There is a video circulating on social media that is worth thinking about. Kellie Snider, an artist and writer from Pittsburgh, asked a question that is as simple as it is profound. Why do poor white people vote against their own interests?
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In exchange for voting for President Trump, MAGA politicians and people like them, they get nothing but broken promises. Prices are getting higher, though they were promised life would become more affordable. And the social safety net that so many of them depend upon (TANF, Medicare, etc.) is slowly and unceremoniously being taken away.
So, she asked again, why do they vote like this? What’s going on? Her answer was unexpectedly insightful. (I’m going to have to put on my professor hat for a second. Stay with me.)
W.E.B. Du Bois, the preeminent American Black Intellectual of his day, proposed an idea in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America that explains what we see today. He looked at the social status and benefits that poor white people gained from the devaluation of Black life and called the effects of that on those poor whites the psychological wage of whiteness.
Poor white people are convinced by elites who look like them that they are better than Black people, Latinx, immigrants…really anyone who is not white. (People who are members of these groups are ‘othered.’) And they think that their racial demographic gives them the same status that the rich white people who convinced them of this truth enjoy.
As a result, poor whites end up voting for things that hurt them. But it gets deeper.
These folks are then convinced that they are not just better than non-whites, but that people who do not look like them poise a threat to their wellbeing. Therefore, the elites promise them protection. (Ever heard anyone say they are going to build a wall and deport illegal immigrants? Same logic.)
And what’s the result of all this? They end up voting for policies that they are told will hurt the groups that threaten them, but, in actuality, they end up hurting themselves. And instead of placing the blame where it should be (the elites, MAGA whoever is doing them harm) they blame Black folks, immigrants any and everyone they were told is the enemy.
That’s what Du Bois was talking about. Poor white people get racial status, but they have no material security. And that is why he calls it a psychological wage.
He wrote that book almost 100 years ago, but what he saw then is still being used today. President Trump and his MAGA army are not doing anything new. They are simply putting a new spin on an old game.
Straight From 
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