Community college grads can outearn their "elite university peers"

Teresa Watanable reported last week for the Los Angeles Times under the headline, "The most lucrative majors? Some community college grads can outearn their elite university peers."  An excerpt follows: 

While UC and top private campuses are flooded with applications, students' post-graduation earnings can be as much — or more — with degrees from the more accessible California State University or California Community Colleges, depending on the field, data analyzing California institutions showed.

Among computer engineering majors, for instance, San Jose State graduates earn a median $127,047 four years after graduation. That’s nearly the same as UCLA’s $128,131 and more than USC's $115,102, as well as seven other UC campuses that offer the major, which combines software development with hardware design. Cal State graduates in that field from Chico, Long Beach, Fresno, Fullerton, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Luis Obispo earn more than $90,000 annually. 

“It really pays to look at outcomes and not be blinded by the brand name,” said Martin Van Der Werf of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “The best brand name doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to result in the highest life earnings.”

Itzkowitz said Cal State is a particularly good deal. The CSU annual base tuition is only $5,742, compared with $13,752 at UC and $66,640 at USC, although such variables as financial aid and housing costs affect the actual out-of-pocket expenses. Even if Cal State increases tuition, which some officials are proposing to address a $1.5-billion budget gap, the price would still be thousands lower than UC.

“The CSU system itself has really been shown as a pillar of producing economic mobility for students,” he said. “It enrolls a more economically diverse student body. And it also has been shown to produce strong economic outcomes for lower and moderate-income students. They're really at the top of the list of affordability and outcomes.”

Blue-collar workers in the news, especially following Biden's State of the Union address

The New York Times ran two stories by Jonathan Weissman in quick succession last week.  The first was headlined, "Biden Aims to Win Back White Working-Class Voters Through Their Wallets," ran on February 8.  Interestingly, the print headline was a bit more direct about the class issue, "Biden Aims Pitch at White Voters without Degrees."  The subheads are "A Vow to Lift Wages" and "Speech Outlined a Path to Increase and Improve Blue-Collar Jobs."  Here are some key excerpts: 

With his call for a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America,” President Biden on Tuesday night acknowledged rhetorically what Democrats have been preparing for two years: a fierce campaign to win back white working-class voters through the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.

Mr. Biden’s economically focused State of the Union address may have avoided the cultural appeals to the white working class that former President Donald J. Trump harnessed so effectively, the grievances encapsulated by fears of immigration, racial and gender diversity, and the sloganeering of the intellectual left. But at the speech’s heart was an appeal to Congress to “finish the job” and a simple challenge. “Let’s offer every American the path to a good career whether they go to college or not,” he said.

In truth, much of that path was already laid by the last Congress with the signing of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for low-emission energy to combat climate change.

The second story by Weissman ran two days later under the headline, "As Federal Cash Flows to Unions, Democrats Hope to Reap the Rewards."  The dateline is Bridgeport, West Virginia, population 9,325, part of the Clarksburg, W.V. micropolitan area, and it leads with the story of Mark Raddish, the grandson of a coal miner who has recently gone to work in the green energy sector.  Raddish followed his grandfather's advice not to become a coal miner.  Instead, he got "an eduction and land[ed] a pipe fitters' union job" that then went overseas.   

[Raddish then] took a leap of faith late last year and signed on as West Virginia Employee No. 2 for Sparkz, a California-based electric vehicle battery start-up. The company was enticed here, in the wooded hills outside Bridgeport, W.Va., in part by generous federal tax subsidies and in part by the United Mine Workers of America, which is recruiting out-of-work coal miners for the company’s new plant in a faded industrial park.

It is no accident that this plant, rising in place of a shuttered plate-glass factory, is bringing yet another alternative-energy company to rural West Virginia. Federal money is pouring into the growing industry, with thick strings attached to reward companies that pay union wages, employ union apprentices and buy American steel, iron and components.

President Biden and the Democrats who pushed those provisions are hoping that more union members will bring more political strength for unions after decades of decline. White working-class voters, even union members, have sided with Republicans on social issues, and still tend to see the G.O.P. as their economic ally, as well.

On issues of race/ethnicity and rurality in the California Redistricting Process

The Sacramento Bee reports today on the latest from California's independent re-districting commission, specifically about a newly drawn U.S. Congressional district that stretches from just south of San Francisco, down through part of Silicon Valley, along parts of the central coast, and inland to the rural reaches of San Luis Obispo County.  Here's an excerpt from Gillian Brassil's story focusing what's wrong with a district like this one, a Democrat-heavy area that would likely be held by incumbent Rep. Jimmy Panetta of Carmel Valley, in Monterey County.  

Paul Mitchell, a redistricting expert, said that the size and shape of the district aren’t what pose a problem, rather the distribution of wealth, endorsements and political structure that would make it difficult for a representative from San Luis Obispo County to run against someone from Silicon Valley. 

He drew an analogy: If a sliver of downtown Sacramento were connected to disparate rural areas, candidates from outside the state’s capital would stand little chance against someone who has the financial and political support of people in the metropolitan hub.

“Somebody from Yolo County isn’t going to beat somebody from Sacramento in a congressional race. That’s the problem, I think, with this new ‘ribbon of shame’ that they’re talking about,” Mitchell said. “It’s not the size that I think is problematic. It’s the fact that it has a finger going into Atherton and Menlo Park and the Apple headquarters.” 

“Ribbon of shame” was former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nickname for a 2000s-era congressional district that stretched from Oxnard to the bottom of Monterey County. Maps sliced it out the last time California underwent redistricting in 2010. The phrase resurfaced among analysts to describe the San Luis Obispo to South San Francisco stretch.

My prior post on this topic is here.   

Postscript:  The final maps, published a few days before Christmas, are here.  A Wall Street Journal editorial on the topic doesn't mention rural issues, but it criticizing California's "racial gerrymandering" as reflected in the final redistricting is here.  An excerpt follows:  

The map-makers apparently tried to achieve something like proportional representation by race, drawing 18 majority-Hispanic districts and 18 majority white districts, according to the Princeton data. That roughly tracks both groups’ total share of the adult population. One district is majority Asian and the rest have no majority group.

This outcome is being touted as a victory by ethnic activists, but it means that voters are being assigned electoral districts based in part on race or ethnicity. The idea is that voters of a particular race should be grouped together to increase their collective voting power. 

* * * 

But it has the effect of amplifying identity politics, including white identity politics. When jurisdictions are carved along ethnic lines, politicians in both parties have less need to build multiethnic coalitions.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Rural California wins one (a rarity) in special election

Calfiornia's most rural politician has just defeated an urban (or, at best, suburban) politician for State Senate District 1.  The winner is not college educated.  The loser has a Bachelors degree from Harvard and a J.D. from Yale Law School.  Brian Dahle, the winner, has been mentioned in five prior blog posts here, one of them mentioning the occasion of his visit to my Law and Rural Livelihoods class several years ago.  Dahle garnered 53.4 % of the vote, and  his Ivy-educated opponent just 46.6%  One striking fact is that Dahle carried every nonmtro county by a considerable margin, while Kiley carried every metropolitian county--except Shasta County, the least metro of the metros, in the would-be State of Jefferson, which I'll discuss below.

As I have written elsewhere, it's hard to gain traction on rural issues in California because only about 2% of the state's population live in rural places, at least as "rural" is defined (admittedly, narrowly) by the U.S. Census Bureau (population clusters of less than 2,500 or open territory).  That trend was defied a few days ago when Brian Dahle of Lassen County (population 34,895, population density 7.39/square mile) defeated Kevin Kiley of Placer County (population 348,432, population density 230/square mile) to become California's newest State Senator.  Just as telling in terms of where these candidates come from spatially and culturally, Dahle is a seed farmer from Bieber, California, population 312.  (While Bieber is in Lassen County, it is on State Hwy 299, in the corner that connects Shasta County to very sparsely populated Modoc County, which may say something about the Shasta County vote; see below).  Kiley lives in the Placer County suburb of Rocklin.

District 1 includes all or part of 11 California counties and stretches from north Lake Tahoe to the Oregon state line.  Among the counties included in the district are all or parts of four metropolitan counties, including Sacramento County (1.4 million), Placer County (population 348.432), El Dorado County (population 181,058), and (much farther north), Shasta County, (population 177,223).

The California Secretary of State's page about this special election is here.  The Sacramento Bee's minimal coverage of the election is here.  The Redding Record Searchlight's coverage is here.  The Lassen County Times is here, though I was unable to click through to a story about the election, which might have been interesting since Dahle served on the Lassen County Board of Supervisors for 16 years before he was elected to the California General Assembly.

Here are the (approximate) votes (and population counts) for the Senate District's nonmetropolitan counties:

Lassen County, population 34,895: Dahle got 81.5% of the 4,000 votes.
Alpine County, population 1,175:  Dahle got 73.5% of the 223 votes.
Sierra County, population 3,240: Dahle got 67.2% of the 860 votes.
Plumas County, population 20,007: Dahle got 65.7% of the 4,400 votes.
Modoc County, population 9,686:  Dahle got 87.1% of the 1,857 votes.
Siskiyou County, population 44,900: Dahle got 69.7% of the 7,331 votes.
Nevada County, population 98,764:  Dahle got 67.1% of the 15,000 votes.

And here are the votes for the metropolitan counties--well, parts of some of those counties:

Sacramento County (partial 10.2%):  Kiley got 71.8% of about 21,000 votes.
Placer County (partial, 62.9%): Kiley got 60.8% of 38,000 votes
El Dorado County (all):  Kiley got 56% of about 31,000 votes.
Shasta County (all):  Dahle got 82.2% of about 28,000 votes.

The prior State Senator for this district was Ted Gaines, who lives in El Dorado Hills, a posh suburb/exurb of Sacramento, just over the Sacramento/El Dorado County line.  Thus, the election of Dahle, the seed farmer with a high school education, is quite a shift culturally and experientially.

In the run up to this run off, some controversies about the Senate District 1 election were reported in the Bee here and here.  Regarding the former, I can't help wonder if the lack of anonymity associated with rural people and places played a role in its possible efficacy (leaving aside, for now, the very dodgy ethics) of the mailer threatening to disclose folks' voting records.  The latter story describes how two Republicans (Dahle and Kiley) were the top two vote getters in the primary, while the Democrat, a woman from the Truckee/Lake Tahoe area, came in third.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

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.  

What does the Camp Fire and its aftermath reveal about white privilege?

I can't help wondering, as I read the New York Times latest story on the Camp Fire's total destruction of Paradise, California, what good the "whiteness" of the vast majority of survivors is doing them.  Are we, the voyeurs consuming news about the tragedy such as that proffered up by "In a Walmart Lot, a Rough Refuge for Fire Evacuees," seeing the refugees/evacuees/survivors (what word should I use?) of the fire with more or less compassion because the vast majority of them (indeed, all I have seen visually depicted in the many media sources I have consumed) are apparently (non-Hispanic) white?

These days, we hear a great deal about white privilege, white supremacy (not only as a far-right ideology but as a phenomenon, what some students in our class have suggested is a synonym for white privilege or racism generally), whites, and whiteness in the news media, and amidst the chattering classes generally.  Our heightened preoccupation with race in the Trump era has caused mainstream/left-leaning media to express whiteness and make it an explicit component of analysis.  Just a few examples are David Brooks' "The Rich White Civil War," David Leonhardt's "The Senate:  Affirmative Action for White People," and Thomas Edsall's "Who's Afraid of a White Minority?"  (I am certain I could find better illustrations of my point if I took a lot more time to track them down, but I'll let these suffice for now, given that this is just a blog post, not (yet) a law review article! or book chapter).  My point is this:  Critical race scholars have long complained (appropriately, in my opinion) about whiteness being "transparent," meaning that whiteness is an unspoken racial default.  If no race is specified, white or whiteness is assumed.  This is an aspect of what Peggy McIntosh calls the invisible knapsack of white privilege.

Scholars--including me--have been increasingly resisting and defying this transparency by calling out whiteness, by naming it, making whiteness an explicit axis of analysis, including in the context of intersectionality (i.e., what is at the intersection of white-skin privilege and socioeconomic disadvantage?).  Some of my illustrative work is here, here and here. Another fabulous example, this one by Prof. Camille Gear Rich, is here.  Increasingly, especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election, journalists and pundits--especially in the mainstream media and on/from the left--are centering race in their analysis of many phenomena, including phenomena that would not previously have been seen as "raced."  I think the Brooks and Leonhardt pieces at the links above are pretty good examples of that, though Brooks also focuses on class ("rich") and Leonhardt could well focus on rurality in lieu of whiteness when complaining about the disproportionate power Senators from red states.  So, if we are going center race (as opposed to centering ability, gender, class, sexuality or ...) and not permit whiteness to be transparent, we're going to see the words "white" and "whiteness" in a lot more headlines and news coverage.  That's the trend I've observed.

That brings me back to the Camp Fire and its aftermath:  All of the folks I have seen photographed or featured in media coverage as evacuees/refugees from the Camp Fire area appear to be (non-Hispanic) white.  This is consistent with the demographics of Paradise, California (87.1% white alone; 7% Hispanic or Latino; 1.5% Native American; 1.2% Asian; 0.1% African American), and Butte County more generally (which is a bit more diverse72.1% white alone; 16.4% Hispanic or Latino; 2.5% Native American; African American, 1.8%).  Yet these evacuees don't look privileged, and that appearance is not only because they've just survived a wildfire with little but the clothes on their backs.  In fact, they look largely like the population associated with rural-ish/nonmetro places:  disproportionately elderly, low-income and/or low-education, people with disabilities, veterans.  Interestingly, 14.1% of Paradise residents live below the poverty line, compared to 19.5% of those in Butte County. (A former student who lives in Chico told me this summer that the city has in recent years been a magnet for homeless people because it is known to be a generous, charitable community; I have no idea if this is borne out by hard data, but the higher poverty rate in Butte County than in Paradise seems consistent with that proposition).

Some of the folks featured in Simon Romeo's New York Times report are representative:  They include financially precarious whites, including veterans (more than 10% of Paradise residents) and (from other journalists' reports) the elderly (more than 25% of Paradise residents were over the age of 65) and people with disabilities (18.9%).  (More links to coverage of the fire's aftermath, touching on lack of housing and illness, among other issues, are embedded here). Indeed, many news reports have referred to Paradise as a "retirement community" because it had attracted as residents so many elderly folks on fixed incomes looking for reasonably priced places to live, including in the Pine Springs mobile home park that burned to the ground in record time.  Here's some further economic context from/for Simon Romero's NYTimes depiction of those displaced by the Camp Fire:

California is the richest state in the country, home to technology giants like Google and Facebook and the multimillionaires who lost luxury homes around Malibu to wildfires this month. But the blazes are also laying bare the economic inequality that distinguishes the state, as shallow-pocketed survivors grasp for the kinds of ad hoc strategies commonly seen after disasters in the developing world.  (emphasis added)

Romero provides several profiles of evacuees.  One is of a 39-year-old former Marine, Jarrad Winter, "who recently emerged from a stretch of homelessness, only to lose everything" in the fire.  Winter comments,

I never thought I’d live in a tent city... I mean, this is America; we’re not supposed to live this way. But here we are, man, the new normal.

Another is Anjeanette Ramey, age 30, who had worked in customer service previously but was unemployed at the time of the fire.  Romero quotes Ramey:

We were always a paycheck-to-paycheck kind of town. ... All I made it out with were the clothes on my back ... My house, my car, gone. No money, no job. I have no idea what happens next. 

Her boyfriend’s reaction was more about suspicion and anger. He declined to give his name, saying he didn’t want to be known as a victim, and said the couple was avoiding formal shelters because he thought they were unsafe for people like him and his neighbors, who he thought counted for little with the rich and powerful.

A 65-year-old man, James Reed, is a retired tow-truck driver who points to his 1968 Chevrolet El Camino, commenting,  “This is my home now,"  Reed had bought his house in Magalia, a community near Paradise, just two years ago.  He commented for Romero's story,

[B]eing here, in this parking lot, I’m reminded I’m not the only one.

Another profile of an evacuee of the Camp Fire is from a prior NYT story, an 89-year-old woman named Patty Sanders who "barely escap[ed] the mobile home community where for years she has subsisted on a $900 Social Security check."  (Another story of an elderly mobile home survivor is here).  More affluent (if only slightly)--or perhaps just luckier--are the evacuees depicted in this feature, who seem to have found friends or family with whom they can stay in nearby Chico.

And then there are those previously homeless in Chico who have joined the tent city outside the Chico Walmart.  They were mentioned in a local NPR story a few days ago, and they also get a mention in this recent Sacramento Bee piece:

There have been rumors that some homeless people have moved in and taken over, but those in the camp say while there might be a handful, they are not the majority. 

“There’s a few of them, and they live down there,” said fire survivor Tim Howell, pointing to a row of tents near the freeway. “We call that skid row.” 

“The come up here and go through the stuff,” said his friend, Christian Walters, pointing to a tent filled with donated goods. “We call them ‘day walkers.’”

So I wonder if it would be helpful to mention the whiteness of these vulnerable, down-and-out  refugee/evacuee/survivor/victims rather than let the accompanying photos permit the reader to observe what is apparent.  To mention the whiteness and make a point of analysis would at least implicitly resist the conflation of whiteness with affluence, agency, autonomy (which I contrast with Professor Trina Jones point that blackness gets conflated with dependency).

The only instance I can think of where the whiteness of a "victim class" (for lack of a better term; I'm open to suggestions) has been explicitly named in reporting is on deaths of despair which, at least early on, were disproportionately occurring among middle-aged, low-education whites (Read more here (see embedded links, too) here, here, here, and here).  Should we talk about the disproportionate whiteness of the victims of the Camp Fire? or will that just perpetuate the stereotype that rural folks are disproportionately white?  or might doing so call attention to the fact that many whites are in economically precarious situations, completely ill-equipped to bounce back from a natural disaster like the Camp Fire?

Remember this Forbes Magazine story from a few years ago about the 63% of folks, unmodified/unraced, who don't have the savings/liquidity to cover an unexpected $500 expense?  We could think of them as the precariat--and on some level don't "we" see it as their own damned fault that their situation is so precarious?

Another issue should be noted, another question asked:  When we look at photos of (mostly) white refugee/evacuee/survivor/victims of the Camp Fire, do we see them any differently than we saw the (mostly) black refugee/evacuee/survivor/victims of Hurricane Katrina more than a decade ago?  I'd argue that many (or most) of us do not view them differently based on their skin color.  That was part of my core argument in Welfare Queens and White Trash:  most Americans have little tolerance for the poor and/or economically precarious.   As long as the victims/survivors/refugees are the type camped out in a Walmart parking lot rather than staying with friends or able to cash their insurance checks and stay in a motel or some other temporary housing, it's their own damned fault.  Aren't the former at some point assessed as "white trash" or hard living, and the latter assessed as settled working class, even upright, striving middle class.  Maybe "we" (the average or typical person) feels some short-term pity, but does that evolve into long-term empathy for the struggle facing these folks in the months ahead?  Whatever the views of observers, I'm not convinced they vary much depending on the race/ethnicity of the refugee/survivor/victim/evacuee.

Let me end by saying that we can never know with certainty the answer to the question I have posed in my "headline." More precisely, we are unlikely to be in agreement about what the Camp Fire, its aftermath, and media coverage of it reveal about whiteness.  Nor are we likely to reach consensus  regarding how the media should cover racial angles/components of the huge story that is the Camp Fire.  Should they, for example, try to find some Latinx or Native American refugees/evacuees/survivors/victims to profile (I saw a profile of a survivor with a Latinx name, Villanueva, for the first time on Nov. 21). so we know that not everyone suffering is white? Should they mention the whiteness of the vast majority of the refugees/evacuees, survivors/victims?  or just let the photos convey that fact?  Would the latter helpful or important because it defies stereotypes of whiteness as affluent and autonomous?  even whiteness as invincible, as reflected in the adage, "you're white, you'll be alright."

I look forward to hearing others' thoughts on the questions I am raising here.