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Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part V

Above photo: Samuel Riley, right, stops at the Valero gas station after getting off work as a mechanic to buy some cigarettes from Roger Baker in Booneville, Ky. Wednesday August 6, 2014. David Stephenson.

The Deplorables: In their Own Words.

Identity politics and class politics battle for the soul of the nation. 

NOTE: This is the fifth installment in a weekly series by Professor Danny Shaw. Read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here and Part IV here.

A comrade once asked me: why do liberals seem to abstractly love poor people of color, but hate poor white people? 

That is a question my material existence has forced me to sit with for 46 years since I came out shadowboxing from my mother’s womb. After I was snubbed as the best man by some “friends” who turned their noses up at me at a wedding in Ithaca, NY, I meditated on this definitive class schism.  

No Beef but Class Beef, No War but Class War

The white liberal suffer from a crisis of validation. Thoroughly groomed by the hegemonic identity politics of this day and age, they seek to please black and brown people by behaving in non-offensive ways and saying politically-correct things. These are their symbolic, surface-level “victories” they need to appease their consciences. Their workshops hyperfocus on what a generation ago was called “political correctness.” The constantly evolving liberal elites now promote political correctness on steroids. Children across this country are taught terms like “Latinx” in Spanish class, a term most of their Mexican and Puerto Rican peers have never even heard, never mind understand. This does not stop the language overlords from stepping up their vocabulary and expression policing. Patrolling their and other white people’s language ingratiates them with their POCPMC  friends. The PMC or Professional Managerial Class are the millionaires and petty bourgeois managers who dominate “the movement.” Armed with foundation grants and nonprofit budgets, these are the “goodies” or “goodie-two-shoes liberals.” Liberal “victories” specialize in targeting workers, as the rich laugh all the way to the bank. 

For the “progressive,” attention and approval from a person of color is worth its weight in gold. The downtrodden whites are politically incorrect by definition. Liberalism, the most superficial of ideologies, has no use for the poor white, who provides no validation. The presence and proliferation of the LGBTQBIPOC community is the liberals’ hit of validation. Poor white trash lack such exotic, alphabetical qualities. They are the blight. The debris. The eyesore. The monstrosity. The down and out, The public defender needs a cup of coffee and a cigarette in order to turn in a plea deal. 

The petit-bourgeois whites are a non-thinking tail to the kite of the dominant wing of capitalism. Appearance is everything; dialectics is a cross to the liberal vampire. 

It is not uncommon that they recruit, artificially elevate and reward “diverse” members of the oppressed class who do their bidding. There are such examples, which Fox News unabashedly refers to as “diversity hires.” On our side of the class barricades, we should be careful of those possessing the appearance of militancy but not critically grasping the essence of Marxism. Independent thinkers are a problem for the PMC. Dialectics demands creativity; the PMC demands obedience. These two diametrically opposed forces are on a permanent collision course. Today, identity politics and class politics battle for the soul of the nation. 

A Peculiar Historical Character

Liberals look down on us; conservatives try to convince us everyone else is the problem, except those who are the problem. Our bosses tell us our enemies are black people, immigrants and Muslims. Everyone, except our real enemy, an overwhelmingly white ruling class who hides behind fake Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. 

We poor whites insist on being the same peculiar historical character who has perfectly hated everyone, including ourselves, but cannot identify the exploiter that towers over us. Dave Chappelle comedically explores our gullibility in a skit about the 2016 elections:

“I stood with them in line like all Americans are required to do in a democracy — nobody skips the line to vote — and I listened to them. I listened to them say naive poor white people things. ‘Man, Donald Trump’s gonna go to Washington and he’s gonna fight for us. I’m standing there thinking in my mind, ‘You dumb motherfucker. … You are poor. He’s fighting for me.” 

We have a history of trusting our exploiters and masters. Behold our most peculiar social behavior. We hate anyone who lives like us but is not us. How many of us ever expressed outrage at the fact that native people and Africans were being genocided and viciously exploited for their labor power, let alone raised one finger in protest?  History will name very few such white people. Du Bois takes us there:

“This brings us down to the period of the Civil War. Up to the time that the war actually broke out, American labor simply refused, in the main, to envisage black labor as a part of its problem. Right up to the edge of the war, it was talking about the emancipation of white labor and the organization of stronger unions without saying a word, or apparently giving a thought, to four million black slaves. During the war, labor was resentful. Workers were forced to fight in a strife between capitalists in which they had no interest and they showed their resentment in the peculiarly human way of beating and murdering the innocent victims of it all, the black free Negroes of New York and other Northern cities; while in the South, five million non-slaveholding poor white farmers and laborers sent their manhood by the thousands to fight and die for a system that had degraded them equally with the black slave. Could one imagine anything more paradoxical than this whole situation?” 

What innocent victims of capitalism do we beat and murder today? What are hate crimes and school shootings but the projection of our incomplete liberation struggle? We are the abandoned, defamed chickens coming home to roost, harvesting hatred and violence all about us.  

While far too few John Browns and Newton Knights arose in the South, slavery was inimical to poor whites’ class interests. 

The historical materialist uses precision to thwart his ideological rivals. There were 5,000,000 whites in the South in 1860 who owned no slaves. According to Du Bois, 8,000 slave-owning white oligarchs ruled the entire South. Du Bois offers this social portrait that disproves a central bourgeois lie. It was a tiny sliver of white men who owned slaves and directly benefited from slavery. They were the Buffets, Ellisons and Zuckerburgs of the 19th-century South. 99 percent of us whites did not exist for them. Like the billionaires of today, they did not consider us as “constituting any part of what they called the South.” Why is blame distributed evenly across all whites for slavery and colonization? Those busy trying to feed themselves have not the power to exploit and imprison others. The bricks in the wall of the fascist and white supremacist state are not the same as its facilitators and managers. This is what the liberal class has forgotten. 

How can we be said to benefit from a state that humiliates and encages us all? Oppression Olympics is not a game that benefits any of us. There is but one fundamental contradiction to be resolved, and all secondary and tertiary contradictions will then wither away with time. 

The Simple Man

On full display and explored here are two peoples, at odds. Before the class divide, whom do you stand with? 

The ranchers, the farmers, the herders, the marines, the fishermen, the NFL fans, the highwaymen, the patriots and those imprisoned in their own land?

Or our supervisors, bosses and CEOs?  

We have our own poems, creeds and anthems. We are Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man:”

Forget your lust for the rich man’s gold

All that you need is in your soul

And you can do this, oh, baby, if you try

All that I want for you, my son, is to be satisfied

And be a simple kind of man

Oh, be something you love and understand

Baby, be a simple kind of man

Oh, won’t you do this for me son, if you can?

Oh, yes, I will…

You have been taught to fear us and hate us. 

We are the friends of Bill W. We learned no one could confront and transcend the trauma but us. Self-pity was our drug of choice. We 12-steppers fight like Pink, Mark Ruffalo and Josh Gad in “Thanks for Sharing.” Our world record for sobriety is 24 hours. Because all we have is today. We picked up the shattered pieces of our pasts and knitted together an existence of self-respect. 

We are the big men with the red flannel shirts. Our presence makes you cringe and back up. We are the hardened women with a cigarette hanging out of our mouths and a hoarse voice, whose life expectancy is drastically lower than yours. Our deaths of despair constitute an ongoing pandemic but are largely dismissed given our rank in this American caste system. We have more guns than friends. We know whom we can trust. According to the noble historians, all we have ever done for the length of time is hate black people. We are told that for the lot of history we were merely the overseers, cracker-ass-crackers and lynchers. We never had a vision for ourselves and our families? We never built or constructed anything, even though we were the ones who wielded the drills, chisels and hammers? Our skin was draped in soot. Our lungs drowned in coal dust. We are anti-history. 

The anti-nazi poet Bertolt Brecht raised this very point in 1935 in his poem “Questions From a Worker Who Reads:”

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? 

And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times? 

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them ? 

Over whom did the Caesars triumph?
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants? 

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it,
The drowning still cried out for their slaves. 

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone? 

Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him? 

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep?  

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it? 

Every page a victory.
Who cooked the feast for the victors? 

Every 10 years a great man.
Who paid the bill? 

So many reports.  

So many questions.

Brecht’s brilliant commentary is a critique of capitalist history writing which focuses on the great generals and presidents but ignores the masses of workers who made history. We have a responsibility to rescue from oblivion, what Frederick Engels called “prehistory,” all of our ancestors’ mettle and contributions. For who would allow their enemy to teach them and write their history? History, and our own history, has been stolen from us. Our enemies have created a self-hating, obedient class in their image. 

Notes:

Dave Chappelle, Dave Chappelle Poor Whites, YouTube, “They grow fast, don’t they? Can I ask you a weird question? I don’t want to make you feel…” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojBXsfkpOa4.

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction. New York: Scribner. 1995.

For more on the manipulation of all of this nuanced history, see the work of Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels.

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