What does this story have to do with the White Working Class? if anything?

I'm copying and pasting from my other blogs, but here I pause to ask:  are the hunters the white working class?  or are the white female strippers?  or are both?  If both, does this come down to a story about gender or is there a component of intersectionality?

A friend drew my attention to this story in South Dakota's Argus-Leader last month.  The headline is "Stripping, sex-trafficking, and small towns looking the other way," and it seems to support my long-standing argument that law and legal institutions are less present, less effective in rural areas, in part for socio-spatial reasons.  That is, material spatiality disables law because of the challenge and cost of policing vast, sparsely populated places.  Further, material spatiality reinforces (and is reinforced by) social expectations of law's anemic presence and role.

Here's an excerpt from Jeremy Fugleberg's story in the Argus-Leader.

Pheasant hunting season was once a homespun South Dakota tradition. But increasingly it is a commercial enterprise, one that comes with a dark side: sex trafficking and pop-up strip clubs that cater to hunters here for a good time.

The hunting season's dark side stands in stark contrast to South Dakota’s friendly, clean-cut image. It can be easy to overlook by small farm towns that increasingly rely on hosting a flood of rich pheasant hunters to offset losses from troubled agricultural markets. 

Pop-up strip clubs, while legal, have their own place in the shadow. They can trap freelance dancers in a web of exorbitant fees, throwing them into debt and making them vulnerable to being illegally exploited by traffickers and hunters. 

The story features Frank Day's bar in Dallas, in Gregory County (population 4,271), which has "become legendary as a South Dakota destination for groups of hunters, mostly male, sometimes wealthy, looking for after-dark entertainment." 

South Dakota is dawning to the realization that human trafficking isn’t just a big-city problem. It’s essentially modern slavery that does happen in the state, as (usually) men, control and manipulate (usually) women and sell their bodies for sex. 

It’s a shocking practice, one that can be masked as simply providing entertainment for hunters in remote communities. 

“These small towns allow this to happen because it’s a social norm, right? 'Boys will be boys,' that’s what we tell ourselves,” said Tifanie Petro, co-chair of the South Dakota West River Human Trafficking Task Force. “There’s this social acceptance because, ‘that’s just what happens here, that’s just what goes on during the rally, or during the pheasant season.’”

Fugleberg suggests that Gregory County authorities turn a blind eye to exploitation of strippers by establishments like Frank Day's, which becomes "No Wives Ranch" during pheasant season.  Fascinating.

So, what is the onus on local government to protect the women who come to work as strippers?  What would government protection look like in that context?  Is the exploitation mostly economic?  or is it something else?

The story suggests that these are the secret ingredients to sex trafficking:

South Dakota’s two largest tourist events, the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and pheasant hunting season, both have the ingredients that attract sex traffickers: lots of men a long way from home, looking for a good time, with money to spend.  (emphasis added)

Interesting.  Maybe so.  I always assumed there was a pimp or profiteer or clear-cut criminal who was making a lot of $$$.  Is Frank Day's Bar making a lot of money during the period it is the "No Wives Ranch"?

Are these the ingredients to a patriarchal society, turning a blind eye to women not earning what they deserve.  But does that equate to sex trafficking?

I noticed a few years ago at conferences that what we previously called prostitution is now widely labeled "sex trafficking."  Hmmm.  Is all prostitution sex-trafficking?  To be more precise, is all sale of sex for $$$ sex-trafficking?  or only when a man or men are involved and are making the profit.

I really appreciate Fugelberg's reporting, but I'm trying to sort things out here. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism and Feminist Legal Theory.

Obituary of country songwriter Jerry Chesnut notes his "Blue-collar hits"

Here's the obituary in today's New York Times.  Of course, country music is often associated with working-class whites, as are the lyrics of the genre.  But it seems Jerry Chesnut, who died this week at 87, had real blue-collar credibility based on his roots in Kentucky's coal country. 

The obit reads: 

Mr. Chesnut, who grew up in rural eastern Kentucky, came by his working-class sensibilities honestly. 

It quotes Chesnut's 2009 interview: 

I was born and raised in the coal-mining camps and the railroad center where they all came together. 

To say the least, it was a very poor place to be from. When you’re from Harlan County, there’s no way to go but up.

Harlan County, among other distinctions, is one of the poorest places in Kentucky.  The poverty rate is 41.5%. It's iconic coal country and also the setting for parts of the series "Justified"; it's the home county of protagonist Raylan Givens. 

I only recognize a couple of the Chesnut songs listed in the obituary, so it's a little hard to say what made them oriented to the working class, except in a few instances specified in the obit:

Mr. Chesnut had a gift for illuminating the struggles of working people, like the beleaguered factory hand in “Oney,” a song, drawn from his experience with a tyrannical employer, that became a Top 10 country hit for Johnny Cash in 1972. 

“Looking at the World Through a Windshield,” a two-stepping country hit for the singer Del Reeves in 1968, portrays a solitary trucker speeding through the night, longing for home.

At least 30 members of the Country Music Hall of Fame have recorded Chesnut's work, as did Elvis Costello in a 1981 album, Almost Blue, in which he covered a number of "hard-core country" hits.  And this causes me to ponder the attraction of country music--including that oriented to the working class--by pop artists like Costello and his fans.  I suppose there is an element of voyeurism. 

A focus on working class youth displaced by the Camp Fire

A great deal of coverage of the Camp Fire has focused on the elderly and those with disabilities, who made up a disproportionate percent of the residents of Paradis, California, and a disproportionate percentage of those killed in the fire.  Now, Dan Levin reports today in the New York Times under the headline, "After Wildfire, Class of 2019 Faces Uncertain Future."  As a student in this class and I suggested in posts a few weeks ago on Working Class Whites and the Law (here and here), Paradise, the small city destroyed in the so-called Camp Fire last month, was very much a working class town, and its population was predominantly white.  Here's a data point from Levin's story that reinforces the point:

• 67 percent of Paradise High School students qualify for free or reduced lunch

The story features many profiles of Paradise High students.  One profile in particular reminds me of my Legal Ruralism post from a few days ago regarding the struggles of rural students in the higher education context:   

[Elie] Wyllie, 17, grew up in Paradise “way below the poverty line,” she said. Problems at home motivated her to get stellar grades. Her zeal for perfection made her Paradise High’s top tennis player and earned her the nickname The Comeback. She dreamed of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon, believing that college was the sole path to changing her family’s fortunes.

She was in the midst of applying to a dozen colleges, including Yale, when the inferno reduced her home to ashes. While California state schools extended their application deadlines, she still does not have all the paperwork they require.

Levin quotes Wyllie:

Everything is crashing down.  Now I’ll be the only person in my family to have a future. They’re going to expect me to take care of them when I can barely take care of myself. 

Wyllie has moved in with her now-retired AP history teacher, the only way she could complete homework and her college applications.

Here's another sobering quote from Ms. Wyllie:

The Camp Fire tore up more than just my town; it took away my peace of mind.  Everything for the rest of my life is going to be affected by this.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

An appeal to liberals: we seek to be culturally attuned abroad...surely we can do that at home, too

Those who live in liberal areas on the coasts of America have doubtlessly heard of (and probably support) ideals such as celebrating diversity, practicing cultural sensitivity, and finding culturally appropriate solutions for problems. These values are generally mentioned when talking about interactions with people from different countries – “cross-cultural encounters.” Why are the same principles not applied to interactions among Americans? It’s clear that people in America live and think in very different ways. In one of my earlier posts, I discussed the “culture war” which seems to exist between the liberal coasts and the rest of America and the impact that it may have had on the 2016 Presidential election  and the 2018 midterms. Our political polarization and vilification of the other side show that “cultural sensitivity” between Americans is lacking in many cases.

I’ve spent most of my time lately at universities in California, which tend to be bastions of the liberal coastal elite, so I will primarily address those on that side of the “culture war.” The values we hold regarding diversity and cultural sensitivity can and should be applied to our fellow Americans. I dare say that those values would have the same positive effects intra-nationally that they have when we apply them internationally.

Consider the value placed on finding culturally-appropriate solutions. We’ve come to recognize that imposing the American way of solving problems on our friends abroad often backfires. At best, it’s less effective because of its blindness to culturally important factors, which are left unaddressed. At worst, it’s colonization and oppression. We recognize that locally-led efforts which are culturally informed are far better.

Similarly, culturally informed solutions can be applied to domestic problems. Rural and white working-class populations have been struggling with drug epidemics. The impacts of meth on rural and WCW people have been depicted in films such as "Winter’s Bone" and the documentary "Meth Storm", and  the opioid epidemic has also hit hard in these communities (see responses by the USDA and CDC). What would a culturally sensitive effort to address this problem look like? At least one already exists. Teen Challenge is a faith-based addiction recovery center. The Central Valley chapter, based in the Fresno area, has been around for three years and has grown rapidly in that time. It now has 170 beds.

This recovery program is attuned to Central Valley culture in at least two ways. First, it is faith-based. Coastal liberals tend to be suspicious of anything that adds religious practice to another activity, such as addiction recovery.  Yet Teen Challenge has been quite successful using this model. Moreover, an additional cultural benefit flows from this: community support. Because faith is a value for many people in the local community, Teen Challenge has strong community support. This is crucial and brings us to the second point of cultural sensitivity.  Many rural communities are marked by a lack of anonymity. Last Sunday, Teen Challenge gave a presentation at a Central Valley church that has supported their efforts. Two of the young men who spoke at the presentation had attended the local school and were known to the church congregation. Because Teen Challenge enjoys strong community support, the lack of anonymity was less of a hindrance to them entering the recovery program. In fact, community members referred them to the program and supported them along the way. The program is able to use the interconnectedness of these communities to its advantage.

Despite the fact that Central Valley Teen Challenge is locally-led and culturally attuned, I imagine that many coastal liberals would be very reluctant to support it because faith-based programs are not a part of our culture. Colleagues and friends, don’t let cultural difference lead to antagonism. Our culture has done a lot of work in building an appreciation of cultural difference and working to learn from those who are different from us. In some ways, the difference here is smaller – the people on the other side of the “culture war” are our fellow Americans, people with whom we share history and government and future. Please don’t let the fact that this culture is a domestic one prevent you from using the valuable skills of cultural understanding that you have developed in different contexts.

New developments in low-income (and rural) students' access to higher education

Access to higher education is one of my pet causes--in part because I am aware of the huge difference that it has made in my own life.  I'm really grateful that several students have blogged about the issue this semester, and I want to highlight in this post some excerpts from recent coverage of the issue.

First, Susan Dynarski (University of Michigan economist and one of my Twitter heroes) and colleagues have just released the results of their study of an inexpensive intervention aimed at getting low-income students to apply to the prestigious, flagship University of Michigan:  In short, they invite the low-income, high achievers to apply and let them know that, if admitted, tuition, room and board, and living expenses will be covered.  Here's part of the abstract of their paper:

We contact students (as well as their parents and principals) with an encouragement to apply and a promise of four years of free tuition and fees upon admission. Materials emphasize that this offer is not contingent on completing aid applications (e.g., the FAFSA or PROFILE). Treated students were more than twice as likely to apply to (67 percent vs. 26 percent) and enroll at (27 percent vs. 12 percent) the University of Michigan. There was no diversion from schools as (or more) selective as UM. The enrollment effect of 15 percentage points (pp) comprises students who would otherwise attend a less selective, four-year college (7 pp), a community college (4 pp), or no college (4 pp). Effects persist through two years of follow-up. The intervention closed by half the income gaps in college choice among Michigan's high-achieving students.

This came to my attention because David Leonhardt of the New York Times, long attuned to college access issues for low-income students, made it the subject of his daily newsletter yesterday.  His description of the findings is slightly more accessible to the layperson.  First, he provides this background:

Unfortunately, most working-class and poor teenagers, including many who excel in high school, still don’t graduate from college. They often enroll in colleges that have a high dropout rate and never finish.

Then he describes the study's findings in context:

In truth, the packet wasn’t promising anything new to most students. Those receiving it typically had good enough grades and test scores to be admitted to Michigan, as well as a family income low enough to qualify them for a full scholarship. 

And yet the experiment nonetheless had a huge effect. 

Some 67 percent of students who received the packets applied to Michigan, compared with 26 percent of a control group of similar students who did not. And 28 percent of recipients ended up enrolling in a top university (most of them at Michigan), compared with only 13 percent of the control group. Many members of the control group didn’t attend any college, despite being excellent high-school students.

A somewhat similar study from a few years ago is noted here.  It suggests that who gets recruited to attend an elite college has a lot to do with where one lives and goes to high schools.  Some high schools attract recruiters from elite colleges; most don't.  (Spoiler alert:  I don't know of any really rural high schools that do).

With this big news out of the University of Michigan yesterday, it may not be a coincidence that NPR today ran this story on the first-gen college experience at Michigan.  The headline plays up "rural," however:  "'Going to Office Hours is Terrifying, and Other Tales of Rural Students in College." Here's an excerpt from Elissa Nadworny's long feature that reflects another theme of the story--the similarities of first-gen students, even across racial boundaries:

Two students share a laptop in the atrium of the chemistry building at the University of Michigan. One, Cameron Russell, is white, a freshman from a rice-growing parish in Louisiana; the other, Elijah Taylor, is black, a senior and a native of Detroit. 

They are different, yes, but there is much that unites them. 

Both are the first in their families to go to a four-year college, a tough road Taylor has already traveled. Now he's serving as a mentor to Russell, whose rural background brings with it struggles that only a tiny handful of universities, including this one, are beginning to acknowledge and address.

* * *

Taylor says neither student can "call home and say, 'Mom, how do I navigate the college experience?' "

Then there is the part of the story that focuses on rural, and acknowledges the difference that the 2016 election has made to the amount of attention paid to the rural sector:

Many colleges and universities were caught by surprise when frustration among rural Americans spilled over into national politics during the 2016 election. That, in addition to steady declines in enrollment, has pushed some schools to pay more attention to rural students — and to recognize that these students need at least as much help navigating the college experience as low-income, first-generation racial and ethnic minorities from inner cities.

Again, this focuses on what low-income students have in common, not that which divides them.  I sure wish we saw more of this sort of hopeful, cross-racial bridge building.  There's lots more in this story about rural students and their particular struggle.  It features students from Au Gres, Michigan, population 889; Charlotte, Michigan, population 9,074; Lake Linden, Michigan, population 1,007 on the Upper Peninsula; and an specified town near Holland, Michigan, in the western part of the state.  All of these students from places that are rural to one degree or another are fascinating to me, perhaps especially Kendra Beaudoin, the eldest of five children raised by a single mom in Michigan's UP:

"I'm still intimidated by professors. Going to office hours is terrifying," she says. "There were definitely moments when I was like, 'I'm only going here to fill a diversity quota and I don't really belong here and everybody else is so much smarter than me.' "

Other obstacles are more mundane. Take crosswalks. "Those don't exist where I lived," Beaudoin says. She stops and waits for the light to change while other pedestrians brush past her. When her phone broke, leaving her without one for several months, she used a paper map to find her way around campus. She still has trouble figuring out the bus system. Yet, as someone from a rural place where self-sufficiency is valued, "The idea of going to someone and asking how this works ... it was almost like I felt bad for not knowing."

The story also includes information about the University of Georgia, Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and Appalachian State University in North Carolina.  And it pays a lot of attention to class, including this quote from a first-gen, rural student:

"Everybody else has got the coin that I don't have. Those Canada Goose jackets? You're kidding," Schwiderson says, referring to the brand of parkas other Michigan students wear, which can cost up to $1,550. "I'm walking down the road and I see people with Gucci or Versace."

The NPR feature continues:

Students say they're acutely aware of the socioeconomic divide at the University of Michigan, where the median family income of students is $156,000, or three times the state average, according to the Harvard-based think tank Opportunity Insights. Ten percent come from families in the top 1 percent of earners, and only 16 percent from the bottom 60 percent.

Sadly this NPR piece also suggests the rural brain drain--that is, it features students who don't want to go back to their rural home towns--at least not any time soon, and sometimes not even for the holidays.  One reason for that is political differences the students have with those in their home communities.  The story also tends to confirm negative stereotypes about rural places as racist and intolerant, and it certainly confirms that many assume rural folks to be racist and intolerant.

Another higher education story that implicates class ran last week, also part of NPR's series, The Changing Face of College.  It's about how top colleges, including Princeton University, are taking transfer students for the first time in decades, including transfers from community colleges.  Elissa Nadworny also reports this story:

In reinstating the school's transfer program, they wanted to encourage applicants from low-income families, the military and from community colleges. 

It's a part of the wave of attempts by elite schools to diversify their campuses. Just 3 percent of enrollment at these top colleges are students from low-income students. And a proven ground for recruiting smart, low-income students is through transfers, especially from community colleges. 

Nadworny quotes Keith Shaw, the director of Princeton's transfer, veteran and non-traditional student programs, regarding these populations. 

They're bringing perspectives out of their experience that would otherwise be lacking here.

Of the thirteen offered admission last fall, nine accepted.  They included military veterans, older students, and students with young families.  More from Shaw:

It's not like you admit nine students, and it's suddenly wildly changed the campus culture. [But, having those students on campus] goes a long way towards changing the campus culture and making it a little bit more reflective of the broader American public that it's drawing on.

This story also discusses efforts at Amherst, long a leader in efforts to achieve greater socioeconomic diversity.

Finally, this in the New York Times by Jennifer Medina and Jill Cowen talks about the first-gen experience at University of California, Irvine.  And this is a story from last month that talks about "when the wheels start to come off" at Thanksgiving, meaning students often start to think about giving up on college near the end of their first semester or quarter.  

Affirmative action for new minority group: white males

According to a recent Newsweek article, being a white male might put a college applicant at an advantage, but not the one that you might think. Apparently, white males are now considered a minority group among British universities. Statistics show that white men are underrepresented at approximately 10% of all higher education institutions in the United Kingdom—especially in fields of business and science where ethnic minority groups make up 70% of students. In response, the University of Essex and the University of Aston have announced plans to recruit more white men, putting them on a par with Black students and women engineers.

Aston and Essex's initiatives controversially follow a September warning by the Office for Students (which regulates British universities) that:

Institutions could be punished unless they give a higher proportion of top degrees to Black students,

The Telegraph reports. Despite the warning, Aston and Essex still found white male representation to be lacking in their institutions. The colleges relied on research published by the Higher Education Policy Institute which also indicated that more needs to be done to encourage young white males to apply for college, according to the Atlanta Black Star.

Notably, these statistics do not account for the class of the underrepresented men, only their race. However, Oxford University does intend to consider class status in a new initiative. The world renowned institution has introduced a plan to recruit specifically white men of working-class backgrounds. This too is subject to controversy since Oxford was accused of "Social Apartheid" last year after data showed 10 of its 32 colleges failed to admit a single qualified Black student with Advanced Levels or A–levels (a secondary school qualification).

Recent research indicates that some university staff have mixed reactions to recruitment schemes aimed specifically at white males because they fear the programs may lead to accusations of racism on the part of admissions offices, The Telegraph reports.

For example, a 2016 study led by education and youth development group LKMco (King's College of London) stated that, in response to initiatives addressing the underrepresentation of white working-class boys in higher education,

We found that people were quite uncomfortable with the idea of running a targeted activity with this group, in a way that we've not encountered, for example, targeting young black African men.

The low number of white males applying for colleges is an issue not unique to the United Kingdom. In America, too, males are enrolling in college at alarmingly low rates, according to The Atlantic. By 2026, the U.S. Department of Education estimates that 57% of college students will be women. The feminist in me wants to see this as a good thing—more women and less white men becoming educated might shift the current power dynamic over time. But, I think this statistic (and the United Kingdom studies) identifies a larger issue: working-class white males' aversion to education. This aversion must be addressed since better educated voters should result in better policy and (hopefully) more rationality.

American universities could address the decrease in WWC enrollment in a similar fashion as Aston, Essex, or Oxford. However, such an initiative would likely be met with skepticism in the United States—especially if the plan focused solely on recruiting white men without attention to class. Americans (myself included) probably question whether the dwindling numbers of white males in business and science is even really an issue. Wasn't attracting more women and people of color—and therefore fewer white men—the goal of affirmative action programs in the first place? Even so, people are quick to forget that working-class whites from rural communities face crippling disadvantages in pursuing education. Yet, the WWC is left out of racially-based affirmative action programs which purport to level the college application playing field. Are class-disadvantaged white applicants entitled to affirmative action? Or will they prosper because "if you're white, you'll be alright"?

White male privilege appears to be rampant in the United States where white males, quite literally, control the government and most major corporations. So, the belief that white men will be successful simply based on the color of their skin is somewhat understandable. But, as this course has illustrated, working-class white men are underrepresented in all facets of prestigious modern life—especially in elite education. I posit that it is time to abandon the traditional notion of white privilege when applied to the WWC. In the context of higher education, universities must consider an applicant's socio-economic background rather than racial-minority status alone if the educational system is to be improved and diversified. That, or, expand affirmative action programs to assist a new minority group: the white working class. 

Economic anxiety is central to the white working classes attraction to populism

In Joan C. Williams recent article, she posits:

Many decent, sensible people voted for Trump because they believed that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans had stopped the downward spiral of the middle class.

Economics can help explain much of the working-class's support of Trump, and on a grander scale the swing to populism in America, as well as in many other developed countries globally (see commentary on the collapse of established political parties in France, or the rise of the Five Star Movement in Italy here, here, and here).

First, what does it mean to be a populist? The underlying characteristics of populism are an ideology that pits a good and moral population against a corrupt elite. This ideology then takes on many moving parts like socialism, nationalism, or anti-imperialism to explain the world around them and to justify specific agendas. For example, in Poland a religious-nationalist populist, Mr. Kaczynski, pushes for a Catholic takeover of the country's institutions from the elite secular liberals. In Netherlands, Mr. Wilders, is demanding a crackdown on the "Islamization" of Europe in defense of women's rights and LGBT rights. In Spain, Podemos - a socialist populist party, is aiming to seize vacant buildings owned by banks and distribute them to the poor while attacking the elite groups.

In America, populism means a division of a virtuous general population against corrupt elites that constrain the will of the people. On the right, this can also be spun as the people, including the white working class, against certain ethnicities identified as foreigners who are thought to be the enemy (Latin Americans and Middle Easterners). So why have these sets of ideas become increasingly potent and prevalent in American politics?

The economic pain of blue collar voters - largely the white working class - can illustrate the populist movement in the United States. Following the Great Recession, citizens experienced many economic struggles. Unemployment skyrocketed and entire job markets were lost. Journalists have found that some companies used the recession as an opportunity to fire low-skilled workers and replace them with labor-saving machines. The financial crisis not only shocked the United States financial system, it damaged citizens confidence in the policymaking elites. The people who feel these problems the most are those in the working-class who have not received any "bail-outs" similar to those the largest banking and regulatory institutions did receive.

A Harvard study (by Raj Chetty) documents the sharp decrease in social mobility in recent decades (1940's children broadly out-earned their parents, but only half of those born in the 1980's will). Mr. Chetty finds that this change in mobility is largely a response to automation in factories and the widespread use of computers. Advancements made computers technologies have replaced many jobs that used to be done manually by low-skilled workers. Those jobs are now replaced with a computer engineer, or other high-skilled worker, who uses advanced technological skills to work these technological jobs.  The low-skilled workers remain in labor, but there is a sharp decline available jobs.

Mr. Chetty's study illustrates a wide gap of "middle-class" jobs that have effectively vanished. An increase in international trade has allowed job making companies to offer low-skilled jobs to those who can do the work the cheapest, which often is someone who lives outside of the United States. This results in jobs being outsourced to other countries where the cost of labor is lower. Economic data suggests that outsourcing is good because it is the most cost effective and efficient way to produce goods and services. However, that fails to address the individual citizens concern that there are fewer and fewer jobs in the United States for the low-skilled worker.

The result of both the Great Recession and advancements in computer technology is a large population of working-class people who have been left behind by the elite policy makers of the country. These very real struggles have spurred a populist movement of voters who have aligned themselves with a figure head who has publicly and fervently opposed elite policy makers, President Donald Trump.

There is a need for politicians to discuss the economic issues faced by the populists' opposing the elite policy makers. Trump, however, has used his alignment with the populist movement to further his agenda and maintain a voter base. His rhetoric claims the loss of jobs in America is due to illegal immigration and the "others".  This separates the populist citizens (the good and moral population) against "others" in order to maintain the support of the populist movement. He holds that the failure of the financial system and resulting outsourcing of jobs are the fault of the "policy making elite" or the "swamp" in Washington. Putting the pure and decent population against the "other" is a great and effective fear tactic. Trump expertly fed into these ideas with his drain the swamp and build the wall campaign strategies. Trump and the right even succeeded in goading elite white people into dismissing non-elite white people as racist and ignoring their economic concerns.
All of this creates a populism movement that may have lasting effects for years to come.

The economic concerns of the working-class in America has moved beyond trade and immigration (see commentary in this article) because job losses consistently result from technological advances as opposed to disruption by an "other." As a nation, we should strive to raise skill levels through better education and skills-training programs. This administration seeks to avoid education and give low-skill workers their old jobs back (for example the re-opening of coal mines) without regarding this advance in technology as a driving force. The left has proposed little to combat this problem besides expanding job training at the corporate level. How we decide to cope with the economic woes and the surge of technological advances will dictate how our society responds to the populist movement in the United States.

More conflation of whiteness with rurality--and more divisive language about what constitutes the "real" America

The headline in the New York Times Upshot feature is "Are Rural Voters the 'Real' Voters?  Wisconsin Republicans Seem to Think So."  I worry that it is one more feature from the progressive media, no doubt well intentioned, that drives a further wedge between rural and urban people.  The story does this primarily by conflating whiteness with rurality, by suggesting that rural interests (broadly defined) are synonymous with white interests and therefore necessarily racist.

Here's the background:  Since Tony Evers beat Scott Walker in the Wisconsin governor's race last month, the Wisconsin legislature has moved to limit the governor's power.  Make no mistake:  I see this as a huge problem and, as many media outlets have labeled it, anti-democratic (with a small "d").  Here's what the Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin Statehouse said after the 2018 election in which Evers defeated Walker:

If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, [Republicans] would have a clear majority.  We would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.

Now this is obviously a silly thing to say because Madison and Milwaukee are, in fact, part of Wisconsin, and the votes of people there count for just as much as those in rural places, which I understand are often called "outstate" in the Wisconsin context.

Here's how Emily Badger responds to this current controversy in her Upshot story for the New York Times:

In much of Wisconsin, “Madison and Milwaukee” are code words (to some, dog whistles) for the parts of the state that are nonwhite, elite, different: The cities are where people don’t have to work hard with their hands, because they’re collecting welfare or public-sector paychecks. 

The debate over whether Trump voters, and by extension Scott Walker voters, were motivated by racism v. economic woes has been dominant theme of news reporting and opinion pieces since the 2016 Presidential Election.  I have a file folder inches thick collecting stories debating the issue, and the vast majority conclude "racism."  Most liberal elites seem to have concluded that rural voters, as well as working-class white voters, are motivated more by racism than by economic woes.  Indeed, I've seem some pretty dramatic expressions of that, such as a Tweet by Amy Siskind stating that the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August, 2017, proves that support for Trump was racially motivated, "Jobs my ass," she wrote. "The truth is marching in Charlottesville." I thought this was a problematic thing to say because it conflated all Trump voters with those marching in Charlottesville, thus rendering all who voted for Trump white nationalists.  It was also a problem because it dismissed the economic distress that many Trump voters are in fact facing.

In any event, Badger's story continues:

That stereotype updates a very old idea in American politics, one pervading Wisconsin’s bitter Statehouse fights today and increasingly those in other states: Urban voters are an exception. If you discount them, you get a truer picture of the politics — and the will of voters — in a state. 

I don't think I agree with Badger on the point that urban voters are being framed as the exception.  I think rural voters are struggling to be heard at all, to have their concerns taken seriously.  Republicans may leverage that concern into an anti-urban message, and that anti-urban message will resonate with many rural voters because they don't feel they are getting their fair share of the commonweal or that they are getting the government support they need.   In short, I'm not convinced that rural voters are hearing the dog whistle or, perhaps more precisely, if they are that it is disconnected from their own sense of not having gotten a fair shake in recent decades.  Plus, I've often observed a feedback loop between economic concerns and racism; I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive. The more excluded and neglected rural and white working-class voters feel, the more likely they are to resent people they feel are getting more from the government than they are.  Many of those people are going to be urban, and some of them are going to be non-white.  Recall Arlie Hochschild's metaphor of the white man waiting in line for his turn, for economic opportunity and economic stability, only to see (or at least perceive) others cutting in line ahead of him.  Those "others" include women, immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and--in the context of Louisiana--the brown pelican, which was protected by environmental laws. 

Badger's column continues:

Thomas Jefferson believed as much — “the mobs of great cities add just so much to support of pure government,” he wrote, “as sores do to the strength of the human body.” 

Wisconsin Republicans amplified that idea this week, arguing that the legislature is the more representative branch of government, and then voting to limit the power of the incoming Democratic governor. The legislature speaks for the people in all corners of the state, they seemed to be saying, and statewide offices like governor merely reflect the will of those urban mobs.

For more on the rural-urban divide--and rural Wisconsin as "outstate"--see Kathy Cramer's book, The Politics of Resentment, which I blogged about here.  I don't recall Cramer, who did extensive field work for her book by holding focus groups all over the state, calling out the racial divide that Badger's piece would have us believe lies along the rural-urban axis.  But my memory might fail me on this point.  Another example of conflating rurality with whiteness in the midwest is here.

It's also worth noting that Sarah Palin surfaced the "rural America is the real America" argument back in 2008.  Remember Joe Six Pack?  Palin was to represent Main Street while Obama, the uber urban cosmopolite, represented Wall Street.  (Read more here on how the culture wars got construed as straddling the rural-urban divide during that election cycle.) That was just about 10 years ago, yet the extent to which we are now assuming all rural voters are white--and racist--has shifted dramatically in the course of a decade.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

The yellow vests and Macron's working-class problem (but nary a mention of race or ethnicity)

National Public Radio's most recent coverage of the three-weeks of "yellow vest" protests in France puts elites/elitism v. working class concerns/realities squarely at the center of the conflict.  Most obviously at stake is a gas-tax hike that was set to go into effect on January 1.  Macron's government announced today that the tax increase has been put on hold.  Here's a quote from this morning's story:

"Originally, the yellow vest protesters were people from rural areas who have to drive long distances as part of their daily life. They said they couldn't afford the hike in fuel prices. Protests appeared in pockets around France to denounce Macron's green tax and then quickly grew into a larger movement that includes members of the working and middle classes who are expressing their frustration about slipping standards of living. They say their incomes are too high to qualify for social welfare benefits but too low to make ends meet. The movement has no official leadership and was organized initially through social media groups." 

The protests' initial target was the fuel tax — but they quickly homed in on Macron as the man behind the hike. 

"Macron faced down the unions when he passed his labor market overhaul last year," NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from Paris. "So he wasn't worried about the grassroots, leaderless yellow vest movement when it first appeared. But three weeks on, the movement is turning out to be the biggest challenge of Macron's presidency." 

The movement is channeling the anger of working-class people across France who are struggling, Eleanor says, adding, "They perceive Macron as arrogant and deaf to their suffering."

In the version of this (or another) story aired this morning (but for which a transcript is not available online), some French political scientists were quoted, including one who used the word "hatred" to describe how French workers feel about Macron, who represents the elites and has no ability to understand or empathize with worker struggles. Here is some prior reporting on the protests (Nov. 23 and Dec. 3), which have turned quite violent and destructive of property in recent days.

This quote from yesterday's story by Eleanor Beardsley is vivid and illustrative, with many references to geography: small towns, heartland, etc:

Well, they rose up three weeks ago - and they all put these yellow vests that you have to keep - every French motorist keeps in their car - against a new gas tax that's supposed to begin in January. But it's a very different movement. It's not backed by the unions. It has no leaders, so there's - we haven't seen anything like this before. Basically, it's being described as a revolt from the other France - not the France of the big cities, you know, the rich France, but the - from the France that can't make ends meet every month, from the rural areas, the small towns, you know, blue-collar workers, farmers. You know, it's just showing - this movement - how split France is, really, between rich and poor. And these protesters - they also accuse French President Emmanuel Macron of being arrogant and completely out of touch with their problems, the problems of the working and underclass.

* * * 

Now, they're saying Macron loves the powerful, the rich, the CEOs, but he has complete disdain for the people. And this - the woman says, "we're governed by mafia bankers, and Macron is a pawn of Rothschild's bank and JPMorgan."

* * * 

Well, up to now, about 80 percent of the French say they support the demands because they say a lot of people can't make ends meet and they're ignored.

And the New York Times coverage from December 2, under the headline, "'Yellow Vests' Riot in Paris, but Their Anger is Rooted Deep in France," includes this vignette of a poor town in central France:

But if it was the shattered glass and burned cars along Rue de Rivoli or Boulevard Haussmann in Paris that finally got Mr. Macron’s attention, the movement — named for the roadside safety vests worn by demonstrators — has in fact welled up from silent towns like Guéret, an administrative center of 13,000 people, lost in the small valleys of central France. 

Far from any big city, it sits in one of the poorest departments of France, where the public hospital is the biggest employer. The cafe in the main square is empty by midafternoon. The hulks of burned-out cars dot the moribund train station’s tiny parking lot, abandoned by citizens too poor to maintain them. 

In places like these, a quiet fear gnaws at households: What happens when the money runs out around the 20th? What do I put in the refrigerator with nothing left in the account and the electricity bill to pay? Which meal should I skip today? How do I tell my wife again there is no going out this weekend?

Can't help note how interestingly patriarchal that last line/question from Adam Nossiter's NYT story is.  Nossiter continues:

It is not deep poverty, but ever-present unease in the small cities, towns and villages over what is becoming known as “the other France,” away from the glitzy Parisian boulevards that were the scene of rioting this weekend.

So, again, the agitation began in a rural place but had to migrate to the city to get people's attention.  Further, the unrest does transcend the rural-urban divide because what underlies it is profound income inequality; that income inequality is perhaps more evident in rural areas because--as with the "flyover states" in the United States and far northern California within the Golden State, these populations feel unseen.  They don't feel that overwhelming urban and elite decision-makers see their plight, and they certainly don't feel that their pain is prioritized.

I'm showing here some screen shots of Twitter activity about the protests, some of which speak to that sense of feeling overlooked:

Speaking of those involved in the protests, Alissa Rubin wrote in the New York Times on December 3 that protestors are

men and women who rely on their cars to get to work and take care of their families [including] small-business owners, independent contractors, farmers, home aides, nurses and truck drivers [who] live and work primarily in rural towns and in the suburbs or exurbs of France’s big cities, many earning just enough to get by.

Rubin also helpfully details precisely how the movement emerged, starting with a petition seeking support for lower gasoline taxes. That petition was initiated by a woman who has an Internet cosmetics business in an exurb south of Paris, and it eventually went viral with the help of social media.

France is a very diverse country, and a significant percentage of its population is of north African descent.  Many immigrants also come to France from other parts of Africa--and the world.  It is thus interesting that I've seen nothing in reporting on the "yellow vest" protests about race.  I wonder if immigrant communities tend to be on one side or the other of this political divide?  Reporting on such phenomena (politics, protests, income inequality) in the United States inevitably centers race and immigration?  We don't permit whiteness to be transparent, the default.  Why are journalists not doing the same regarding France?

I also can't help think of the parallel to California, where the recent gas tax increase caused particular agitation in the state's rural communities, in part because people in rural California are more likely to be on fixed incomes, financially strapped, and driving longer distances.  I'm also thinking about how this arguably parallels unrest in the Catalan region of Spain, where rural folks have been (and are?) the primary agitators regarding the secession movement--so much so that the tractor became the symbol of the movement.  On that, read more here.

I also can't help think of the role that Europe's recent policy of austerity has played in all of this.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.