Five myths about class in America

[rug]

This young employee of the Alexandria Glass Factory worked day shifts one week and night shifts the next. (Library of Congress/Lewis Wickes Hine/Library of Congress)

By Nancy Isenberg July 1 at 1:12 PM

The 2016 election is about class. “For the first time in a generation, the working class is front and center in an election cycle,” one MarketWatch writer proclaimed. Commentators fret that Hillary Clinton has “lost” the working class and that Donald Trump has risen to prominence on the backs of “white trash.” (Never mind that Trump voters are, on average, wealthier than Clinton’s constituency.) Bernie Sanders even calls himself the working class candidate. This demonstrates just how fuzzy this category is — though Sanders advocates for the working class, he has spent his career in politics, not manual or wage labor. There are lots of other misconceptions about class in America, too. Here, we debunk five.

MYTH NO. 1

The working class is white and male.

Trump is often credited with engaging the working class. He “won with the working class voters the GOP forgot,” blared one Breitbart column. Meanwhile, “Hillary is losing white working Joes,” proclaimed the Toronto Star. Even Sanders argued that Democrats had allowed Republicans “to capture the votes of the majority of working people in this country.”

Of course, that’s true only if you ignore Asians, Latinos and African Americans. “Factor them into the population of ‘working people,’?” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes, “and Democrats win that group, handily.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-class-in-america/2016/07/01/244ddb44-3e20-11e6-a66f-aa6c1883b6b1_story.html