Above photo: Provided by Danny Shaw.
Death by Capitalism.
An estimated 50 million of us Americans fight addiction. 60 million of us have a mental health condition.
NOTE: This is the third installment in a weekly series by Professor Danny Shaw. Read Part I here and Part II here.
To our more than 8 billion fellow human beings:
“Despised: A Poor white Trash Manifesto” is a cry for help. We are not living well. The American dream that appears on your netflix and Hollywood movies is a brittle myth. We are so busy surviving the capitalist nightmare, most of us have never even had the opportunity to learn about your struggles in Nigeria, Bolivia or Indonesia. The earth’s radius along the equator is almost 4,000 miles but the longest mile is between our two ears. When we are in our heads, we are in a bad neighborhood. We a shortsighted breed, but now at least you know the perplexing origins of our myopia. Most of us never even thought about getting a passport. For many of us a machine gun and courses in hatred for humanity from the Marines and the Army were the only passport out of this misery we had. Capitalist existence has robbed us of the ability to see beyond our own trauma, individualism and dogged quest for survival. Here we stand in Neopit, Wisconsin, Hayti Heights, Missouri and Porcupine, South Dakota at the crossroads of thirst for truth and despondency. We hate politicians. We have long given up on any saviors and know in our heart of hearts, only we can save ourselves.
Dual Diagnosis
Some 200,000 of us overdose every year. Millions more are traumatized. That means every year 28 times as many of us disappear as the US. government war machine disappeared in the U.S.’s failed conquests of 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. Our lives are often worth less than a five or ten dollar bill. We bury our loved ones swearing revenge on the scumball drug dealer who mixed fentanyl in our supply to save a few bucks. Isolated in our tragedies and rages, we don’t know how to mourn and fight back together. The People’s Vigils are the vision so that we never have to cry alone again as we bury our sons and daughters, and mothers and fathers from death by capitalism. As we hear Tucker Carlson blame China and Trump threaten to invade Mexico, do we stop to think that it is this very system, “American democracy,” that is murdering us in mass? “American de-mo-cra-cy” in the 5th Ward of Houston, the Bronx and the 9th Ward of New Orleans is dem-mock-ing-me > they-are-mocking-we > the rich are mocking us. Only we the 340,000,000 Americans can create the “Democracy” that has eluded us and has only ever existed for the George Washingtons, John D. Rockefellers and Donald Trumps.
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.
We are fantasy addicts. We hope to live long, prosperous lives with our children, partners and family. We defend an American dream that has never included us. We are the anti-Patriot Patriots. We defend a flag that we long ago relinquished to our exploiters and enemies. Is your red white and blue the flag of Bezos and Musk or the flag of your parents and grandparents? Old Glory cannot shine for the Haves and Have-nots at the same time.
We have OCD. We do things in threes to control the untamable trauma. We cannot let up; The superior classes have humiliated us since the womb. We failed every Anger Management class.
We are your ADHD test cases. We produce mental illness at scientific rates, corresponding to the rates of our alienation. Many such diagnoses are but a maladaptive coping mechanism to deal with 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.
We are marked by obsessions. If you whoop us in a fight, we show up at your doorstep the next day for Round Two. Regret is foreign to us. Resentment is the number one offender.
We are the deflectors and denialists who scream “Fuckin’ Cunt” and “Cocksucker” at you on Routes 2, 95 and 80. We are the first to flip out, yell and fight, but somehow the rage always returns stronger. We mock therapists and place our hopes in the Mega Millions.
Caffeine lightens the weight of routine. Caffeine gives us a reason to get out of bed. Caffeine is the beautiful mistress that inspires us to do ten more pushups.
We are judgmental. The anorexic judges the obese as ghastly. The cutter quivers upon thinking about the heroin addict. The gossips entertain themselves with the failures of the alcoholics. The gamblers murder themselves with promises of “I got to hit next time.”
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?
In Germ vs. Terrain theory, we are the germs that inevitably sprout up from the alienating social terrain.
We are a scientific people. Our DOCs (Drugs of Choice) tell our stories.
An addiction to heroin and fentanyl tells a story of a childhood of incest and rape. Combat veterans suffer from similar afflictions. This is reflective of severe PTSD. The cutters and anorexics are not far behind. Of course, there are comorbidities and we have cousins who check all of these boxes.
Stoners and codependents most often had some degree of healing and have a much lighter load of PTSD. Of course, there is great variation across these oversimplified columns. What is scientific and predictable is that the severity of the addiction corresponds to the severity of the trauma. The capitalism-trauma-addiction-recovery-socialism nexus is our only hope. We just don’t know it yet.
The Class Schism
The poor white offends every polite sensibility. He is the walking mockery of liberal illusions. He is the concrete matter of your surveys and sociological studies. Our deaths of despair are the only time we are headlines, as you hate us, mock us and tuck us under the analytical rug.
Your theories of the racialized and sexualized have no room for us. Identity politics offers you an out and a satisfactory explanation. You can blame capitalism’s failures on detached single issues, like racism, sexism and heterosexism. Then, you only have to attend your next self-castigating “white privilege” workshop of the year to feel you are playing your role in fixing society’s ills. You ignore proletarian black, white and brown leadership because their analysis is real and calls out your contradictions. Cancel culture is a one-way street. Perceive the class of who is cancelled and who does the cancelling.
You practice “progressive stack” and make “points of privilege” at DSA conventions. We watch your workshops and conventions to entertain ourselves with your meekness. You can’t read the room because you have never lived outside your bubble. You attend picket lines and lecture workers on the way forward but have never had to work a 9-to-5 yourself. You preach about not taking up too much space but you are the professionals, pundits and professors.
We are the human filth and flotsam you removed from South Boston, Dorchester and Charlestown. You pushed us and our generational trauma to Gardner, the Cape and Manchester. You form groups targeting “white privilege” to appease your consciences, never reflecting on who you displaced. The DSA and PSL kicked us out because we made the wrong joke or stopped talking to us because they think they are better than us. Hipsters and professional activists gentrified our old neighborhoods and pushed us far away from the expensive city limits. This was never about skin color; This was all about Benjamins, Grants and Jacksons. Neither dead presidents nor living presidents represent us. Every president held up as a hero has been but a mouthpiece and rep of the rich. In 1848 in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” This is exactly what we mean every time we say “you can’t trust these dirty, corrupt politicians.” Though we have yet to read him, we are Marx and the workers who fought before us are us.
We know who has put us in this rut and it is not us. Does the identity-politics-funded left know who their true enemy is? Surely, it is not their funders. Upton Sinclair reminds us: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The superficial is a liberal’s best friend. We are his feeble conscience, the inverted mirror to his ideal stability and perfect equilibrium. We are the surest proof that perfection and trying to please everyone is the closest thing to death. We, in our trailer parks, alongside the reservations and ghettos, are the surest proof that your entire system is irreformable and your destiny is to be overthrown.
The Virtue Hoarders
Social critic Frederick Deboer brilliantly captures the liberal’s paternalism:
“They [liberal whites] wage this effort to justify their position with a different kind of virtue: not that of hard work and frugal living, but political virtue, identity virtue, the virtue of having the right kinds of opinions. And those opinions, amount to a benevolent, quietly condescending love for minority identities–the black, brown, the gay, the transgender, the Muslim, the disabled.”
Everyone is worthy of your pity except for your own “rejects” and “failures.” We are the virtue transgressors and virtue outlaws. We say what we think and don’t think when we say it.
Liberals drive around with their children giving their leftovers to the homeless and then preach about their principles. They elevate theatrics over solidarity and illusions over sacrifice. They defend Biden, because “at least he is more cultured than Trump,” the poor white trash billionaire. There is only one problem. The conman billionaire sounds so much realer to us because the liberal epitomizes paternalism.
The poor white can spot the plastic, penny-pinching, patronizing Biden-voters from a mile away. Kamala-voters smile as they rudely gawk at and touch a black woman’s hair with curiosity, only to turn around and snub us downtrodden whites. For what is exotic or special about us?
Liberals are the face of incrementalism; we are the physiognomy of struggle.
If we had to set the table at someone else’s house, we hated it and contemplated smashing the entire home to pieces, because we never had a table of our own to set. Before we were 14, we lived in 13 different places. The left hates us; the right manipulates us. The heartless left has delivered us to the doorstep of the right, like a stork arriving with a basket and a tender baby.
The liberal trades in appearance, attention and validation politics. His activist hobbies, on full display in “White Dudes for Harris” and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), are self-flagellation and civility. The liberal self-segregates, marching at the back of the Black Lives Matter rallies; we march out of the welfare office irate, calling the social worker “a faggot” or “a cunt.”
The liberal provokes mockery; We provoke disgust.
They feel guilt; We feel hunger.
The liberal has stripped the word “progressive” of any meaning. They have a fetish for mediocre workshops, empty words and hollow slogans. One bright morning at Boston University, after receiving their tenth report from Ibram X, Kendy’s ten-million-dollar team, they decided by academic committee to cease calling us “homeless” and label us “unhoused.” At Brown, they lecture us not to say “slaves,” but rather enslaved people. We are no longer “convicts” or “locked up,” we are “state impacted.” We ask: “What the fuck is the difference?”
We do not measure our progress and emancipation by liberal linguistic yardsticks; We measure “progress” according to our material reality. Liberals offer us nothing, so we give them the finger and embrace their enemies, who also despise “the despised.”
Every diversity initiative focuses on the underrepresented. Has anyone thought that poor whites, like all human beings, deserve a shot too? Why is this framed as a threat to the interests of black America or any other oppressed groups? Why do we fight over scraps from the masters’ table? No other oppressed person is our enemy, rival or competition because you never exploited us, spoke down to us or mocked our condition. You are our natural allies. While today this is far from being realized, the reality is that only together can we seize what belongs to us all. In the words of Bobby Seale and dozens of Black Panthers armed to the teeth before the legislature in Sacramento: “Up against the wall motherfucker! We’ve come for what’s ours!”
Liberalism, Fascism and Guilt
Timidity never made it in history. Nor did liberals. Liberals have paved the way for holocausts and genocides. Liberals are cowardice and vacillation personified. Liberals are afraid to offend a Jewish friend or colleague as a nation is incinerated and a 76-year holocaust accelerates beyond Gaza into the West Bank, all of Occupied Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Facebook and X likes and silence are more important than 2.4 million incinerated Gazan lives.
Like the Germans of 1939 and 2024 who cheer on genocide, the liberals are permanently attached to their guilt over their grandparents’ crimes of yesteryear. This provoked me to ask all my German friends: Are you against the genocide in Palestine? Why do you take great pride in feeling guilty about the Holocaust? Of what use is your guilt-pride, as you arm the modern-day Nazis to the teeth?
The New York Times 1619 project serves this very ideological function. Liberals can mourn over past crimes as they ignore them today. They can cry over the need for reparations for Haiti, Black America and individual groups that were oppressed, while leaving the ongoing oppression and occupation untouched. Trump is the overtly racist dog whistler against Haitian immigrants. Kamala is the savvy occupier of Haiti for the fourth time in the past century.
The German, English and U.S. governments once competed for the gold medal in invasions, occupations and bombing campaigns against innocent human beings. The Western European colonial powers are but junior partners today in genocide. Once the colonizer, Western Europe today is the backyard of empire, occupied from England to Romania, from Italy to Ukraine, by over 75,000 U.S. troops.
Don’t Conflate Us with Our Enemies
We poor whites are sick of being the crabs in the barrel that hate all the Mexican and Muslim crabs as Robert Kraft and Jeff Bezos degrade us all. Because we hate ourselves, it comes across that we hate you. How can we hate those whom we only know through the eyes of our enemies?
Liberals tiptoe on eggshells and gossip behind our backs. We say what’s on our minds. Alfred Lubrano, author of Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, highlights the culture shock we feel if we are among the few selected for college scholarships. He hints at the passive-aggressive way of expression and the difficulty of learning to adapt to their alien norms and expectations. It was clear Columbia University was a place that would never accept his father and family. This was how we scholarship students felt on Ivy League campuses. Homesickness and culture shock appeared in their naked class iteration. We may not have had much where we came from, but we had acceptance and love. On UPenn and Stanford’s campuses, we had to learn to be somebody else.
The liberal quotes Gandhi, Barack Obama and Kamala. The poor white quotes Jefferson, Jesus and Trump. He rarely talks about peace because it is not part of his reality.
They have sold us false prophets from Ronald to Donald. How many disgruntled whites were about to go Biden-huntin’ on July 15th, after Trump was shot? We fail to see the origins of our despised state. We are high off The New York Post and drunk off Fox because it is all we have ever known.
Liberalism represents nothing but petty concessions, proceduralism and a fake spirit of “kumbaya,” encouraging us to get along with rich and middle class whites who do everything to separate from us. We don’t want your crumbs; we want our own bakery in which to make our own bread. Your charity degrades us. Our cooperation with our own class, with its infinite hues and personal expressions, uplifts us.
We don’t judge you by your appearance or words. We could care less whom you sleep with. We give you our trust until you betray us. We can see through you. There is a transparency to both your hypocrisy and sincerity. Trauma, if survived and transcended, provides a special lens to gaze upon the souls of all folks.
Notes:
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
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020.
This is the title of a book by Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class.
Carefree Wandering. YouTube. “Guilt Pride: A German Vanity Project Conquering the World.” Oct 23, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy2ju_qPtuM
The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. ”Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams: A Clash Of Ethics.” May 22, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDIi6SPwOSo.