give us our due

We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans, we're Americans. With a capital "A", huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts.

- Stripes, 1981

There's a history in this country that Barack Obama never seems to have heard. It is usually called 'the immigrant experience', and its basic assumptions are at the center of why Obama is so incapable of connecting with working class white voters.

The majority of "whites" in America are not descended from the Mayflower. Our people came here through Ellis Island. We mostly weren't considered white when we first got here - in fact, some of the earliest IQ tests proved "scientifically" that we were subhuman (which is largely why we ignore jerks who publish books like The Bell Curve).

But we were proud to become Americans. And now peoples' definition of whiteness has expanded to include our features.



We are not passive beneficiaries of the slavery system. We had to fight for our place in America's prosperity, and we are aware (acutely aware, this election) that we are already losing what we've gained.

The first of us got here just in time to fight the Civil War (on the Union side), and after that the rich whites used us like disposable tissues in and on their factories and railroads and mines.

Cities like New York were so crowded with dirt-poor immigrants that the only way to get a job was to literally sell your body, signing away all rights. Conditions were terrible - sweatshop conditions. Immigrant labor made other people rich, but the workers lived terrible lives.

We did benefit from wealthy whites who were horrified at what we were subjected to. There is no simplified narrative like the one Rev. Wright gives us, where you can tell who the villain is by something as easy to check as skin color. If rich whites were as bad as some people seem to think, immigrants and blacks would still be living the way they did in 1904. It is crude and simplistic and insulting to suggest that you can divide people into moral categories of good and evil in such a fashion. There were activists who spoke out and who worked to end horrific conditions and we owe them something. And it's petty and ungracious to refuse to acknowledge that debt.

But although we had help, we also fought and died ourselves for what we gained: minimum wage, forty hour workweeks, child labor laws, workplace safety regulations.

Obama is probably familiar with the Illinois Pullman strike.

(Do Americans realize that once upon a time it was legal for employers to pay wages in "scrip", that is, company credit?)

We fought for rights such as the right to not be kept locked into the building, after 146 teenage girls died in a fire (started because the building was not well kept).

I have heard a lot about how unions "overpay" their employees. What they don't realize is that working in a blast furnace is like working in Hell. It's hot and it's dangerous and it's hard work. The shifts are often crazy, ten or twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch, working through weekends and holidays, very frequently on a rotating schedule that seems designed to make sure nobody ever gets a good night's sleep. The "big bucks" usually comes from overtime, not base wages.

...of three men at J & L who fell
when a catwalk buckled
to the crucible
and how their screams melted...

- excerpt, Open Hearth, by M. Lisa Shattuck
from Youngstownsteel.com

Factory workers dying on the job isn't something from last century. Even with all the nearly obsessive focus on safety, people still die, and factories still post those Days Since Last Accident signs. In a way, it kinda bugs me that those signs don't count the most pernicious danger: falling asleep behind the wheel - I wish someone would do something about back-to-back shifts. However, before there were unions, fatal accidents were not only common, but the surviving spouse usually had to pay the company for any damage done to the machinery.

Fighting those excesses in power is, to me is the essence of what the Democratic party stands for. I'm the so-called labor vote and my first interest is a decent life for anyone willing to work hard and play by the rules. This has two parts:

1. a decent life: this is what the labor movement fought for. It's what conservatives don't get/don't want to talk about. Americans had to fight hard to win a good standard of living because the sweatshop is what capitalism looks like in its natural state.

Just as our system works on the principle of checks and balances, so too economics and politics need to check and balance the other. Economics without politics leads to corruption and tyranny; politics without economics leads to stagnation. Either way, the end result of extremism is collapse.

2. willing to work hard and play by the rules: this half is important. It's the part liberals don't get/don't want to talk about. Working stiffs live in that world economists are describing when they speak of "competition for scarce resources". Scarcity is reality and it means life is naturally harsh. Civilized life means banding together to make life a little less uncertain. A little less painful.

The working class works hard and plays by the rules and wants to be recognized and rewarded for that. Some of us take it as a personal affront when our tax dollars, instead of supporting things that benefit us, are instead diverted to the sort of handouts that reward people for rejecting our ethical code.

Personally, I really like the idea of a safety net - but I resent that so many safety net projects specifically exclude white people; they should be open to anyone who has a legitimate need. I want to hit something when I hear it suggested that reverse discrimination never hurt nobody; of course it does. It's just that nobody listens to the people who actually carry that burden.

And lots of people resent programs that destroy incentive and undermine the work ethic.

There's been a lot of shaming going on for the past several decades. People aren't proud to be an American anymore, and they don't want to speak the language, and expecting people to assimilate the way my own people assimilated is considered somehow insulting.

To become affluent too often means leaving behind your immigrant roots. In today's America, if you started from working class white stock but you're moving up in the world, you either become a conservative, or you disown your heritage and take on the peculiar identity of the latte liberal - the self-hating white, the America-hating privileged American.

Many liberals seem happy to do this. They are only too pleased to have an excuse to be angry with their small town origins. I guess it's fun to mock their parents' culture. They get to be better than, and smarter.

"The place where I come from
is a small town
They think so small
they use small words.
But not me
I'm smarter than that..."

"...and my Heaven will be a big Heaven
And I will walk through the front door."

- Peter Gabriel, Big Time

I won't vote for Obama because he doesn't understand that we don't share his identity crisis - we have our own identity, and we don't particularly want to renounce it so that we can become latte liberals. Or so that we can become free trade conservatives. Or so that we can become...whatever the hell it is he is offering us. (Kos Libertarianism?)

Once upon a time, the underprivileged stood together. The blacks (and other minorities) have legitimate grievances, but they are making a big mistake in letting their leaders turn their anger against "America", which too often means against the labor vote (divide and conquer).