The HBS hosts take a critical look at the white working class and their grievances.
Leading up to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, and even more so afterwards, the U.S. found itself inundated with analyses of the allegedly “overlooked” grievances of the white working class. Were those legitimate grievances that should have been affirmed and addressed? Who belongs to the WWC in America, anyway? Do they share a “class consciousness” in the traditional Marxian sense, or are they primarily identifiable by their shared Whiteness? Are there multiple iterations of the “white working class” ? And, if so, are the many WWC’s compatible?
Dr. Rick Lee is in the hot seat for this episode’s deep dive into the definition, evaluation, and analysis of the white working class, who are clearly (in Rick’s estimation) “lashing out” these days.
Check out the links below for references to ideas and thinkers mentioned in Episode 22:
- Noel Ignatiev, How The Irish Became White (1995)
- Frank Newport, “Looking into What Americans Mean by ‘Working Class'” (Gallup, 2018)
- Paul Faisal, Class: A Guide through the American Status System (1992)
- Aimee Picchi, “America’s white working class is the smallest it has ever been” (CBS News, 2019)
- Marxian class theory
- Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983)
- Steve Martinot, “The Racialized Construction of Class in the United States” (Radical Philosophy Association, 2000)
- David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (2007)
- W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940)
- Dara Lind, “Why historians are fighting about ‘No Irish Need Apply’ signs– and why it matters” (Vox, 2015)
- Michael Dawson, “Race, Capitalism, and the Current Crisis” (2019)
- Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class” (Harvard Business Review, 2016)
- Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel, “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote for Trump, Racism Did” (The Nation, 2017)
- Andrew van Dam, “White economic anxiety evaporated after the 2016 election. Now black economic anxiety is on the rise” (The Washington Post, 2019)
