There are a lot of poor white people in America

There are a lot of poor white people in America

And remembering that could do a lot to close racial gaps

Matthew Yglesias

Jun 11

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(Mark Makela/Getty Images)

I was finding myself getting sucked into yet another Twitter controversy about DEI initiatives at some company, and I felt like maybe I should write a post arguing that the way to actually make progress on racial equity issues is mostly just to support an expanded welfare state.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities turns out to have an item that makes this basic point — there’s nothing in particular about racial equity in the Biden Families Plan, but via direct large quantities of material resources to less affluent Americans, it mechanically does an enormous amount to advance equity. Their fresh report about closing the Medicaid gap adopts a similar frame.

My prior post, “The Racial Wealth Gap is a Class Gap,” makes a similar point — anything you do to redistribute wealth from billionaires to the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution narrows the racial wealth gap because the billionaire class is very white.

But I’m also mindful of Marc’s point in “Stop Marketing Race-Blind Policies as Racial Equity Initiatives” — this seems like badly counterproductive politics. I liked Ezra Klein’s recent formulation of this point, which is that the more seriously you take the idea that deep currents of racism are an important force in American politics, the less sense it makes to talk about the Family Plan as if it’s just about helping non-white people.

Much in our politics is not what it seems. Contrary to the aesthetics of our current political debate, there is a deep optimism in the confrontational politics of the modern left and a quiet pessimism in the caution with which Obama speaks. To ask the question bluntly: Who truly believes America to be a racist country? The political voices who state that view clearly, because they think Americans can be challenged into change, or the ones who try to avoid even implying the thought, because they fear the power of the backlash?

To me, one of the most important ideas of Critical Race Theory is interest-convergence — things like Brown vs. Board of Education or the Civil Rights Act happen because the politically decisive white people decide it is going to be good for them.

And I recall that when I was young, the normal progressive argument was that the media association between the welfare state and Black people was bad. On the one hand, it perpetuated negative stereotypes of Black people, who are mostly gainfully employed and not receiving public assistance. On the other hand, it perpetrated negative views of public assistance which was seen as benefitting “those people” rather than people like you, the median voter. Public views on race have shifted since my younger days — in the 1990s, half or more of non-Black Americans said they would oppose a family member marrying a Black person, which is down below 15% now — and I worry less about backlash than I would have 20 years ago.

But there is always going to be a healthy dose of self-interest in democratic politics. Barack Obama did much better with low-income white people than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden did. I argued last week that’s in part because he did more to cater to their relatively conservative views on certain cultural issues. But no matter what positions you take, Democrats are going to be the more culturally liberal party. If you want low-income white people to vote for you, you need to emphasize the idea that part of what you are trying to do in politics is help low-income white people — who, after all, are a substantial plurality of the low-income population.

There are lots of downscale white people in America

I live in Washington, D.C., where virtually all of the white people are college graduates and virtually all of the working-class people are Black or Hispanic.

D.C. is a bit of an extreme case in that regard, but it’s fairly typical of big cities in the Northeast and California to have extremely tight correlations between race and class. That’s especially true when you consider that Black and Latino families tend to have significantly lower wealth than white families at an equal income level. But that is not typical of overall life in the United States of America. Race and class are correlated nationally, but not in the hyper-stark way that they are in D.C. In a national view, for example, while white people are more likely to have graduated from college than Black or Hispanic people, it’s still the case that the vast majority of white people don’t have a bachelor’s degree.

But beyond that, there are just way more non-Hispanic whites than members of any other racial or ethnic group. So even though white people are much more likely to have a Bachelor of Arts, the majority of people without a bachelor’s degree are non-Hispanic whites.

You see this effect in Catalist’s look at the demographic composition of Trump vs. Biden voters, where even though Biden did quite badly with non-college whites, there are so many of them that Biden got far more non-college white votes than he did Latino or Black votes:

When you look at the truly downscale population in terms of material conditions, the ratios shift. But there are just still a lot of white people in America, including at the low end of the economic totem pole.

Here’s Matt Bruenig’s chart of the racial wealth breakdown by decile. You can see that even beyond the flukey reality that a lot of people in the bottom tenth are actually recent law school grads with tremendous debt, a plurality of the people at every decile is white.

So as a descriptive fact about the United States, it’s clearly true that there are big racial gaps in average material living standards. But if you’re trying to get voters psyched up about the idea of redistributing wealth to the bottom third of the population, you want to make sure that the huge number of white people who would benefit from such a policy are aware of the fact that you are out there and trying to help them. It’s true that if you’re in an intra-progressive knife fight about whose causes merit attention and funding, it’s probably useful for welfare state proponents to note that redistribution closes racial gaps. So I don’t begrudge anyone’s right to do what they feel they need to do to gain attention and support while operating in that universe.

But ultimately, the elites themselves need to get their shit together and try to organize a movement that can win. That means not obscuring the benefits of a progressive agenda from a huge share of its beneficiaries.

The wages of whiteness

For a long time, there were endless tedious discussions about why certain categories of people (variously southern whites, rural whites, white evangelicals, working-class whites) would “vote against their interests” by backing the GOP.

In classy intellectual circles, I think this idea ultimately got resolved through the rediscovery of W.E.B. DuBois’ old analysis in “Black Reconstruction in America” that racism delivers real benefits:

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.

I’m glad that put a certain set of arguments behind us.

But I think that as the Trump phenomenon gathered steam, it also started to obscure the really basic idea of competing for people’s votes. Mitt Romney offered certain psychological wages to certain voters, but Barack Obama promised to protect their Social Security and Medicare benefits. Some cross-pressured voters backed Romney and others backed Obama. And the precise quantity of that split was decisive to the election outcome.

Along comes Trump who, unlike Romney, says he will also protect your Social Security and Medicare benefits, and naturally that changes some people’s calculus.

The contemporary GOP’s moderation on those issues is just an objectively difficult problem, and I think a lot of people on the left are weirdly reluctant to admit that gaining more votes by moderating is exactly what Republicans did. But if the GOP campaigns in 2024 on the platform of cutting Social Security, I hope Democrats won’t just say that Social Security benefits Black people (though it does) but also mention that lots of cranky old white people who agree with Republicans about some stuff derive large, significant material benefits from the program.

By the same token, Trump kept trying to kick people off of SNAP, a program whose beneficiaries are about 45% white.

Democrats did great in 2018 when Republican plans to cut Medicaid were highly salient. The group that benefits most disproportionately from Medicaid is Hispanics, but the largest ethnic group on Medicaid is white — 41% of non-elderly Medicaid recipients are white. And for Senate and Electoral College purposes, most states are whiter-than-average. A majority of Pennsylvania Medicaid recipients are white, and the same is true for Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Idaho, and Minnesota.

If you’re at a donor table in Wisconsin and someone tells you they want to fund racial equity initiatives rather than your Medicaid expansion idea, then I think you should tell them that Medicaid expansion is a highly effective lever for closing the racial insurance gap and narrowing the racial gap in life expectancy. But if you get the people at your table to agree, then the actual campaign work looks different. To expand Medicaid, you need to win more state legislative races in the face of a gerrymandered map. That means convincing white people in rural Wisconsin that Medicaid is good for them. I don’t think it’s an impossible task and I also don’t think that winning back rural Obama-Trump voters necessarily means giving up the suburban voters Biden picked up.

The perils of privilege

I think the harder ideological sell here is the need to take a closer look at the way the concept of “privilege” and related notions are used and deployed. I have read “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and I think I can give you a pretty clear explanation of how in certain respects, whiteness even advantages white people who are quite poor relative to Black and Latino people. And if you read a serious take on intersectionality, like this explainer from Jane Coaston, it’s very clearly not supposed to be just about an “oppression Olympics” of different subgroups.

But in life, there is often a gap between theory and practice.

And I think mainstream progressives, often speaking from specific geographies where there are genuinely very few poor white people, speak about the question of who is and is not privileged in terms that erase the large number of very genuinely struggling white people. Poverty disproportionately afflicts Black and Hispanic Americans, but due to the overall predominance of white people, the plurality of the American poor (whether measured with the conventional or supplemental poverty line) are non-Hispanic whites.

Again, I don’t deny that on the very best account of what “white privilege” is, these poor white people have some genuine privilege.

But there is also a looser way of thinking about who is and isn’t privileged in some absolute sense, and I think the millions of white people living below the poverty line are clearly not “the privileged” in America. I don’t really think it would make sense to go around looking at each individual and adding up their privilege points — +1 to Kamala Harris for being Black, +1 for immigrant parents, -2 because they both had PhDs, but +1 for being raised by a single mother — and come up with a definitive ranking. But if you go to Penobscot County, Maine where the population is 95% white and the median household income is the same as the national median for African-Americans, you definitely see plenty of people who deserve to be reckoned in the bottom half of the national privilege spectrum.

Most of Penobscot County voted for Obama, and they voted for Jared Golden in 2020 too, so it’s not like they’re lost forever to the Democratic Party. But Trump won the county twice, and with it, Golden’s overall district. And I think that’s because while it’s fine to ask affluent white people to back an agenda of helping the underprivileged for high-minded reasons, low-income white people want to vote for someone who says he wants to help them. Conveniently, Democrats have policy ideas to do that. But you also have to talk the talk and speak like someone who is passionate about low-income people’s problems regardless of their racial background.

The class-class narrative

One thing that I find frustrating about this overall dynamic is that I think the official position of the progressive nonprofit sphere is basically in agreement with me.

If you look at Demos’ big presentation on what they call “The Race Class Narrative,” they are basically just telling people to emphasize that the welfare state is beneficial to people of all races and you, the voter, should not get suckered into pointless culture war controversies.

They say a race-class narrative is better than a colorblind narrative, but their actual example of a good narrative reads as extremely colorblind to me. They are simply naming all the races, including white, as among the beneficiaries of their program. In fact, if I were to troll, I would say that what the RCN effective here is that it literally centers white people by listing them first.

I’m not deeply invested in nitpicking about names, but I do think it’s important to pay attention to the details here, because what we are looking at is a class-class narrative that exclusively centers on concrete material interests.

There’s nothing about microaggressions. There’s nothing about whether some tech company’s board of directors has an appropriate balance of rich white people and rich non-white people. There’s nothing about “racial equity” or “gaps.” There’s nothing about privilege. There’s nothing about dismantling white supremacy. In some of its forms, the narrative acknowledges people of color’s concerns about racism and in other forms, it just acknowledges their existence as a salient identity group. But the agenda is entirely material, and entirely pitched in terms of the individual and collective self-interest of every individual — including white individuals.

So I think that’s great. But look at how Demos is actually talking about the welfare state:

They’re not countering a racist dog-whistle here; they are bringing up race unprompted. And they are not naming white people as among the beneficiaries, and they are not mentioning class at all. And this is the group that came up with the race-class narrative!

And while it is certainly true that ARP provides economic relief and investments in Black and Brown communities, it also provides investments in Jared Golden’s district and to Jon Tester’s constituents in Montana and to everyone else. Tons of white people got money from ARP. Not because ARP is racist, but because it delivers tons of money to all non-rich people in America, and a huge share of the non-rich are white. So why not tell them?

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