Abstract
The Contexts editors interview Arlie Hochschild about revisiting respondents after the 2016 election.
Arlie Hochschild, Berkeley sociologist, returned to Louisiana in September 2017. Her third visit since the publication of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, the trip came on the heels of the “Unite the Right’” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (see Viewpoints, this issue). White nationalists and Neo-Nazis protesting the planned removal of a Civil War statue carried torches and Confederate flags, gave the Hitler salute, and shouted “blood and soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” One drove his car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing activist Heather Heyer and wounding many others. Contexts’ editors spoke to Hochschild about her return to Louisiana and what her respondents thought about that rally, Confederate statues and the flag, and their own voting preferences. On the surface, these responders may be easily categorized as racist sympathizers. And of the 60 respondents, the 40 core Tea Party enthusiasts—White, older, evangelical Louisianans from blue-collar families—all voted for Donald Trump. Yet, talking with her respondents suggested a more complex view of American history that colors their interpretations of the past, the present, and the potential future of the United States.
Arlie Hochschild
How did the Louisianans you write about respond to Charlottesville? Were there any surprises or paradoxes?
Yes, there were. Here I was, studying older, White, Southern, many blue-collar, Trump supporters. So, I was prepared to encounter classic racism. But my first surprise was that the people I talked to didn’t hesitate to condemn the KKK and White nationalists. When I asked about these groups, I got answers like, “They are thugs and scum.” Or “they’re a disgrace.” “They’re idiots!” “They’re stupid.” So while Trump seemed to be winking to the KKK, saying of Charlottesville that there were “some very fine people on both sides,” some of his enthusiastic followers were doing no such thing.
So why are these Trump supporters from the deep South condemning the KKK?
Part of the reason is, I think, that they fear being associated with the KKK, which they know is widely despised. Again and again, I heard people say things like: “Because we’re Southern, people think we’re racist, but we’re not,” or “not any more than people in the North or anywhere else.” But in addition to that defensiveness, they felt liberals did not give them the cultural room they needed to express their feelings as Whites. So I was trying to get a sense of what that cultural room was and why they felt the need for it.
What did you find?
At first, I was completely confused, because I was looking for an older, more unitary, easy-to-point-to racial ideology. In Strangers, I describe racism as a “belief in a natural hierarchy that places Blacks at the bottom and the tendency of Whites to judge their own worth by their distance from that bottom.” And I suppose I expected to find the people I had come to study saying, “yes, that’s me,” but I found nothing so clear or simple.
I think I saw three things: the dismantling of an “old racism,” the attempt to legitimize a new cultural space for concern for Whites (their economic and cultural losses), and a blind eye turned toward the most powerful source of insecurity facing them.
So, their views about race didn’t fit together the way you thought they would?
Exactly. That wasn’t because racism wasn’t there, it’s because I was imagining a coherent, earlier version of racism that I didn’t find—or if they felt it, none dared express that to me. I heard nothing about Blacks as intellectually inferior or “naturally” this or “naturally” that. What I did hear were a series of small narratives that all had the same final punchline—that the relationship between Blacks and Whites was not well, and that the cause of the problem was often with Blacks.
One man, a retired petro plant technician, born-again Christian, and owner of 100 guns vehemently hated the KKK. He hated them because they defiled something he was fiercely loyal to: the Confederate flag. The flag was a way of paying homage, he felt, to young men protecting their homeland against outsiders bent on destroying it. So this man thought slavery was wrong, but that the Confederate flag had nothing to do with it—it represented an innocent loyalty to one’s region.
Blue-collar Whites in the South are facing economic hard times, but they misunderstand the source of that threat. It’s not Blacks. For the most part, the real culprits are not people, they’re robots.
So, you expected their devotion to the Confederate flag to tie to sympathy for the principles for which the South fought—a rationale the KKK upholds?
Right. Things I had expected to go together didn’t go together. There’s been a loosening between ideas that once cohered, leaving smaller stories to appear, separately, each suggesting its own emotional tagline.
What was the tagline for this regional pride narrative?
“Don’t shame us as Southerners. Don’t tell me I have the wrong birthplace, background, upbringing, cuisine, customs, social class or color—don’t shame me as a Southerner. Above all, don’t call me a redneck—a word we find as insulting as Blacks find the N-word.” It was a de-shaming narrative.
What were some other narratives?
One man told me, “My ancestors were Kentucky dirt farmers and horse dealers. They didn’t own any slaves. They were too poor.” Here the emotional tagline seemed to be, “Don’t guilt-trip me. My family had it hard, too.”
Did you find any narratives around Affirmative Action?
Yes. For example, I met a retired plant technician, now living on a farm in Ragley. He told me, “When I worked at Citgo, an Affirmative Action officer called us in for a meeting and showed us a pie chart that reflected company goals. About half of new jobs should go to women, a quarter to African Americans, and 15% would go to White men.”
Then he recounted how he challenged the Affirmative Action officer, saying, “I told the officer, ‘So, basically, what you’re telling me… is that I need to teach my sons how to knock over a 7-Eleven so that they’ll have some money, because Citgo is not going to hire them.’” Later he added, “I don’t think I’m a racist for saying this.” In this narrative, the man’s son is forced by Affirmative Action into crime, as if there were no alternative to a job in the plants or the life of a thief. In this somewhat strange—the connection to crime was unusual in the accounts I heard—Whites are victims of liberal government-promoted racial “bias.” The emotional tagline is, “We blue collar Whites are in the same fix liberals think Blacks are in. We resent it, and liberals don’t get why we resent it.”
What is the link between these seemingly disparate narratives? Because, to sociologists who study race and inequality, they seem to have similar outcomes for policy decisions and views that the government “gives handouts to Blacks”.
Right. What these sub-narratives share in common is a policy and they all share a general absence of a historical context. One woman remarked that Northerners and liberals “ don’t get brought up with our history. They believe a different history.” Indeed if we look at the history of highschool text books, up until the 1960s, even in the North, they conveyed a “Southern” version of the Civil War, (ie just a matter of states’ rights.) The perspective these narratives add up to helped guide a sense of blame for fears they had about work.
So what did the Louisianans you came to know think about liberals or progressives?
They think liberals and progressives are overly race conscious and that race consciousness is itself a form of racism. “Liberals are always identifying people by race,” one woman told me. Pointing to the road she lived on, she added “We’re mixed, and we’re just neighbors. But the [Obama] government has everyone saying, ‘You’re White, you’re Black’ dividing us up. That’s racist.”
How did they respond to the idea of removing the statue of General Robert E. Lee?
Interesting. My colleague Troy Duster has proposed a solution to the conflict over statues [in “What to Do About a Man on a Horse”]. Instead of taking down the statue of General Lee and erasing the history of the Civil War and slavery, why not add a second statue of someone such as African American abolitionists Fredrick Douglass or Ida B. Wells, and so provide a missing side to that history.
So I tried Troy’s two-statue idea out on people during my third trip back to Louisiana. One man, a retired telephone repairman, said, “I think they should put Lee’s statue in a museum where it won’t offend anyone.” In response to the two-statue idea, he still preferred sending the offending statue away. Others, oil workers, just wanted the existing statuary to remain (assuming that “people didn’t used to be bothered” by it). But most others greeted Troy’s idea with some interest. As one said, “Well, why not?” Or another: “I don’t have a problem with that.” Others were dubious on various grounds. “If you give in on this statue, they’ll go for the next and the next. You’ll never satisfy them.” One woman reluctantly conceded the idea, saying, “It’s okay if they pay for the second statue.”
Overall, these strong Trump supporters from the deep South were willing to condemn the KKK with more alacrity than Trump showed, and most seemed open to Troy Duster’s “Two-Statue” idea. At the same time, race-related stories, each with its own emotional tagline, added up to Blacks unfairly cutting in line ahead of Whites and Southern Whites and their culture unfairly blamed for Black problems.
You mentioned in the beginning a “structural source” of White anxiety that the people you talked to weren’t looking at.
Yes. As I argue in the new Afterword to Strangers, blue-collar Whites in the South or anywhere else are facing economic hard times, so we can understand their anxiety. But they misunderstand the source of that threat. It’s not Blacks. For all the talk of Affirmative Action, Blacks have not, on average, advanced ahead of Whites over the last three decades—not in higher education, not in average family income, not in wealth; the 2008 crash hit them harder than it hit Whites.
If Blacks are not the source of White decline, the question becomes: who is? For the most part, the real culprits are not people, they’re robots. Especially hard-hit has been the oil industry. It used to take 20 workers to “man a rig.” It now takes five. According to a McKinsey Global Institute’s study of 2,000 work activities across 800 occupations, “half of today’s work activities could be automated” in just 40 years. The people I talked to were anxious about their futures, but turning blame in the wrong direction.
One big task ahead of sociology, I think, is to understand such economic trends, how the distress they cause is distributed, culturally portrayed, and emotionally absorbed. To this we need to add an understanding of a culture of blame displacement as it impacts those groups—especially Blacks and immigrants—most vulnerable to it. And all along this chain of causality, we need to listen openly to human voices and the feelings they express. So, we sociologists have our work cut out for us.
One big task is to understand such economic trends, how the distress they cause is distributed, culturally portrayed, and emotionally absorbed. To this we need to add an understanding of a culture of blame displacement as it impacts those groups most vulnerable to it. And all along this chain of causality, we need to listen openly to human voices and the feelings they express. So, we sociologists have our work cut out for us.