NO, IT'S NOT OK TO BELITTLE POOR WHITE PEOPLE

Anonymous said...

Jeez, what a tight ass liberal you are. Is there anything that doesn't offend your exaggerated sense of social injustice. Do you sit up nights dreaming this shit up.

Anonymous said...

I can't believe you are defending ignorant dumb-asses and comparing this to racial issues. Que chingen su madre los Trump-loving hillybillies, como decia mi tio.

By Esther J. Cepeda
Washington Post Writers Group
CHICAGO -- We live in a country where it’s considered out of bounds to put down African-Americans and other ethnic and racial minorities, LGBTs, unlawfully present immigrants and many other special interest groups.
But, as has long been the case, poor white people are simply another story.
Derogatory names such as “redneck” and “hillbilly” have been co-opted by poor whites themselves as a reaction to derision from the so-called educated class. But other terms, such as “white trash” and “hick” -- terms that have become seemingly omnipresent among liberals dismissing Donald Trump’s populist appeal -- are, if you held them to the same standards as other ethnic epithets, just plain hate speech.
But, again, since the targets are white -- and supposedly privileged by the color of their skin -- those who put them down usually get a pass.
Yet, let’s be clear about just how disenfranchised poor whites are: Not only are they the object of derision on the left, they’re apparently becoming fair game for conservatives as well.
I’m referring specifically to a piece in National Review magazine that hasn’t made many eyelashes bat, given its subject.
In his essay “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction,” roving correspondent Kevin D. Williamson writes that, basically, all this kerfuffle about working-class whites being angry enough to buy into Trump’s rhetoric because globalization has destroyed decent-paying factory jobs is beside the point. Williamson thinks these losers should just get off their butts and go elsewhere to find jobs since wanting work in their own communities “is the indulgence of absurd sentimentality.”
Moreover, neither globalization nor immigration is to blame for ruining the quality-of-life and life expectancies of poor white people -- “nobody did this to them. They failed themselves,” writes Williamson, noting that this conclusion comes “if you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy -- which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog.”
Hmm, I wonder if Williams would have the spine to say this to my family’s faces -- that would be my white husband’s parents, sisters and extended family, who live in rural Southern Illinois towns so economically depressed that those who are lucky enough to work do, in fact, commute 40 or 50 miles one-way or have had to move away from their families.
Williamson continues: “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. ... The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”
They seem to all be sanctimonious struggling-Rust-Belt-factory-town addicts in Williamson’s vision of your typical sample of poor white country dwellers. But over 20 years of marriage into a family in which no fewer than half live in mobile homes, drive pickups and/or own shotguns, I can’t say I’ve known of any of my in-laws to be either drug or welfare dependent.
Still, I’m sure we can all agree that “real opportunity” is the cure to what ails these communities. That and oh, let’s say, a modicum of respect for the 10 percent of non-Hispanic whites, or nearly 20 million people, who live in poverty.
It’s a well-documented fact that poor whites are dying at record rates due to poor nutrition, drug addiction and suicide. According to Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case, in middle age, poor whites are dying at such high rates that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans.
Those committed to a strictly race-based agenda that simplistically labels all whites as natural oppressors/enemies to people of color miss out on the common cause that all who live in poverty, or at the bottom of the middle class, share.
If Williamson’s high-profile treatment of poor whites as drug-addicted mongrels whose communities deserve to die isn’t a rallying cry for reaching across ethnic and racial boundaries to coalesce politically around the issues of elitism, poverty and lack of opportunity, I don’t know what is.

Esther J. Cepeda is a Nationally Syndicated Columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.