New York Times newsletter again talking class and the Democratic Party

Here's an excerpt from David Leonhardt's newsletter, which begins by asserting that the Democratic Party's biggest challenge today is to win over working-class voters.  Leonhardt is skeptical that working class voters' drift to the Republican Party boils down to racism--at least not to racism alone: 

If the Democrats’ struggles were really all about racism, several heavily Mexican-American counties in South Texas would not have swung to the Republicans this year. Nor would Trump have increased his vote share in the New York boroughs of Queens and the Bronx by about 10 percentage points versus 2016. He appears to have won a higher share of the vote in the Bronx, which is only 9 percent non-Hispanic white, than in affluent Manhattan, which is 47 percent white, Dave Wasserman of The Cook Political Report pointed out.

This pattern leaves Democrats needing to attract a lot votes in traditionally Republican suburbs to win many elections. That’s a narrow path to victory. 

Here's Leonhardt's response to the question what Democrats can do: 

Many working-class voters, across racial groups, are moderate to conservative on social issues: They are religious, favor well-funded police departments and support some restrictions on both abortion and immigration. On economic issues, by contrast, they tend to back Democratic positions, like a higher minimum wage and expanded government health care.

For Democrats to do better with the working class, they probably need to moderate their liberal image on social issues — and double down on economic populism.

Here's a related New York Times April essay by Doug Sosnik on the so-called diploma divide. 

The working class and coronavirus (Part III): Meatpacking

This is not actually a "rural" topic, nor is it one limited to the white working class, so I have avoided treating it as such and writing about it on these blogs.  But after weeks of following outbreaks of coronavirus in meatpacking plants, I've decided to collect many of those stories here, along with datelines, in no particular order.  Well, no particular order except that I have to start with this Washington Post coverage of comments by the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this week.  Justice Patience Roggensack, in the middle of an oral argument about the constitutionality of the governor's stay-at-home order, responded to data about the high rate of infection in Brown County (whose county seat is Green Bay):

These were due to the meatpacking, though. That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.

Many people on Twitter are calling this racist, though I've not seen any data on the racial make up of those who work at the JBS meatpacking plant in Brown County.   Others called Justice Roggensack's comments "elitist" and "classist," which they no doubt are.  My favorite comment on Twitter came from Prof. Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas Law School who commented that the Chief Justice said "the quiet part out loud."  Ahem.

Here's a great overview of what is happening in this coronavirus era, with the meatpacking industry overall, from Adam Clark Estes for Vox/Recode, from May 8:

This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the meatpacking industry hard, as some of the worst virus outbreaks in the United States have occurred in the tight, chilly confines of meat processing plants. Standing elbow-to-elbow, workers there — many of them immigrants, in already dangerous roles and making minimum wage — are facing some of the highest infection rates in the nation.

Sick workers mean meatpacking plants are shutting down, and these closures are contributing to a deeply disruptive breakdown in the meat supply chain. The vast majority of meat processing takes place in a small number of plants controlled by a handful of large corporations, namely Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings Inc., and Cargill Inc. More than a dozen of these companies’ beef, chicken, and pork plants closed in April, and despite an order by President Trump to reopen the plants, managers fear that doing so will put lives at risk so facilities continue to close. There have been nearly 5,000 reported cases of workers with Covid-19 at some 115 meat processing facilities nationwide. At least 20 meatpacking workers have died.

Here's a Politico story about how Alex Azar, Secretary for Health and Human Services, blamed the high incidence of coronavirus in meatpacking plants on workers' "home and social" conditions.  An earlier Buzzfeed story reported similar blame-shifting by Smithfield re: the Sioux Falls outbreak.

A Smithfield pork processing facility, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, population 154,000, was one of the earliest meatpacking outbreaks reported.  Reports on the outbreak there are here, here and here.  Don't miss NYT's "The Daily" Podcast interviewing a woman, born in South Sudan, who worked at the plant and was diagnosed with coronavirus after she was quarantined following a co-worker's diagnosis.  But one poignant aspect:  when she was put on quarantine, she was told she would be paid for 40/hours a week during that period.  But she could not get by on just 40/hours week wages because she'd been working and earning an average of $500/week in overtime.

A Cargill pork and beef processing plant in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, population 25,340, is the subject of this Bloomberg story and this NYTimes story from a few days ago.

A Tyson plant in southwest Georgia was featured in this post from early April.

Meat and poultry processing plants in Nebraska (Grand Island), Colorado, and on the DelMarVa peninsula have also been closed temporarily.

Today, The Oregonian covered an outbreak of coronavirus at a seafood packing plant in Astoria, Oregon, population 9477.

There are no doubt many more outbreaks I've not picked up on or am not highlighting here, such as in Dodge City, Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, and "deep East" Texas.  As with nursing homes and jails/prisons, these packinghouse outbreaks show up as dense spikes on charts and tables tracking where the coronavirus hotspots are.  They look particularly "oversized," if you will, when they occur in areas with small populations.

Post-script:  Big New York Times feature May 10 out of Black Hawk County, Iowa, population 131,090, which includes Waterloo.  Here's the lede, which has the county sheriff playing a role I would not have expected, while Tyson Foods plays the villain part just as expected:

On April 10, Tony Thompson, the sheriff for Black Hawk County in Iowa, visited the giant Tyson Foods pork plant in Waterloo. What he saw, he said, “shook me to the core.”

Workers, many of them immigrants, were crowded elbow to elbow as they broke down hog carcasses zipping by on a conveyor belt. The few who had face coverings wore a motley assortment of bandannas, painters’ masks or even sleep masks stretched around their mouths. Some had masks hanging around their necks.

Sheriff Thompson and other local officials, including from the county health department, lobbied Tyson to close the plant, worried about a coronavirus outbreak. But Tyson was “less than cooperative,” said the sheriff, who supervises the county’s coronavirus response, and Iowa’s governor declined to shut the facility.

A week later, Tyson sent a text message to employees:

Waterloo Tyson is running.  Thank you team members! WE ARE PROUD OF YOU!

Please read for yourself the rest, reported by Ana Swanson, David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Postscript from ProPublica on June 12, by Michael Grabell, Claire Perlman and Bernice Yeung.  The headline is "Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking Companies Fought Health Agencies Over COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their Plants."

The working class and coronavirus (Part II): Pandemic throws inequality into sharp relief

I've been trying to write a nicely composed post on this topic for weeks now, but I'm giving up and providing just headlines, links, and brief excerpts, with featured stories arranged in chronological order. 

One of the earliest inequality stories by the national media was this one under the headline, "‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide, by Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu, published on March 27, 2020 in the New York Times. Among the places featured was Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Here's an excerpt:

In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth.

And across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

Another early story focused on inequality played up the distinction between "essential workers" and the typically more privileged who are working from home.  "Location Data Says it All:  Staying Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury."  Jennifer Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel J.X. Dance reported for the New York Times on April 3, 2020.  The lede follows:

It has been about two weeks since the Illinois governor ordered residents to stay at home, but nothing has changed about Adarra Benjamin’s responsibilities. She gets on a bus nearly every morning in Chicago, traveling 20 miles round trip some days to cook, clean and shop for her clients, who are older or have health problems that make such tasks difficult. 

Ms. Benjamin knows the dangers, but she needs her job, which pays about $13 an hour. She also cannot imagine leaving her clients to fend for themselves. “They’ve become my family,” she said. 

In cities across America, many lower-income workers continue to move around, while those who make more money are staying home and limiting their exposure to the coronavirus, according to smartphone location data analyzed by The New York Times.

Charles Blow, New York Times columnist, observed on April 5, 2020, that "Social Distancing is a Privilege."  There he writes:

People like to say that the coronavirus is no respecter of race, class or country, that the disease Covid-19 is mindless and will infect anybody it can. 

In theory, that is true. But, in practice, in the real world, this virus behaves like others, screeching like a heat-seeking missile toward the most vulnerable in society. And this happens not because it prefers them, but because they are more exposed, more fragile and more ill. 

What the vulnerable portion of society looks like varies from country to country, but in America, that vulnerability is highly intersected with race and poverty.

From April 9, an op-ed in the New York Times by Walter Scheidel was titled, "Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics."  He writes of the aftermath of the Bubonic Plague:

Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.” 

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrank the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades.

This is sounding ominous for the wealthy, but only if government responds appropriately to what is happening.  Scheidel is a professor of history at Stanford University.

This data driven story is one that launched the "The America We Need" series on April 9, from the New York Times.  It was published on April 10, by David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez.  The headline is, "America Will Struggle after the Coronavirus.  These Charts Show Why."  Here's an excerpt:

Inequality didn’t cause the coronavirus crisis. But it is making the crisis much worse, having created an economy in which many Americans are struggling to get by, and are vulnerable to any interruption of work or income and any illness. 

On this page, we present dozens of ways to look at American life that together provide a more meaningful picture than G.D.P. There is reason to expect that many of these indicators are already beginning to look worse, as the country grapples with both a pandemic and a recession. Together, they also help show the areas in which Americans will struggle to recover from this crisis.

Jason DeParle of the New York Times reports on "The Coronavirus Class Divide:  Space and Privacy," on April 12, 2020.  The dateline is Robesonia, Pennsylvania, and the initial subject is Mark Stokes, a student at Kutztown University, who shares a house with 10 other people:

Housemates come and go to jobs in fast food and a chocolate factory, sharing a single shower. Dirty dishes crowd the kitchen that no one cleans. Lacking a bed, Mr. Stokes, a freshman at Kutztown University, sleeps on the floor in the room of a friend who took him in when the dorms closed.

No stranger to hardship, Mr. Stokes, who spent part of high school living in a car, worries that the crowded conditions will expose him to coronavirus. But like many poor Americans, he says the sanctioned solution — six feet of physical space — is a luxury he cannot afford.

DeParle quotes Stokes regarding his current living situation: 

It’s just so many people in the house and there’s nothing I can do about it — it’s not my house.  You can’t be six feet apart when you have to rely on other people’s space.

Stokes is sleeping on the floor of his friend's room in the house.  His friend sleeps on the bed with her child.  Stokes talks of sitting in his car to get some privacy, and also of reciting affirmations to calm himself. 

DeParle quotes Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins: 

The pandemic is a reminder that privacy is at a premium among the poor — hard to find and extremely valuable.  Living in crowded conditions not only increases the risk of infection but can also impose serious emotional and mental health costs. The ability to retreat into one’s own space is a way to cope with conflict, tension and anxiety.

This is a deeply reported and powerful story that also features a recovering heroin addict living in a one-room trailer, along with several family members, in Oklahoma and several homeless folks living together on Whidbey Island, Washington.  I highly recommend the entire story.

From Patricia Cohen of the New York Times on April 16, 2020, "Struggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis."  Here's the lede:

An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well-dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.” 

The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment captured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up groceries from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; renters and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospitals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing.

Damon Winter, a photographer on assignment to the Opinion section of the New York Times, contributed this photo essay (text also by Winter), which was published o April 20, 2020.  It's titled "The Great American Divide" and features photos from central New York, Ithaca (home to Cornell) and Syracuse.  This is part of the New York Times "The America We Need" series.

This April 23, 2020  New York Times Upshot piece is framed in terms of "Who Has Enough Cash to get through the Coronavirus Crisis?"  Alissa Quart and Yaryna Serkez report that just 47% of Americans say they have enough savings to get through three months of unemployment:

Even before Covid-19, many Americans were living check to check, because of the costs of housing and child care, student debt payments, medical bills and the rest. Despite the cheery insistence of people like President Trump and personal finance gurus, the economic growth of the last decade had not brought wealth or security to most Americans. Fewer than half of American adults — just 47 percent — say that they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted this month by the Pew Research Center. 

In the coronavirus’s wake, those without savings may also be losing their jobs, leaving them with little to support their families other than the CARES Act relief from the government, help from charitable groups or GoFundMe or Venmo tip jar campaigns. This won’t be enough to save many families from ruin.

Lastly, here's a story from The Economist on April 27, 2020, which offers a global perspective on how the coronavirus is aggravating inequality.  It's one of a number of stories I've seen that highlights the likelihood of dramatic food shortages around the world. The headline is "Closing schools for covid-19 does lifelong harm and widens inequality," and it contrasts quarantined kids in Amsterdam and Paris with those in Dakar.

The working class and coronavirus (Part I): Higher education

Uneven access to higher education has been a persistent theme in media coverage since colleges and universities began to close down a month ago and, in so doing, sending their students "home," whatever that means.  This phenomenon is closely related to a long-time theme of my research and a personal obsession:  access to higher education and what keeps low-income students from achieving it.  And let me be clear at the outset:  while this blog generally focuses on working-class whites, this post is about the wider working class.   

There is so much to say on this topic, so I'm primarily going to collect sources, beginning with some early stories about what was happening with the elite higher education sector.  The first story that crossed my radar screen was this one by the Harvard Crimson published on March 11, 2020.  An excerpt follows:

Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana wrote to Barton and more than 6,000 other undergraduates on Tuesday morning that campus would not reopen after spring break, which stretches from March 14 to 22. 

Within hours, the email sent students scrambling to pack up all their belongings and make plans to vacate. But Barton and others say it hit one group of undergraduates particularly hard: first-generation and low-income students, many of whom depend upon Harvard for food, housing, and stability. 

“They've been evicted from their stability, they've been evicted from their homes, they’ve been evicted from their ability to live comfortably and safely,” Barton, who is an FGLI [First Generation Low Income] student, said. “There's already enough concern, and now they're concerned about being able to get home and have stable housing and food.” 

Some students must ship or store their on-campus belongings without financial support from Harvard. Others who planned to stay on campus must now book unexpected flights home and accrue additional costs. And those who rely on term-time employment must confront additional financial concerns as they lose their primary sources of income. 

Nicholas T. “Nick” Wyville ’20 called the College’s announcement “outrageous,” adding that he believes it will weigh most heavily on him and his fellow FGLI students. 

“Harvard prides itself on having a massive student body that is a large percentage on financial aid,” Wyville said. “I think that they forget that those are the same students who often come from home situations that are uncomfortable.” 

This Harvard Crimson story is rare in that it does mention rural folks and their relative lack of access to technology, especially broadband: 

Wyville — who hails from Anniston, Ala. — said online courses are not feasible for him and some of his peers from rural or low-income areas, where many homes do not have internet access. 

“It's not as if we can just like up and go to the library or the coffee shop every day,” he said.

Even before that Crimson story came this, on March 9,  from the Washington Post.  The headline was "Amherst College switches to online learning, as universities nationally scramble to respond to covid-19 outbreak."  Susan Svrluga and Nick Anderson report:

The announcement was a dramatic stroke from a small but nationally renowned school: A growing number of colleges and universities have announced temporary shifts to virtual classes in recent days in response to the uncertainty and rapid pace of changes with the covid-19 outbreak. Amherst took especially decisive action.

They quote Amherst president Biddy Martin:

We know that many people will travel widely during spring break, no matter how hard we try to discourage it.  The risk of having hundreds of people return from their travels to the campus is too great. The best time to act in ways that slow the spread of the virus is now. Let me make our decisions clear.

* * * 

It will be hard to give up, even temporarily, the close colloquy and individual attention that defines Amherst College.  ... Our goal is to keep members of our community as safe as we possibly can while ensuring that students can complete their coursework for the semester and the daily operations of the institution can continue.

The story reports on many other posh campuses, including Vanderbilt, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Stanford shutting down early that week, well ahead of many other prestigious institutions and also some that are less so (e.g., University of Washington).

Next I saw this piece in the Washington Post on March 11 which, like the Crimson piece, made the point that these shut downs are a hardship on poor students who don't have much of a place to go--especially if scholarships are paying for their room and board. The piece is actually an op-ed by two Amherst students, and here's a salient quote:

These residential colleges are also undermining much of their own rationale for existing. They are meant to be havens for young people, home-like places with established routines and networks meant to foster learning. They are also sanctuaries for low-income and marginalized students who might not have stable homes to return to on short notice. Students without computers or broadband will be unable to access online courses once they begin. Perhaps worst of all, some international Amherst students may be unable to return to campus, when it eventually reopens, because of the Trump administration’s recently expanded travel ban.

To its credit, Amherst’s administration has set up a petition process for students to ask to stay on campus, and the student government is trying to reimburse some fees to help pay for travel. But the default is eviction. Communications from the school this week indicate that refunding the cost of room and board — but not tuition — is being considered.

Many similar stories have run in the last few weeks.  Here's one about the particular disappointment for first generation college graduates who won't get to have their live commencement ceremonies:

Administrators and college presidents are scrambling to figure out what to do about graduation this year. How can they acknowledge students' hard work and success, while still maintaining social distancing amid the outbreak of coronavirus? 

Many colleges across the country have outright cancelled graduations, others, such as Harvard and Miami University in Ohio, have scheduled virtual ceremonies. Some students have taken things into their own hands and created their own ceremonies — on a reconstructed campus — through Minecraft.

* * *

Celebrating graduation wasn't really about her, says Monica Ferrufino, who's finishing up at California State University, Los Angeles. It was really going to be for her parents. 

"When they cancelled graduation, it was exactly 60 days prior to our scheduled commencement," she explains. She knows that because her mother and father kept track, counting down the days, crossing each one off on their calendar. When she told them it was off, her mom cried. "My parents didn't get to finish high school," she says, "so for them, seeing their daughter graduating college was just beyond their dreams."

And finally, here's one from the New York Times early this week suggesting that college was the great "leveler" or "equalizer" before coronavirus.  Let me begin by challenging that starting proposition, which seems absurd in light of my own research into higher education access and books like Suzanne Mettler's.  Here's an excerpt from her 2014 editorial, "College, the Great Unleveler."

Something else began to happen around 1980. College graduation rates kept soaring for the affluent, but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s. And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where. 

The demise of opportunity through higher education is, fundamentally, a political failure. Our landmark higher education policies have ceased to function effectively, and lawmakers — consumed by partisan polarization and plutocracy — have neglected to maintain and update them.

Ah, so elitism in the higher education sector is an extremely important part of the big story here.  And that reminds me of this important NYT story from nearly a decade ago.

But/and let's return to the New York Times story suggesting the contrary, that college is a great leveler.  Here's an excerpt, which is just a teaser to get you to read the rest of Nicholas Casey's story, which speaks to extreme socioeconomic (dis) advantage, race/ethnicity, (dis)ability and a range of other issues salient to an authentic intersectionality:

The political science class was called “Forced Migration and Refugees.” Students read accounts of migrants fleeing broken economies and seeking better futures, of life plans drastically altered and the political forces that made it all seem necessary. 

Then suddenly, the subject matter became personal: Haverford College shut down and evicted most students from the dormitories as the coronavirus spread through Pennsylvania. 

Like many college courses around the country, the class soldiered on. The syllabus was revised. The students reconvened on a videoconferencing app. 

But as each logged in, not everyone’s new reality looked the same. 

One student sat at a vacation home on the coast of Maine. Another struggled to keep her mother’s Puerto Rican food truck running while meat vanished from Florida grocery shelves. As one young woman’s father, a private equity executive, urged the family to decamp to a country where infections were falling, another student’s mother in Russia couldn’t afford the plane ticket to bring her daughter home.

Bottom line:  much as so many in the United States resist this reality, class matters profoundly with respect to higher education access, as with respect to everything else.  And it's consequences are enduring, far beyond the Zoom-enabled classroom.

Oh, and something I learned from Nicholas Casey's story is about the existence of Questbridge, which helps low-income students connect with elite colleges.  Don't think that service was around back in the day I was making college application decisions.

Here's a story from April 6 in the Washington Post about student attitudes toward the widespread move to pass-fail grading. 

Postscript from Politico on April 12, 2020:  "'We're on the edge of the precipice': How the pandemic could shatter college dreams," by Bianca Quilantan.

Postscript from the Daily Yonder on April 13, 2020.

Postscript from Anemona Hartocollis of the New York Times on April 15, 2020, "After Coronavirus, Colleges Worry:  Will Students Come Back?"

And from the Los Angles Times on April 16, 2020, a story about coronavirus's $558 million impact on the University of California system.

Postscript from the The Atlantic on April 24, 2020, "What if Colleges Don't Re-Open until 2021?," by Adam Harris.

Postscript from Christina Paxson, President of Brown University, "College Campuses Must Re-open in the Fall.  Here's How We Do It," a guest editorial in the New York Times.

Postscript from The New Yorker on April 28, 2020, "How the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Shattered the Myth of College in America," by Masha Gessen.

More to follow in this series on socioeconomic class and coronavirus.

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.

Demographic trend of "natural decrease" among whites spreads quickly across Southwest, South, Northeast

The New York Times reported a few days ago on demographic changes in the United States.  The story, by Sabrina Tavernise, reports a natural decrease--more deaths than births--among whites in a majority of states.  Part of the story focuses on rural places:

The Census Bureau has projected that whites could drop below 50 percent of the population around 2045, a relatively slow-moving change that has been years in the making. But a new report this week found that whites are dying faster than they are being born now in 26 states, up from 17 just two years earlier, and demographers say that shift might come even sooner. 

“It’s happening a lot faster than we thought,” said Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a co-author of the report. It examines the period from 1999 to 2016 using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the federal agency that tracks births and deaths. He said he was so surprised at the finding that at first he thought it was a mistake.

* * *

The aging of the white population began in rural counties long before it ever took hold in an entire state. Martin County, a bear-shaped patch of eastern North Carolina, first experienced it in the late 1970s. In recent years, deaths have exceed births among its black population, too. Hispanics make up less than 4 percent of the county’s population.

Other states subject to this trend include several won by Donald Trump in 2016: Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan ... as well as Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and the Carolinas.  Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana and Texas are exceptions among southern states.

Of interest elsewhere in the country is the fact that all of New England is experiencing more white deaths than births.  Indeed, among states in the northeast, only New York is an exception to this trend.  The Midwest--broadly defined--is the most persistently resistant to this trend.

The New York Times published this op-ed last month which analyzes the trend from a global perspective. The piece, by Philip Auerswald and Joon Yun, also discusses the political correlations to this demographic trend, in countries from Italy to Japan.

In the past decade people in rural, remote places have been disproportionately losing not just jobs and opportunities, but people, elementary schools and confidence in the future. ... Against such a backdrop of general decline, populists’ promises to revive dead or dying local industries are understandably welcome. 

As youth have continued to migrate from rural areas to cities, their movement has widened not only the median age gap between rural places and cities, but also gaps in attitude, since the young, regardless of where they live, tend to associate more with urban outlooks.

* * *

Election data from the past two years plainly describe the consequences of these demographic dynamics: Most advanced industrialized countries are dominated by two competing political movements that either awkwardly inhabit the bodies of existing political parties or create new ones more to their liking. One movement extols the values that are a practical necessity in dense, interconnected cities: interdependence, internationalism and the embrace of “diversity” (defined along multiple dimensions). 

Another movement extols the equally necessary virtues of people in rural areas: self-reliance, autonomy and the embrace of immediate community and place.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Pitting rural against urban, black against white in the safety net work requirement debate

I blogged last week about the high-profile media attention being showered on a proposed Michigan law that would exempt counties with high unemployment rates (8.5% and above) from work requirements being imposed on Medicaid.  Then a related piece was published in the New York Times Upshot.  In "Which Poor People Shouldn't Have to Work for Aid?" Emily Badger and Margot-Sanger Katz quote Heather Hahn, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute.

The problem, Ms. Hahn and others say, is that geography captures just one kind of barrier to employment. “If you’re taking only the geography as the structure,” Ms. Hahn said, “it’s really overlooking the much more obvious racial structure.” African-Americans who face racial discrimination in the job market are more likely to have a hard time finding work. 

And people who can’t afford cars and live where public transit is inadequate have a harder time. So do the poor with criminal records, or those without a high school diploma, or people with problems securing child care.

Policies that exempt high-unemployment places, but not people who face other obstacles to work, selectively acknowledge barriers for only some of the poor. In effect, they suggest that unemployment is a systemic problem in struggling rural communities — but that in poor urban neighborhoods, it’s a matter of individual decisions.

They then quote David Super of Georgetown Law, who studies public benefits programs.    

The hardships of areas that have seen industry leave are very real; the hardships of rural areas that have had jobs automated away are real.

* * * 

But so are hardships that come from a lack of child care or transportation, he said. “It is troubling that one set of conditions are being taken seriously and another are being scoffed at.”

One thing both Hahn and Super seem not to realize is that public transportation and child care deficits are much more acute in rural communities than urban ones (a point made, with lots of data back up, in my 2007 piece on welfare reform as a mismtach for rural communities."  And the problem of criminal records  looms large for the chronically unemployed in rural places, too.  Employers don't want to hire these folks, even when they are white.  (And I do acknowledge that the criminalization of poverty and the war on drugs have had a disproportionate impact on communities of color).

I agree that we should attend to all of these barriers to employment, but the "rural v. urban" and "black v. white" framing is divisive.  It echoes the "who's worse off" or ranking of oppressions frame that has become too common amidst the proliferation of identity politics.  It fails to seek common ground.  Which reminds me that today is the second Monday in the 40 days of action invoked by the revival of Martin Luther King, Jr., Poor People's Campaign.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Elite hypocrisy about working class white and rural women? The case of the West Virginia teachers strike

I've been keeping an eye on elite bashing of working class and rural whites for years now, and I published my first article about it as long ago as 2011.  But the election of 2016 brought the badmouthing to a fever pitch, and I've occasionally blogged about the phenomenon, such as here and here.

One "series" I see on Twitter begins:  "And in today's episode of:  I Bet I Know Who You Voted For..." That is the common  preface to re-Tweets of headlines that could previously have appeared in the "Darwin Awards" or perhaps the petty crime pages of a local paper.  I'm pasting one below.  It re-Tweets a Fox News Tweet that reads "Substitute allegedly brought boxed wine to school, vomited in class."

Another re-Tweets this Fox News Tweet:  "Woman charged with choking teen for blocking view at Disney fireworks show."

On a related note, here's an item from Instagram just a few days ago, from the account called guerrillafeminism that reads "happy international women's day except the 53% of white women who voted for trump."

Pat Bagley, the cartoonist for the Salt Lake City Tribune (whose work I greatly admire, by the way--both cartoonist and paper), has referred to Trump's "idiot followers."  I could provide many more illustrations of this phenomenon.

With that background, you can imagine my surprise--but also delight--when I saw this Tweet from Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress, which bills itself as an

independent nonpartisan policy institute that is dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans, through bold, progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action. Our aim is not just to change the conversation, but to change the country.

Despite the "nonpartisan" billing, I see Center for American Progress as clearly left leaning (a good thing in my book!).  Tanden's Tweet reads:

The teachers of West Virginia are heroes.  They deserve good pay and a real raise.  I stand with them.

Now, I don't recall any past Tweets by Tanden blasting Trump supporters, though I do recall some highly critical of Trump.  That's fine by me.  It's a line I've drawn myself--at least in the last year or so (I was a bit less discriminating--a bit more knee jerk--as I reeled in the wake of election of 2016)  I readily take aim at Trump but try to be more thoughtful and circumspect re: Trump supporters.  I'm looking to understand them, trying to listen empathically. (I've got a whole law review article forthcoming about female Trump supporters, delivered as the key note address at the Toledo Law Review symposium in October, 2017:  The Women Feminism Forgot:  Rural and Working Class White Women in the Era of Trump.  I hope to have the text posted soon on my ssrn.com page).

But the bottom line is that some things I saw on Twitter about the West Virginia teachers--many sympathetic comments of the sort Tanden shared--had me wondering if the lefties doing this Tweeting realized that many of the folks they were lauding and advocating for had no doubt voted for Trump.  That is, these newfound labor heroes with their wild-cat strike were one and the same with (many) reviled Trump voters.  Some 68% of West Virginians voted for Trump!  Could I possibly be seeing praise for these women--praise from the left?   These are the same women that many lefties on Twitter have said "get what they deserve" if they lose their healthcare (thanks to Trump's effort to dismantle Obamacare) or face further economic decline (thanks, for example, to the long-term consequences of Trump's tax reform law).

(Btw, I was at an Appalachian Justice symposium at West Virginia University College of Law in Morgantown from Thursday Feb. 22 'til Saturday Feb. 24th, and I got to see the picketing--and hear the honking in support--first-hand, which was pretty cool.  One of my favorite signs, this published in the Washington Post, is below )

Michelle Goldberg, a relatively new columnist at the New York Times who is writing a lot about gender issues, offered up this column under the headline, "The Teachers Revolt in West Virginia."  She called the strike "thrilling," noting that strikes by teachers are unlawful in West Virginia, which became a right-to-work state a few years ago, and where unions do not have collective bargaining rights. Yet, Goldberg writes,

teachers and some other school employees in all of the state’s 55 counties are refusing to return to work until lawmakers give them a 5 percent raise, and commit to addressing their rapidly rising health insurance premiums.

Goldberg further explains that the "obvious impetus" for action is West Virginia's awful pay of teachers, which ranks 48th in the nation (read more analysis here).  She also discusses the critical role that health care/health insurance plays in the labor dispute:

 In the past, solid health care benefits helped make up for low wages, but because West Virginia hasn’t been putting enough money into the state agency that insures public employees, premiums and co-payments have been increasing significantly.  

Ah, there's that health care problem again, by which I mean you should read this and this, among other sources cited and discussed in that forthcoming Toledo Law Review article. 

Having pored over many, many mainstream media reports of white working class Trump supporters in places like Appalachia (you guessed it, all discussed in that Toledo Law Review article!), I was struck that the women Goldberg identified and interviewed did not appear to be Trump supporters.  Quite to the contrary, these women are held out as having responded to Trump's election by becoming part of what is popularly known as "the resistance." I was delighted to learn about and hear from these women, but was Goldberg unable to find any Trump supporters among the striking teachers?  I would very much have liked to have heard their attitudes about the strike, also in relation to their support for Trump.  Did they reconcile the two?

Here are excerpts/quotes about the two women Goldberg did feature, Jenny Craig, a special education teacher from Triadelphia (population 811, northern panhandle) and Amanda Howard Garvin, an elementary art teacher in Morgantown (third largest city in the state, home of WVU):

Craig described the anti-Trump Women’s March, as well as the explosion of local political organizing that followed it, as a “catalyst” for at least some striking teachers.

Goldberg quotes Craig:

You have women now taking leadership roles in unionizing, in standing up, in leading initiatives for fairness and equality and justice for everyone.

Goldberg also quotes Garvin:

As a profession, we’re largely made up of women. ... There are a bunch of men sitting in an office right now telling us that we don’t deserve anything better. 

Oh how I LOVE that quote.  In the wake of Trump’s election, Garvin added, women are standing up to say: 

No. We’re equal here.

I sure hope Garvin is right that the sentiment and movement are as widespread as she suggests--and as Goldberg implies.  If this is accurate, liberal elites--including feminists--will have to give Craig, Garvin and so many more like them their due.  (Indeed, teacher strikes may be in the works in the equally "red" states of Oklahoma and Kentucky, too).  That will challenge deeply entrenched stereotypes about folks from this region (read more here and here), which will in turn serve all of us quite well.  

By the way, the strike succeeded, with the teachers getting what they held out for.  You can find more exciting coverage of the West Virginia teachers strike here, here and here.  And don't miss this by WVU Law Professor and education law expert, Joshua Weishart.  

The question that all of this leaves me with is this:  What can the WV teachers strike teach us about how to build and sustain cross-class coalitions, including among whites?  How can these intra-racial coalitions interface with cross-race coalitions for even stronger pacts among progressives? And what role will gender play in all of this coalition building?  

Other hopeful news of change in relation to women and the national political landscape is here, here and here.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism, Feminist Legal Theory, and UC Davis Faculty Blog.