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Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part I

By Danny Shaw, Popular Resistance.

December 23, 2024

Strategize!

Above photo: Child Poverty in West Virginia. The Daily Atheneum.

NOTE: This is the first of a weekly series by Danny Shaw.

The Liberal white Versus the Poor white.

Much has been written about the poor white

but on rare occasion

has he been able to speak for himself…

This is for him

and her.

Unleashed here is the anguish within

Buried under 1,492 survivals and sins…

This is dedicated to Zoe, Cathy and all the petty bourgeois liberals

who treated me like they were better than me. Your disgust spoke to my class instincts and got the ball rolling on this sociological and historical essay.

Dedicated to the true street prophets:

If my trauma were but an inch deeper or a centimeter to the right,

like the bullet that nearly assassinated the

Demagogue-in-Chief Trump and threatened a second Civil War,

I may not be here.

All the trauma deposited within me

is unleashed here.

I write this inspired by the true street soldiers who never made it out.

Away at college, writing a poem or visiting another country,

I carry my family, the deceased and the survivors with me.

Their words, instincts and early deaths molded me into who I am.

They whispered them to me

before lighting their last Newport,

placing their last bet at Foxwoods Casino and

swigging their last sip of Wild Turkey…

There is a material reality behind this human schism and this mutual hatred, that of the privileged white versus that of the downtrodden white. It dates back centuries and hemispheres. Whoever is not a billionaire and groups us together, erasing our class differences, does so at their own peril, and our peril as well.

To group all whites together is the priority of the ruling class. We poor whites have different resentments, spiritualities and worldviews from those of our class oppressors, though we often don’t recognize it, much less know how to express it. Leftist identity politics conflate us with the foreign reality of another social class. Whose agenda does this serve?

Beyond similar skin tones and hair textures, what do we share? Lumping all “white people” together discards and cancels millions of down-and-out, disgruntled poor whites who have the potential to be a revolutionary force. So much of what we have experienced and endured applies to the entire multiracial working class, especially poor Blacks and Latinos. Before us we have arguably the greatest challenge imaginable, of 248 years in motion: to move the unmovable and unleash the long-buried class impulses of the other America. The very future of humanity and the planet depends on our discovering ourselves, alongside all of our class brothers and sisters. This was what Dr. Ernesto Che Guevara had in mind when he said: “I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all — you live in the heart of the beast.”

Here before us in the 2025 United States, as Trump prepares to take office, are two different peoples who understand little about each other and stand diametrically opposed to one another’s interests.

A Sociological Snapshot of a Forgotten Historical Protagonist

From the abandoned coal mines along the Cheat River in Preston County, West Virginia to the crystal-meth-fueled insomnia that plagues the streets of Fresno, California, poor white life has infinite expressions. In my 46 years, I have experienced too many to remember, many in my own flesh.

We are a polytheistic people. We worship the gods of gambling, whiskey and escapism. We pray to the lords of an alien class’s creation. Denied worldly deliverance, we pray for an afterlife to whisk us away from all we’ve known: harm and self-harm. Unlike Christ, the man and martyr, we all too often burn our crosses on the wrong lawns.

Passages or clips from “Hillbilly Elegy,” vice-presidential scapegoater and millennial “hip” conservative J.D. Vance’s novel-turned-Netflix movie about his childhood, shows some of what we know all too well: the poverty and trauma too many in Trump country have lived through. We account for nearly 50 percent of Americans who receive food stamps from the government. Roughly 3 in 5 addicts in America wear our skin and our trauma. Hundreds of thousands of us overdose every year, but this elicits little public attention nor social change.

But through all that, damn it, we are loyal. I’ll take one destitute white boy from Alabama or Massachusetts over 10,000 of these preppy Ivy-league pricks. You cannot teach heart; it is something absorbed through survival.

We are more than loyal. We are what Michael Parenti called “the superpatriots.” If anyone questions our government’s inequality or murderous foreign policy, we shout them down. We root for the home team, even when the home team couldn’t care less about us. When Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police murders of unarmed black people, we screamed: “Get up you ungrateful, lazy bum.” What we meant to say was, you earn millions of dollars to play a game we love. We earn thousands of dollars to swing a hammer or push a lawnmower that we hate. We critique the “spoiled” millionaire athletes whom sportswriter William C. Rhoden calls the “40 million dollar slaves.” All the while, we ignore the billionaire owners who cash in on trading and squeezing “their” players, destroying their bodies and leaving them brain-damaged with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) to boost their profit margins.

We are a stubborn species that is never wrong. In response to any attacks on what we hold most sacred, we scream “America is number 1!,” insist “Right or Wrong My Country” and threaten “Love it or leave it.” We are better at defending our class oppressors than defending ourselves. Politicians who send us overseas to get Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) claim that they back us up with bombs of democracy and missiles of equality. But the 8,000,000,000 people of the world beg to differ; they have never seen a U.S. war they benefited from. The poor white fights the wars for the rich alongside the rest of the mosaic of cannon fodder. We are 68.8 percent of your Armed Forces. 100 percent of us are fucked; 0 percent of us are rich. From 1962 to 1975, nearly 60,000 of us and our brothers were sacrificed to subdue the untamable Vietnamese. Hundreds of thousands more returned to the streets and backwoods of America maimed and traumatized. 500,000 of us mutinied against the U.S. military in the napalmed, scorched earth of Vietnam and “fragged,” that is we attacked our superior officers with fragmented grenades. To ignore all of this is to play an unwinnable game of Russian roulette called National Nihilism.

A Foreign Country

We have been so busy surviving we never had the opportunity to live. We work 50 hours a week at dead-end jobs both at 16 and 60, because college and retirement is not economically feasible. Every day, artificial intelligence and automation take away even our humiliating jobs at CVS and Subway. We hate “the line cutters” but fail to identify who grows rich by putting us in competition with immigrant workers and robots.

Things are not going well for us. So, we do what all alienated people do best. We double down on our frustrations and hatreds, and strike out against our own.

The New York Times Magazine’s Eric Levitz captures the class divide, writing: “people who experience material security in youth tend to develop distinctive values and preferences from those who do not; if childhood teaches you to take your basic material needs for granted, you’re more likely to develop culturally-progressive values and post-material policy priorities.” Levitz is talking about us and our class brethren from Black, Native, Puerto Rican, Chicano etc. backgrounds. There are oft-cited, recurring studies about the reading gap that exists between the rich and poor and the impact this creates over time.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right takes us deeper into the other white America. As she gives a voice to the voiceless, Hochschild learns about the moral fortitude and endurance of everyday Americans. In Lake Charles, once a Tea Party and now a Trump stronghold, the community had been devastated by toxic oil and chemical dumping. Conditioned by Fox News and other conservative media outlets, the Louisianans expressed deep distrust of any government agencies. They viewed it as a badge of honor not to receive one red cent of government help, aid which they see as reserved for Reagan’s “black welfare queens.” None of the families interviewed ever expressed critiques of the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on U.S. wars and military spending overseas. After living with members of the anti-communist John Birch Society in Santa Ana, California and in the backwater bayous of Louisiana, Hochschild writes: “I felt I was in a foreign country again. Only this time it was my own.”

Our Enemies

There are 813 billionaires in this country. They preside over and hoard the wealth, resources and media of the United States. Another way of stating this is we have the largest economy in the history of the world, but of the $27.3 trillion dollars of the GDP we workers produce, the lion’s share is owned by the rich, leaving only crumbs for the 78% of us who struggle paycheck to paycheck. Bernie Sanders is the only national candidate who has dared to speak to this ever-deepening contrast between property and poverty. Those in power do everything to manipulate our economic despair and social anxiety so we hate everyone, except our actual class enemies. We are then pitted against and at war with ourselves and our own best interests. This harkens back to the times of slavery. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction dedicates a great deal of attention to this “peculiar” condition whereby our poor white ancestors betrayed the freedmen by forming a cross-class alliance with the former slaveholders. Choosing this “psychological wage of whiteness” over class solidarity and our own material interests, we became the agents of class division and the storm troopers of bourgeois domination, laying the groundwork for the next eight decades of Jim Crow apartheid and poverty.

We’ve been so manipulated we abandon even looking at who is deciding who gets paid what, and this perceived “competition” clouds our ability to distinguish between allies and foes.

Forbes and Bloomberg estimate that Trump is worth between $6.9 and $7.7 billion. My mother’s average yearly income was $18,000. My father was a stonemason who downed coffee and inhaled Newports to keep food on the table. Complaining was alien to him. The Federal Poverty Level today for a family of four is $31,200. What could we poor whites possibly have in common with our overseers and overlords? To borrow the African-American mantra, “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” The superstructure of capitalism exists to convince us that our exploiters represent us and our class interests. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most senators are millionaires. Kamala Harris is worth $8 million dollars. While our grandparents may look like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, these hoity-toities could never understand our material reality.

Corporate elites and mass media convinced white Americans that being poor was a “black thing,” yet more than twenty two million of us live in poverty. One in three of us has zero net worth or owes more than they have. 41.6 percent of all poor people in this country look like us. 44.6 percent of Americans who need food stamps to get by are white like us.

To discard us is to give up on revolution in this country.

Yet here we are, airing out society’s racist, anti-immigrant and hateful dirty laundry for the world to see. We remain tenser than ever, at each other’s throats, always ready to pop off. Racism is used as a trojan horse to dismantle the social welfare state which is the only way we and all working people can survive. Racism, sexism and homophobia exist to drive a wedge between us and other workers. This is called false consciousness, a pandemic among us poor whites. We are always ready to carry out our executions in a circle.

Survival until revolution…

Notes:

Desiver, Drew. “What the data says about food stamps in the U.S.” Pew Research Center. July 19, 2023.

AmericanAddictionCenter. “Alcohol and Drug Abuse Statistics (Facts About Addiction).” September 5, 2024.

Michael Parenti. Super Patriots. City Lights Publishers. 2004.

U.S. Naval Institute Staff. “Department of Defense 2022 Demographic Profile.” November 29, 2023.

CLD. Youtube. Director: David Zeiger – “Sir! No, Sir!” (2005) [1080p].” December 13, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AOQvFPb7aU.

Levitz, Eric. “How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics Education is at the heart of this country’s many divisions.” Intelligencer. October 19, 2022.

WorldBankGroup. “GPS (current US$) – United States.” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=US.

Batdorf, Emily. Forbes Advisor. “Living Paycheck To Paycheck Statistics 2024.” April 2, 2024.

NewsNation. “Donald Trump, Kamala Harris Net Worth: Who Is Richer?”. November 16, 2024. https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/2024-election/donald-trump-kamala-harris-net-worth/.

Burack, Emily. TownandCountry. “What Is Kamala Harris’s Net Worth? The Vice President has held public office for over 20 years.” September 10, 2024

DataCommons. “United States of America Country in North America.” https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?utm_medium=explore&mprop=count&popt=Person&cpv=povertyStatus,BelowPovertyLevelInThePast12Months&hl=en.

Yahoo!Finance.

Danny Shaw taught Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender at the City University of New York. He holds a Masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He was born and raised by a single mother in Brockton, Massachusetts and has lived in the Bronx for the past 18 years. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French. He has worked and organized in forty different countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition. He works in the national leadership of the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) to keep young people out of the military and prison industrial complex. He is a mentor to many guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of two young Life Warriors, Ernesto Rafael and Caũa Amaru. He is the author of five books: 365 Days of Resistance, Shedding that which is Not Us: A Working-Class Guide to Life Foods Training and Healing, The Saints of Santo Domingo: Dominican Resistance in the Age of Neocolonialism, My Son Blazes within Me: Reflections on a Poor “white” Family’s Survival, and Diving over Infinite Horizons: Journal Entries of an Internationalist. He has also authored blogs and articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics. He can be contacted at [email-masked].

Class war, Liberal class, Poverty, West Virginia, white America

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