A joto in “White Working Class and the Law”?!

As I planned for the semester, I sought out courses with critical components; courses that would challenge me in a different way from “Bar” courses. After glancing over the course offerings, two options stood out: "Critical Race Theory," and "White Working Class and the Law." I opted for the latter.

So what is a joto femenista doing in a seminar titled “White Working Class and the Law”? What could I possibly gain from learning about the group of people who, arguably, placed a vile, racist, pussy-grabbing man in the White House? Hopefully a lot.

Through the application of critical theory to contemporary news and personal narratives, I hope to make sense of the hyperreality we’re enmeshed in, where fake news and alternative facts are more “real” than reality itself. It’s ironic that Trump, someone so removed from the intelligentsia, is forcing intellectuals to contend with some of postmodernity’s faults, including the specter of meaninglessness that haunts social constructionist projects. Sure, I’ve enjoyed deconstructing gender by exposing its contextual specificity and mutable nature. But I’m not enjoying this administration’s attempt to deconstruct scientific facts—e.g., the negative impact of humans on climate change—by arguing that they are constructs created by scientists, whose method of inquiry, the scientific method, is also a construct. Indeed, we’re living in a time when postmodern intellectual methods are being employed to undermine objective reality.

Worse still, this administration’s selective war on facts enables insidious forms of thinking that place marketing rhetoric above a tenable objectivity. Have you heard of “clean coal”?! I’m afraid this abuse of rhetoric will lead more folks to utter statements such as “I don’t see color” when referencing race, and to adopt political positions that are indifferent to persons’ material conditions. So, are we doomed to keep falling further down the rabbit hole?

Perhaps our saving grace lies in retrograding to modernity and its companion structuralist trends. Max Weber’s sociological approach of Verstehen (to understand) is one such approach. It asks observers to empathize with social actors, so they may understand why social actors act the way they do. That is the approach and open mind I’m bringing to this course, which is why I’m not so much concerned with what went wrong, but rather with understanding why so many white working class (WWC) individuals voted for Trump.

In keeping with Verstehen, I want to learn about the embodied subjectivities/identities that comprise the WWC. I’m curious as to who makes up the WWC—does it include hyphenated Americans? educated individuals? Hispanics? How do self-identified members of the WWC see themselves? What narratives of whiteness/race do they construct to make sense of and navigate the world? Were the WWC's votes for Trump symptomatic of the white gaze turning inward, subjecting white folks en masse to the sting of being racially objectified for the first time? Relatedly, are WWC egos/identities fracturing from having to look at themselves “through the eyes of the others,” e.g., people of color, or elite whites? And was Trump’s election a defensive psychical posture—denial—from having to atone for the American indelible sins that continue to scar black, colored, and poor bodies?

Admittedly, I don’t expect to arrive at a correct answer to the preceding questions. But I do, perhaps selfishly, seek to situate the WWC within a narrative that will allow my election wounds to heal, even as Trump picks away at the scabs. By the end of the course, I hope to fold that narrative into a theory of praxis that will allow other folks experiencing social angst to build bridges with WWC allies who are interested in reforming our racists, capitalistic system. I haven’t given up on the WWC, but it is time to start owning our s***!