The Problem People and the Hard Workers: whiteness and small town response to economic decline

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the role of race and class in post-industrial economic decline and revitalization in a predominantly white town in the northeastern United States. Ethnographic research in this small town revealed that residents commonly identified lazy, welfare-dependent substance abusers as the source of local problems. At the same time, they lauded workers, drawing on a national white hard worker mythology. Poor and underemployed workers themselves thus negotiated between the problem people and white worker ideals. I argue that the white worker myth provides a symbolic escape hatch, which reinforces hegemonic whiteness and the US racial order despite the lack of material payoff for economically marginalised white workers. As such, I call for a shift away from measuring degrees of white privilege towards an analysis of how people in various classed and gendered positions mobilise or contribute to white power differently.

KEYWORDS:

• Hegemonic whiteness
• poverty
• white working class
• economic restructuring
• gender
• rural United States

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Melanie Bush, Clare Forstie, Frank King and Jorge Ramón González Ponciano for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.