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writingguide003-blog · 5 years

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Out from the margins: meet the New Daughters of Africa writers

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Out from the margins: meet the New Daughters of Africa writers

More than 25 years after her groundbreaking Daughters of Africa anthology, Margaret Busby reflects on the next generation of black women writers around the world

Time was when the perception of published writers was that all the women were white and all the blacks were men (to borrow the title of a key 1980s black feminist book). At best, there was a handful of black female writers Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou who were acknowledged by the literary establishment. This was the climate in which, more than 25 years ago, I compiled and published Daughters of Africa. It was critically acclaimed, but more significant has been the inspiration that 1992 anthology gave to a fresh generation of writers who form the core of its sequel, New Daughters of Africa.

The critic Juanita Cox told me: I received Daughters of Africa as a birthday gift from my father. Two things immediately struck me about the book. It was huge and it contained women like me. Even though Id been brought up in Nigeria, I had had very little exposure to black literature. At school the only black characters Id ever read about occupied the margins: figures like the Sedleys servant Sambo and the mixed-race heiress Miss Swartz in Thackerays Vanity Fair. Daughters of Africa introduced me to a huge number of writers Id never previously been aware of. And on a more personal level it made me realise that I was somehow valid. The anthology was peopled not just by women of pure African descent, but also women of mixed ancestry, and just like the women the book contained, I too could have a voice.

Ivorian Edwige-Rene Dro said: It was as if the daughters of Africa featured in that anthology were telling me, their daughter and grand-daughter, to bravely go forth and bridge the literary gap between francophone and anglophone Africa. Bermudian writer Angela Barry, meanwhile, spoke of her thrill at coming across a contributor whose father was from her island, allowing her to feel that I also was a daughter of Africa and that I too had something to say. Writer Phillippa Yaa de Villiers recalls: We were behind the bars of apartheid we South Africans had been cut off from the beauty and majesty of African thought traditions, and Daughters of Africa was among those works that replenished our starved minds.

Windrush is an ever-present theme Jamaican immigrants arrive at Tilbury in 1948. Photograph: PA

New Daughters of Africa has been a truly collaborative venture: writers steered me in the direction of others whose work they admire. Altogether, more than 200 writers from more than 50 countries contributed work to the new anthology, from Margo Jefferson to Aybmi Adby, Malorie Blackman to Yrsa Daley-Ward. New Daughters of Africa begins with some important entries from the 18th and 19th centuries a reminder that later generations stand tall because of those who have gone before. Nana Asmau (17931863), a revered figure in northern Nigeria, spoke four languages and was an educated and independent Islamic woman whose life and work can be considered a precursor to modern feminism in Africa. Sarah Parker Remond (18151894), abolitionist, lecturer, suffragist, demonstrates many of the themes and serendipitous connections that characterise this anthology. Her letter of September 1866 to the London Daily News, in which she waxes eloquent on the reactionary movement against the coloured race in the United States, and castigates the social commentator Thomas Carlyle for having claims to the gratitude of all negro haters on both sides of the Atlantic, makes one wonder how she might have reacted to a tweet by Donald Trump. Elizabeth Keckley (18181907), her life bridging the 19th and the 20th centuries, describes first hand the trauma of enslavement in her autobiography Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, published in 1868 exactly 100 years before the mould-breaking year that Delia Jarrett-Macauley refers to, when on university campuses from Paris to New York, students were protesting against the old order, against bureaucratic elites, against capitalism, sexism and racism and all forms of authoritarianism.

The year 1968 was blighted by the assassination of Martin Luther King in April. Later that month Enoch Powell gave his infamous Rivers of Blood speech, scaremongering about mass immigration to the UK. And it was in that year that Angela Cobbinah, the only black girl in her Cornish village, watched African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists in a Black Power salute on the podium at the Mexico City Olympics. I felt an unfamiliar emotion, she writes. Call it connection or kinship, or the bubbling of a youthful rebelliousness.

Such connections, and bonds of kinship, actual as well as intuited, strengthen the links between contributors. There are the literal mother-daughter relationships, as with Josephine St Pierre Ruffin (18421924) and Florida Ruffin Ridley (18611943). It is pleasing to note the emergence as a writer of Yvonne Bailey-Smith, having raised and empowered three successful children (Zadie Smith and her brothers), to witness Attillah Springer following the path of her mother Eintou Pearl Springer, a contributor to Daughters of Africa, and to see Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker, achieve prominence in her own right.

In many ways 1992 seems much longer ago than a quarter century; yet, while much has changed, many challenges remain to the publication of work by women of African descent. Who imagined in 1992 that we would celebrate the first African American US president in 2008, and who could have predicted who would follow Barack Obama in the White House? Much more empowering to think of Michelle Obama, who in 2018 broke records with her memoir Becoming, selling 1.4m copies in its first week.

In 1992, Morrison had not yet been awarded the Nobel prize. Only the following year did she become the first black woman to win it. Many accomplishments were years away: Jackie Kay, the current Scottish makar and a contributor to the first anthology, had only just begun to receive recognition after the 1991 publication of her first book. So the authors within New Daughters of Africa that may still be unknown are as deserving of attention as the household names.

Custom, tradition, friendships, romance, sexuality, intersectional feminism, the politics of gender, race and identity all are explored, in ways that are surprising, angry, considered, joyful, heartrending. Taboo subjects are addressed head on, familiar dilemmas elicit fresh takes. How candid and engaging is Ted Hughes poetry prize-winner Jay Bernards I resist the urge to destroy my own records by reflecting on archives, how I use them, and what they have meant to me. How touching is Andaiyes recollection of her amity with Audre Lorde:

I do not remember when I wrote Audre but I did, and I remember that she answered immediately and sent me a copy of A Burst of Light with the inscription, Sister Survivor May these words be a bridge over that place where there are no words or where they are so difficult as to sound like a scream!

Unflinching stories Audre Lorde. Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

Lordes name recurs in other contributors work, including that of Edwidge Danticat, Sisonke Msimang and Panashe Chigumadzi, who writes:

It wasnt until I met the force of the unflinching stories of our mothers and grandmothers and aunts and sisters written by black women that I was compelled to find an answer to the question: what did it mean to be a black woman in my grandmothers time?

The different ways of connecting to an African heritage are an ever-present theme, as are stories of migration, and specifically Windrush stories, typified by the poignant writing of the late Andrea Levy, whose father was among those immigrants who sailed to Britain from the Caribbean on the Empire Windrush in 1948. Stories of mothers separated from offspring through transatlantic crossings, and the resultant psychological effects, inform many of the contributions.

How you find your identity in the course of growing up in Britain is a major thread, whether it is Simi Bedford describing the particular experience of being an African at boarding school in England shared by many (myself included) or Nah Dove making the journey from a childhood in West Africa.

So often London encapsulates the black British experience, with all its possibilities for racism, and much else besides. For Donu Kogbara, whose harrowing tale is of being kidnapped in her Nigerian homeland, London has become a sanctuary.

The book reveals works in progress, identities in transition, shapeshifting sensibilities, a delicious mash-up of expectations. Who knew that Nadifa Mohamed, one of Grantas best young British novelists in 2013, was also a fine poet? The chef Zoe Adjonyoh, from whom cookery writing might have been expected, delivers a memoir of her father that is indeed A Beautiful Story. Contributors are drawn to write about countries not theirs by birth: a Zimbabwean shines light on Antigua, Ghana has an impact on a writer from Trinidad.

Another link with Daughters of Africa is the image on the UK cover, by black British photographer Suzanne Roden, featuring her friend Sibusiso Nozipho Mavolwane (19582015). Busby herself exemplifies the international scope, historical trajectory and enduring female bonds represented by the 200-plus women in New Daughters of Africa. The third of five sisters, she was born in what was then Southern Rhodesia, lived in the former Gold Coast, attended boarding-school in Sussex, and from the 1980s worked in London. New Daughters of Africa pays tribute to her as well as to the many writers we have lost, most recently the talented Andrea Levy.

The aspirational mantra of inclusivity and diversity is increasingly routine, fashionable even, in todays publishing industry, but lasting change has yet to be achieved. Verna Wilkins, founder of the childrens imprint Tamarind Books, explains in her essay that she began hands-on work creating books in diverse classrooms in the belief that the process must start with children: They should see themselves as the authors, editors, designers, illustrators and publishers of the future.

New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African descent, edited by Margaret Busby, is published by Myriad. New Daughters of Africa is launched at Women of the World at Southbank Centre, London SE1, 8-9 March. southbankcentre.co.uk.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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Michelle Wolf Is the Future of Stand-Up Comedy

The stand-up comedy world is in the throes of a sea change, as three of its marquee namesAziz Ansari, Louis C.K. and T.J. Millerstand accused of various degrees of sexual misconduct. Muddling matters further is the largesse of streaming giant Netflix, whose lofty $20 million-per-hour paydays for male comics Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld, and Dave Chappelle have caused much consternation among lesser-compensated women (and understandably so).

As the so-called Bad Men dissolve from the pop-culture consciousness faster than the McFly family photo in Back to the Future, and as women across all industries reclaim their time, a confident new comedy voice has emerged from the maelstrom.

Her name is Michelle Wolf. And she is fucking hilarious.

If you havent seen the 32-year-olds HBO comedy special, Michelle Wolf: Nice Lady, well, you should get on that immediately. It was, in this writers estimation, the funniest stand-up special of 2017, packed with sidesplittingand blessedly Trump-freejokes on topics ranging from the fragile male ego (A soft penis looks like the sound of sad) and the feminism of naked selfies to pay equity and Caitlyn Jenners brave transition (I still fucking hate your personality). Throughout the hour-long ride, she is both cutting and ebullient, her piercing voice, bobbing red mane, and chortle accentuating each clever punch line.

The through-line is the outmoded concept of the nice lady, and how, in the immortal words of The Real World, its time for women to stop being polite and start getting real. Though the special was recorded in August, two months prior to the disturbing Harvey Weinstein revelations, its a sentiment that aligns perfectly with the current #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

I dont want to say serendipitous, because so many terrible things are happening to so many people, but its kind of serendipitous, I guess, offers Wolf. Its just a good time in comedy right now for women, because its a perspective that people are now more open to.

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Unlike her male contemporaries whove struggled with addressing the epidemic of sexual-harassment allegations, Wolf has proven to be more than up to the task. In late October, just after the Weinstein stories dropped, her Daily Show boss Trevor Noah tasked her with creating a humorous bit on the truly horrifying casein just a few hours, no less.

Its a hard thing to make jokes aboutespecially that soon, she recalls. I struggled to find a take on it. Its good to have emotion behind something, but sometimes your feelings can blind you comedically. You have to remain fairly neutral, stand back from a situation, and think of the way it will actually work, not the way it will make your heart feel better.

The result was both funny and spot-on: My solution? Every time a guy gets caught sexually harassing someone, you dont just fire him. You have to replace him with a woman. Its a policy that I call, Pull out your dick, get replaced by a chick.

Wolf is also fearless. In addition to skewing Caitlyn Jenner in Nice Lady, she takes a few clean shots at Hillary Clinton, or rather the patriarchal system that made Hillary Hillary, from one so-called shrill voice to another.

I do have a theory on why Hillary lost: I think its cause no one likes her, says Wolf in the special. You shouldnt like Hillary. Shes a bitch. You have to be a bitch to be that powerful. Were never going to have a nice lady run for president. Nice ladies arent in charge of things, and if youre in charge of something and you think youre a nice lady, no one else does.

Thats the balance you have to create, she says, explaining the bit. I come from the train of thought that you can joke about anything as long as its funny enough. You have to anticipate what peoples arguments against you will be so that you can make a joke-rationale for it. That Hillary bit goes pretty aggressively at her but then it turns into a compliment. Im not a lawyer but I think its similar to writing a good argument where you have to cover all your bases.

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Wolf wasnt always the self-assured comic you see on HBO and The Daily Show. At the College of William & Marythe same school Jon Stewart went to, strangely enoughshe was a real big nerd who majored in kinesiology, working in a cardiovascular molecular physiology lab, and ran track and field.

I used to watch those old Gatorade commercials from the 90s where the athletes are hooked up to wires on the treadmill and I wanted to be the doctor working on those guys, because I knew I wasnt a good enough athlete, she says.

After graduating from college in 2007, she took a job at Bear Stearns working in mutual funds and separately managed accounts. Then came the financial collapse.

I was the low person on the totem pole but I felt terrible for the people there whod been there for their entire careers and invested in the company. That was heartbreaking, says Wolf. It would almost have been better if everyone got fired on one day, but it dragged on for years. Youd just hear about people getting pushed to other departments and would think, yeah, theyre getting pushed out. It was pretty soul-crushing.

In March 2008, right around the time Bear Stearns was falling apart, a few high-school friends came to New York City to visit, and they all went to a taping of Saturday Night Live. Afterward, she thought, How did they get to do this? So she Googled the cast members and discovered that each and every one of them had done improv.

She immediately signed up for a beginners improv classlevel 1 at The PIT, or Peoples Improv Theaterand found it exhilarating. She had, after all, grown up idolizing Carol Burnett. Wolf would go directly from Bear Stearns (and later JPMorgan) to The PIT.

I used to go to improv classes in my skirt-suit from work, wearing heels, she remembers with a laugh. I finally started bringing pants and sneakers to wear and thought, Oh yeah, you can move!

At one of her improv classes, she befriended someone who worked in a computational biochemistry research lab as a recruiter. And so, after three-and-a-half years in finance she took a job there, because it provided her with more flexibility to explore comedy. She soon got into stand-up, and worked on it all day, day after day, writing jokes, performing sets, and tweeting.

It gave me a ton of time to sit at my computer and tweet all day, which really helped with my joke-writing, shares Wolf. I would just read the news and tweet jokes about the news. It teaches you an economy of words.

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Wolf eventually began doing less and less work at the lab, devoting more and more time to comedy, and got fired. But shed saved up enough money, along with her severance, to last a year: I tripled down with so much fear inside of me because I was like: This is it. I have a year to make it.

She was fired in January 2013. In January 2014, she got hired on the new show Late Night With Seth Meyers, where she worked in the writers room and participated in the occasional sketch. Then, feeling the itch to perform more on-camera, she joined The Daily Show with Trevor Noah in April 2016.

Nice Lady is no accident. Its a late December evening and Wolf has, with the aid of an entire French press, worked from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. writing jokes (a process they call gangs) all day at The Daily Show before meeting me for more coffee. After our chat, shell head downtown to perform three stand-up sets, including at the famed Comedy Cellar.

I did 21 shows last week, she says, and thats on top of her Daily Show job. I have a new hour Im working on. I wanted to go on tour after the special came out, and I didnt want to do the same stuff. So Im workin on it. Its great and terrifying to work on new jokes.

She pauses, reflecting on her regimen. Its a lifestyle thats not necessarily conducive to women most of the time, because touring and doing stand-up a lot is not easy when you have a baby. Its easy for a guy because the baby can stay home, but Ali [Wong] brings her baby with her all the time, which is a very tough thing to do, and she has a great support system around her. But thats not the norm.

Wolfs well-received Comedy Cellar sets soon caught the eye of high-profile stand-up comedians, including Hannibal Buress. When host Chris Rock was recruiting joke writers for the 2016 Academy Awards, Buress recommended Wolf. She vividly remembers running into Seth Meyers office and frantically yelling, I just got a voicemail from Chris Rock telling me to call him back. What should I do?! You should call him back, said Meyers.

Several of Wolfs jokes made it into the Oscars telecastincluding a great sorority racist bitand Wolf eventually opened for Rock on several European dates.

Hes become a friend and a mentor, which is crazy. Theres no past me that would ever have thought this would happen, she says.

Another of her mentors is Louis C.K., whos been accused ofand confessed toserial sexual misconduct. Wolfs guest-starred on Louis web series Horace and Pete, opened for him on tour, and spent many nights shooting the shit with him at the Comedy Cellar.

When I mention the Louis scandal, she says matter-of-factly: Hes always been very supportive and generous, and my experience with him is very different than others, I suppose. But, in this kind of big moment in my career, I dont really want to talk about stuff that a man did.

Fair enough. After all, it wasnt Louis C.K. who performed thousands of stand-up sets or spent years in a pair of late-night writers rooms meticulously honing her craft, transforming from a nerdy scientist into the stage-commanding badass in Nike His you see before you today. It was Michelle Wolf.

To do stand-up, you have to have a strong point of view, and doing stand-up gave me that strong point of view, she says, cracking a smile. It made me a person.

Michelle Wolfs The Not Nice Comedy Tour kicks off Feb. 1 in Philadelphia. Shell be performing March 8-10 at Carolines in Manhattan.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/michelle-wolf-is-the-future-of-stand-up-comedy

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samanthasroberts · 6 years

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Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

Last March, my 71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three hours to caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her first-ever vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could have deterred her. Betty a white woman who left school after ninth grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in severe poverty wanted to vote.

So she waited with busted knees that once stood on factory lines. She waited with smoking-induced emphysema and the false teeth shes had since her late 20s both markers of our class. She waited with a womb that in the 1960s, before Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire hanger inside after she discovered she was pregnant by a man shed fled after he broke her jaw.

Betty worked for many years as a probation officer for the state judicial system in Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and raped. As a result, its hard to faze her, but she has pronounced Republican candidate Donald Trump a sociopath whose mouth overloads his ass.

No one loathes Trump who suggested women should be punished for having abortions, who said hateful things about groups of people she has loved and worked alongside since childhood, whose pomp and indecency offends her modest, midwestern sensibility more than she.

Yet, it is white working-class people like Betty who have become a particular fixation among the chattering class during this election: what is this angry beast, and why does it support Trump?

Not so poor: Trump voters are middle class

Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didnt have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall werent clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. Surprisingly, a Gallup researcher wrote, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism not income, education, gender, age or race predicted Trump support.

These facts havent stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working classs giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trumps appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if were examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

The faces journalists do train the cameras on hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.

Part of the current glimpse is JD Vance, author of the bestselling new memoir Hillbilly Elegy. A successful attorney who had a precariously middle-class upbringing in an Ohio steel town, Vance wrote of the chaos that can haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty. A conservative who says he wont vote for Trump, Vance speculates about why working-class whites will: cultural anxiety that arises when opioid overdose kills your friends and the political establishment has proven it will throw you under the bus. While his theories may hold up in some corners, in interviews coastal media members have repeatedly asked Vance to speak for the entire white working class.

His interviewers and reviewers often seem relieved to find someone with ownership on the topic whose ideas in large part confirm their own. The New York Times election podcast The Run-Up said Vances memoir doubles as a cultural anthropology of the white underclass that has flocked to the Republican presidential nominees candidacy. (The Times teased its review of the book with the tweet: Want to know more about the people who fueled the rise of Donald Trump?)

While Vance happens to have roots in Kentucky mining country, most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia. That sometimes seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isnt always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.

One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over 20 years ago not in the news but on the television show Roseanne, the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.

Countless images of working-class progressives, including women such as Betty, are thus rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll.

This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America red v blue in which the 42% of Kansans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are meaningless.

This year, more Kansans caucused for Bernie Sanders than for Donald Trump a newsworthy point I never saw noted in national press, who perhaps couldnt fathom that flyover country might contain millions of Americans more progressive than their Clinton strongholds.

In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.

Poor whiteness and poor character

The two-fold myth about the white working class that they are to blame for Trumps rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest takes flight on the wings of moral superiority affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.

I have never seen them flap so insistently as in todays election commentary, where notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.

In an election piece last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamsons assessment of poor white voters among whom mortality rates have sharply risen in recent decades expressed what many conservatives and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities ravaged by oxycodone use deserve to die.

The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles, Williamson wrote. Donald Trumps speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

For confirmation that this point is lost on most reporters, not just conservative provocateurs, look no further than a recent Washington Post series that explored spiking death rates among rural white women by fixating on their smoking habits and graphically detailing the haggard face and embalming processes of their corpses. Imagine wealthy white woman examined thusly after their deaths. The outrage among family and friends with the education, time, and agency to write letters to the editor would have been deafening.

A sentiment that I care for even less than contempt or degradation is their tender cousin: pity.

In a recent op-ed headlined Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class, David Brooks told of a laid-off Kentucky metal worker he met. On his last day, the man left to rows of cheering coworkers a moment I read as triumphant, but that Brooks declared pitiable. How hard the man worked for so little, how great his skills and how dwindling their value, Brooks pointed out, for people he said radiate the residual sadness of the lonely heart.

Im hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We dont need their analysis, and we sure dont need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.

One such journalist, Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his mission arose from frustration with hot takes written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects.

Zaitchik wisely described those he met as a blue-collar middle class mostly white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades. He found that their motivations overwhelmingly started with economics and ended with economics. The anger he observed was pointed up, not down at those who forgot them when global trade deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.

Meanwhile, the racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on household income. Those who wont vote for Trump are not necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated as the countrys moral scourge.

When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a basket of deplorables, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language could be read as another way of saying white-trash bin. Clinton quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss normals with distaste behind closed doors.

The DeBruce Grain elevator. Federal safety inspectors had not visited it for 16 years when an explosion ripped through the half-mile long structure, killing seven workers. Photograph: Cliff Schiappa/AP

When we talked, Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away with talking that way about any other group of people and still have a TV show.

Maher is, perhaps, the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was 17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas, exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers. The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.

I kept going to work like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the search for one of the killed workers bodies still under way, Maher joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.

That moment was perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my life, I would politically identify with the same people who often insult the place I am from.

Such derision is so pervasive that its often imperceptible to the economically privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with obliviousness.

Many people recommended to me the bestselling new history book White Trash, for instance, without registering that its title is a slur that refers to me and the people I love as garbage. My happy relief that someone set out to tell this ignored thread of our shared past was squashed by my wincing every time I saw it on my shelf, so much so that I finally took the book jacket off. Incredibly, promotional copy for the book commits precisely the elitist shaming Isenberg is out to expose: (the book) takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing if occasionally entertaining poor white trash.

The book itself is more sensitively wrought and imparts facts that one hopes would dismantle popular use of its titular term. But even Isenberg cant escape our classist frameworks.

When On the Media host Brooke Gladstone asked Isenberg, earlier this year, to address long-held perceptions of poor whites as bigots, the author described a conundrum:They do subscribe to certain views that are undoubtedly racist, and you cant mask it and pretend that its not there. It is very much a part of their thinking.

Entertain a parallel broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively young country that long believed itself to be free of castes. Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.

The other problem is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in the room, she told Gladstone. as if theyre more racist than everyone else.

That problem is rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, The story remains that only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education were told. As the first from my family to hold degrees, I assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human decency.

Berry points out that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites not even white Republicans who passed legislation bent on preserving segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state capitols for decades to come.

It wasnt poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the war on drugs.

Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black welfare queen.

These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.

Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trumps campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.

Mainstream media is set up to fail the ordinary American

Based on Trumps campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.

One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.

Barack Obama, a black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal lineage in the white working class. A lot of whats shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas, he wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.

Last year, talking with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books, Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America, for which he has a sort of reverence. Theres this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life, he said, naming one cause as the filters that stand between ordinary people who are busy getting by and complicated policy debates.

Im very encouraged when I meet people in their environments, Obama told Robinson. Somehow it gets distilled at the national political level in ways that arent always as encouraging.

To be sure, one discouraging distillation the caricature of the hate-spewing white male Trump voter with grease on his jeans is a real person of sorts. There were one or two in my town: the good ol boy who menaces those with less power than himself running people of color out of town with the threat of violence, denigrating women, shooting BB guns at stray cats for fun. They are who Trump would be if hed been born where I was.

Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.

Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in red America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.

Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are voting against their own best interests, undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isnt mentally fit to cast a ballot.

Whoever remains on Trumps side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Lets be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who they are.

Journalist? Then the chances are youre not blue collar

A recent print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:

Mitch Hedges, who farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is an idiot.

This made me cheer for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who doesnt support Trump. It also made me laugh one cant farm cattle. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. Its sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New York Times seriously.

The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.

This isnt to say that one must reside among a given group or place to do it justice, of course, as good muckrakers and commentators have shown for the past century and beyond. See On the Medias fine new series on poverty, the second episode of which includes Gladstones reflection that the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of us.

I know journalists to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and Im resistant to rote condemnations of the media. The classism of cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America in general. Its everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didnt bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from the general election.

The economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trumps venom now fills. That the term populism has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy its supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see it.

One such person was my late grandfather, Arnie. Men like Trump sometimes drove expensive vehicles up the gravel driveway of our Kansas farmhouse looking to do some sort of business. Grandpa would recognize them as liars and thieves, treat them kindly, and send them packing. If you shook their hands, after they left Grandpa would laugh and say, Better count your fingers.

In a world in which the Bettys and Arnies of the world have little voice, those who enjoy a platform from which to speak might examine their hearts and minds before stepping onto the soap box.

If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonalds bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

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