How do economics shape the feelings and thinking of the people Hochschild profiles, especially their feelings and thinking about race, immigration, welfare, and other political issues?
I understand the shame of getting help. I understand how it feels when you must go the rely on others so you could do what needs to be done. Some days I like to pretend that I’ve overcome my days of needing help and having people work with me. Shame to the point where you remove vectors which can help you and other. Maybe I haven’t experienced it in a way that makes you angry I can recall several times not getting help when I should have biting me in the ass. That makes you the kind that makes you want everything that reminds you that you are weak to not exist. when I started reading this, I didn’t get how communities that use the services could have such a visceral hatred. I knew people who are not so enthusiastic about welfare and a large government apparatus but, to the extent of getting rid of stuff that helping. This isn’t just like oh I got to write in English paper tomorrow. This is if I don’t have food stamps, I’m going to starve. I severely lack the perspective to even understand this. Just reading this quote like fries my brain. “Sharon was a giving person, but she wanted to roll back government help. It was hard supporting her kids and being a good mom too. Managing the trailer park had called on her grit, determination, even hardness—which she regretted. She mused, “Having to cope, run the trailer court, even threaten to shoot a dog”—her tenant’s pet had endangered children—” it’s hardened me, made me act like a man. I hate that. It’s not really me.” There was a price for doing the right and necessary thing, invisible, she felt, to many liberals.” ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD. She’s not being incoherent it’s just that I guess that I’ve been living in such a different bubbled in her that it’s hard for me to understand.
How does the gap between male lives at the top and male lives at the bottom relate to the idea (from “The Invention of Race”) that US slavery depended on a multi-class coalition of whiteness?
The gap between multi white guys on the top poor white guys on the bottom you know maybe at some point was smaller than it was today but I will never understand why their allies cause it seems like the rich guys get more out of the relationship then the white guys and it feels a lot more like a remnant of another time when he was much easier to align their interests but that’s just me talking. Maybe they benefited more than I see. “And what did that do? It switched their allegiance from the people in their same circumstance to the people at the top. It eventually created a multi-class coalition of people who would later come to be called white. It created a multi-class coalition. So, this was a divide and conquer strategy. It was completely brilliant.” Suzanne
Do you recognize any elements of the “Deep Story of Personal Protectionism” in the Whiteness Project videos we’ve been analyzing? If so, describe and explain at least two of them, being sure to indicate who is saying what and how prevalent each element is in our spreadsheet. Are there any other “Deep Stories” at play in the Whiteness Project videos? If so, what would you call them?
From where I am right now, I can’t really see any connections. I’m trying to see the connection now I can see the overall connections, but I can’t see on something that’s good to write about. I can see the general overlap with you know the people in these communities being predominantly white and the whiteness project being about people who are predominantly white, but I can’t really see the good connective tissue that really works in there.
Nice work on empathizing with the feelings of shame and loss in the first question, Doyle. How do those feelings of economic stress shape their beliefs about people of color as expressed in the Deep Story?
In your second bullet point, you’ve correctly connected the Hochschild to the multi-class coalition built around whiteness, which the consultant in “The Invention of Race” insists was a way for 18th & 19th century white elites to establish and maintain power. So what’s the power dynamic involved in today’s multiclass coalition of whiteness?