In The Age of Trump: Do White Working Class Males Really Represent America’s “Heartland”?

After this election disaster pundits of all stripes have been doing what pundits do best….pontificate.  Much of the “pontificatiing” devolves around the belief that Trump won the supposed  “Heartland” of America. This for the purposes of the punditry is represented by “White Working Class Males“.  The pundit’s have expanded the territory of the “Heartland” to include  “Rust Belt “  States like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin,  but their description of the voters there meets the classic descriptions of those worthy people (White Males) of the  “Heartland”.  What follows is a reprise of a piece I’ve published twice before,  but as I go through the experience of my grief stricken countdown to the inauguration, my thoughts about the  “Heartland”,  keep playing in my consciousness.  Trump lost the popular vote by a significant margin, yet I have heard Republicans and some Democrats explain that away by pointing out that those votes came from the Coastal States, with the implication that people in those States do not represent the American “Heartland”.  The idea that the voters of this “Heartland” of the pundit classes minds, represent the “Real America” is ridiculous,  but pernicious in its widespread acceptance.

America’s culture has always been one of the topics I’m most interested in. When we deal in the concept of culture we are thinking about a broad swath of issues that include cultural mythology, sociology, psychology, political science and economics. The study of all of these fields are intertwined in ways that are not always apparent and yet represent a convoluted and interconnected system that affects all the lives of those touched by the “American Empire”.

For many years I’ve been thinking about the term “Heartland”, how it is used in the media and the connotations of its use as representing a certain conservative cultural propaganda. This is constantly being spread by those representing what I call the Corporate/Military/Intelligence Complex(CMIC). Let us not confuse the spread of this message with any concept of the central conspiratorial planning of some sinister group. To be sure, part of this propaganda is financed by people of the Koch Brothers ilk, but I don’t link that to some “evil” conspiracy, rather it represents beliefs of people whose life experience seems to justify their beliefs. People who are born to wealth and privilege, would naturally view their world through a lens quite different from those for who life has always been a struggle. That the perspective of that lens one is born to,  gets spread inordinately by those “to the manor born,” is to be expected because that’s where the money lies.

In my lifetime, the concept of America’s “Heartland” originally referred to the agricultural center of the country. States like Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, etc. “The Midwest”. The connotations were that these rural, agriculturally driven States, somehow represented the “purest” of American values and the best of the American ethos.  As the years of my life went by, there was an addition made to the theory of “Heartland,” that added in the States of the “Bible Belt“ and became associated with deeply held conservative beliefs as espoused by the Republican Party. The coastal areas like New England, New York, Pennsylvania and their “West Coast” doppelgangers California, Oregon and Washington, were seen as somehow less representative of American values and American tradition. As the American societal scene passes before me on my widescreen TV, whether in reality shows like American Idol, or the now ubiquitous overarching popularity of the NFL, I see more and more this representation of “Heartland” values and the falsehood of what this propaganda is succeeding in selling to us all.

There Is No White Working Class

In the wake of the election loss, people prominent in the Democratic Party and in the Mainstream Media, keep stating that Hillary lost the White Working Class vote and sadly they are dangerously clueless.  Going beyond the reality that the average Trump voter has a $72,000 yearly income Here  and had a college education or higher:  Blame Trump’s Victory on College-Educated Whites, Not the Working Class.  Yet despite the evidence growing daily, DLC Corporate Democrats,  Centrist Media Pundits and the Corporate Media itself insists upon perpetrating the meme that Trump was elected by a disaffected White Working Class. I’ll get into why I think these establishment types have the need to perpetrate their  White Working Class fantasy,  but first let’s first clarify by defining terms.

Working Class Defined Wikipedia

noun:

1. those persons working for wages, especially in manual labor.

2. the social or economic class composed of these workers.

 

Working Class Defined (Cambridge Dictionary)

noun:

a social group that consists of people who earn little money, often being paid only for the hours or days that they work, and who usually do physical work:

People who work for a wage are defined as being  “Working Class”.  This was always the  definition as the term came to become popular in the 19th Century.  Workers work or don’t based upon the whims of those who employ them.  Salaried workers are thus seen as  “servile” to their “superiors”.  The term became well-known as the labor union movement grew into a mechanism to protect the economic lives of working people from the exploitation of their far more powerful bosses.  The term “Working Class” does not refer to an ethnicity,  but obviously to a class.

“A Social Class (or, simply, class), as in class society, is a set of concepts in the social sciences and political theory centered on models of social stratification in which people are grouped into a set of hierarchical social categories,^[1] the most common being the upper, middle, and lower classes.”

To segment the idea of “Working Class” into a reference to skin color, or ethnicity, is creating a false dichotomy that actually degrades it’s meaningfulness in public discourse. These DLC Democrats and smugly centrist corporate pundits, in pretending to relate to these “workers” and championing “their” cause,  are actually looking down their privileged noses at them with contempt.  Furthermore, they are using the false dichotomy inherent in the term “White Working Class”, to push a narrative placing the needs and aspirations of people of color, onto a back burner of political importance,  bringing the needs of White Americans into the forefront.

Why Does “Black Lives Matter” Anger So Many White People?

America is a racist country,  especially regarding its treatment of the descendants of it’s former slaves.  This isn’t a matter of speculation,  it is simply a fact born out by our entire history since the Civil War.  The inherent mistreatment of people of color throughout our American history gives lie to the myth of America as the “Land of the Free” and starkly denies the concept of “American Exceptionalism”.   I strongly suspect that in our modern world most people bigoted against Black Americans, are yet loath to be honest about their racism towards them.  They are conscious that these feelings within them are somehow “wrong”,  yet they get a sort delicious pleasure from them and don’t want to give them up.

The “pleasure” no doubt is a mixture of sadism compounded with the ability to raise oneself emotionally above a large class of people.  This possibly discharges the deep suspicion that one is actually inferior to the class that is despised.  In the mythology of “racism” Black men have larger,  more effective penises, they are therefore better lovers and of course are far superior athletically to the White male.  Black women are “hotter” sexually and more powerful than their White counterparts,  but more importantly they really abandon themselves to their sexual desires.  This White inferiority complex,  born from mythical stereotypes,  gave license to the cruel exploitation and usage first of the slave population and then of the supposedly “freed” slaves post-bellum.

However,  most people are never as stupid as their prejudices make them seem.  Most White people are aware that these are false stereotypes,  used to the detriment of Black people for the benefit of their White privilege.  This knowledge of the truth is a painful one to bear since it dislodges most of the mythical premises that drive this nation.  When human beings are faced with dichotomies between the “beliefs” they cling to and the reality of their existence,  they tend to use the powerful defense mechanism of Denial: “in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. An individual that exhibits such behaviour is described as a denialist or true believer.

With the advent of cellphone videos and police cameras,  proof of what was often charged and suspected of police conduct towards people of color, is now available in “living color” so to speak. There have been far too many video captured police murders in the past few years to deny.  The fact that the officer(s) involved are almost always routinely held blameless has fueled the “Black Lives Matter” movement.  BLM typically has used the tactics laid down by Martin Luther King in non-violent protests,  almost all of which have been met by civic intolerance rather than understanding.  The civic posture in many localities is that people of color do not have the right to protest the horrid oppression laid upon them.  The posture among the bigots of this nation is one born of the denial of their own bigotry.  Were they to admit that Black Lives Matter has a point in their protests, then they would have to admit to themselves their own bigotry.

On some deep psychological level this admission of ones’ prejudice would have a corrosive effect upon all of the false premises many have built up about “Their America” and this corrosion might destroy their own “Potemkin Village like” edifice of “Exceptional America”.  For these people it is far more comfortable to hate and deny the “Black Lives Matter Movement”,  rather than look deeply at themselves and their own motivations.

 

 

 

 

 

“Hurricane”: Black Lives Really Don’t Matter, White America Only Pretends They Do

When it come to racism America pretends it is neutral towards Black people under “The Law”.  I believe that a majority of “Whites” see the #Black Lives Matter Movement as fomenting, rather than eliminating racism towards people of color. Even the terms we use to discuss the issues of bigotry towards people of color,  are flawed with the bigotry of centuries past. There is only one race of homo sapiens and that is the Human Race, by definition. The concept of the “Black Race”, the “Yellow Race”, the “Brown Race” and yes the “White Race” were born through the discredited pseudo-science of Eugenics which I wrote about here: Paul Ryan, Teddy Roosevel, Adolph Hitler and Eugenics.  The human race comes in a variety of skin tones and other physical features and human society has evolved a multiplicity of cultures, some defined on the basis of skin tone. This is why when I write, I try to use the term “people of color”, rather than the “White” defined “Black people,” to refer to Americans of African heritage. However, “People of Color” connotes more than just Afro-Americans and is my weak attempt to take in the other humans in America, that are treated un-equally under “The Law”.

America pretends that our Constitution and therefore the legal system that flows from it defines all humans as equal under “The Law”, when clearly that has never been the case. I believe that The Law Is A Whore and that Black Lives Do Matter, But Maybe Not So Much to Federal Prosecutors The truth is that for a “White guy”, I tend to write a whole lot about the racism inherent in American tradition, as practiced in the American legal system.  I do so because I find it inherently disgusting and personally very upsetting.  This being “upset” does not ennoble me, because the cause of justice is the obvious way to views ones relationship to other humans. Being opposed to bigotry is not a factor of my own guilt either, but rather it comes from empathy extrapolated from my own personal life experiences of being treated unfairly.  My empathy, however, is imprecise because being a recipient of “White Privilege” myself, I can only make dim guesses as to how it feels to be “Black” in America.

Yesterday was a very nice day for me. An afternoon spent in with close friends, attending a tony arts exhibit with artworks I would have to take a mortgage out on to buy. In the morning though, listening to Pandora, I heard a familiar old song that lingered with me in my mind for the entire day, making me sad at the specific injustice described and serving as a metaphor to me for the treatment of “Black People” in America.

America’s Black Genocide and the White Reaction to Baltimore and Ferguson

Genocide is the systematic destruction of all or a significant part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group. Well-known examples of genocide include the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and more recently the Rwandan Genocide and the Bosnian Genocide. Wikipedia

When the “so-called riots” in Baltimore broke out last year I became furious. I’m wasn’t angry at those protesting, who were characterized as  “dangerous mobs” by racists and by ignorant inheritors of “White Privilege”, my fury was directed at the clueless anchors and reporters of our mainstream media. What the hell did all of you stupid bastards expect was going to happen when you push a people to the point of despair,  by the shackles of racism that pervades all of American culture?  “White Privilege” pervades America and our entire system is officially structured to assure that people of color are the underclass. This discussion, however, is uncomfortable for the majority of people in this country and the common psychological defense mechanisms used by them are denial and repression.

After Barack Obama won the Presidency Republicans and our Supreme Court used his victory as a proof that America was a “post racial”. That this was a patently absurd concept was proven by all the vitriol aimed at him in his Presidency, which were really code words for the thought “WE DON’T WANT A NIGGER AS PRESIDENT!” I’m sorry if I offend anyone by use of the “N” word, but I use it with all its horrible connotations to give emphasis to how many have viewed Barack Obama. I’ve been at odds with Barack Obama myself, but my disputes with him revolve around policy issues and the fact that I see him as a right wing centrist. Anyone who has called him a communist, a Nazi, a dictator, too weak, or too immature, was not only ridiculously misinformed about their epithets, but actually were using racist code words for his being considered a “Black Man”.

One of the things unnoticed by the media in the series of Republican Presidential Debates was that the derogatory language used against President Obama was racist in tone. Chris Christie, that evil man from New Jersey, called our President “feckless”. This struck me because it’s been years since I’ve heard that adjective used and the way I used to hear it was from segregationists to describe Black People, or “Nigras” as they said back then. There were many other characterizations of our President in those debates by the participants, that also had deeply, racist undertones.

On Being Black in America: Pretensions of a White Radical

None of my best friends are Black. For those of you too young to understand that reference, a joke that was common in the 50’s and 60’s used with different ethnicities depending on who the comedian was, went like this. “Some of my best friend’s are Black (Jewish, Italian, etc.) but I wouldn’t let one marry my daughter.” The joke was meant as an ironic comment on bigotry, but as is the case with irony it was rooted in truth as to people’s attitudes. When it came to Black people, or other minorities it was common to hear in conversations something like “So and so” (perhaps a maid or co-worker) is a real fine person, but you know the rest of “them” are:…..(pick you adjective)”. As for me today, seriously, I have no close Black friends and I live in a Gated Community, in a predominantly Jewish area, in a most Southern State. Understanding this is where the “pretensions” of my title comes from. Who am I to opine upon Black people in America would indeed be a fair question to ask and I intend to answer it and then draw upon my experiences to comment on the far larger issue.