The Diminishing Lives of the White Working Class

~ Laura

Thomas Edsell writes about the plight of the white working class.

At work and at home, their lives are worse than they were a generation ago. Their real incomes have fallen, their employment opportunities have diminished, their families have crumbled and their ties to society are fraying.

This is how daily life feels, to many in the white working class. Unlike blacks and Hispanics, whites are not the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs designed to open doors to higher education and better jobs for underrepresented minorities; if anything, these programs serve only to limit their horizons.

Published by Laura

8 thoughts on “The Diminishing Lives of the White Working Class”

  1. The pull quote is pure trash — the white working class in America were beneficiaries of racism against other potentially low skilled workers. If they have suffered setbacks now it’s because the benefits to whites of racism are diminishing (though, notably, not enough that whites are not still significantly better of than blacks and hispanics on every measure of wellbeing). If they hope to reverse the trend of decreasing income and employment opportunities, they need to band together with other similarly situated workers and not buy into the false belief that similarly situated somehow have it easier than they do. Are they going to? Probably not, especially as long as fools like Edsell keep writing this trash.

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    1. Explaining to working class whites that they are racist and formerly had many undeserved advantages is pretty much guaranteed not to be a successful electoral strategy.

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      2. Fortunately, I’m not a politically operative.

        Great study on what might work to change minds: “A new study that used door-to-door canvassing to assess voters’ attitudes toward same-sex marriage found that gay canvassers could trigger a persistent change in those attitudes.”

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  2. Edsell pulls out a statistic that white working class are much more pessimistic about the future than minorities. Their income has dropped significantly over the past few decades. They probably benefitted from racism, but also from a strong manufacturing economy and unions. All that is a thing of the past and they are in mourning for a way of life.

    I think we need to have more income-based, affirmative action programs. We also need to take a hard look at the employment options for people without a college degree.

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    1. Surely the number one thing that prevents middling bright working class children from going to middling good colleges is not lack of preferential admissions, but cost. Unfortunately, the self-interest of academics appears to lead in the direction of making college less affordable, not more. E.g., Cooper Union is implementing tuition, Colby (I think) eliminated need-blind admissions. It seems that the governors of most academic institutions prefer a higher-budget, charge-more-spend-more model to an affordability model. Everyone wants to be Saks, no wants to be Wal-Mart.

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  3. Surely Edsell realizes there are white women in the working class? And that we have benefited greatly from affirmative action and the Civil Rights Act? And surely he realizes that things like FHA and VA mortgages, the GI Bill and such basically amounted to set-asides for whites? (or more accurately, non-blacks; not every ethnic community that benefited was recognized as “white” yet, but if a community had enough political oomph, which black people did not have prior to the VRA, that was enough).

    Also unmentioned: white working class men who are unionized do trend heavily Democratic.

    Deindustrialization and the devaluation of physical labor has hurt all of the working class, and measurably hurts working class people of color more than working class whites. All the AA of the past few decades still reveals that white men have a strong advantage when it comes to being hired, staying employed, receiving opportunities for advancement, and taking home a higher paycheck—in comparison to men of color or women. So, while they’ve lost ground along with the rest of the working class, they’re also doing demonstrably better than the rest of the working class.

    I find it really curious that he thinks white working class women are worse off than previous generations; that’s an attitude I have never heard from a white working class woman. I mean, every time I’m feeling pressed, I just remind myself how much better off I am than my mother or grandmothers. That quick reality check keeps me in perspective.

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