I Grew Up In The Rust Belt, But I’m Not In Any Of The Stories About It

January 12, 2017 12:23 PM

It’s strange to see the media turn its attention to places like my hometown in coal-country Pennsylvania and find that my experience there, as part of the non-white working class, is still invisible.

"I grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small city in a swing county in a swing state deep in the Rust Belt, the sort of demographic puzzle that voted to elect Barack Obama twice and then swung, dramatically, for Donald Trump.
...
Seeing the name of my hometown in a dateline never fails to give me a queasy little thrill, like getting an update about an ex. But I’ve watched this phenomenon with increasing dismay as, over and over, the economic and cultural “crisis” in the small, post-industrial cities and towns that dot the Northeast and Midwest is presented as some exquisite torture felt only by white Americans. In this narrative, people of color — people like me — are whitewashed out of the story entirely."

posted by cynical pinnacle (24 comments total)

A good read, and a good reminder. It's easy to abstract away people who live beyond a certain distance- I'm on the coast, so if the media says "white working class" enough times I start to accidentally internalize it as a good description of an area I'm not familiar with.
posted by Secretariat at 12:51 PM on January 12, 2017 [4 favorites]

No, "privilege" means they don't know any better. If they know about the stories and like ignoring them, that's racism.

Both are harmful.
posted by Frayed Knot at 1:22 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

Recognizing that you're privileged doesn't make it go away. The ones who know better are just privileged AND racist.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 1:38 PM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]

I don't get it. Her family, as described, is white working class. Sure, she's the daughter of an immigrant but most of the residents of Wilkes-Barre seem to be descendants of immigrants, with Italians, Polish, and Irish making up nearly 3/4ths of the city's demographics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkes-Barre,_Pennsylvania#Demographics). "White" seems to be a catch all term for a variety of ethnicities, cultures, etc.
posted by enamon at 2:01 PM on January 12, 2017

I was just in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My boyfriend's family is from there and so I went there for the holidays. What a bizarre place. I guess based on what I thought about that area of Pennsylvania from the media, I expected it to be closer to the coal mining country my father's family is from in Appalachia, but it's nothing like that at all. It reminds me a lot more of Chicago than Kentucky, with more "old world" ethnic divisions like between the Irish, Polish, and Italians. But then it has kind of a Sunbelt (where I'm from) lack of public infrastructure. At least that's how it seemed to be as admittedly an interloper. It was depressing in that it seemed like that lack of that infrastructure had drained the life out of the place. Little public transit for example, a lot of places didn't even have sidewalks despite high density. And there seems to be a lot of resentment of non-white immigrant newcomers – people told me not to go to Wilkes-Barre itself because it was "bad" which I assumed was dogwhistle (I wanted to go to a pupusa place there- pupusas are delicious corn things from El Salvador).
posted by melissam at 2:02 PM on January 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

Wow, this is so good. Others will have more to say about what it means politically, but it really, really resonates with me as a racially ambiguous kid from Folsom, California, which is not the Rust Belt and not quite the "State of Jefferson" (the sparsely populated northern reaches of California where Trump won by as much as 50 points in some counties), but certainly on the way there.

I know that a big reason I got out is because I was never really allowed in. This, so much this. I left and I thought, I like books, I'll go into publishing, and when I landed the job I learned to wear nice shoes and carry a leather handbag and stop eating at McDonald's and start tasting wine and listen politely to people talking about their summer home in Calistoga or their vacation in the French Alps. I fit in better here, but there's still so much I can't say.

I think - I can't quite believe I'm about to admit this here, and she wouldn't even admit it to my face anyway but - I think my mom voted for Trump. She's your classic low-information voter. She's different from your average Republican in that I don't think she actually consumes any right-wing media (she doesn't have cable and can barely navigate the internet - she did used to listen to Dr. Laura and Michael Savage which maybe is where some of this stuff came from), but she's in her sixties, a part-time cashier at a supermarket, works herself to the bone and still barely covers the bills - basically your perfect image of your white working-class voter, except oops, she's Japanese American. (I bet now that I've said that you're picturing an industrious model minority type, not the American daughter of American parents who sits around in the break room grousing and cursing with her coworkers about "fucking asshole customers," then goes home, drinks a Budweiser, and watches NCIS on her laptop.) And I'm having a hard time articulating what I think that means, but I think her concerns and beliefs are much the same as any member of the white working class. And not only is she (and all her nonwhite coworkers) erased by this "white working class" narrative, but liberal white elites are (or were, right after the election, anyway) holding up white working class racism as the one thing we need to understand, without taking into account any other concerns the working class might have. Yes, they voted against their own interests; yes, their willingness to go along with the Trump campaign's racism makes them complicit; but I feel strongly that racism, too, is a behavior that is class-coded, and that both the white working class and white liberal elites are acculturated to their own racist behavior but easily able to point out racism in the other group. And I've seen zero reflection on how an attitude of disgust and dismissal toward working-class culture (your football and MMA and reality TV and what have you) drove those demographics straight into Trump's arms.

I think the Meryl Streep thing is largely a distraction and haven't much wanted to talk about it, but I read an article in the goddamn National Review arguing basically what I said above, and I agreed with every word. That alarms me. That's where I think we're leaving working-class votes on the table, not in failing to empathize with their odious racism.
posted by sunset in snow country at 2:07 PM on January 12, 2017 [40 favorites]

So, yeah, you could call them just white working class, though I think that's overly flattening and exhibits some erasure.

I agree but I would go further as to say that calling anyone "white working class" is overly flattening and exhibits some erasure. The term "white" tends to lump a wide variety of different ethnicities, cultures, histories, etc. together based on skin shade and tries to present it as a monolithic group. That's far from being accurate. Unfortunately, I think the author is guilty of this as well. When you have such a tremendous cultural diversity in a city as small as Wilkes-Barre it strikes me as a bit nearsighted failing to mention it.
posted by enamon at 2:14 PM on January 12, 2017

Mod note: Couple comments removed. enamon, we've had to ask you previously to stop derailing threads with "yeah but there's not really such thing as 'white' people" sidebars. You need to stop doing it period.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:37 PM on January 12, 2017 [9 favorites]

My friend's Chinese immigrant parents voted for Trump. It's a complicated story.
posted by jb at 3:46 PM on January 12, 2017

MMA

Is this a stereotypical working-class thing in the way football is? I don't do MMA but a friend who does says it's really popular among white collar people, especially investment banking types.
posted by Sangermaine at 3:49 PM on January 12, 2017

[Couple comments removed. enamon, we've had to ask you previously to stop derailing threads with "yeah but there's not really such thing as 'white' people" sidebars. You need to stop doing it period.]

This thread is an object lesson in how someone jumping in to to shout "WHAT ABOUT THE WHITE PEOPLE?" and race101 questions just sucks all the air out of the room. For a thread about the working class POC experience, and how that experience is ignored in the current political climate, we've so far managed to almost completely ignore the POC experience because some people only want to talk about white people.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 3:59 PM on January 12, 2017 [23 favorites]

Yeah, it's interesting: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has done amazing reporting on school segregation for the New York Times, among other outlets, is a native of Iowa. She's from Waterloo, which is a post-industrial town with a substantial, long-standing black population and a really deep history of racial segregation and civil rights activism. I can't remember where I read or heard and interview with her where she talked about how her perspective was informed by her experiences growing up a biracial kid in a profoundly segregated town. On the face of it, she seems like the poster-child for the kind of big-city, coastal journalist who is out-of-touch with the Heartland, but she's actually totally a product of the Heartland. She's just a product of a Midwestern experience that is always understood, by many people both in and outside of the Midwest, as somehow less legitimate and normal than the experiences of white people from farms or factory towns.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:23 PM on January 12, 2017 [18 favorites]

the constant refrain of my youth, most often put to me by total strangers: “What are you?”

Man, that takes me back. I'm long gone from my hometown but still struggle to parse all the weird intersections of class and race and privilege that inflected my first two decades. I never quite seemed able to establish the right frame of reference for anything, from my failure to grasp that random-ass adults weren't complimenting my English because they'd peeked at my report card to my belated realization that when other college students said "suburb" it meant something closer to "wealthy planned community" than "relatively prosperous blue-collar town."

Nobody's ever going to profile my hometown. It's in a pretty safely blue county in a firmly blue state. I think my relationship to the place will always exist at a weird confluence of familiarity and inaccessibility, but now that I'm another coastal elite the cause and nature of that inaccessibility have shifted. I wouldn't pass as a local if I went back now, although as Habib articulates so well, I couldn't pass as a local when I was living there either.

Thanks for posting this.
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 4:52 PM on January 12, 2017 [8 favorites]

Is this a stereotypical working-class thing in the way football is? I don't do MMA but a friend who does says it's really popular among white collar people, especially investment banking types.

You know, I have no idea - I was riffing off Meryl Streep's speech, but that does sound right.

I'm interested in this tension, between not belonging as a person of color in heartland America, and then escaping to a coastal elite haven and feeling forever marked by the place you escaped from. I notice that Habib is also in the book world, and that the last few paragraphs of her essay are about the telling of stories. She says, I still have hope that telling these stories could change how Rust Belt communities, and Americans, see themselves. It means something when we talk about these stories and don't erase them.
posted by sunset in snow country at 4:59 PM on January 12, 2017 [7 favorites]

On the face of it, she seems like the poster-child for the kind of big-city, coastal journalist who is out-of-touch with the Heartland, but she's actually totally a product of the Heartland.

So, this is mildly off-topic, but liberal folks on Twitter right now are really into sharing pictures of Trump in his gaudy, gilt hotel penthouses and pairing them with sarcastic "Yeah, that Trump guy is so salt-of-the-earth" statements.

And I'm just sitting here thinking, damn, they really don't get it. The reason we're always hearing variations of the phrase "coastal liberal elite" is because the right want to redefine what elite means. And they've done it, successfully. If you are liberal, now, you are by definition elite. Because only elites are liberal. And, conversely, anybody who is not a liberal cannot be elite. Because only elites are liberal.

The same process is erasing (has erased) non-white people from the "Heartland" and the "working class". The very phrase "white working class" is doing the same memetic work as "coastal liberal elite". The message is "only whites are working class"; therefore, anybody non-white is not working class. Therefore, any policy that takes into account non-white people by definition is anti-working class, no matter what that policy actually does.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:22 PM on January 12, 2017 [27 favorites]

That being said, I think sunset in snow country is right. The antidote is to keep telling stories like this that challenge the skewed version of reality that white supremacy is trying to talk us into.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:24 PM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

the constant refrain of my youth, most often put to me by total strangers: “What are you?”

Ah, yes.

Previously on Mefi:
No, where are you really from?
So, like, what are you?
What kind of Asian are you?
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:26 PM on January 12, 2017 [6 favorites]

Because only elites are liberal.

And only liberals are out of touch.

Thank you. That did click.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:03 PM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]

We can debate what really entails "whiteness", I guess, specifically when it comes to racial privilege, but I'm not sure what you're getting at here--it seems to me that you're trying to claim that Arab-Americans are part of the white working class, without considering that they get hit with a lot of different bigotry and suspicion that white working class people don't.

Thank you for this. The Husband is of Syrian descent. Pick the epithet for a Middle Eastern person, he's been called it. He ALWAYS gets the stink eye and extra "security screening" when he flies. When we shop at the Middle Eastern grocery store, someone always addresses him in Arabic. When we come home from Canada (a 40 minute drive), he gets grilled about his birthplace even with passport, Ohio drivers license, and birth certificate in hand. On 9/11/01, a customer punched him in the face, flung a slur, and told him to go back to where he came from.

There's ALWAYS some honky standing by to tell him "But you're WHITE!" It's obnoxious as hell. The Census Bureau might say he is, but he and his family say otherwise. So do all of the other Arab-Americans we know. Certainly, he isn't afforded the same courtesies as my lily-white ass. He isn't considered white until he talks about his experiences as someone who isn't - he's only considered white when it suits someone else's purposes.

People need to knock that off. It's rude AF.
posted by MissySedai at 9:39 PM on January 12, 2017 [23 favorites]

I think there's an important point to be made that race is not ethnicity. Race is imposed from the outside by societal forces. It changes over time based on who is accepted and who isn't. Heck, it changes based on place. You can be considered white somewhere and not really white somewhere else.

Ethnicity is something different. It's about your own culture, your own family history, your own identity.

Pretending that white is a clear cut category, that it tells you anything fixed and real about a member of the category, that certain ethnicities can't fall in and out if acceptance, is a mistake.
posted by Zalzidrax at 6:01 AM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's striking how much the author's dad and my dad look alike. It's also no surprise, his experience. I'm often grouped as an other with my thick lips and olive skin. I've got a boring English last name that spares me much of the worst of it. But I have also heard the same slurs thrown my way that the author has, minus the habib stuff.

Some of the resentment from whites sources from the loss of their own ethnicity. That's the source of fragility. It's the source of stuff like, 'change your name'.

I direct my anger at the wasps and protestants, the categories that also happen to hold so much of the wealth in the country. It's the way I can identify with minorities.

The cost of jumping the divide for the benefits of inclusion, inclusion that is always contingent on suppressing things like talking with my hands and not getting too excited, the cost is the erasure of parts of my identity.
posted by Strange_Robinson at 7:10 AM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]

There's ALWAYS some honky standing by to tell him "But you're WHITE!" It's obnoxious as hell.

I've got kinda obsessed with seeing this stuff as a gatekeeping phenomenon - folks feeling like they have the right to make the definition for others about who does and doesn't get to call themselves X. I have probably become kind of "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail" with it, but I see it as applying to so many things.

For a while after Obama was elected there was a stretch where I saw certain folks who seemed to want to minimize the achievement of electing a black president by claiming he had a white parent so he wasn't actually a black president. As if anyone who would object to a "real" black president with two black parents magically becomes cool for folks with mixed race, as if we didn't have the one-drop rule or Michling tests in our not at all distant past, or folks don't get assaulted until someone asked them about their parentage.

Any sort of trans issues, from bathroom bills to arguing about the NYT's pronoun use for Chelsea Manning. I just today saw arguments about respecting her identity based on where she is in reassignment surgery. TERFs excluding trans women by claiming they don't experience real misogyny.

"Fake geek girls," with nerds persecuting women based on whether or not they supposedly rise to the level of being a Real fan. Other fandoms do it to people based on when they picked up an appreciation for stuff. People have been doing it with other music fans for as long as I have been aware of music. Nope, you don't love to read - you like the wrong kind of books. You're not bisexual, you're just afraid to come all the way out.

I knew black folks in Miami who dismissed the experiences of Haitians because, as immigrants, they weren't really black americans. At least once a year I see some variation of someone feeling like they're free to argue about someone over their name. A woman I know had a general in the pentagon - a colleague - say to her I am not willing to call you that in reference to her legal middle name which she went by.

Obviously much of this shit actually starts with racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, etc, and just gets rationalized/excused/manifested this way. But the willingness in our culture to comfortably tell other people who and what they are and who they're allowed to say they are is just astonishing to me in its pervasiveness. It's a rare day when I don't hear or read something and think "what the hell do you care what they call themselves?"

tl'dr: our culture fucking sucks for respecting other people's identities and lived experiences.
posted by phearlez at 10:42 AM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]

Is this a stereotypical working-class thing in the way football is? I don't do MMA but a friend who does says it's really popular among white collar people, especially investment banking types.

You know, I have no idea - I was riffing off Meryl Streep's speech, but that does sound right.


Football is also popular among investment banking types, I'm pretty sure - in both sports you've got strategy plus people getting hurt, what's not to like? I feel like the fanbase for fighting sports also spans a few kinds of people - skewing male, of course - but does have a bit of a lower-class image.

(I'm at least casually interested in MMA myself, for anyone who is going to take offense to the line about "people getting hurt").
posted by atoxyl at 11:47 AM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]

tl'dr: our culture fucking sucks for respecting other people's identities and lived experiences.

It so very much does. We seem to be a nation of scolds, hollering the battle cry of "You're doing it WRONG!"

Argued with over my name? Yeah. I have my legal name, which I never use. I am Missy at work and on the Internet. Family and very close friends call me Moo. My German friends call me Gretchen or Sahne (the latter being a play on my middle name and my pale complexion). And yet, there are people who insist on calling me by my legal name - one who even mansplained at me at length, in my own home, why he was "incapable" of addressing me by my chosen moniker. (He got a good hard slap.) WTF?

The Husband is told constantly that his experiences simply are not possible. "I can't tell you're Syrian!", they tell him, as if that magically erases what he's been through because of his olive skin and ample beak. "Race is a social construct!" Well, no shit. That doesn't make him feel any less angry and humiliated by getting felt up at the airport or getting grilled coming home from bloody WINDSOR, ferfuckssake. My passport barely gets a first glance, let alone a second. His get finely scrutinized, and he's expected to detail his heritage 3 generations back.

It shouldn't be so hard to respect people's identities, instead of engaging in gatekeeper behavior. But here we are.
posted by MissySedai at 9:49 PM on January 13, 2017 [2 favorites]