White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America
by Joan C. Williams
View on GoodreadsLaw professor Joan C. Williams's 2017 post-2016-election analysis of the American white working class — built on her decades of class-and-gender research — as a corrective to coastal-professional misreadings of the constituency Trump won and Democrats lost.
Core ideas
- The "professional class vs. working class" cultural frame is the book's organizing distinction — different value systems around honor vs. credentialing, hard work vs. self-actualization, family obligation vs. independence — and these aren't economic differences but cultural ones that map imperfectly onto income.
- The "middle class" most working-class Americans aspire to is not the professional-managerial class — it's stable industrial-employment respectability, which has been systematically dismantled, and professional-class commentary that conflates the two misreads what's been lost.
- The book is written for the professional class about the working class — Williams is explicit about her audience, and the book functions partly as cultural-translation aid for readers whose default explanations for 2016 were "racism" or "stupidity."
Published2017
Pages180
ISBN9781633693784
ReadFeb 2021
