Sociology

13W I N T E R 2 0 1 8 c o n t e x t s

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.

CONTEXTS (CTX): How did the Loui-

sianans you write about respond to

Charlottesville? Were there any surprises

or paradoxes?

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD (AH): Yes, there

were. Here I was, studying older, White,

Southern, many blue-collar, Trump sup-

porters. 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 nation-

alists. 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.

CTX: So why are these Trump support-

ers from the deep South condemning

the KKK?

AH: 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.

CTX: What did you find?

AH: 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 dis-

tance 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 dis-

mantling of an “old racism,” the attempt

to legitimize a new cultural space for

genuine anger, genuinely misplaced by rashawn ray and fabio rojas

Arlie Hochschild

Contexts, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 13-15. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2018 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504218766538.4

14 contexts.org

concern for Whites (their economic and

cultural losses), and a blind eye turned

toward the most powerful source of inse-

curity facing them.

CTX: So, their views about race didn’t

fit together the way you thought they

would?

AH: Exactly. That wasn’t because racism

wasn’t there, it’s because I was imagin-

ing 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 tech-

nician, 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 out-

siders 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.

CTX: 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?

AH: 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 emo-

tional tagline.

CTX: What was the tagline for this

regional pride narrative?

AH: “Don’t shame us as Southerners.

Don’t tell me I have the wrong birthplace,

background, upbringing, cuisine, cus-

toms, social class or color—don’t shame

me as a Southerner. Above all, don’t call

me a redneck—a word we find as insult-

ing as Blacks find the N-word.” It was a

de-shaming narrative.

CTX: What were some other narratives?

AH: 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 tag-

line seemed to be, “Don’t guilt-trip me.

My family had it hard, too.”

CTX: Did you find any narratives around

Affirmative Action?

AH: 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 chal-

lenged 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.”

CTX: 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”.

AH: Right. What these sub-narratives

share in common is a policy and they

all share a general absence of a histori-

cal 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.

CTX: So what did the Louisianans you

came to know think about liberals or

progressives?

AH: They think liberals and progressives

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.

q&a

15W I N T E R 2 0 1 8 c o n t e x t s

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 say-

ing, ‘You’re White, you’re Black’ dividing

us up. That’s racist.”

CTX: How did they respond to the idea

of removing the statue of General Robert

E. Lee?

AH: 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 reluc-

tantly 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 con-

demn 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.

CTX: You mentioned in the beginning

a “structural source” of White anxiety

that the people you talked to weren’t

looking at.

AH: Yes. As I argue in the new Afterword

to Strangers, blue-collar Whites in the

South or anywhere else are facing eco-

nomic 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 immi-

grants—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.

Rashawn Ray and Fabio Rojas are the co-editors

of Contexts.

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.