This is a little long, but it connects to /antiwork.
I come from a working-class white family that is very affected by multigenerational trauma, substance abuse, mental illness, disability, and poverty. Some of my relatives are the people described in Angus Deaton and Ann Case's book “Deaths of Despair”: working-class people without college degrees who perceive their long-term economic prospects as bleak and are experiencing high rates of death by suicide, alcohol use disorder, and overdose as a result. (No disrespect meant there.) Due to family dysfunction, I left childhood with serious PTSD from physical violence and emotional abuse. I got well with a lot of hard work and some good luck. (Importantly, while one side of the family is working class/poor, the other side is middle class, and this positioned me to access clinical care I needed.) In time, I've managed to build an interesting life and career, with a master’s degree, a prestigious fellowship, various awards, working abroad, etc. It hasn’t been easy.
A little while back, a cousin died (of excessive alcohol use; a true death of despair), and after the funeral, my mom reinitiated a relationship with some troubled relatives. One of them had committed an act of life-threatening violence on me when I was a kid; my family never offered any help for this, despite knowing about it all along. My mother's insistence on connecting with and repeatedly talking about the perpetrator reopened my old trauma (and eventually forced me to cut all contact with her, but that’s another story). While this was happening, I used to sit at my desk at work, feeling pretty bad, and think, “If anyone in this office knew what my family and life are really like, I wouldn't be welcome here anymore.” Then I would talk myself out of that: traumatized people always feel isolated and dehumanized, trauma creates hyperbolic thoughts, most people are nicer than you think, don't worry…. I’ve worked so much on getting past trauma that I’ve learned how to cope, so this worked OK.
Then my company decided to have a diversity, equity, and inclusivity training for all staff. I'm generally in favor of sincere efforts to that end, so I was game.
Halfway through the training, the instructor led an exercise about first harmful stereotypes and then sources of oppression for impoverished communities of five races/ethnicities (Black, Asian, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, and white people). The class did fine at identifying issues at the intersection of racism and socioeconomic deprivation for the first four groups. The instructor emphasized that stereotypes and real problems arose from external systemic oppression and this explained the perceived shortcomings of each group. It seemed fine.
Then the last section was on stereotypes of poor white people (using words like “trailer trash” and describing violence and substance abuse), and the instructor suggested these were all true and then launched into a lecture about how there has never been a reason, social or legislative, for poor white people to be as troubled as they are. (In the section about “trailer trash,” her slides literally said “???????” for reasons.)
This struck me as inaccurate. There have been considerably more laws and social circumstances that have oppressed people of color, and I can't imagine claiming otherwise. But there is also the opioid epidemic, which began with a deliberate marketing campaign to provide enormous amounts of opioids to impoverished white communities specifically. And as Deaton and Case have shown, specifically white Americans underwent a period of severe economic loss and rising mortality in the late 1990s through about 2011, which implies some socioeconomic oppression coming to bear on these people specifically. Both of those issues have since begun affecting nonwhite communities as well, but the point is, the idea that poor or working-class white people have never been adversely affected by anything doesn't add up.
It also seemed poorly done. She could have done the exercise without the “trailer trash” part. She could have talked about how oppression can happen to anyone, but it’s much more intense and complex for nonwhite groups. She could’ve defined intersectionality way more clearly, too – that seemed pretty important, generally speaking.
Most of all, though, this BS struck me as very, very painful. I had thought, “If people here knew about my family, they wouldn't like me or want me here.” Now there was someone whose job it was to instruct the group to talk about “trash” and then tell the entire organization, all 1200 employees, that white people who are struggling economically and socially — my people — are basically just shitty human beings. It seems my traumatized thinking was actually pretty spot-on. It made me feel deeply unwelcome.
I spoke up a bit, but I’d noticed that most of the class and the organization overall was treating this training as though it was a divine gift of the gospel truth. The overall vibe was a cultish absence of critical thinking. It was clear my discomfort wouldn’t register with anyone there—it was more likely they thought I was a racist asshole for attempting to question the training.
So I gave up. I quit later, but that was the day I stopped being committed to the job. All the struggling I did just to not die from serious PTSD, become reasonably healthy, and have a decent middle-class career, when so many people with this kind of brain injury do not — and then such a slap in the face from these thoughtless scugholes, in the name of inclusivity, of all things.
I’ll always be a leftist and an antiracist, but please, don’t make me join the fucking Moonies of pretend wokeness and hear insults about my background just to do some boring office work. WTF.