In New Statesman, Helen Lewis has a column titled “From white trash to the whitelash: what do white people want?”:
A few weeks after the election of Donald Trump, a veteran British politician told me about visiting a multi-ethnic primary school. He watched a lesson where the pupils were asked to draw something that represented “their culture”. Everyone got to work, except one kid – a white boy. When asked what was wrong, he replied: “Miss, I haven’t got a culture.”
That is gut-wrenching.
Of conventional wisdom among the P.C. elite:
White people are the butt of the joke, which is no problem if you’re shielded by status and wealth. You can afford to laugh it off. But where does that leave those who are not rich and who don’t feel privileged? By the rules of polite society, they are certainly not allowed to be proud of being white. They can’t complain, either, because the general belief is that they are holding an ace.
Of the White Death:
Economists are now looking at the problems of being poor in a rich society, whose social frameworks are not built with the poor in mind. The Nobel winner Angus Deaton, who has studied early “deaths of despair” among white Americans, has argued that “if you had to choose between living in a poor village in India and living in the Mississippi Delta or in a suburb of Milwaukee in a trailer park, I’m not sure who would have the better life”. Part of his reasoning is that “life expectancy in much of Appalachia is below life expectancy in Bangladesh”.
That way of framing the White Death phenomenon is very gut-wrenching.
Lewis then provides her thoughts on the recent spate of books written by various liberals on the topic:
- The New Minority: White Working-Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality by Justin Gest
- White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg
- Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Hillbilly Elegy: a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J D Vance
