This was the second plant closing he had gone through. Sometimes he sounded like a Marxist, yet he voted for Donald Trump, and he did it because of the factories. He was as militant as anyone I’ve ever met. John, the White guy who I followed, was the vice president of the union. ![]() ![]() He’s angry about it, because he’s saying, “I lost my job twice.” And when the laid-off White factory worker hears these discussions of White privilege on TV, he can’t take it. The conversation that we have in educated circles about White privilege is really important, but oftentimes it pretends that the laid-off White factory worker has the same amount of privilege as the White CEO. How should race on the factory floor be covered? In a lot of ways, race is used as a way to dismiss these economic grievances of a whole class of people. Today, look an awful lot like they did back then. We don’t look at the fact that in the ’70s, many of them were forced to share their jobs with Blacks and with women. In some educated quarters, there is a way that we talk about the working class and laid-off factory workers as if they’re just a bunch of privileged, whiny White men who need to get over it. We’ll never know what racial disparities would look like today if those factories had remained. But of course, within 15 years, after the Civil Rights Act passed, factories start moving away, first to the American South, where there are no labor unions, and then overseas. My eyes were really opened about what that act really did for Blacks and for women, in being able to expand access for what had previously been good jobs reserved for White men. The uncle of Wally, the Black man who I followed, got a job at that plant and was made a janitor, like every other Black man at the plant at the time, and the day after the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, he went to his boss and said, “I want to operate a machine. And so what was the civil rights movement, but the fight for those jobs, the fight to be able to operate a machine. They literally boiled down in many cases to one thing, which is are you allowed to operate a machine on the factory floor, because the labor movement made those jobs middle-class jobs, and White men got those middle-class jobs. I started to realize that for blue-collar people, the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement had so much to do with jobs. It’s a disservice to working-class people not to truly see that. We talk a lot about the White working class. How are we missing the working-class reality of America? Get over it.” What would that do to your life? At the intersection But imagine someone saying, “Oh, the colleges are gone and they’re never coming back. Get over it.” A lot of people in my world would say that. It’s very tempting to say, “Oh, the factories are never coming back. It’s the place you go, it’s a powerful social network, and it’s where you go for advice on your career, and if you lose your job, they’re the ones who are going to help you get a new one. I came away with the idea that the factory served the same role in her life as Harvard served in mine. Her high school friends would say, “Where do you work?” She’d say, “Link-Belt,” which is the old name for the plant, and she would watch the envy spread on their faces, because they knew what a great job that was. Shannon, a woman I followed, used to talk about the factory in the same way that I talk about Harvard. It was the best of the best job a blue-collar person could get in Indianapolis coming out of high school. ![]() They were the most valuable thing that a blue-collar child could inherit from their parents.
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