Estranged in Their Own Land: Real and Imagined White Marginality in the Era of Trump

Abstract

intro: MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid said it best, when she described the existential plight of the disaffected white rural voter: “Imagine you are a normal white guy in Kentucky. You look around at the world and you see gay folks have gotten the right to marry, you see Black folks have gotten a president in the Oval office, Latinx have received DACA, and you are left to wonder, what about me, what have I gotten recently?” (Reid, USC Festival of Books 2017). Racial divisions within the US are as old as the country itself, but not since President Johnson’s visit to Appalachia, has white poverty been thrust onto the national scene, as it is today. With new books entitled, “White Trash: 400 Years a History” and “Hillbilly Elegy,” we see main- stream society trying to understand this white other. The marginality of poor whites has been highlighted by the promise of saving Coal Country, renewing jobs in the Rust Belt, and more recently, pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Donald Trump was elected, according to many media pundits, in response to a growing group of white working-class voters who feel marginalized and unheard by what they view as out of touch “elites” who run Washington. They voted for Trump in order to bring jobs back to their once prosperous and now impoverished hometowns, based on the specious assumption reduced taxes for large corporations would somehow transfer the sheen of Wall Street to Main Street. White poverty has always been a problem in the US, but it appears globalization, the shift of jobs and wealth, and lack of inter- est or opportunity in education uplift, has led to a white backlash (Stauffer 2017). What CNN correspondent Van Jones calls the whitelash. One example of the marginality of this group is characterized by a new drug and spiritual epidemic called “deaths of despair” (Boddy 2017). Princeton economists Case and Deaton (2015) have found that middle- aged white Americans are 45% more likely to die than middle-aged Germans. Why? There seems to be a growing pathology of despair and marginality. Until the 1970s, there were jobs and upward mobility (what some called the blue-collar aristocrats’ heyday). Now globalization has moved those jobs offshore and pushed working-class white communities to turn to opioids and suicide to cope with their decline (Guo 2017). When compared to the working class of other developed, predominantly white countries, America’s working class has a higher mortality rate. White ...