White pain

ABSTRACT

President Trump’s 2016 electoral victory prompted a series of journalist inquiries into the pain of white Rust Belt voters. Imploring readers to heed their cries for help, profiles of “Trump Country” suggested that declining physical health and economic anxiety explained Trump’s success more so than racism and xenophobia. This essay argues that the rhetoric of white working-class pain reproduces what Franz Fanon called a historical-racial schema: a corporeal grid of intelligibility that prefigures how racialized subjects perceive their bodily sensations and movements in relation to others. Building on critical race scholarship on personhood, I contend that public pain is rhetorically constructed along a racialized continuum from fully actualized (white) humanity to (black) insensate flesh. As a result, profiles of the white body-in-pain implicitly register as uniquely worthy of public sympathy, particularly when juxtaposed to the black working class whose flesh bears the marks of historical racial violence.

KEYWORDS:

• pain
• white victimhood
• Donald J. Trump
• personhood
• common-sense racism

Notes

1 J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).

2 Michael Lerner, “Stop Shaming Trump Supporters,” New York Times, November 9, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/stop-shaming-trump-supporters.

3 Vinnie Rotondaro, “The Science of White Working Class Pain: Trump’s Appeal Is Rooted in the Body as Well as the Mind,” Salon, January 8, 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/01/08/trump-seduced-white-working-class_partner/.

4 Rotondaro, “Pain.”

5 Jennifer M. Silva, We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (London: Oxford University Press, 2019), 150.

6 Bryan J. McCann, “Therapeutic and Material <Victim>hood: Ideology and the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty Controversy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 382–401, doi:10.1080/14791420701632931.

7 Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (London: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3.

8 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); see also Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004).

9 Gerard A. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013), 129.

10 I borrow this term from Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso Books, 2009).

11 See Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65–81, doi:10.2307/464747; Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); and Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

12 See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999).

13 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political (New York: Verso Books, 2020), 112.

14 International Association for the Study of Pain, “IASP Terminology—IASP,” https://www.iasp-pain.org/Education/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1698#Pain (accessed December 14, 2017).

15 Michael J. Hyde, The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 95.

16 Emphasis original. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 22.

17 See Michael P. Vicaro, “A Liberal Use of ‘Torture’: Pain, Personhood, and Precedent in the US Federal Definition of Torture,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (2011): 401–26, doi:10.1353/rap.2011.0015.

18 Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2017).

19 Paur, Right to Maim, 78, 92.

20 Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2018), 16.

21 Amanda Nell Edgar and Holly Willson Holladay, “‘Everybody’s Hard Times are Different’: Country as a Political Investment in White Masculine Precarity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2019): 122–39, doi:10.1080/14791420.2019.1638952.

22 See Amanda Nell Edgar and Andre E. Johnson, The Struggle over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018).

23 See Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Lisa M. Corrigan, “On Rhetorical Criticism, Performativity, and White Fragility,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 86–8, doi:10.1080/15358593.2016.1183886; Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why it’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Anjali Vats, “Affecting White Accountability: What Mr. Rogers can Tell us about the (Racial) Futures of Communication,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 88–94, doi:10.1080/14791420.2020.1723800.

24 Paul E. Johnson, “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery,” Women’s Studies in Communication 40, no. 3 (2017): 229–50, doi:10.1080/07491409.2017.1346533.

25 See Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

26 Casey Ryan Kelly, “Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of Ressentiment,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 1 (2020): 2–24, doi:10.1080/00335630.2019.1698756.

27 Aaron David Gresson, America’s Atonement: Racial Pain, Recovery Rhetoric, and the Pedagogy of Healing (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 17.

28 Lisa M. Corrigan, Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), xxviii.

29 Corrigan, Black Feelings, xv.

30 See Stuart Hall, “The Whites of their Eyes: Racist Ideologies in the Media,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2010), 81–4; and Ryan Neville-Shepard, “Rand Paul at Howard University and the Rhetoric of the New Southern Strategy,” Western Journal of Communication 82, no. 1 (2018): 20–39, doi:10.1080/10570314.2017.1320809.

31 Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver, “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences between Blacks and Whites,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113, no. 16 (2016): 4296–4301, doi:10.1073/pnas.1516047113.

32 Matthew Houdek, “Racial Sedimentation and the Common Sense of Racialized Violence: The Case of Black Church Burnings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 3 (2018): 280, doi:10.1080/00335630.2018.1486035.

33 Kent A. Ono, Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a Colonial Past (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).

34 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/Ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 465, doi:10.1080/00335630.2019.1669068.

35 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1952/2008), 90.

36 Fanon, Black Skin, 91.

37 Fanon, Black Skin, 91

38 Fanon, Black Skin, 91.

39 Fanon, Black Skin, 92.

40 See also Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

41 Butler, Nonviolence, 112.

42 Wynter, “Unsettling.”

43 Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 324, doi:10.1080/14791420.2017.1338742.

44 Alyson M. Cole, The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006).

45 See Casey Ryan Kelly, Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020); and Claire Sisco King, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).

46 See Casey Ryan Kelly, “The Wounded Man: Foxcatcher and the Incoherence of White Masculine Victimhood,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 161–78.

47 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 18.

48 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 51.

49 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.

50 Kirt H. Wilson, “Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict: Communicating Social Justice and Civil Rights Memory in the Age of Barack Obama,” Carol C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, 2016 National Communication Association Conference, https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/annual-convention/NCA_Convention_Video_Archive_2016_Arnold_Lecture.pdf.

51 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 16–17.

52 Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8.

53 See Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017); and Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

54 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 1.

55 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 67.

56 E. Chebrolu, “The Racial Lens of Dylann Roof: Racial Anxiety and White Nationalist Rhetoric on New Media,” Review of Communication 20, no. 1 (2020), 9, doi:10.1080/15358593.2019.1708441.

57 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 5, doi:10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871.

58 Flores, “Abundance,” 14.

59 Armond R. Towns, “‘What do We Wanna be?’ Black Radical Imagination and the Ends of the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 76, doi:10.1080/14791420.2020.1723801.

60 Donald Trump quoted in Aaron Blake, “Donald Trump’s Full Inauguration Speech Transcript, Annotated,” Washington Post, January 20, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/20/donald-trumps-full-inauguration-speech-transcript-annotated/.

61 Gabriel Rossman, “White Working-Class Blues: On Deaths of Despair by Anne Case and Angus Deaton,” Washington Examiner, April 2, 2020, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/white-working-class-blues-on-deaths-of-despair-by-anne-case-and-angus-deaton.

62 Rossman, “Blues”; see also Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

63 Rossman, “Blues.”

64 Here I am referring to neither states of mind nor explicitly verbalized racial epithets but instead the President’s words and deeds that infer and align with racist beliefs. For an account of President Trump’s racist rhetoric, see Lamiyah Bahrainwala, “Shithole Rhetorics,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, doi:10.1080/17513057.2020.1795224; Donovan O. Schaefer, “Whiteness and Civilization: Shame, Race, and the Rhetoric of Donald Trump,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2020): 1–18, doi:10.1080/14791420.2019.1667503; and Robert E. Terrill, “The Post-Racial and Post-Ethical Discourse of Donald J. Trump,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 20, no. 3 (2017): 493–510, doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.3.0493.

65 Wilder Deitz, “Don’t Judge the White Working Class? Listen to Them,” The Capitol Times, December 18, 2017, https://madison.com/ct/opinion/column/wilder-deitz-don-t-judge-the-white-working-class-listen/article_b1e55fa2-26db-5b27-a2b3-f949cf93d58f.html.

66 Alec MacGillis, “The Original Underclass,” The Atlantic, September 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/.

67 Emphasis mine. MacGillis, “Underclass.”

68 MacGillis, “Underclass.”

69 George Packer, “Head of the Class: How Donald Trump is Winning Over the White Working Class,” New Yorker, May 8, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/how-donald-trump-appeals-to-the-white-working-class.

70 Harrison Jacobs, “The Revenge of the ‘Oxy Electorate’ Helped Fuel Trump’s Election Upset,” Business Insider, November 23, 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-vote-results-drug-overdose-deaths-2016-11.

71 Rotondaro, “Pain.”

72 Rotondaro, “Pain.”

73 Rotondaro, “Pain.”

74 Rotondaro, “Pain.”

75 Jacobs, “Oxy Electorate.”

76 Gary Younge, “My Travels in White America—A Land of Anxiety, Division and Pockets of Pain,” The Guardian, November 6, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/06/my-travels-in-white-america-a-land-of-anxiety-division-and-pockets-of-pain.

77 Packer, “Class.”

78 Rossman, “Blues.”

79 Jamie Fellner, “Race, Drugs, and Law Enforcement in the United States,” Stanford Law & Policy Review 20, no. 2 (2009): 257–92.

80 Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2007), 12.

81 Rotondaro, “Pain.”

82 Tamar Jacoby and Isabel V. Sawhill, “Visiting Working Class America,” Brookings Institute, October 11, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/10/11/visiting-working-class-america/.

83 Younge, “My Travels.”

84 Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People don’t Get About the US Working Class,” Harvard Business Review, November 10, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class.

85 Packer, “Class.”

86 Dana L. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in ‘Oprah’ Winfrey’s Rags-to-Riches Biography,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13, no. 2 (1996): 115, doi:10.1080/15295039609366967; and Kristen Hoerl, “Monstrous Youth in Suburbia: Disruption and Recovery of the American Dream,” Southern Communication Journal 67, no. 3 (2002): 259–75, doi:10.1080/10417940209373235.

87 Joe William Trotter Jr., Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), xv.

88 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998).

89 Joe Queenan, “How the Democrats Lost the White Working Class,” Barron’s, August 5, 2017, http://www.barrons.com/articles/how-the-democrats-lost-the-white-working-class-1501908264.

90 Queenan, “White Working Class.”

91 Jeff Guo, “A New Theory for Why Trump Voters are so Angry—That Actually Makes Sense,” Washington Post, November 8, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/08/a-new-theory-for-why-trump-voters-are-so-angry-that-actually-makes-sense/.

92 Susan B. Glasser and Glenn Thrush, “What’s Going on With America’s White People?” POLITICO Magazine, September/October 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/problems-white-people-america-society-class-race-214227.

93 J.D. Vance quoted in Glasser and Thrush, “White People.”

94 Rotondaro, “Pain.”

95 J.D. Vance quoted in Rotondaro, “Pain.”

96 Karen Nussbaum quoted in Thomas Frank, “Millions of Ordinary Americans Support Donald Trump. Here’s Why,” The Guardian, March 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support.

97 Tom Lewandowski quoted in Frank, “Ordinary Americans.”

98 See Paul Starr, “How the Right Went Far-Right,” The American Prospect, March 31, 2020, https://prospect.org/api/content/8d05ebe2-72c7-11ea-aa98-1244d5f7c7c6/.

99 Glasser and Thrush, “White People.”

100 Rotondaro, “Pain.”

101 Jeff Guo, “Stop Blaming Racism for Donald Trump’s Rise,” Washington Post, August 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/19/stop-blaming-racism-for-donald-trumps-rise/.

102 Lerner, “Shaming.”

103 Lerner, “Shaming.”

104 Gary Abernathy, “Please, Big Media, Come Visit Us in Trump Country,” Washington Post, November 9, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/please-big-media-come-visit-us-in-trump-country/2017/11/09/eccdaa54-c56a-11e7-84bc-5e285c7f4512_story.html.

105 Abernathy, “Please, Big Media.”

106 Robin D.G. Kelley, “Forward,” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, ed. Cedric J. Robinson (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), xi–xxvi, xiii.

107 Kristen Hoerl, “Selective Amnesia and Racial Transcendence in News Coverage of President Obama’s Inauguration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 2 (2012): 179, doi:10.1080/00335630.2012.663499.

108 Catherine R. Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 39.

109 Jessica Chasmar, “Michael Moore Says Trump Voters Not Racist: ‘They Twice Voted for a Man’ Named Hussein,” Washington Times, November 11, 2016, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/11/michael-moore-says-trump-voters-not-racist-they-tw/.

110 See Vincent N. Pham, “Our Foreign President Barack Obama: The Racial Logics of Birther Discourses,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 8, no. 2 (2015): 86–107, doi:10.1080/17513057.2015.1025327; and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 4, no. 1 (2011): 23–30, doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2010.01090.x.

111 See Rachel E. Dubrofsky, “Monstrous Authenticity: Trump’s Whiteness,” in Theorizing the Communicative Power of Whiteness, ed. D.M. MacIntosh, Dreama A. Moon, and Thomas K. Nakayama (New York: Routledge, 2018), 155–75.

112 See the introduction in Curry, The Man-Not.

113 Robert C. Rowland, “The Populist and Nationalist Roots of Trump’s Rhetoric,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 22, no. 3 (2019): 343, doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.3.0343.

114 Nate Silver, “The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support,” FiveThirtyEight (blog), May 3, 2016, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/.

115 Joel Kotkin and Wendy Cox, “It Wasn’t Rural ‘Hicks’ Who Elected Trump: The Suburbs Were—And Will Remain—The Real Battleground,” Forbes, November 22, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2016/11/22/donald-trump-clinton-rural-suburbs/.

116 Kelly, “Ressentiment,” 14.

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Casey Ryan Kelly

Casey Ryan Kelly is Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.