The Wretched of the Earth for Appalachians.
NOTE: This is the second installment in a weekly series by Professor Danny Shaw. Read Part I here.
Turning the Ethnographic Lens around on the Liberals
Perched up in their Ivy League offices and downtown skyscrapers, the tenured professors and well-paid journalists have written a great deal about us. When have we got a day off from work and our survival routines to analyze their foreign attitudes and habits? Today, we get to have our say. It is our lived experience in the trenches versus your pontificating. You are not us and we are not you. Do you really think you would last a round with us in the real world? The petit bourgeois white has found their place at the capitalist trough; the poor white, desperate for breathing room, searches for an opening.
Richard Reeves of the centrist thinktank the Brookings Institute calls the well-to-do the Dream Hoarders. He critiques how liberals bemoan the privileges that exist for white Americans or men but they are often the very ones who benefit from these privileges and have doors open up for them that are closed to those further below on the social totem pole – when I was caught “stealing” food in 6th grade, my mother came to the school to defend me but I was still suspended. Families who have high incomes can get into Princeton and Dartmouth. Their parents can afford the necessary training, networking and tuition, leaving little room for students who come from poverty and need scholarships. Liberals say that it is absurd that we are unemployed and insecure because they live in a fantasy world. They convince themselves that their self-righteousness will somehow create opportunities for us that never existed. How can you open a door to a dream neglected?
The liberal “progressive” march forward only exists in their heads.
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. His book examines the lifestyle of liberals. He points out that because of their guilt about their wealth, “they clothe their affluence in moral, organic and environmental drapery.” The liberal father teaches his children to make healthy decisions when ordering dinner and dessert. The poor father shows his kids how to survive, sending his clever little accomplices to scoop up what is left on another family’s table after they stood up and exited the local IHOP. We have been put into detention, suspended and arrested for taking food we needed in school.
Liberals vacation in Europe with their kids, granting them access to a more expansive vocabulary and worldly knowledge. We take our moms to Applebee’s for their birthdays when we can afford it. The uppity complain, stressed beneath the burden of their privileges. We are so grateful because every day we are alive is on borrowed time and means so much to us. We never thought of getting a passport. Our vacations are to visit our grandmothers or other family members. The only foreign countries we ever visited were New York City and Los Angeles.
In the media, you speak for us. 89 percent of newspaper editors are white, but few come from where we do. You are our social workers, doctors, sociologists, criminologists and psychiatrists. You pretend to spirit away our problems with Trazadone, Xanax and Percocets, only delaying and compounding our anguish. When your prescriptions are not enough, Jack Daniels and stronger remedies do the trick, extending our miseries until we awake. Did it ever occur to you that with proper attention and resources we could speak for ourselves and heal ourselves? We are not the permanent underclass; it is your system that is permanently pathological.
The congenial, play-it-safe petty bourgeoisie lives in fear of being discovered. Their social media posts never broach the genocide in Gaza or other “controversial” topics because they seek to appease and pacify, lest they ruffle religious feathers. What do workers know of their fear and cowardice? For they are a class that has everything to lose: their sinecures, their second homes on Cape Cod and their vacations abroad. And there in your backyard or at your vacation home, the poor white is mixing the cement, taking a swig and chain smoking, trying to make a living. My father’s shadow lurks over the false prophets of stability and security, a reality altogether foreign to us.
Class Instincts
The poor white knows the class reflexes of the petit bourgeoisie well. For he has always been on the other side of their arrogance and superiority complex.
Class instincts and a worker’s mentality cannot be taught in any academic textbooks, not even in Marx. We carry an ideology of rage and combat, inherent within us, that develops over the course of our peoples’ history, and our daily lives. The poor white anticipates alien class instincts sniffing what is sincere or not. Knee-jerk class reflexes surge from the confines of the deep humiliation the poor whites have internalized. How many of us never looked a fellow human being in their eyes? For many of us, battered and war torn, that was our number one fight, to remember that we too were men and women who deserved to be respected as such.
Returning to history, we cannot feel alone in our condition. Francis Butler Simkins and Robert Henley Woody, biographers of the South, offer the following portrait of “the white worker” in South Carolina During Reconstruction:
“These cabins . . . are dens of filth. The bed if there be a bed is a layer of something in the corner that defies scenting. If the bed is nasty, what of the floor? What of the whole enclosed space? What of the creatures themselves? Pough! Water in use as a purifier is unknown. Their faces are bedaubed with the muddy accumulation of weeks. They just give them a wipe when they see a stranger to take off the blackest dirt. … The poor wretches seem startled when you address them, and answer your questions cowering like culprits.”
This devastating image provokes an immediate solidarity with any human creature reduced to such degradation. From the holocaust in Gaza, to 1848 colonized Ireland to 1860 South Carolina, to an ADX Florence federal prison cell in 2025, great attempts have been to separate us from humanity, but we insist on being of it.
The Myth of “white America”
“White America” never was and never will be. It is a myth of the ruling class minority.
Of little use is relative white privilege, when you have PTSD and a heroin needle salivating and searching for your eighth vein. All sociological treatment of white America like any nation — real or invented — must be subjected to the most rigorous class breakdown. This is anathema to the liberal favorites like Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi and Adrienne Maree Brown, race whisperers for the white middle class.
However, the historical invention of “white people” had all too real consequences for Black people, Chicanos, Native Americans, and all those racialized as “others.” As low as our social indicators are, there are those pushed further down on the social totem pole. As the writings of Lenin and Stalin prove, it is a historical fact beyond dispute that the United States was explicitly founded as a white nation, with “white” being the signifier for first Anglo-Saxon, then Western European more broadly. Only when masses of white people turn on this relative privilege and the whole damn system do we all have a chance to defeat our common enemies.
W.E.B. Du Bois, the father of American Marxism, cites one of his early mentors at Harvard, and one of the first professional historians Albert Bushnell Hart, who captures the following ethnographic snapshot of our ancestors:
“Most of them are illiterate and more than correspondingly ignorant. Some of them had Indian ancestors and a few bear evidences of Negro blood. The so-called ‘mountain boomer,’ says an observer, ‘has little self-respect and no self-reliance …. So long as his corn pile lasts the “cracker” lives in contentment, feasting on a sort of hoe cake made of grated corn meal mixed with salt and water and baked before the hot coals, with addition of what game the forest furnishes him when he can get up the energy to go out and shoot or trap it …. The irregularities of their moral lives cause them no sense of shame …. But, notwithstanding these low moral conceptions, they are of an intense religious excitability.”
We regret to inform you, in the two centuries since the Civil War, our moral lives continue to be most “irregular.” We are the momentary front pages of the New York Times and give you your “breaking” stories on CNN. We are rarely worth more than a 24-hour news cycle. We are the social segment that produces the bulk of school shootings and hate crimes. We succumb to addictions and early deaths from economic and social despair. Our limelight in the capitalist press 999 out of 1000 times stems from our alienation, yet no one dares to say it.
We are pregnant with shame and apologies when we are around the “superior” class with “woke” vocabulary and pedantic ideas. We know embarrassment intimately. It has been deposited in our lifeblood for centuries by the kings, lords and billionaires who preside over our dignity. We are the eternal over-compensators and over-sharers, trying to make up for our battered self-esteem. Other times, we won’t utter a word, because we feel we are not good enough. We wear corduroys of self-doubt and overalls of self-loathing. Our self-suicides have no trace of self-pity. For even in our early deaths, there is a great pride that presides over our condition. The dignity of the down-and-out emits a certain working-class chauvinism towards those who never had to survive what we have. We have an ax to grind. We are well balanced. We have chips on both shoulders.
We inhabit an entire world the liberals can never understand. We, the army of the indebted, bankrupt and unemployed. They have already taken so much from us. What do we have to defend? Our battered self-esteems? The most limited of property?
Some 200,000 of us overdose every year. Millions more are traumatized. That means every year 28 times as many of us disappear as were disappeared in the U.S. imperial wars of conquest against Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a war on us too, we just have not figured out how to make common cause with the rest of the hunted.
We are the panopticon the godfather of wokeness Michel Foucault obsessively studied. The social workers, Department of Youth Service workers and teachers feel pity for us. They blame us and get crocodile tears in their eyes for “our victims,” so as not to understand and make common cause with us.
The liberal is hobbled by fear, for his horizons are seemingly endless. Fear is foreign to us. We’ll do what we have to, just to get by. For the liberal, the revolution provokes fear; for us, hope.
We are fantasy addicts. We hope to live long, prosperous lives with our children, partners and family. But how can we let up when they have humiliated us since the womb? ADHD is but a maladaptive coping mechanism for our trauma. It is a learned lifestyle, when you never had a lifestyle choice. Survival instincts are a matter of life and death. Dr. Gabor Maté, our true godfather and defender, speaks to us gently and with respect. Scattered, we collect the shattered pieces and spilled drugs off the carpet, trying to reassemble our brokenness.
The liberal has everything to lose. What does the poor white have to lose but his self hatred, class chains and humiliation?
We are the oxyelectorate. We do not vote based on our own best interests, but rather based on our alienation. How can we “make America great again,” when for almost three centuries the haves never stopped stepping on the necks of the have-nots? Our exploiters, “the globalists,” moved their capital abroad to pay Dominicans and Vietnamese a day’s pay on an assembly line which is the equivalent of what they once had to pay us per hour in the 1980’s. Journalist Thomas Frank asks this very question in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Why do we vote for haughty politicians who would never sit down with us for a cup of coffee or a cold Bud Light?
My mentor’s mentor John Black walked into a bar in rural Pennsylvania and said to a group of young comrades: “You see these stout men here? They can either turn their guns on us the communists or on the billionaires. It is our historical task to win them over so we can turn on our oppressors or we are all finished.”
The Great Divide
How can we make America great again if we were always on the bottom?
It is the material reality of food insecurity, the projects and the overdoses which mold our personalities and dictate our actions. The foppish and the fastidious cannot roll with the hardened and the hustlers. We do not speak the same language nor do we seek to. All of your high-falutin smugness creates the distance only revolt can shrink. We feel the urgency. We inject, swallow and cut to outrun ourselves in a race we can never win…
Liberals hold their tongue afraid to offend anyone. Our very being is repellant so why would we hold back?
How many liberals think we “talk black” or “talk like a Puerto Rican.” They didn’t know poor whites also grew up in similar class terrain. The race-blind bullets, needles and alcoholic fathers breed a different set of knee-jerk class reactions to life.
What then can the liberal feel in the presence of the poor white, his arch-nemesis, but envy? The envy of seeing him let go of that which is rotten and decaying. The liberal cannot bring himself to admit the raw truth and post about the genocide in Gaza. Such actions would dictate that they too would have to rise up and confront history. The liberal is comfortable and quite willing to turn his back on humanity. The spineless cannot even confront themselves, much less the holocausts they hide and justify.
Liberals despise us because we have broken free. We are the stallion masses, emerging from the dust and ashes, hardened by deficit and foreclosure. What do we have left? What did we ever have? We threaten to trample over the inconsequential, but society’s blinders hold us back. We had better identify our enemy clearly or all of America will be in the crosshairs of our half a billion guns…
This system was never ours. But it did afford us strategic crumbs to convince us we had a significant material stake in it. From day one in colonial America, many poor European settlers fled to here as religious, political and economic refugees and accumulated as much free land as they could conquer and defend. While they might not have run the system, they willingly and even enthusiastically made the system run. This continued the span of American history. The Homestead Act of 1862 exclusively afforded white farmers the ability to own land. The GI Bill of 1944 allowed returning white GIs to purchase a home in suburbia, which was understood to be “white suburbia.” Law professor Wilfred Codrington III posits that “the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.” Like poll taxes and voter-ID laws historically designed to disenfranchise non-white voters, the electoral college gives more weight to small state and suburban voters, who are usually whiter and more conservative voters.
We never had to do anything to be “down” because we were born at the bottom. When you are born into Dante’s 9th rung of incest and self-mutilation, where else is there to go but up? The poor white may not know history nor the bonds he shares intrinsically with people fighting around the world for dignity, but I have seen the Haiti and Palestine that blaze within many of us. If we can tap into solidarity and internationalism, we could help reshape history.
We have a different approach to the streets. The liberal looks tepidly over his shoulder, full of fear, fear of being consumed by the irascible flames of history. We strut and gallop forward trying to escape a history that lives within.
Poor skin, white masks
While we live in denial, there is no hiding our organic disdain for the rich.
Liberals inherit wealth; poor whites abhor wealth. And we covet it, at the same time. The paradox consumes the sanity and the serenity we never knew. Fighting for the commoner is both foreign and native to us.
We hate privileges, not because we don’t need them but because they are out of our reach.
The liberal blows with the winds of self-interest; we are loyal to the only ones who ever had our backs.
No one ever sought to represent us honestly in the media or in Hollywood. We were never allowed to cultivate our own voice. Only the voices from us but against our interests were amplified. Alien interests who earn one thousand times what we do insist on speaking for us.
Does that sound familiar to any other oppressed social groups? Our marginalization is yours; your humiliation is ours. Our empowerment is yours; your uprising is ours.
Notes:
DeBoer, Fredrik. How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Francis Butler Simkins and Robert Hilliard Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction (Farmville, VA: State Teachers College; Duke University, 1932) [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012056464&seq=12](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012056464&seq=12)
Albert Bushnell Hart, The Southern South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1910), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012056464&seq=12.
Bushnell Hart, Albert. “The Southern South.” March 4, 2013.
Costs of War. (n.d.). Human costs. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Brown University. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military
The “panopticon” is English social theorist Jeremy Bentham’s concept which studies prison design as a metaphor for social control. The panopticon allows a single Correction Officer to monitor all prisoners without them knowing they are being watched.
Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder is Dr. Gabor Maté’s deeper look at the cause of ADHD in our late capitalist society.
Frydl, K. (2021, November 5). The Oxy electorate. Medium. https://medium.com/@kfrydl/the-oxy-electorate-3fa62765f837
Frank, T. (2004). What’s the matter with Kansas? Macmillan. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805077742/whatsthematterwithkansas
Codrington III, Wilfred. The Atlantic. “The Electoral College’s Racist Origins.” November 17, 2019.