is paramount for corporation’s “democratic” identity, which is to say, they want to soften the general perception of the crimes most of them commit against human creativity and life.
Unions function and lobby to save their narrow agendas without ever challenging the their corporations environmentally destructive nature of profit. As long as they get their money, it’s whatever for whomever.
So now that most large corporations have successfully moved most of their jobs oversees and public sector jobs are drying up, the panic is starting to set in as unions brace for the collapse of their way of life.
The problem I see is that in 1930’s & 40’s people had a chance to really halt the growth myth we are infected with now with regards to the economy, and instead develop a sustainable resource based economy. But like what is described in Nixonland and American Babylon, all of the protest, mass mobilization of people, and race to suburbs, much like unions, grossly magnify the worst elements of our civilization.