Poor White Trash Ain't Got No One

On the monolith of white America

I’m white.

This is obvious to anyone who knows what I look like, and just in case I forget, there’s always someone there to remind me.

It wasn’t always like this: I was raised thinking I was half-Arab, until a DNA test revealed, in an irony that still buzzes around my head in quiet moments, that I’m actually half-Jewish. But even when I believed my parentage lay in the Middle East, I didn’t identify as nonwhite and didn’t claim that perspective for the simple reason that it was immeasurably distant from my lived experience. I looked white to most peoples’ eyes, and I was raised white by a white adopted family in a mixed-race suburb of a largely white city.

But even given these facts, the situation seemed muddled to me, and still does. Although my adopted family is made of of deeply racist whites from Alabama, their hatred of other races never caught on with me. I can’t say I’m not racist; racism is a big part of being white in America, and even in the most enlightened and educated people, rejecting even sublimated racism is a constant struggle. But I never picked up on the bone-deep loathing of blacks that consumed so many of my Southern relatives, the anti-Asian animus that war trauma instilled in my father, or the low-key prejudice my mother displayed towards Mexicans.

What’s more, the older I got, the more murky the whole definition of race seemed to become. I read more about colonialism, about imperialism, and about the arbitrary racial categories invented by people in power to marginalize those below them. I read about the shifting goalposts of ‘whiteness’ in books like How the Irish Became White, and learned about the strange history of the American census, which once categorized Mexicans and others from South and Central America as “White persons with Spanish surnames”.

I discovered the crimes of rape perpetrated on colonized people, and the way the colonial masters dreamed up new ways of defining the children of such rapes. I learned that nations I had been brought up to think of as racially homogenous were anything but, and that different cultures had such wildly different understandings of race that the whole thing began to seem completely invented — but I also learned that the largely imaginary nature of race didn’t prevent racial hierarchies from being developed and brutally enforced at the cost of untold suffering.

When I finally began to learn about socialism, I found what may be the two great truths of my life: first, that racism is just another weapon in the arsenal of the bosses, and that it’s designed to divide, distort, and weaken the working class in any attempt to unseat their power; and second, that essentialism is a poison that kills you no matter who hands you the cup. The idea that everyone belonging to any given category, whether that category is men or women, blacks or whites, Arabs or Jews, queers or straights, Americans or Europeans, all embody the same opinions, beliefs, perspectives, cultural preferences, or politics, is both obviously false and clearly meant to reinforce existing structures of power and oppression.

I didn’t retain too many of the values of my parents and their generation, but one thing I’ve always believed is that no one has the right to speak for anyone else. No group is a monolith, and I have no more authority to say what all white people think than any randomly selected man has to include me in his ideas about masculinity. I still thrill when I think about Fred Hampton’s insistence that racism can’t be fought with more racism, but only with solidarity; I still think there is great wisdom in Dick Gregory’s observation that “just being a Negro doesn’t qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine”.

In our country and in others, racism and capitalism don’t just go hand in bloody hand; they need each other. And they cannot be separated, not here and not now. But we have to fight them together. We have to fight them with solidarity, as difficult as that may often be, especially for those who aren’t white. We can only win together, and we can only lose apart, which is why the bosses are always trying to find ways of driving us apart.

One of those ways is white guilt. It comes and goes in waves in America, but it’s enjoying a renaissance right now that is so widespread and so variegated that it might be called a revolution. There is, it turns out, a lot of money in telling white people that they must engage in what black philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò brilliantly refers to as “epistemic deference” — what is often termed ‘listening to black people’, regardless of who those black people are, what their class positions might be, and how representative they are of general or specific black experiences.

It is the same sort of approach that believe that the system need not be upended, but can be reformed by decorating its highest tiers with a more diverse group of elites. We don’t have to stand together against racism and capitalism, it says; we just have to make sure white people understand how racist they are (unless they read the right books and listen to the right people) and bring enough women, nonwhites, and queer people into the halls of power. It is a breeding ground for essentialism, and a sure path to destroying solidarity. When I was trying to organize a union at the factory I worked at in my early 20s, a black co-worker told me that white guilt never paid anybody’s rent, and I still find in these words more wisdom than in all the books about the importance of a diverse board of directors.

One of the most curious manifestations that come out of the (necessary and good) conversations we have about white privilege and white supremacy is the flattening of the broad range of lives lived by people who are white in America into a single universal experience. Aside from the various opportunists who appoint themselves spokespeople for the whole of black, Latinx, Asian, and other populations, it’s hard to imagine that most nonwhite people would accept being told that their experiences are identical to those of everyone else on Earth who looks like them; we rightly call this stereotyping and reject it as harmful and destructive. But those same opportunists are more than happy to claim that there is one single ‘white’ experience in America.

Even leaving aside the reality of class (which I will never do), what constitutes whiteness in America is a constantly moving target; the question of who counts as ‘white’ is forever changing, and different subsets of 'white people' experience the world incredibly differently. The very definition of whiteness is in dispute: most European-descended Jews are considered white in America, a notion that white anti-Semites find outrageous, and Arabs are also considered white by the standards of the U.S. census, but many Arabs reject this, as do racist Americans, who, after, the 9/11 attacks, placed them in a new category in order to vilify them.

Obviously, whiteness expands and contracts at random to serves the interests of both ordinary white racists and bosses looking for new ways to divide the working class. Groups like Italians, Irish, and Slavs were once considered no more white than a Zulu; when they began to show signs of solidarity among themselves, they immediately got ‘promoted’ to white and set against blacks, Chinese, Mexicans, Indians, and whatever other group of exploited people were close enough to be kicked down at. Even today, the meaning of 'white' is frangible, uncertain, and subject to revocation at any time. It is also different in both other parts of the world and inside American regions and communities.

The experience of poor whites in America is different from the experience of middle-class or rich whites in America, which is different than those of whites in Europe. Southern whites and northern whites have different experiences of life. White ethnic groups have all kinds of internecine beef. There is no more a white cultural identity than there is a Martian one; even the current commonality of white culture, which takes the form of slick pop-country and an unnatural cross-border pseudo-Southern accent, is entirely invented. The idea that 250 million Americans all lead the same lives and enjoy the same cultural touchstones — except insofar as all Americans are subjected to the same general corporate monoculture — is absurd.

I grew up a white kid in the suburbs. But I was also working class; I was raised Southern Baptist; I dropped out of high school; my parents were transplants to the Southwest from the Deep South, and both worked in trades; I was not connected to my extended family. I was a member of Generation X who was adopted at birth, not by Baby Boomers, but by the last vestiges of the Silent Generation. All these things shaped who I am, as did my class position and that of my family, and the politics I developed and how I developed them. There is no such thing as a single white culture, politics, or experience of life in America, any more than the life of an African-American family who fled the South to become line workers in Flint is identical to that of an academic whose parents were skilled tradespeople from Nigeria, or than a dirt-poor Mexican immigrant farmworker’s experience of life is comparable to that of the child of a wealthy Cuban landowner who fled Castro’s revolution.

What's more, the bosses don't intend for all white people to share in any alleged commonality of whiteness, nor do white supremacists and white fascists consider all white people their allies. That's why whiteness is a function of division, not of unity. Certainly it is the case that all black Americans have likely experienced many and varied manifestations of anti-black racism, but they have not all experienced it in the same way, just as not all white Americans have shared in the benefits of white supremacy beyond occupying a single rung higher on the ladder of oppression.

It's also profoundly insulting to write off anything as 'white culture' or 'the white experience' or whatever dipshit formulation of what 'white people' are like. Whatever it is you're talking about, tens of millions of 'white' people have never had any experience of it. This is particularly true — of white people and every other racial category in America — in our fragmented age of cultural balkanization, when we speak of something as being the most popular movie, book, record, or television program in America, when it may have been seen by as little as a hundredth of the population.

And, as with all cultures and societies, the experience of being white is (ahem) colored by whether you are cis or trans, single or married, male or female or gender nonconforming, straight or queer, rich or poor, and with or without children. These all play a huge factor in your experience of 'whiteness', and it does no one any good to erase these experience into one great undifferentiated mass of white culture. The erasure of subdivisions of whiteness, the arbitrary inclusion/exclusion of specific groups from the definition of 'white', and the projection of monoculture onto previously rich and storied ethnic and cultural minorities is as harmful to 'white' people as it is to anyone else.

All of this is to say that making a monolith of 'white' culture is as stupid, pointless, and destructive as doing it with 'black' culture or any other attempt to turn vast collective and individual experiences into a catechism of clichés. It's essentialism and it's garbage. White supremacy, white racism, whiteness as an ideology, and white privilege are all real, all destructive, and all things we should identify and destroy. As socialists, our project must always take into account the exceptionally murderous impact white America has had on people of other races, especially blacks and indigenous peoples, and the solutions we advance must include recognition of and recompense for those ongoing historical crimes. 'White culture', whiteness as a collective experience, and a monolithic conception of the lives of all white people, however, are all nonsense, and the collapsing of all those lives into a cardboard cut-out of humanity we can kick over serves nobody but the bosses, who breathe a sigh of satisfaction and relief every time they see it.