This is the South, the deep countryside-violently against unions, voting Republican all the way. Or the wage has stagnated or fallen in the face of inflation to the point where only (undocumented) immigrants will take those jobs. It’s all changed, and the manual labor jobs that afforded at least a decent life, are all gone. At most, there’ll be a white person supervising. What self-respecting white person would work in butchery? Would you do outside yard work for a living? It doesn’t pay enough to live up to the standards they’ve come to expect-if nothing else, that their parents expected and obtained.Įven here in California, I never see a white (or for that matter, black) person doing the manual labor at a home renovation.

In short, it was possible to have a decent life. I knew this because I worked full-time in fast food for 2.5 years, so I got to see cohort after cohort of people, both high school kids and graduates, coming through. There were very few Latino immigrants, and I remember distinctly that most of the fast-food workers were white (there weren’t many black people in this town, though of the few, some did work fast-food, too). There were good jobs 30 years ago-at least, jobs that allowed someone to raise a family, even on blue-collar wages.īack then, in 1981, the butchery outside of town paid $12/hour-a good wage, given inflation, and the fact that you lived in a small town. I went to a high school where the “smart ones” went to Texas Tech, flunked out, and got a community college degree at the two-year school south of town. I saw both the cultural mores and habits that led to boys and girls graduating high school for only manual labor jobs. This next reader has mixed feelings-between his sympathy for struggling white Southerners and his resentment over their pockets of racism:

I think part of the despair we’re seeing is shame at the loss of self-reliance, and there is no way forward. Where I come from, the welfare queens are all white. It is also well noted that in many parts of the country, resentment of working people towards social programs isn’t as racial as it might be in the South. The Drug War and zero tolerance on sex offender crimes (like teenagers sleeping with teenagers) leave people with criminal records and no way to get out from under. The only hope these areas have seen in recent years is from fracking. All along the bus routes from New York City to upstate New York and Pennsylvania, those little towns that used to be leafy and peaceful now look like the worst dregs of New Jersey. They just set up shop in the new areas and recruited the locals. That was a factor of poverty and also of criminal justice strategies that imported hard criminals from the cities to rural areas in an attempt to rehabilitate them.

Having grown up in rural Pennsylvania myself, I can say that things seemed to take a turn from bad to much worse when heroin and meth started coming in.

White trash the 400