CHALLENGING “WHITE HATE”: racism and Antiracism in a Working-Class Community in the United States
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.9771/ccrh.v37i0.24939Keywords:
Working class, United States, Deindustrialization, Labor precarization, AuthoritarianismAbstract
The rise of nationalist and authoritarian leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, and Andrzej Duda—not to mention Jair Bolsonaro—in different national political contexts seems to have revitalized the dusty thesis of working-class authoritarianism popularized by Seymour Martin Lipset in the early 1960s. Both in academia and in the press, the narrative of the working class “white hatred” as the supposed structuring axis of the global farright offensive has never been more popular. In this article, we challenge this interpretation through the lens of an ethnographic study conducted in a community of workers who predominantly voted for the politician embodying the prototype of contemporary nationalist and authoritarian leadership: Donald Trump. To this end, we aim to highlight the relationships between processes of labor precarization, workers’ support for nationalist and authoritarian projects, and the alleged racism of workers, in order to interpret shifts in workers’ political behavior in contexts marked by an acute socio-reproductive crisis.
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