How White Ideals Color US Race Relations

Author Joan Walsh on her book and the notion that minorities get handouts while whites work hard

By Edward Wyckoff Williams, The Root

In her new book,What’s the Matter With White People?: Why We Long For a Golden Age That Never Was, Joan Walsh, editor-at-large for Salon.com, tells the story of the white working class in 20th- and 21st-century America.

Using her personal journey growing up in a blue-collar, Irish Catholic family, Walsh offers a window into the hopes, fears, racial anxieties and political leanings of a group who have become in some ways all but invisible in a post-All in the Family era.

Walsh also uses the election of the nation’s first African-American president – and subsequent backlash from the far-right – as an opportunity to explore racial politics, given that mainstream American identity is largely defined vis-a-vis whiteness. As the browning of America continues, the Republican Party’s platform is increasingly invested in using race to divide and conquer. Walsh explores the dog-whistle politics – particularly around the issue of welfare – that have been central to America’s political discourse since the implementation of Nixon’s Southern strategy and the rise of the Reagan-Democrats: namely, disgruntled white working-class voters who are socially conservative and have been encouraged, often unknowingly, to resent the black, the brown and the poor.

Her book examines the fallacy that minorities have benefited from affirmative action at the expense of whites and explains why many poor and middle-class white Americans vote Republican, even against their own economic interests.

Read the interview with Joan Walsh here.

ABHM’s own Fran Kaplan speaks directly to white readers about race.

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