KING: Using 'working-class voters' as shorthand for white people is insulting and rooted in racism

[DonCoquixote]

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/king-don-working-class-voters-refer-white-people-article-1.2990988


sample quote:
White people have bailed. The majority of all people of color voted for Hillary Clinton. The majority of all white people voted for Donald Trump. And while I agree with the basic philosophy of Bernie Sanders that if the Democratic Party would do better by all working-class people, it could possibly begin to win back working-class white people in the process, we must not erase the fact that tens of millions of working-class voters simply are not white. Period. If you want to say that working-class white people are abandoning the Democratic Party, say that. Otherwise, if you fail to include the racial designation you aren't just wrong, you are insulting. Saying "working class" when you truly mean "white working class" only advances the ugly stereotypes that hardworking Americans look like white lumberjacks and listen to country music. They damn sure might look like that here or there, but working-class Americans look like all of America. They are of every hue, every gender, every shape and size, every ability, every ethnicity and nationality. To reduce "working-class voters" to rural white people is a gross oversimplification of the beautiful complexity of this nation.

[loyalsister]

1. He's right

They have been stokeing the fear of jobs being stolen by people of color since the Civil Rights movement. Women were also a part of that and immigrants were added to the formula. People of color, immigrants and women have been a part of the working class for decades. The only way to keep that narrative about stolen jobs going is to use the label "white working class."

[leftstreet]

2. DURec

[JHan]

3. Thanks for this Don, K&R

[Hekate]

4. What I've been saying. The term "working class" started to make me itch several years ago, ...

...and I finally parsed it out pretty much the way the OP does.

Ultimately, Hillary won the popular vote by 3 million more votes than Trump. She did NOT "lose the working class," which contains an abundance of POC; she lost the WHITE "working class."

All those talking heads telling Hillary and the rest of the Democrats to grovel because we alienated every blue collar voter in the US can go pound sand. Whatever angst my fellow white people feel about the changing demographics of this country is going to have to be addressed truthfully at some point. They've been lied to for years by RWNJ media. They think "Mexicans" are taking their blue collar jobs? Oh please, come work in California's Central Valley, Joe Sixpack. The work never ends. They think Asians and Middle Easterners are taking white collar jobs? -- by all means, knock yourselves out getting an advanced degree in the sciences, and push your kids hard to succeed in school. They think coal mining jobs are coming back, even as grandpa hacks up another blackened lobe of lung? Great -- where's the coal?

Change is hard, and social change is especially hard in the face of economic uncertainty. But the white working class has been lied to, and THAT is what the Democratic Party needs to work in.

I wouldn't be a lifelong Democrat if I didn't care about the little guy and the greater good. Our Party could use some tweaking -- the most serious change being to go back to the good Dr Dean's 50 State Strategy and never depart from it. And tell the truth.

[leftstreet]

5. Democrats shouldn't have sacrificed 'working' for 'middle'

But what's done is done

Both parties have sufficiently destroyed the term 'working class'

[okieinpain]

6. Agree 100%. These so called working class

folks are always bragging about how our forefathers adapted to changing times but for some reason that problem doesn't apply to them. Sorry mr. Rural white voter I know you don't want to learn new tech skills but the times are a changing. Wake the fucc up doesn't just apply to black people.

[wcast]

7. +1000