Academic literature on the topic 'Working class whites – united states – biography'

By the close of the nineteenth century, Hawai‘i had become a newly annexed territory of the United States and was tightly controlled by a cohesive oligarchy ofhaolesugar capitalists. The “enormous concentration of wealth and power” held by the Big Five sugar factors of Honolulu up until statehood was unparalleled elsewhere in the United States (Cooper and Daws 1985: 3–4). In contrast, native Hawai‘ians and immigrants recruited from China, Portugal, Japan, and the Philippines—in successive and overlapping waves—endured the low wages and poor working and living conditions characteristic of other agricultural export regions.

Recent research finds that there is a growing class gap in levels of civic engagement among young whites in the United States. Much of the literature on civic engagement focuses on individual– and family–level factors related to civic engagement. Our evidence suggests that it is critically important to consider variation and change in community–level factors as well, and that such factors may play a key role in facilitating or inhibiting civic engagement. To explore the puzzle of the growing class gap among young whites in civic engagement, we conducted two–generation in–depth qualitative interviews in white working class neighborhoods in Philadelphia and its inner suburbs, with companion interviews among Philadelphia–area youth living in middle class communities. We complement these interviews with quantitative measures of institutional and demographic changes in these neighborhoods over time. Our evidence suggests that a withdrawal of institutional investments in working class neighborhoods (and relative to middle class neighborhoods), along with an increase in population turnover and racial and ethnic heterogeneity, which has disproportionately impacted working class neighborhoods as well, may be important factors in understanding the growing class gap in civic engagement among white youth.

Body mass index (bmi) values reflect the net balance between nutrition, work effort, and calories consumed to fight disease. Nineteenth-century prison records in the United States demonstrate that the bmi values of blacks and whites were distributed symmetrically; neither underweight nor obese individuals were common among the working class. bmi values declined throughout the nineteenth century. By modern standards, however, nineteenth-century bmis were in healthy weight ranges, though the biological living standards in rural areas exceeded those in urban areas. The increase in bmis during the twentieth century did not have its origin in the nineteenth century.

Growing racial, ideological, and cultural polarization within the American electorate contributed to the shocking victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Using data from American National Election Studies surveys, we show that Trump’s unusually explicit appeals to racial and ethnic resentment attracted strong support from white working-class voters while repelling many college-educated whites along with the overwhelming majority of nonwhite voters. However, Trump’s campaign exploited divisions that have been growing within the electorate for decades because of demographic and cultural changes in American society. The 2016 presidential campaign also reinforced another longstanding trend in American electoral politics: the rise of negative partisanship, that is voting based on hostility toward the opposing party and its leaders. We conclude with a discussion of the consequences of deepening partisan and affective polarization for American democracy and the perceptions by both experts and the public of an erosion in its quality.

Popular and scholarly accounts of Trump’s ascendency to the presidency of the United States on the part of the American white working-class use different variables to define the sociodemographic group because there is no “working-class White” variable available in benchmark datasets for researchers to code. To address this need, the Author ran a multinomial regression to assess whether income, education and racial identity predict working-class membership among white Americans, finding that income and education are statistically significant predictors of working-class whiteness, while racial identity is not. Arriving at a robust definition of “white working-class” in light of these findings, the paper next turns to a review of the extant literature. By retrieving studies from searches of computerised databases, hand searches and authoritative texts, the review critically surmises the explanatory accounts of Trump’s victory. Discussion of the findings from the review is presented in three principal sections. The first section explains how working-class White communities, crippled by a dearth of social and geographic mobility, have been “left behind” by the political elites. The second section examines how white Americans, whose dominant group position is threatened by demographic change, voted for Trump because of resonance between his populist rhetoric and their latent “racist” attitudes. The third and final section explores the implications of a changing America for native-born whites, and how America’s increasing ethnoracial diversity is eroding relations between its dominant and nondominant groups. The Author surmises by arguing that these explanatory accounts must be understood in the context of this new empirical approximation of “working-class White”.

If, as a famous dead white European man once suggested, the point of studying racism is to change it, what can we learn about ending racism by studying it as whiteness? The first part of the paper summarizes some of the major issues and findings of recent studies of whiteness in the United States. It suggests that there is a hidden life at the heart of whiteness which is about preserving a set of specifically white constructions of masculinity and femininity, and that whites' lack of consciousness about this, and about white privilege in general, have undermined antiracist efforts. It summarizes some of the ways in which working-class white privilege is gendered, and how notions of masculinity and femininity are racial. Part II examines whiteness as ambivalence about the privileges and costs of whiteness as a useful entry point for understanding impulses to white antiracism.

(Title: Just Like Black, Only Better: Poor White in Antebellum South of America Depicted in Solomon Northup’s Novel “Twelve Years as A Slave”). Antebellum era, the period before the Civil War occured, or before the year 1861, in the United States is used to relate to the enslavement of black American. In fact, the era was not merely about black, but also poor white. This study is purposed to describe the poor whites’ life in antebellum America as reflected in Twelve Years As A Slave (1855), a narrative biography novel written by Solomon Northup. Set up the story in New York, Washingotn DC, and New Orleans, the author (and focalizer at once) told the story based on his own experience as a black who was captivated and sold into slavery for twelve years. Although the novel centered its story on black character, it also reflected the life of poor whites who were also being “enslaved” by their white counterparts. Through sociology of literature perspective, this study reveals that the character of poor white that represented through John M. Tibeats, Armsby, and James H. Burch came from Great Britain especially from Ireland. Mostly, they moved to America as incarcerated people. They lived under the poverty and some of them were the vagrants and petty criminals. Poor white during antebellum era in America was positioned in the lower social level. They were “enslaved” by their white master but more better compared to the black slaves. It can be noticed that poor white were positioned in low social level because of the socio-economic problem, while blacks were race and racism. Keywords: antebellum America, poor white, slavery, social class, American literature

Substantial racial/ethnic and gender disparities in COVID-19 mortality have been previously documented. However, few studies have investigated the impact of individual socioeconomic position (SEP) on these disparities. Objectives: To determine the joint effects of SEP, race/ethnicity, and gender on the burden of COVID-19 mortality. A secondary objective was to determine whether differences in opportunities for remote work were correlated with COVID-19 death rates for sociodemographic groups. Design: Annual mortality study which used a special government tabulation of 2020 COVID-19-related deaths stratified by decedents’ SEP (measured by educational attainment), gender, and race/ethnicity. Setting: United States in 2020. Participants: COVID-19 decedents aged 25 to 64 years old (n = 69,001). Exposures: Socioeconomic position (low, intermediate, and high), race/ethnicity (Hispanic, Black, Asian, Indigenous, multiracial, and non-Hispanic white), and gender (women and men). Detailed census data on occupations held by adults in 2020 in each of the 36 sociodemographic groups studied were used to quantify the possibility of remote work for each group. Main Outcomes and Measures: Age-adjusted COVID-19 death rates for 36 sociodemographic groups. Disparities were quantified by relative risks and 95% confidence intervals. High-SEP adults were the (low-risk) referent group for all relative risk calculations. Results: A higher proportion of Hispanics, Blacks, and Indigenous people were in a low SEP in 2020, compared with whites. COVID-19 mortality was five times higher for low vs. high-SEP adults (72.2 vs. 14.6 deaths per 100,000, RR = 4.94, 95% CI 4.82–5.05). The joint detriments of low SEP, Hispanic ethnicity, and male gender resulted in a COVID-19 death rate which was over 27 times higher (178.0 vs. 6.5 deaths/100,000, RR = 27.4, 95% CI 25.9–28.9) for low-SEP Hispanic men vs. high-SEP white women. In regression modeling, percent of the labor force in never remote jobs explained 72% of the variance in COVID-19 death rates. Conclusions and Relevance: SARS-CoV-2 infection control efforts should prioritize low-SEP adults (i.e., the working class), particularly the majority with “never remote” jobs characterized by inflexible and unsafe working conditions (i.e., blue collar, service, and retail sales workers).

This chapter examines the policy arguments advanced in Fisher v. University of Texas, an antiracial diversity in higher education case argued before the United States Supreme Court. The author contends that the arguments put forth by the petitioner are intended not only to frame White people as the expressed victims of opportunity-expanding policies, such as diversity, but also to construct people of color as undeserving of admissions to one of America's most preeminent public institutions of higher education. In addition to being ahistorical, the anti-diversity arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas purposely dismiss the structural arrangements and institutionalized practices responsible for the development of the University of Texas's diversity policy. The chapter concludes with a recommendation for a multidiscipline approach to education policy analysis in order to better understand and contextualize how race is operationalized in contemporary public policy debates. In 1942… segregation was considered fair. –Terry H. Anderson … the fact that special treatment for minority applicants upset working and middle-class whites so much more than preferences for applicants whose parents are faculty members, alumni, or major contributors cannot be explained solely by recent Supreme Court decisions holding that any racial classifications must be reviewed with utmost suspicion. –Derrick Bell

In 1945, American labor unions optimistically expected considerable growth in the coming decades. The New Deal policies continued their influence, and organized labor achieved its highest density rating (35 percent) ever recorded in the United States. By the mid-1950s, however, that figure began to decline, slowly at first and then, after 1970, swiftly. At the close of 2011, it had fallen to 11.8 percent. The cause of this reduction was not simply employer opposition, although that did occur. Rather, the American working class itself underwent a political and sociological sea change, propelled by southern migration of whites and blacks into the industrial North, sharp changes in political attitudes during and after the 1960s, and the economic transformation of the American and global economy that began in the 1970s. Some of these changes were beyond the scope of organized labor’s ability to alter; regarding others, labor proved to be slow, even hesitant, in its response. One consequence was the resurgence of a sharply conservative political vision among American working people that had a powerful impact on national elections and the policy choices followed.

AbstractIn the United States, gentrification typically involves whites displacing African American, working-class communities. This work uses a political economy framework to better understand the clues displacement leaves behind. Specifically, this research investigates what happened to a former community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, known as Silver Hill, which was an enclave of mostly African American residents founded in the late nineteenth century just west of the city. Through archival research and investigation of the remaining traces of the neighborhood, we develop a theory of spatial erasure that highlights how wealthy white communities that grew up around Silver Hill subsumed and eradicated it. Specifically, racial capitalism played a major role in the abuse and neglect of Silver Hill. The neighborhood became surrounded by wealthy white developments which cut off road access to their homes. Today, a cemetery, two houses, and a litany of historical records offer clues about what was once a thriving African American community. Additionally, descendants of the neighborhood’s residents provide key information about its life and death. We discuss the implications of examining this history, especially as it pertains to the collective remembrance of Silver Hill.

AbstractThe New York metropolitan area is one of the oldest, largest, and perhaps most complex urban region in the United States (U.S.). Its 23.7 million residents live across four states, produce a GDP of more than $1.7 trillion, are governed by a fragmented political system, and experience persistently high degrees of geographic and racial/ethnic inequality and segregation. This chapter investigates the evolving spatial organization of occupation and race across the metropolitan area. While white professionals have traditionally lived in an outer ring of suburbs and blue-collar immigrant and minority groups have lived closer to the city center, our research shows that the forces of gentrification and minority and immigrant suburbanization have been turning the metropolitan area inside out. Specifically, young, usually white, professionals are increasingly located in and around the central city whereas many working-class minorities have shifted away from it. At the heart of this spatial reordering lie the diminishing plurality of native-born whites within the region and the increasing share of immigrant minority groups, especially for foreign-born Hispanics and Asians. This trend has lessened the share of white males in better occupations even as the region’s occupational structure slowly but inexorably tilts toward managerial and professional occupations. Technology is transforming white-collar work as blue-collar work continues to disappear. Dramatic shifts are thus afoot, yet inequality and segregation remain high. We argue that these changes in the spatial organization of the metropolitan area challenge us to see these inequalities from a new vantage point. As elites are now more likely to live among less advantaged groups, this may provide the social basis for new thinking.

Chapter 3 of the book focuses on the character, reputation, and place-identity of the Buenaventura Lakes suburb, and the impact of linguistic transformations due to the community’s Latinization. Drawing on various data sources, the chapter shows how talk about landscape aesthetics, living conditions, crime, racial, ethnic, and class identities, and language intertwine to reinforce social class distinctions and the racialization of suburban spaces, places, and therefore people. The strong connection between suburban living and prosperity is unraveling, and Buenaventura Lakes is a declining suburb representative of the changing social and economic conditions and demographics in suburbs across the United States. Buenaventura Lakes, once a community for “country club living” and “affordable luxury,” is perceived as a Latino “ghetto” or “slum” in the eyes of residents and non-residents, Latinos and non-Latinos. Despite the populations’ income diversity and the high prices of some homes, the residents are paradoxically described as poor, lower class, low income, or at best working class. Additionally, the concentration of Latinos is interpreted as a lack of diversity. Thus, this suburb is constructed as a non-white space, foreign and uncomfortable for non-Latino whites, which adds to residential segregation in Greater Orlando.

"Academic leaders in the United States are tasked with establishing university strategic plans that facilitate a holistic educational experience in order to meet the needs of our diverse student populations. A holistic education includes the academic, social, emotional, and spiritual (meaning of life, finding purpose) necessities of our students. To this end, let us consider the leaders accountable for upholding this ethical imperative. This autoethnography examines the concept of Whiteness as Property (WaP) (Harris, 1993) to identify how the distribution of power amongst educational leaders maintains whites in a space of racialized privilege while using people of color to signal their commitment to establishing a diverse university culture. Using the WaP lens, allows for the analyses of the practices, behaviors, and other social performances administrators engage in to construct their leadership identities in relation to the current sociopolitical milieu concerning inclusion and diversity. Autoethnography illuminates these leadership practices in unique ways—the narratives are from the perspective of the non-traditional leader. We serve to collectively lead our universities in the right direction to meet our strategic goals and provide equable education for all students. As a working-class Latina occupying educational leadership roles, autoethnography permits the theorization of my liminal perspective to underscore the interconnected role of universities as apparatuses assisting in capital accumulation, legitimation, and production. The narratives provide an analytical and profoundly humanistic understanding of the experiences that shape our conscious behaviors, actions, and thoughts in our workplace."

In the decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African Americans made historic gains in accessing employment opportunities in racially integrated workplaces in U.S. business firms and government agencies. In the previous working papers in this series, we have shown that in the 1960s and 1970s, Blacks without college degrees were gaining access to the American middle class by moving into well-paid unionized jobs in capital-intensive mass production industries. At that time, major U.S. companies paid these blue-collar workers middle-class wages, offered stable employment, and provided employees with health and retirement benefits. Of particular importance to Blacks was the opening up to them of unionized semiskilled operative and skilled craft jobs, for which in a number of industries, and particularly those in the automobile and electronic manufacturing sectors, there was strong demand. In addition, by the end of the 1970s, buoyed by affirmative action and the growth of public-service employment, Blacks were experiencing upward mobility through employment in government agencies at local, state, and federal levels as well as in civil-society organizations, largely funded by government, to operate social and community development programs aimed at urban areas where Blacks lived. By the end of the 1970s, there was an emergent blue-collar Black middle class in the United States. Most of these workers had no more than high-school educations but had sufficient earnings and benefits to provide their families with economic security, including realistic expectations that their children would have the opportunity to move up the economic ladder to join the ranks of the college-educated white-collar middle class. That is what had happened for whites in the post-World War II decades, and given the momentum provided by the dominant position of the United States in global manufacturing and the nation’s equal employment opportunity legislation, there was every reason to believe that Blacks would experience intergenerational upward mobility along a similar education-and-employment career path. That did not happen. Overall, the 1980s and 1990s were decades of economic growth in the United States. For the emerging blue-collar Black middle class, however, the experience was of job loss, economic insecurity, and downward mobility. As the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first century began, moreover, it became apparent that this downward spiral was not confined to Blacks. Whites with only high-school educations also saw their blue-collar employment opportunities disappear, accompanied by lower wages, fewer benefits, and less security for those who continued to find employment in these jobs. The distress experienced by white Americans with the decline of the blue-collar middle class follows the downward trajectory that has adversely affected the socioeconomic positions of the much more vulnerable blue-collar Black middle class from the early 1980s. In this paper, we document when, how, and why the unmaking of the blue-collar Black middle class occurred and intergenerational upward mobility of Blacks to the college-educated middle class was stifled. We focus on blue-collar layoffs and manufacturing-plant closings in an important sector for Black employment, the automobile industry from the early 1980s. We then document the adverse impact on Blacks that has occurred in government-sector employment in a financialized economy in which the dominant ideology is that concentration of income among the richest households promotes productive investment, with government spending only impeding that objective. Reduction of taxes primarily on the wealthy and the corporate sector, the ascendancy of political and economic beliefs that celebrate the efficiency and dynamism of “free market” business enterprise, and the denigration of the idea that government can solve social problems all combined to shrink government budgets, diminish regulatory enforcement, and scuttle initiatives that previously provided greater opportunity for African Americans in the government and civil-society sectors.

Thus far in reporting the findings of our project “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” our analysis of what has happened to African American employment over the past half century has documented the importance of manufacturing employment to the upward socioeconomic mobility of Blacks in the 1960s and 1970s and the devastating impact of rationalization—the permanent elimination of blue-collar employment—on their socioeconomic mobility in the 1980s and beyond. The upward mobility of Blacks in the earlier decades was based on the Old Economy business model (OEBM) with its characteristic “career-with-one-company” (CWOC) employment relations. At its launching in 1965, the policy approach of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission assumed the existence of CWOC, providing corporate employees, Blacks included, with a potential path for upward socioeconomic mobility over the course of their working lives by gaining access to productive opportunities and higher pay through stable employment within companies. It was through these internal employment structures that Blacks could potentially overcome barriers to the long legacy of job and pay discrimination. In the 1960s and 1970s, the generally growing availability of unionized semiskilled jobs gave working people, including Blacks, the large measure of employment stability as well as rising wages and benefits characteristic of the lower levels of the middle class. The next stage in this process of upward socioeconomic mobility should have been—and in a nation as prosperous as the United States could have been—the entry of the offspring of the new Black blue-collar middle class into white-collar occupations requiring higher educations. Despite progress in the attainment of college degrees, however, Blacks have had very limited access to the best employment opportunities as professional, technical, and administrative personnel at U.S. technology companies. Since the 1980s, the barriers to African American upward socioeconomic mobility have occurred within the context of the marketization (the end of CWOC) and globalization (accessibility to transnational labor supplies) of high-tech employment relations in the United States. These new employment relations, which stress interfirm labor mobility instead of intrafirm employment structures in the building of careers, are characteristic of the rise of the New Economy business model (NEBM), as scrutinized in William Lazonick’s 2009 book, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States (Upjohn Institute). In this paper, we analyze the exclusion of Blacks from STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) occupations, using EEO-1 employment data made public, voluntarily and exceptionally, for various years between 2014 and 2020 by major tech companies, including Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook (now Meta), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Intel, Microsoft, PayPal, Salesforce, and Uber. These data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at these tech companies in recent years. The data also shine a light on the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of large masses of lower-paid labor in the United States at leading U.S. tech companies, including tens of thousands of sales workers at Apple and hundreds of thousands of laborers & helpers at Amazon. In the cases of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Intel, we have access to EEO-1 data from earlier decades that permit in-depth accounts of the employment transitions that characterized the demise of OEBM and the rise of NEBM. Given our findings from the EEO-1 data analysis, our paper then seeks to explain the enormous presence of Asian Americans and the glaring absence of African Americans in well-paid employment under NEBM. A cogent answer to this question requires an understanding of the institutional conditions that have determined the availability of qualified Asians and Blacks to fill these employment opportunities as well as the access of qualified people by race, ethnicity, and gender to the employment opportunities that are available. Our analysis of the racial/ethnic determinants of STEM employment focuses on a) stark differences among racial and ethnic groups in educational attainment and performance relevant to accessing STEM occupations, b) the decline in the implementation of affirmative-action legislation from the early 1980s, c) changes in U.S. immigration policy that favored the entry of well-educated Asians, especially with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, and d) consequent social barriers that qualified Blacks have faced relative to Asians and whites in accessing tech employment as a result of a combination of statistical discrimination against African Americans and their exclusion from effective social networks.