
The Despair of Poor White Americans - SonicSoul
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/?single_page=true
======
protomyth
Not one mention of religion in the article. Not one mention of the 2010 or
2014 elections and what happened in DC. No talk of the difference between the
reporting on the Tea Party and what actually happened, No EPA, no school lunch
program talk, and no talk about every Atlantic article that demonizes some
aspect of the rural areas including farming.

Its pretty simple why Trump won the GOP nomination: a lot of folks are not
happy with the actions of politicians and want a definite change. If that
doesn't work, they'll try someone more radical.

or

if you keep demonizing a group, expect them to send an actual demon eventually

Read this one for the other side of the coin: [https://www.amazon.com/Flyover-
Nation-Country-Youve-Never/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Flyover-Nation-
Country-Youve-Never/dp/0399563881/)

~~~
conception
I think the problem is is when their arguments are presented, such as the
write up for that book, they are filled with logical fallacies, hyperbole,
poor morals and ineffective policies.

Just a quick list from that page -

"Dana Loesch believes in Christianity, patriotism, traditional marriage, and
the right to bear arms, among other “quaint” ideas. For the elites in DC, Los
Angeles, New York, and Silicon Valley, that makes her as bizarre as a three-
headed dog." \- Nice use of "elites". If you disagree with her, you must be
one of those crazy elites. Also, nice fallacy equating her views with
patriotism and Christianity, again if you disagree you must not be a true
patriot/Christian.

• In Flyover America, people believe criminals should be punished. Coastal
America focuses on “rehabilitation.” \--Unless you believe in revenge and
career criminals, rehabilitation is a far better way to deal with convicted
criminals. Also, nice use of quotes on rehabilitation. If you just want to
punish them and not try to stop their cycle of criminality, what sort of
people are these? Not good ones.

• Flyovers think the Declaration of Independence was crystal clear: “All men
are created equal.” For Coastals, Black Lives Matter—but anyone who adds that
all lives matter must be a racist. \---First, hilariously myopic because the
Declaration of Independence was written when slavery was in full gear and
women has very few rights. Hence "all men". Also, if you don't understand what
people mean when they say "Black Lives Matter" you are really lacking empathy
and saying "All lives matter" is missing the point so hard, that yes, it
borders on racism.

• Coastals think they understand firearms because they watched a TV movie
about Columbine. Fly- overs get a deer rifle for their thirteenth birthday.
\--I'm pretty sure the debate is over military style weapons with large
magazine and high rates of fire, not deer rifles. But nice strawman.

• Coastals talk about blue-collar workers in the abstract. Flyovers have a
relative who works the night shift in a granola bar factory, where the big
perk is taking home a bag full of granola bars every Friday. \---No one on the
coasts have shitty jobs. Nope.

• Coastals think every problem—from hurt feelings to the cost of birth
control—requires government intervention and huge federal spending. Flyovers
know that money isn’t magic fairy dust, and many problems can be solved only
by individual character and hard work. \---Many problems can be solved only by
individual character and hard work, except of course for all the problems
"fly-over nation" has. Or is she saying that those people don't have character
and are lazy? Hard to tell. Or maybe she's just demonizing the government to
pander to her audience.

How can you be angry at Walmart if you’ve never shopped in one? \--How can I
be against the use of nuclear weapons if I have never survived one? The answer
is called education, research and data. Surprisingly, you can learn things and
form opinions without having to experience the thing you are researching.

How can you hate the police if you’ve never needed help from a cop? \--- I
think she's trying to say "How can white 'elites' on the coast hate the police
if they don't need them". Which of course, more logical fallacies. Talking
about police corruption and wanting to do something about it is of course is
the same thing as hating them, right? Right?

How can you attack Christians if you don’t have a single friend who goes to
church? \-- How can you attack Muslims if you don't have a single friend who
goes to mosque? Oh wait. She probably wouldn't want that question turned
around on her. Also, who's attacking Christians? 70% of the country is
Christian. What is she afraid of? Is this is a war on Christmas thing?
Manufactured outrage created by media companies to get ratings.

If you aren't willing to step up to the table with rational, well reasoned
arguments that improve the country as a whole why should people bother to
listen? Asking how can they judge walmart if they haven't been in one? It'd be
laughable if people didn't take it seriously.

~~~
falsestprophet
"Also, if you don't understand what people mean when they say "Black Lives
Matter" you are really lacking empathy and saying "All lives matter" is
missing the point so hard, that yes, it borders on racism."

That is a meaningless statement. One could just as easily reverse it:

Also, if you don't understand what people mean when they say "All Lives
Matter" you are really lacking empathy and saying "Black lives matter" is
missing the point so hard, that yes, it borders on racism.

~~~
conception
Not really. Saying All Lives Matter is like going to a Breast Cancer charity
event and protesting, "ALL CANCERS MATTER!" You're missing the point of the
movement/event. Because of course, on paper, all lives matter, but in the real
world we're pretty far from that. ALM is a just a dismissive response and
action against a movement that's trying to bring attention on where we want to
be from where we currently are.

------
cs702
So many people in Silicon Valley are preoccupied with developing the next
killer application; meanwhile, there are tens of millions of poor Americans,
white and otherwise, whose potential goes to waste due to social, cultural,
geographic, educational, technological, economic, and other constraints.
Within their world, they _don 't see_ opportunity; they see economic and
social decay; and they despair. It's a huge waste of human capital.

Talk about BIG challenges: how could this be fixed, assuming it can be fixed?

~~~
yummyfajitas
There's a very easy way it can be fixed. Those people can leave their world
and go join a better one.

They can migrate to the American southwest and do agricultural labor,
competing with the illegal immigrants doing jobs that "Americans just won't
do". They can migrate to the distant outskirts of high productivity cities
(e.g. NY, SF), then commute in and provide domestic labor to high productivity
individuals. There is plenty of opportunity out there; if there weren't then
people from around the world wouldn't be desperately attempting to enter the
US.

Hundreds of millions of Indians, Chinese and others engage in internal
migration, moving themselves to where the jobs are. Americans could too.

This is just not a fix that Silicon Valley can do; if a man doesn't want to
fix himself, then Peter Thiel can't build an app to do it for him.

~~~
jomamaxx
"competing with the illegal immigrants doing jobs that "Americans just won't
do"."

So your answer is to work on farms for $5 an hour with no benefits, no worker
protections?

Is that satire?

You do realize that Americans will 'do those jobs' once wages and working
conditions rise to the acceptable, but they will never be so long as mass
illegal immigration is kept in place?

Illegal immigration is a very corrosive trap: once one farmer, in economic
trouble hires illegals and cuts his costs, all of the others have to follow
suite - it's a thin margin game. And then it's a trap the industry cannot get
out of.

Most farmers would happily employ Americans for higher wages and better
conditions if economics allowed for it. But so long as there are tons of
illegals, and 5% of farmers who will take advantage of it - the rest have to
follow suit.

Open border / illegal immigration is a very corrosive thing.

Also - the Asians that come to America are not 'mobile'. They don't go to
Alabama and Georgia, generally. They go to areas where there are many other
Asian people, which is rational on their part. I don't think it's fair to
compare people who have lived in some area for 5 generations to newcomers.

Jobs for the less skilled are not plentiful in America. There is a lot of
opportunity for the upper 50%, but it's not the same for others.

~~~
andres_kytt
Yes, the pesky economy preventing good wages. The "economy" is not a magic
thing that can be turned better or worse at will. It is a complex machine
driven by feedback and some basic rules. Jobs for less skilled are not
plentiful anywhere any more because automation and that's the problem. Work
goes away. People drink themselves silly and get a ton of children in trailer
parks because it is possible. You no longer need to work 12 hours a day so you
do not die. It's not nice, it's not easy but it is possible. I do not have a
solution but if we are to solve this, we have to look at the fundamental
problem rather than complain about the "economy".

~~~
jomamaxx
I didn't complain about the economy, I complained about illegal immigrants,
which create a systematic problem.

Also - the greatest wave of automation happened long ago, in the industrial
revolution. We managed to find jobs for people then, we will now.

------
niftich
The two most insightful quotes are:

"The barely veiled implication, whichever version [for the explanation of the
fall in economic fortunes what the article calls 'less privileged white
Americans'] of you consider, is that the people undergoing these travails
deserve relatively little sympathy—that they maybe, kinda had this reckoning
coming. Either they are layabouts drenched in self-pity or they are sad cases
consumed with racial status anxiety and animus toward the nonwhites passing
them on the ladder. Both interpretations are, in their own ways, strikingly
ungenerous toward a huge number of fellow Americans."

and:

"But far more striking is the general aura of decline that hangs over towns in
which medical-supply stores and pawn shops dominate decrepit main streets, and
Victorians stand crumbling, unoccupied. Talk with those still sticking it out,
the body-shop worker and the dollar-store clerk and the unemployed miner, and
the fatalism is clear: Things were much better in an earlier time, and no
future awaits in places that have been left behind by polished people in
gleaming cities. The most painful comparison is not with supposedly ascendant
minorities—it's with the fortunes of one's own parents or, by now,
grandparents. The demoralizing effect of decay enveloping the place you live
cannot be underestimated."

Together, these factors form an unfortunate situation.

------
Animats
_" Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a
war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes
of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and
negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the
gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in
the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man
closed the factories down."_

We just don't need that many people to make all the stuff. As I point out
occasionally, in 1900, about 90% of the workforce was "making stuff" \-
agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction. That was down to half by
the 1960s. Now it's down to 15%. US manufacturing output is at an all-time
high. US manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979.

That's what happened to white America.

[1]
[http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm](http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_201.htm)

~~~
tdkl
Globalism definitely has nothing to do with it right ?

~~~
lgieron
US is manufacturing more stuff than ever before, with just a fraction of
workers that would be required to achieve the same output 100 years ago. I'd
say technological progress has way bigger impact here than shipping jobs
overseas.

~~~
hodgesrm
Depends on the industry and the relative content of labor in the product, to
name a couple of variables. US furniture making for example has been decimated
by moving manufacturing to low-wage nations. It has not had a lot of success
(as far as I can tell) with reshoring as off-shore labor and transport costs
go up.

------
ChrisNorstrom
This is the problem with using averages to compare people. You can't take all
the poor whites, all the middle class whites, and all the rich whites and dump
their incomes into a spreadsheet and average it out and say "White Privilege"
like the media has done for 7 years now. All the major new outlets from BBC,
ABC, CNN, to MSNBC, CBS, and PBS have run stories that basically ask us to
look away from "The Poor" and only look towards "The Minority Poor". The same
way "black lives matter" asked us to look away from all the people killed by
militant police and only pay attention to blacks killed by police. I find the
same people preaching "unity" are the ones that are separating and dividing.

When you analyze ethnic or racial groups you need to split up the members of
that group into sub-groups to really know what's going on. We need to focus on
real social science and not extremist media narratives.

~~~
pessimizer
I think that one of the reasons for this is that many poor whites don't seem
to stand up for themselves in any other way than attacking other disadvantaged
groups, from racial and sexual minorities to retired people on government
pensions. This is of course not the case for all working class and poor
whites, many of whom support movements for the minority poor and minorities
killed by police, and don't see attention given to minority problems as
attention taken away from white problems.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
People bitch about groups of people they have little in common with. The urban
poor bitch about the wealthy and the rural poor. The rural poor bitch about
the wealthy and the urban poor. The wealthy bitch about the poor.

None of those groups are actually bitching about skin color, just using it as
a crude grouping mechanism for people that are unlike them.

------
gregfjohnson
Mike Rowe (of "Dirty Jobs" fame) has set up the Mike Rowe Works Foundation. He
is doing great work encouraging and helping working class and impoverished
people. He teaches "holding a job 101" lessons that people higher in the
socioeconomic scale learn with their mothers' milk. Show up on time in the
morning. Be the kind of employee and colleague that others can come to trust
and rely on. It doesn't have to be fun or Meaningful: They call it "WORK" and
they pay you to do it!

This guy is a hero in my book: He is not just talking about this problem. He
is actually doing something about it. I wish it had been Mike Rowe instead of
Donald Trump that had caught the zeitgeist and ridden it to national
prominence.

------
Spooky23
People don't like talking about this because the "poor brown people" archetype
fits with the economic double talk that claims "American industry is better
than ever" and that we have meaningful economic growth.

The reality is that we've been hollowing out the US for many years and
significant portions of the population, regardless of race, are living very
poorly.

------
nickgrosvenor
This is a heady conversation, that's simply categorizing a group of people by
race. The only thing that this group has in common are economic status and the
color of their skin. They toss in college degree to sound scientific but it's
such a large swath of communities and cultures that to organize everyone by
being white is literally what everyone is trying to avoid. It's needlessly
being racist in the guise of science.

Organizing poor Americans by the color of their skin is like categorizing
houses by the color that they're painted.

It doesn't have to do with anything.

~~~
benjohnson
Poor white people have an interesting issue - society tells them that they're
have especially failed (for lack of a better term) as they have white
privilege.

~~~
ajamesm
"white privilege" is the relative advantage conferred by appearing white or
having white heritage. Nobody (certainly not society at large) thinks that
white people have a birthright to success.

actually, lots of people subscribe to the delusion that gov't programs for
minorities are so overcorrecting that being born black is now a meal ticket.
Insane.

------
nikcheerla
I would argue we could solve this if we had a better education system. It
seems that they go through the schooling system for 8 years and learn nothing
that helps them get an upwardly mobile job.

Maybe part of the problem is that our schooling system is designed for salary
class professionals looking to go to college – because those are the people
who design curriculum.

------
santaclaus
Those kids are rocking some killer up cuts, funny how fashion comes full
circle.

------
yusee
When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, he was working on the Poor
People's Campaign[0], an effort to alleviate poverty for all Americans.
Meanwhile, Richard Nixon was campaigning on "Law and Order" (ask yourself:
what's the order?) in preparation for the War on Drugs as part of the Southern
Strategy[1]:

> Republican strategist Lee Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger,
> nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires.
> So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.
> You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes,
> and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a
> byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And
> subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying
> that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away
> with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because
> obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more
> abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than
> "Nigger, nigger."

Ronald Reagan campaigned heavily against "welfare queens,"[2] associating
poverty and government assistance with urban blacks. In so doing, he persuaded
working class whites that cutting social programs and tax rates for the
wealthy would benefit them.

As a resident of West Virginia, I must express the deepest sympathies for the
suffering of my neighbors. But I can't help but sigh when I see a Confederate
flag or Make America Great Again sign. And I see many every day. Trump offers
the poor whites of America nothing but relative status at the expense of
others.

Hackers should stand firmly against the sowing of tribal division. We
understand that the strength of capitalism is that it's not a zero-sum
ideology. We are enriched by imagination, creativity, production. We are
impoverished by conflicts over the distribution of the pie as it is.

Are poor whites worse off than poor blacks than poor hispanics than poor
native Americans than poor Asians? What a distraction. This question serves
Machiavellian leaders and sensationalist media whose power is dependent on
everyone hating each other.

How can we make America--and the entire world--prosperous for everyone?

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign)
[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)
[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen)

