White Working-Class Safari Journalism and the Racial Double Standard

If Bernie Sanders accomplished anything sacrificing his self-respect to become the Democratic Party’s prison girlfriend, it was to elevate racism, the fate of the Rust Belt, and economic inequality to front-page stories. The problem is that as long as racism, the fate of the Rust Belt, and economic inequality are separate topics talked about by different people in different ways, nothing will ever change.

One of the reasons economic inequality has ramped up has been the clever division of the people impacted. Poor people of color are victims of racism while poor white people are too lazy to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Encourage the POC to feel jealous of the chances the dumb whites throw away like empty PBR cans. Get the white folks to believe the POC live off handouts. Blacks vote for Dem candidates who say they’ll help but don’t; poor whites elect Trump who promises not to and doesn’t.

Poor whites make good copy. There’s a new book, Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the “Real America.” There’s also a new movie out of an old book, Hillbilly Elegy. National Review has its own white trash story up and the MSM has made parachuting elite columnists into the Heartland to write thought pieces into a sub-genre that could sit aside Business and Sports on the masthead. Whatever all those writers think their point is, their point ends up being that poor whites are very different from poor blacks.

The fascination with writing about white trash arises because poor white people are a stand-in for poor blacks. Kinda by proxy, the way the movie M*A*S*H* set in Korea was actually a criticism of America’s war in Vietnam. White liberals can say anything they want about Appalachians, stuff they can’t get away with saying about blacks. That avoids anyone seeing that the story is all the same story, just whitewashed with claims of racism.

Nick Kristof of the New York Times, in his from-the-Heartland book, visited Jackson, Kentucky, to be shocked by white parents taking their kids out of school because improved academic performances would threaten Social Security disability benefits. These benefits have accrued as various feel-good administration gestures to the point where they are are paid out for loosely defined learning disorders in eight-year-olds. Dumb hicks, throwing away their one chance, education, for a quick handout. But Kristof stumbles in accidental honesty: “This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency.” Um, make that white people.

Next up is Kevin Williamson, who in Big White Ghetto writes without controversy, “welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place.” Now imagine the exact sentence with a little tweak—”welfare has made parts of Newark into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the black underclass in place”—and all hell breaking loose on Maddow. Imagine if Ta-Nehisi Coates, instead of making a career out of cataloging black victimhood, started saying, “Stop getting pregnant and smoking weed. They hiring at KFC.”

Or try this one: “‘The government gives people checks, but nobody teaches them how to live,” says a former high school principal who spoke with Williamson in Kentucky. Now imagine your favorite conservative talk radio host saying “the problem among blacks is the government gives them checks, but never teaches them how to live.” Shall we talk about single moms in Appalachia whose baby daddies cook meth or shall we talk about deadbeat black dads who cook meth in the South Bronx? Write a book about the former and you’ll vie for a Pulitzer. Try that with the latter without making it a how-to on victimhood and Oprah will skin you alive.

For another taste of the same, remember SNL‘s Appalachian Emergency Room, featuring rednecks with comical injuries; one ongoing character came in with all sorts of things stuck up his anus. It was as if the Beverly Hillbillies image of rural people had never been updated. Imagine if Amos and Andy were still on, or maybe just a new series called Ghetto Emergency Room, featuring hilarious episodes of gunshots and Fentanyl ODs. The Simpsons scored virtue points writing off Apu after concerns about racism were raised but kept Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel, voiced by the same Jewish actor from Queens who did Apu. How about an “urban” Deliverance, with white adventurers stalked through the slums of Detroit?

The current Goliath of white trash stories is the movie Hillbilly Elegy, which I viewed recently. Just when you thought they had exhausted every “hick in the big city” cliché since Midnight Cowboy, the protagonist gets invited to a fancy dinner party and is intimidated by the multiple forks set out.

Figure a guy like the main character in Elegy, who went through an undergrad education, the Marine Corps, and got into Yale, could puzzle it all out. What to do with all the forks was even fully explained in the Titanic dinner scene, where the exact same scenario played out to illustrate hickdom. One wonders how many movies featuring POC would do the same. Even Eddie Murphy in Trading Places ultimately turned his street-smart lack of White Manners into an advantage. Imagine J.D. Vance saving the day at Yale in a tobacco spitting contest!

Among the other terrible things about the Elegy movie is a near total lack of empathy with its characters. They are all presented as terrible people, their problems their own fault and made worse by their own actions. They are not presented as victims of larger forces (such as racism or urban gentrification), as is common in stories about POC (think Boyzz in the Hood or Do the Right Thing). There is no leavening poor white problems, even the shared drug problem. Blacks are victims of some white conspiracy, maybe even the CIA, flooding the ‘hood with narcotics. White trash? They have no self-restraint. Same as them using abortion as a cure for recreational sex. Victimhood versus self-sabotage.

We tend to forget the War on Poverty, first aimed at poor whites, failed to help them, as it later failed to help blacks. Too much welfare of the wrong kind without real jobs to back it just created generational dependencies. But we can only talk about one demographic that way.

That seems to be mixed in to the takeaway from another new book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. Author Robert Putnam concludes that the many gaps between blacks and whites—education, health, employment, financial—narrowed between 1940 and 1970, driven by the Great Migration into northern industrial jobs. Then around 1970, black life fell into a decline that continues today.

Putnam misses the big picture to blame racism. From 1940 to 1970, the lives of lower-class Americans of all races improved, especially up north where what became the Rust Belt was then the manufacturing center of the universe. Everyone rose and fell the same. Real, adjusted wages were never higher for all Americans than in 1972. But The Upswing only follows part of the crowd back down. It misses Buchanan County, 99 percent white, marooned in southwest Virginia, among the nation’s most destitute places.

So today we are allowed to mock one failed group as dumb Trump rednecks and treat them like subjects of a nature documentary. Blacks, they’re victims with reparations due. Don’t expect much progress for either group until we are allowed to talk openly about both. Try saying all American lives matter and you risk a broken nose. Wake me when a book called Urban Elegy with its get-to-work ethic up front becomes a bestseller.

And if you’ve read this far, please don’t think this is too original a thought. Lyndon Johnson pretty much issued the thesis statement in 1960, years before he kicked off the War on Poverty. Johnson said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.”

Peter Van Buren is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.