What about the White People?

In the year since the November 2016 election of Donald Trump a central question among many, including academics, has been: how did this happen? While some academics–cum–public intellectuals produced nuanced takes on Trump's connection to long histories of white supremacist institutions, race-based campaigning, and contemporary problems of inequality and democratic deficits, many inside and outside academe soon found a culprit in the figure of the "White Working Class."¹ The perennial bugaboo of liberal politics since the Reagan Revolution, the collected resentments and cultural pathologies of the white working class—what Barack Obama famously called the way they cling to their "religion and guns"—seemed to answer the question.² Yet the category of "white working class" does not so much generate answers to the rise of Trump as demand them.³ Attempts to understand the white working class quickly seized on a set of books that, though predating the 2016 election, seemed to uncannily predict its results. On the social science side of whiteness studies we find the two books under review here: Katherine J. Cramer's Politics of Resentment and Justin Gest's New Minority.⁴ Both cut through the abstraction called the "white working class" and with refreshing clarity produce nuanced accounts of groups of people that are very different in terms of geography, occupation, and institutional power but that share an aggrieved racial identity and a resentment rooted in the idea that they are being "left behind." The benefits of the authors' approach is that it combines behavioral analysis of individual attitudes with knowledge of institutions—like political parties, unions, the judicial system, welfare bureaucracies—that have translated white working-class grievances into seismic political consequences. Yet even in nuanced and complex accounts of whiteness, there is always the danger of reproducing the very mythologies and practices of whiteness that one wants to critique. I believe that Cramer and Gest inadvertently yet dangerously fall back on viewing their white working-class subjects as reasonable, if misguided and misunderstood, political citizens; they argue for greater recognition and inclusion of white working-class concerns instead of critiquing whiteness itself as a problem of domination. They end up producing only a partial narrative of contemporary American racial politics, one that needs to be supplemented by critical accounts of political action by people of color and indigenous groups. I first focus on Cramer's study of rural white voters in Wisconsin and then on Gest's ethnographic account of Ohio rustbelt voters to show how Gest can be put in conversation with Cramer's approach by integrating behavioral research with an analysis of the institutional structures that translate such behavior into political action.

Cramer's Politics of Resentment begins with the acknowledgment that she had no intention of studying white rural voters in Wisconsin. A political scientist trained in behavioral research, which is to say the analysis of individual voter behavior and attitudes, she was paid by the University of Wisconsin–Madison to survey Wisconsinites' views of the flagship university. Yet fortuitously, Cramer's time in the field coincided with the election of Tea Party politician Scott Walker as governor, his controversial attack on labor rights, and the recall campaign against him; Cramer was able to observe her interviewees' political views mobilized in a period of contentious politics.⁵ In the process Cramer discovered the complex and often resentful attitudes of Wisconsin's rural voters toward any manifestation of urban governance. While trained in collecting polling data, Cramer adopts a broader understanding of behavioral research to engage in more qualitative research. She identified a number of local groups across the state that already met regularly and would allow her to listen in on their conversations and ask questions. While not fully immersive ethnographic work in the traditional...