Editor,
Don Starr's letter to the editor on March 5 demonstrates the deep racial divide amongst the working class. As a white person who also grew up in a trailer park, I agree with Starr's call for assistance to poor whites.
However, I don't agree with doing it in a way that ignores the structure of white privilege. What Starr and other working-class whites need to understand is that middle-class whites have long played us against people of color in order to maintain their own status. And for the most part, we working-class whites have gone along with the program, even when it has been against our own class interests. Historically, one of the hard things to figure out about working-class whites is the following: If class issues are the most important to us, why then have we, time and time again, sided politically with wealthier whites rather than working-class or even middle-class, people of color?
During antebellum times, working-class whites paradoxically saw more commonality with the plantation owners than they did the slaves. Why was that? Wouldn't it seem more logical for working-class whites to see kinship with others who do manual labor, like slaves? But rather than taking up with slaves in a revolt against the plantation system, working-class whites were instrumental in suppressing black resistance.
Du Bois explained it best when he said that working-class whites received the "public and psychological wages of whiteness." Working-class whites understood, and still understand, that, in general, that there are many privileges that go along with membership in the white group. That in America, one may be white and poor, but at least they are not a person of color. The difference for poor whites is that they are poor in spite of being white, not because of it.
Save for occasional acts of white resistance, such as John Brown, most poor whites have gone along with the white supremacist program of middle-class whites, even at the same time that middle-class whites use our faces, rather than their own, as the poster children of white supremacy. Which begs the question, how can you align yourself with people who think of you as "white trash?" Meanwhile, working-class whites, fixated in our own oppression, are unable to connect with the very groups that we have structural advantage over - people of color.
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True, many people of color have achieved middle-class status, but the path to and the experience of middle-class status is different for people of color than it is for whites. When I walk down the street or when I speak in a class, no one knows that I was working class unless I tell them. My whiteness allows me to erase my working-class past, if I desire, at the same time that it helped me rise up the ladder in ways not made available to my non-white colleagues. People of color who are middle class still have to deal with not being white in a white supremacist society. And that can't simply be erased.
Ricky Lee Allen
UNM College of
Education instructor
