Redefining the American Working Class. Shamira Ibrahim
There’s no dispute that general working-class support for Democrats has fluctuated from election cycle to election cycle. The one constant, though, is that “working-class” is almost always used in the media to suggest white, male workers. The representative Reagan Democrat was, literally, a white autoworker in Michigan. Even when the white prefix is used to indicate a specific research interest - as in Joan Williams’s White Working Class - there is still an unspoken assumption that this is the part of the working class that matters most. White workers were supposedly neglected in the 2016 campaigns, and so we ended up with Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton.
Last year, I spent time talking to workers involved in the Fight for $15 campaign. One of them, Deatric Edie, a then-forty-two-year-old mother of four in Florida, was working three jobs at fast food franchises, at hourly wages of $11, nearly $10, and $8.65, respectively. “My whole life is dedicated to working,” she said. The American labor force is teeming with workers like Edie, but when they get media attention, they are more often classified as “the working poor” than as simply the American working class.
Last year, I spent time talking to workers involved in the Fight for $15 campaign. One of them, Deatric Edie, a then-forty-two-year-old mother of four in Florida, was working three jobs at fast food franchises, at hourly wages of $11, nearly $10, and $8.65, respectively. “My whole life is dedicated to working,” she said. The American labor force is teeming with workers like Edie, but when they get media attention, they are more often classified as “the working poor” than as simply the American working class.
Few reporters assigned to dig into working-class sentiment would turn to someone like Edie—a Black woman who has suffered from extended housing instability—as a typical voice of working-class discontent, despite the inherent understanding that people like Edie have about the ways that class, gender, and race interact to subjugate the most marginalized communities in the working-class service industry, and despite their overrepresentation in that field. “They said that ‘Black Lives Matter,’” Edie remarked to me. “But they’re still not protecting us. The health and economic security of Black workers, our voices, are still not being heard.”
The United States, however, is much closer now than it was in the era of the Reagan Democrats to a transformation, a point at which the working class will no longer be predominantly white....
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/redefining-the-working-class-ibrahim
The United States, however, is much closer now than it was in the era of the Reagan Democrats to a transformation, a point at which the working class will no longer be predominantly white....
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/redefining-the-working-class-ibrahim
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