I know I am overdue for a post here to talk about how race and class come to intersect--I put it off not because I don't think it's important, but because I think it is important, and I've been having a hard time thinking about how to write about it in a way that's clearer than what's already out there on it. In the meantime, I want to write this post on the Oregon standoff because I haven't seen anyone saying what I want to say at all. And it's bugging me. (This post is also to do with class and race, in a way).

The Oregon standoff of Bundy and Co. seems to have given rise (or airtime, anyway) to a certain discourse about working class white men, which is that they are angry, threatened, and dying at younger ages (see here where Gwen Ifill asked Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton about this during the recent Democratic debate) because they are losing privilege due to the "browning"of the American populace (read, the fact that the "minority" population is increasing faster than the white population). Also because women's rights, so women can now work. This is the explanation that the Bundys and their ilk give for their behavior, and a lot of media outlets, including the progressive ones, have been pretty uncritical in parroting it. What I want to do here is to encourage us all to examine the whole "white working class men are being slowly killed by the loss of white privilege" argument a little more closely.

Why is this becoming such a huge issue now? The fact is that people of color haven't gained much ground in terms of rights over the past 20 years--if anything, they've lost ground. Same for women, really. Not only that, but the South has a long history of being "majority-minority," as have most historically slave-based societies. (Remember the 3/5 law?) Are white working-class guys really dying earlier, becoming more alcoholic, because of those things NOW? When somehow they didn't respond this way during the Civil Rights movement and second-wave feminism? Certainly a lot of them believe that, and we know this because they say so. But honestly, I don't buy it. 

No, I think the real change here has been the recession and the jobless recovery.  People are angry because they can't support their families, their kids can't get jobs, they feel like they're losing hold of the ability to provide for themselves.  None of this is due to minorities or women being more numerous or having more rights than they had before--find me a white guy who can truly say that he lost his factory job because a black guy got it, or a woman did.  He lost his factory job because the factory moved to Mexico, because that's profitable for the 1%. He's lost ground because of the housing crisis, because the minimum wage isn't a living wage but can't be raised because that's bad for big business, etc etc. White working class men haven't lost jobs because they've lost white male privilege. They've lost jobs because they never had class privilege, and because their rights as workers have been steadily eroded over the past 30 years by the wealthy. Who are also largely white and male, but who have encouraged their working-class counterparts to believe that their (the white working class's) strongest source of privilege is and will always be their whiteness. The wealthy have convinced the working class to support them in everything from breaking unions to not raising the minimum wage to going to war over slavery(which economically undercuts any free menial laborers, if you think about it), back in the Civil War, partly by convincing them that it's good for white Americans to do those things. In fact, it's very good for rich white Americans to do those things. For the working class, not so much. The trick is to keep the working class focused on the idea that, in defending the rights of the wealthy, they're defending the rights of other whites. Concurrently, one has to convince them that minorities, not the wealthy, are the real source of their frustrations and difficulties. It's a con, and it's been a spectacularly successful one. It is one of the most breathtaking examples of false consciousness in the history of the U.S.

Here's the thing, though--when progressive writers buy into it, when they report the loss of white privilege as the cause of militia standoffs in Oregon or the electoral success of Donald Trump, it's not just that they're reifying a con. It's not even just that they're supporting one of the best weapons the radical oligarchy has ever had. They're also furthering the idea that somehow no multi-cultural society based on equality can exist without making white men go crazy, or that whites somehow deserve to be comforted for any loss of white privilege. Or that a truly equal society has to mean that white men will be unemployed. Why not instead call out the reality, which, in this case, as in many, has a well-known liberal bias? The real frustration of the white male working class is being channeled into a truly incredible amount of racism, xenophobia, and anti-governmentalism, but that's not where it belongs. By misrecognizing the source of their difficulties, the conservative working class are not just hurting minorities or women. They're hurting themselves too--because they can cheer for Donald Trump's ugly cheerleading all they want, but it won't bring back even one factory job. What will bring back factory jobs, if that's possible, is to join across races to take on the primarily white 1%. That could really change things, and I think it's the responsibility of progressives to point it out as often as possible. A solution exists, and it is not to soft pedal anti-racism to make white guys feel less resentful of losing privilege, and it's not to act as though white people are suddenly racially an oppressed minority. It's for the majority of white people to recognize where their economic interests lie.

(Note that I am not saying here that I think races joining together would solve the problems of the entire working class-and that's where it's tricky. I agree with many critics of Bernie's economic policies that such an alliance would benefit whites far more than it would benefit people of color--and that's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately. To fix the economy for everyone, this isn't the only thing that needs to happen. But from the perspective of the white working class, I think even just accepting that their interests could be counter to the interests of wealthy white people, and that it might NOT be in their interests to spend all their time fighting against non-whites, would be hugely beneficial.)

The idea that working class white guys are doing things like having armed standoffs with the feds because of demographic change has sort of a companion piece to it, which has cropped up as pundits across the political spectrum try to explain why the Republican party is falling apart. Many of them have come to the conclusion (regretfully or gleefully, depending on their allegiances) that the Republicans promised their base too many things they couldn't carry through on, including smaller government, and from my perspective that's only partly true. I think the biggest promise the Republican party made (and continues to make) is that being a white straight guy will always make you more employable and more secure and better in every way--that it would provide not only ideological supremacy but literal, economic supremacy. And that identity does continue to provide a lot of benefits to its holders, relative to non-holders, make no mistake. But for a while now, it hasn't, by itself, provided enough economic benefits to "make it," and that's where the broken promise comes in. You can convince people that having just that much more than another racial group makes them better off until what they have dips below a certain level, I think, and then the rubber starts to hit the road. That's what's happening now. When that happens, racism and xenophobia and misogyny can get a whole lot worse (Exhibit A, Donald Trump's entire campaign), because the cracks are showing, and the people in power want to hide them. But because the cracks are showing, there's just the slightest chance that people could start to see their lives differently--and then things could get a whole lot better. But for that to happen we have to not perpetuate the premise that this mess is all about minorities, or women, because it's not. It's all about class, folks. That's just how it is.