Above photo: The author, second from the right on the couch, with his cousins in 1987 in Brockton, Massachusetts.
The Anti-Woke Proclamation.
NOTE: This is the sixth and final installment in a weekly series by Professor Danny Shaw. Read Part I here, Part II here, Part III here, Part IV here and Part V here.
We know all about Kimberly Crenshaw’s intersectionality even if we are unworthy of her pied-piper pen. Crenshaw claims to want social change but charges $100,000 per lecture to share her anti-worker, identity-politics gobbledygook. You love to write about us and accuse us, yet we never have the right to appear and reply in our own voice?
Professor Chenshaw: if our ideological and class enemies so consistently elevate you, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, what does that say about your work? Why do they pay you to examine every atomized niche of poverty in the United States but to ignore the biggest financial famine? You are fascinated by the pathologies but are too good to descend to talk to the pathologized. Every portrait you paint of poverty in America focuses on “black trans women” and other subsets to the detriment of us all. The only way black trans women can rise up is if we all rise up. Our great uncle Eugene Debs said it from his Chicago prison cell where he received 1,000,000 votes for U.S. president in 1920:
“My purpose is not to rise up from the working class; my purpose is to rise up with the working class.”
Wokeness vs The Vengeance of the Bankrupt and Canceled
10 million of us lost our homes in 2008 when the government bailed out the banks and left us out in the cold. Hundreds of thousands of us lose our homes every year. 26 million of us have no health insurance. Over 100 million of us do not have a job or an adequate one. All economic signs indicate that these patterns are intensifying everyday.
It matters little what color our skin is or who we lay down next to at night; We are all fucked.
The elites divide us over what we think about people born men using women’s bathrooms and whether a woman has the right to have an abortion or not. We won’t fall for your bullshit Culture Wars. Black, white, brown, yellow, rainbow and every shade in between, we are all losing. We will not divide ourselves over who can play on kids’ sports teams or whether you ban assault rifles or not. We are simple people; We want housing, health care and jobs.
Friends and Enemies
We are Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Realpolitik. No one gives a fuck about us and we don’t give a fuck about nobody. We snorted, bet and inhaled every last poison to get through the day. But we still never made it.
We are dope-sick, dope-thirsty and dope-hungry. Our eyes are greedy; our emptiness eternal. Our alter egos rob our grandmothers and hustle our aunts. Here we are, Chasing the Scream, bobbin’ and weavin’ through a chemical obstacle course designed to consume us. We answer the door with an empty syringe in a vein crashed and emptied by the elites. We take our pain out on who is closest. We practice our executions in circles.
We never learned to look another human being in their eyes, until and unless we made it to our 30s. We are the walking, self-mocking contradiction. We exist at the interstices of centuries of abandon.
My great grandfathers and grandfathers were also men of science, standing at the material intersections of debt, distress and destitution. To confuse the propagandized with the propagandists is unacceptable. You help build the academic superstructure that ignores and condemns the majority of poor people. We are the book Adrienne Marie Brown will never write and the skit Alok V. Menon will never perform. Loyal to the publishing industry and algorithms, we are the truths deemed damnable. We are Noah Chomsky’s “unworthy victims” and Chris Hedges’ Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. We are not invested in the system; we live at its margins invested in survival. The trailer parks hate the police as much as the ghettos and reservations do. Only the unity of these necessary hatreds gives us a shot…
“The class-conscious worker is the greatest danger to capitalism,” not tiny infinitely oppressed sects who are taught to hate other poor people while letting our common exploiter sit pretty with his boots on all of our necks. To confuse class exploitation and elevate individual oppressions above it is to sublimate folly and cowardice.
We say with you: “Fuck Trump!” But to say “Fuck Trump Country” is to say fuck ourselves, and this is what we have been doing since we were brought or came to these shores.
Poor white Reconstruction
My father wore the sweat of labor on his sun-burnt neck until his lungs could not swallow more nicotine. His last smile and words were flirting with a Puerto Rican nurse in the VA hospital as his son learned to internalize trauma and run from it. But everywhere I ran, there I was.
My mother is the seven-year-old girl within who never had the time or resources to heal. Violence, trauma and addiction devoured her inner child. I absorbed the best and worst of generations of poor white fighters spread across the Irish, Scottish, English and American landscapes.
Du Bois, the scribe of Black Reconstruction and all things American, spotted this contradictory axis upon whose fortunes America’s future pivots. What most pained and fascinated Du Bois was how the worker in white skin ignored the slave in dark skin. Labor and early American unions were the slaves’ natural comrades in arms, but class unity, thus far in our timeline, has been multiracial, American pie in the sky. The historian tasked his dialectical materialist pen with framing the poor white’s condition.
In all this consideration, we have so far ignored the white workers of the South and we have done this because the labor movement ignored them and the abolitionists ignored them; and above all, they were ignored by Northern capitalists and Southern planters. They were in many respects almost a forgotten mass of men. Cairnes describes the slave South, the period just before the war:
It resolves itself into three classes, broadly distinguished from each other, and connected by no common interest-the slaves on whom devolves all the regular industry, the slaveholders who reap all its fruits, and an idle and lawless rabble who live dispersed over vast plains in a condition little removed from absolute barbarism.
Yes, we too have roots and family lineage that provoke both pride and shame. We continue to be ignored and we continue to be barbaric. We vote for the most obnoxious, who most captures the obnoxiousness that surrounds and consumes us. We are the WWE crowd who votes for the dude who will bomb the most “Hamas and Hezbollah bad guys.” We are the butts of your jokes and the Honey-Boo-Boo caricatures of your Hollywood.
Where are the curriculum, textbooks and state exams that elevate us? Who cares about us? Are we more than a political football to be tossed around every four years? Who tells our stories?
Those who seek to put all whites into one neat box understand little about America. They do the work of the elites. They throw away and cancel a most forgotten and rebellious element. We poor whites and liberals despise one another. When do we come into contact with one another? When we clean your pools or landscape your bushes, you keep us as distant as any other worker. We are the illegals who you have not yet figured out how to deport.
The white-Hot Blaze
Liberals are roadblocks who seek to retard the momentum of history. The poor white then is the spur on the liberal’s conscience, the all-too-real refraction of his timidity. The poor white is a threat. Covetous and carnivorous, with his balls to the wall, he has nothing to lose.
The liberal will go to jail for the cause, as long as he is out by dinnertime; the poor white was born in jail.
You are sensitivity and fragility politics; we are gallows humor, laughing the entire way to the cemetery.
The liberal will experiment with drugs; the poor white smoked, snorted, gambled away and drank every last potion to get through the day. For you drugs are a hobby; for us drugs were survival until we could turn on this system. We are not ashamed. Every swig, snort and injection aided the quest for life or took it. Those of us who made it are the greatest magic show on earth.
The liberal is guided by fear, the poor white by resentment.
The showdown is between cowardice and courage, liberalism versus strength.
As Julia De Burgos wrote of the Puerto Rican quest for nationhood and anti-colonial salvation:
and when with the torch of the seven virtues,
after the seven sins, the multitudes run,
against you, and against everything unjust
and the inhuman, I will go in the midst of
them with the torch in hand.
And so, at last, here it is. Denied the pen and history books, today, we got to have our say. Before the insults and half-truths, now you have a sense of what makes us poor whites tick. Before both our friends and foes, here is The Wretched of the Earth for Appalachians. The Vengeance of the Bankrupt and Canceled. The Pedagogy of the Deplorables. The Poor white Trash Manifesto. An Anti-Woke Proclamation. An Illiberal, Anti-Republican Promulgation. This is the necessary antidote to Hillbilly Elegy. This is a calling. Fuck Trump! But giving up on “Trump country” is giving up on America, which we will never do!
And to all the liberals and fake leftists:
Fuck your internet cancel culture
You’ll never bury the people’s soldiers
Notes:
All American Speakers, “Kimberlé Crenshaw,” https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/speakers/406052/Kimberle-Crenshaw.
See Christian Parent’s work for more on this topic and the difference between exploitation and oppression(s).
Don Jordan and Michael Walsh. White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America. NYC: New York University Press. 2007.
Julia de Burgos, “A Julia de Burgos (To Julia de Burgos),”All Poetry, accessed November 18, 2024, https://allpoetry.com/poem/8593581-A-Julia-de-Burgos–To-Julia-de-Burgos–by-Julia-de-Burgos.