(originally published as a 6-part series at Popular Resistance in the winter of 2025)

Much has been written about the poor white 
but on rare occasion 
has he been able to speak for himself…
This is for him
and her.
Unleashed here is the anguish within
Buried under 1,492 survivals and sins…

This is dedicated to Zoe, Cathy, Dan, Kim and everyone
who ever treated me like they were better than me.
Your disgust spoke to my class instincts and got the ball rolling on this sociological and historical essay.

Dedicated to the true street prophets: 
If my trauma were but an inch deeper or a centimeter to the right, 
like the bullet that nearly assassinated the 
Demagogue-in-Chief Trump and threatened a second Civil War, 
I may not be here. 
All the trauma deposited within me
is unleashed here. 

Dedicated to my mom, Karen Sypher Mahoney:
who has more heart than the entire liberal class. 

I write this inspired by the street soldiers who never made it out. 
Away at college, writing a poem or visiting another country, 
I carry my family, the deceased and the survivors with me. 
Their words, instincts and early deaths molded me into who I am.
They whispered them to me 
before lighting their last Newport, 
placing their last bet at Foxwoods Casino and 
swigging their last sip of Wild Turkey…
And to all the left liberals who think they are better than me and my family:
Fuck your internet cancel culture 
You’ll never bury the people’s soldiers!

Part I. The Liberal white Versus the Poor white

There is a material reality behind the human schism and mutual hatred that exists between the privileged white and the downtrodden white. It dates back centuries and hemispheres. Whoever is not a billionaire and groups us together, erasing our class differences, does so at their own peril, and our peril as well. As the granmoun (elders) say in Haiti, the rocks caressed by the steam do not feel the pain of the rocks under the sun.

To group all whites together is the priority of the ruling class. We poor whites have different resentments, spiritualities and worldviews from those of our class oppressors. We don’t always know how to express it in the most eloquent terms but we express our contempt for the rich and the corrupt everyday in the proverb: “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.” 

Liberal left identity politics conflate us with the foreign reality of another social class. Whose agenda does this serve? 

Beyond similar skin tones and hair textures, what do we share in common with our bosses’ bosses? 

Lumping all “white people” together discards and cancels millions of down-and-out, disgruntled poor whites who have the potential to be a revolutionary force. W.E.B. Du Bois, the father of American Marxism, explored these class dynamics throughout American history in Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. Before us we have arguably the greatest challenge imaginable, of 248 years in motion: to move the unmovable and unleash the long-buried class impulses of the other America. So much of what we have experienced and endured applies to the entire multiracial working class, especially poor Blacks and Latinos. The very future of humanity and the planet depends on our discovering ourselves, alongside all of our class brothers and sisters. This was what Dr. Ernesto Che Guevara had in mind when he said: “I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all — you live in the heart of the beast.”  

Here before us in the 2025 United States of Hypocrisy, as Trump and his billionaire buddies replace one set of corrupt, nepotistic cronies with another, are two different peoples who understand little about each other and stand diametrically opposed to one another’s interests. 

A Sociological Snapshot of a Forgotten Historical Protagonist

From the abandoned coal mines along the Cheat River in Preston County, West Virginia to the crystal-meth-fueled insomnia that plagues the streets of Fresno, California, poor white life has infinite expressions. In my 46 years, I have experienced too many to remember, many in my own flesh. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “I confess I have lived,” and survived. Everyone who ever abused me and supported me, bullied me and uplifted me is present in these 15,000 words of the perfect hate and the perfect love.

We poor white trash are a polytheistic people. We worship the gods of gambling, whiskey and escapism. We pray to the lords of an alien class’s creation. Denied worldly deliverance, we pray for an afterlife to whisk us away from all we’ve known: harm and self-harm. Unlike Christ, the man and martyr, we all too often burn our crosses on the wrong lawns. We may not have read Dr. John Henrik Clarke but he was speaking to us too when he said: “When you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.”

Passages or clips from “Hillbilly Elegy,” vice-presidential scapegoater and millennial “hip” conservative J.D. Vance’s novel-turned-Netflix movie about his childhood, shows some of what we know all too well: the poverty and trauma too many in Trump country have lived through. We account for nearly 50 percent of Americans who receive food stamps from the government. Roughly 3 in 5 addicts in America wear our skin and our trauma. Hundreds of thousands of us overdose every year, but this elicits little public attention nor social change.

But through all that, damn it, we are loyal. Line up one destitute white boy from Alabama or Massachusetts in front of 10,000 preppy Ivy-league pricks and so who has stamina, survival skills and longevity. 

No one can teach Heart; Heart is absorbed through survival. 

We are loyal.

What you tell us is between you, me and the lamp post. In jail the only scum lower that the child molesters are the snitches and police. 

We are more than loyal. We are what Michael Parenti called “the superpatriots.” If anyone questions our government’s inequality or murderous foreign policy, we shout them down. We long for more McCarthyism. We hate leftists, socialists and communists. We root for the home team, even when the home team could care less about us. When Colin Kaepernick took a knee to protest police murders of unarmed black people, we screamed: “Get up you ungrateful, lazy bum.” What we meant to say was: Colin: you earn millions of dollars to play a game we love. We earn thousands of dollars to swing a hammer or push a lawnmower that we hate. We critique the “spoiled” millionaire athletes whom sportswriter William C. Rhoden calls the “40 million dollar slaves.” All the while, we ignore the billionaire owners who cash in on trading and squeezing “their” players, destroying their bodies and leaving them brain-damaged with CTE to boost their profit margins. 

We are a stubborn species that is never wrong. In response to any attacks on what we hold most sacred, we scream “America is number 1!,” insist “Right or Wrong My Country” and threaten “Love it or leave it.” We are better at defending our class oppressors than defending ourselves. Politicians who send us overseas to get PTSD claim that they back us up with bombs of democracy and missiles of equality. But the 8,000,000,000 people of the world beg to differ; they have never seen a U.S. war they benefited from. The poor white fights the wars for the rich alongside the rest of the mosaic of cannon fodder. We are 68.8 percent of your Armed Forces. 100 percent of us are fucked; 0 percent of us are rich. From 1962 to 1975, nearly 60,000 of us and our brothers were sacrificed to subdue the untamable Vietnamese. Hundreds of thousands more returned to the streets and backwoods of America maimed and traumatized. 500,000 of us mutinied against the U.S. military in the napalmed, scorched earth of Vietnam. We are the infamous fraggers. We “fragged,” that is we attacked our superior officers with fragmented grenades. To ignore all of this is to play an unwinnable game of Russian roulette called National Nihilism. 

A Foreign Country

We have been so busy surviving we never had the opportunity to live. We work 50 hours a week at dead-end jobs both at 16 and 60, because college and retirement is not economically feasible. Every day, artificial intelligence and automation take away even our humiliating jobs at CVS and Subway. We hate “the line cutters” but fail to identify who grows rich by putting us in competition with immigrant workers and robots. 

Things are not going well for us. So, we do what all alienated people do best. We double down on our frustrations and hatreds, and strike out against our own. 

The New York Times Magazine’s Eric Levitz captures the class divide, writing: “people who experience material security in youth tend to develop distinctive values and preferences from those who do not; if childhood teaches you to take your basic material needs for granted, you’re more likely to develop culturally-progressive values and post-material policy priorities.” Levitz is talking about us and our class brethren from Black, Native, Puerto Rican, Chicano etc. backgrounds. There are oft-cited, recurring studies about the reading gap that exists between the rich and poor and the impact this creates over time. 

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right takes us deeper into the other white America. As she attempts to give a voice to the voiceless, Hochschild learns about the moral fortitude and endurance of everyday Americans. In Lake Charles, once a Tea Party and now a MAGA stronghold, the community had been devastated by toxic oil and chemical dumping. Conditioned by Fox News and other conservative media outlets, the Louisianans expressed deep distrust of any government agencies. They viewed it as a badge of honor not to receive one red cent of government aid which they see as reserved for Reagan’s “black welfare queens.” None of the families interviewed ever expressed critiques of the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on U.S. wars and military spending overseas. After living with members of the anti-communist John Birch Society in Santa Ana, California and in the backwater bayous of Louisiana, Hochschild poignantly writes: “I felt I was in a foreign country again. Only this time it was my own.” 

There is no substitute for family. I thank higher power everyday for all of the beautiful people who have been with me on this limitless, majestic, heart-breaking journey some call life. 

Our Enemies

There are 813 billionaires in this country. They preside over and hoard the wealth, resources and media of the United States. Another way of stating this is we have the largest economy in the history of the world, but of the $27.3 trillion dollars of the GDP we workers produce, the lion’s share is owned by the rich, leaving only crumbs for the 78% of us who struggle paycheck to paycheck. Bernie Sanders is the only national candidate who has dared to speak to this ever-deepening contrast between property and poverty. Those in power do everything to manipulate our economic despair and social anxiety so we hate everyone, except our actual class enemies. We are then pitted against and at war with ourselves and our own best interests. This harkens back to the times of slavery. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction dedicates a great deal of attention to this “peculiar” condition whereby our poor white ancestors betrayed the freedmen by forming a cross-class alliance with the former slaveholders. Choosing this “psychological wage of whiteness” over class solidarity and our own material interests, we became the agents of class division and the storm troopers of bourgeois domination, laying the groundwork for the next eight decades of Jim Crow apartheid and poverty. 

We’ve been so manipulated we abandon even looking at who is deciding who gets paid what, and this perceived “competition” clouds our ability to distinguish between allies and foes. 

Forbes and Bloomberg estimate that Trump is worth between $6.9 and $7.7 billion. Warren Buffet is worth $150 billion dollars. My mother’s average yearly income was $18,000. Given this inequality, my mother would have to work 12 and a half million years to attain this level of wealth. Does anyone buy that any billionaire really worked 12 and a half million times harder than my mother? My father was a stonemason who downed coffee and inhaled Newports to keep food on the table. Complaining was alien to him. 

The Federal Poverty Level today for a family of four is $31,200. What could we poor whites possibly have in common with our overseers and overlords? To borrow the African-American mantra, “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” The superstructure of capitalism exists to convince us that our exploiters represent us and our class interests. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most senators are millionaires. Kamala Harris is worth $8 million dollars. While our grandparents may look like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, these hoity-toities could never understand our material reality. They are not welcome where we come from. And we are not welcome where they come from. 

Corporate elites and mass media convinced white Americans that being poor was a “black thing,” yet more than twenty two million of us live in poverty. One in three of us has zero net worth or owes more than we have. 41.6 percent of all poor people in this country look like us. 44.6 percent of Americans who need food stamps to get by are white like us. 

To discard us is to give up on revolution in this country. 

When Trump’s anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-human policies fail to produce jobs and breathing room for “Trump country,” Poor whites with Guns will be searching for answers. Only so many of us can be employed as your Correction Officers and police; millions more have fallen by the American wayside, into addiction and deeper rungs of alienation. Every day we are more deeply submerged into the American nightmare. 

Yet here we are, airing out society’s racist, anti-immigrant and hateful dirty laundry for the world to see. We remain tenser than ever, at each other’s throats, always ready to pop off. Racism is used as a trojan horse to dismantle the social welfare state which is the only way we and all working people can survive. Racism, sexism and homophobia exist to drive a wedge between us and other workers. This is called false consciousness, a pandemic among us poor whites. We are always ready to carry out our executions in a circle.

Survival until revolution…

To all my anonymous surrogate mothers and fathers, To all my mentors who I sought out with ferocity and listened to: Thank you! In some way, shape and form, We made it!

Part II. The Wretched of the Earth for Applachians 

Perched up in their Ivy League offices and downtown skyscrapers, the tenured professors and well-paid journalists have written a great deal about us. When have we got a day off from work and our survival routines to analyze their foreign attitudes and habits? Today, we get to have our say. It is our lived experience in the trenches versus your pontificating. You are not us and we are not you. Do you really think you would last a round with us in the real world? The petit bourgeois white has found their place at the capitalist trough; the poor white, desperate for breathing room, searches for an opening. 

Turning the Ethnographic Lens around on the Liberals

Richard Reeves of the centrist thinktank the Brookings Institute calls the well-to-do the Dream Hoarders. He critiques how liberals bemoan the privileges that exist for white Americans or men but they are often the very ones who benefit from these privileges and have doors open up for them that are closed to those further below on the social totem pole. How many times have colleagues and their families who hail from a different social rank lectured me on how not to be underpaid and underemployed? They doubted what America looked like from below, to those of us who don’t have social capital. In the icebreaker “the privilege shuffle,” we were always in the back. In the Oppression Olympics, we competed for gold in every category: abuse, low self-esteem and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

But we must insist that we are not a grim lot. Dealt a tough deck of cards, and having a few cards missing from our deck, we make due, fight for our families and have a hell of a time doing it. Self-pity is alien to us. Our greatest pride is our independence. 

Families who have high incomes can get into Princeton and Dartmouth. Their parents can afford the necessary training, networking and tuition, leaving little room for students who come from poverty and need scholarships. Liberals say that it is absurd that we are unstable and insecure because they live in a fantasy world. They convince themselves that their self-righteousness will somehow create opportunities for us where none ever existed. How can you open a door to a dream neglected? 

The liberal “progressive” march forward only exists in their heads. The idealists deal is subjectivism while we stare down objective, concrete reality. 

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. His book examines the lifestyle of liberals. He points out that because of their guilt about their wealth, “they clothe their affluence in moral, organic and environmental drapery.” The liberal father teaches his children to make healthy decisions when ordering dinner and dessert. The poor father shows his kids how to survive, sending his clever little accomplices to scoop up what is left on another family’s table after they stood up and exited the local IHOP. We have been put into detention, suspended and arrested for taking food we needed in school. We shoplift steaks and trade them on the block for another hit of survival. When we overdose, no priest or family member will speak at our wakes. 

Liberals vacation in Europe with their kids, granting them access to a more expansive vocabulary and worldly knowledge. We take our moms to Applebee’s for their birthdays when we can afford it. The uppity complain, stressed beneath the burden of their privileges. We are so grateful because every day we are alive is on borrowed time and means so much to us. We never thought of getting a passport. Our vacations are to visit our grandmothers or our grandkids. The only foreign countries we ever visited were New York City and Los Angeles. 

In the media, you speak for us. 89 percent of newspaper editors are white, but few come from where we do. You are our social workers, doctors, sociologists, criminologists and psychiatrists. You pretend to spirit away our problems with Trazadone, Xanax and Percocets. You case workers, guidance counselors and psychiatrists only delay and compound our anguish. You are mandated reporters who contribute to stripping us of a home in a society where we only ever knew homelessness. When your prescriptions are not enough, Jack Daniels and stronger remedies do the trick, extending our miseries until we awake. 

Did it ever occur to you that with proper attention and resources we could speak for ourselves and heal ourselves? We are not the permanent underclass; it is your system that is permanently pathological. 

The congenial, play-it-safe petty bourgeoisie lives in fear of being discovered. Their social media posts never broach the genocide in Gaza or other “controversial” topics because they seek to appease and pacify, lest they ruffle religious feathers. What do workers know of their fear and cowardice? For they are a class that has everything to lose: their sinecures, their second homes on Cape Cod and their vacations abroad. And there in your backyard or at your vacation home, the poor white is mixing the cement, taking a swig and chain smoking, trying to make a living. My father’s shadow lurks over the false prophets of stability and security, a reality altogether foreign to us. George Bernard Shaw, my father, worked every day of his life for six decades. The inheritance he left us was only his laughter, impatience and love. 

Class Instincts

The poor white knows the class reflexes of the petit bourgeoisie well. For he has always been on the other side of their arrogance and superiority complex.

Class instincts and a worker’s mentality cannot be taught in any academic textbooks, not even in Marx. We carry an ideology of rage and combat, inherent within us, that develops over the course of our peoples’ history, and our daily lives. The poor white anticipates alien class instincts sniffing what is sincere or not. Knee-jerk class reflexes surge from the confines of the deep humiliation the poor whites have internalized. How many of us never looked a fellow human being in their eyes? For many of us, battered and war torn, that was our number one fight, to remember that we too were men and women who deserved to be respected as such. 

Returning to history, we cannot feel alone in our condition. Francis Butler Simkins and Robert Henley Woody, biographers of the South, offer the following portrait of “the white worker” in South Carolina During Reconstruction:

“These cabins . . . are dens of filth. The bed if there be a bed is a layer of something in the corner that defies scenting. If the bed is nasty, what of the floor? What of the whole enclosed space? What of the creatures themselves? Pough! Water in use as a purifier is unknown. Their faces are bedaubed with the muddy accumulation of weeks. They just give them a wipe when they see a stranger to take off the blackest dirt. … The poor wretches seem startled when you address them, and answer your questions cowering like culprits.”

This devastating image provokes an immediate solidarity with any human creature reduced to such degradation. From the holocaust in Gaza, to 1848 colonized Ireland to 1860 South Carolina, to an ADX Florence federal prison cell in 2025, great attempts have been to separate us from humanity, but we insist on being of it. The poor white is the universal poet Ho Chi Minh’s “dragon threatening to break out of the prison door.” 

The Street Soldiers: They know who they are. I wouldn’t be here without them. These words are theirs as much as they are mine. 

Conformity vs Rebellion

The liberal engages in coordinated civil disobedience in solidarity with endangered oceans and nearly extinct leopards. The poor white goes toe to toe with the police in the here and now, ready to sacrifice it all over one perceived insult. But rarely does he enter battle over an undeniable act of police violence against black and brown people. Humiliation lodged deep in his bones, his rage is his conscience, but it is inconsistent and color-coded. 

Many more of us become the police officers, marines and corrections officers than principled fighters for equality. Alienated from our own happiness, histories and heroes, we are the bricks in the wall of the Prison-Industrial Complex. In the South, we “constituted the police patrol who could ride with planters and now and then exercise unlimited force upon recalcitrant or runaway slaves (Du Bois p. 27). Our “psychological wage of whiteness” is enough to keep us slightly elevated and employed as the custodians of all the people who get an even slimmer slice of the American pie than we. Whites from more stable backgrounds are constitutionally inclined to see policing as a stable profession. Others of us see them as oppressive agents of the state and enemies of our neighborhoods. We are ignorant to the fact that the U.S. State has a relationship with black people much different historically from what it has with poor white people. This has significant implications in terms of theory and practice and is a central contradiction afflicting our class.

Du Bois’s own evolution as a thinker and fighter speaks to the complexity of the poor white in American history and his destiny today.  

It’s no coincidence the second chapter of Black Reconstruction in America is entitled “The white Worker.” Du Bois’ writing is a good foundation for the analysis we have to further develop and refine. For much of his life, Du Bois was a liberal and an integrationist. He initially believed in the “Talented Tenth” Thesis and saw the black liberation struggle as being one of integration into capitalist America as full and equal citizens led by the upper echelons of black America. Later he became a Marxist who promoted the idea that black and white workers could and would unite in a common struggle against capitalism and for socialism. Before his death, he became very disillusioned with the prospects for the white-black worker alliance due in part to the reactionary nature of the white working class. Ultimately, the renowned sociologist renounced his U.S. citizenship and moved to Ghana where he died a Marxist Pan-Africanist. DuBois bequeathed this challenge of uniting the proletariat to us if we ever dream of building a world beyond the ever greater class polarization afflicting us. 

The Myth of “white America”

“White America” never was and never will be. It is a myth of the ruling class minority. 

Of little use is relative white privilege, when you have PTSD and a heroin needle salivating and searching for your eighth vein. All sociological treatment of white America like any nation — real or invented — must be subjected to the most rigorous class breakdown. This is anathema to the liberal favorites like Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi and Adrienne Maree Brown, race whisperers for the white middle class. 

However, the historical invention of “white people” had all too real consequences for Black people, Chicanos, Native Americans, and all those racialized as “others.” As low as our social indicators are, there are those pushed further down on the social totem pole. As the writings of Lenin and Stalin prove, it is a historical fact beyond dispute that the United States was explicitly founded as a white nation, with “white” being the signifier for first Anglo-Saxon, then Western European more broadly. Only when masses of white people turn on this relative privilege and the whole damn system do we all have a chance to defeat our common enemies. 

W.E.B. Du Bois cites one of his early mentors at Harvard, and one of the first professional historians Albert Bushnell Hart, who captures the following ethnographic snapshot of our ancestors: 

“Most of them are illiterate and more than correspondingly ignorant. Some of them had Indian ancestors and a few bear evidences of Negro blood. The so-called ‘mountain boomer,’ says an observer, ‘has little self-respect and no self-reliance …. So long as his corn pile lasts the “cracker” lives in contentment, feasting on a sort of hoe cake made of grated corn meal mixed with salt and water and baked before the hot coals, with addition of what game the forest furnishes him when he can get up the energy to go out and shoot or trap it …. The irregularities of their moral lives cause them no sense of shame …. But, notwithstanding these low moral conceptions, they are of an intense religious excitability.”

We regret to inform you, in the two centuries since the Civil War, our moral lives continue to be most “irregular.” We are the momentary front pages of the New York Times. We give you your “breaking” stories on CNN. We are rarely worth more than a 24-hour news cycle. We are the social segment that produces the bulk of school shootings and hate crimes. We succumb to addictions and early deaths from economic and social despair. Our limelight in the capitalist press 999 out of 1000 times stems from our alienation, yet no one dares to say it. We are worth more ignorant and dependent. The moment we wake up to the reality of Bamboozlement, we will shake and explode the foundations of the system.  

We are pregnant with shame and apologies when we are around the “superior” class with “woke” vocabulary and pedantic ideas. We know embarrassment intimately. It has been deposited in our lifeblood for centuries by the kings and lords. Today, their billionaire heirs preside over our dignity. We are the Eternal Over-compensators and Over-sharers, trying to make up for our battered self-esteems. We are the Trauma Bonders who bombard you with too much information. Our boundaries were shattered the first time we were abused in diapers. 

On other occasions, we don’t utter a word, because we feel we are not good enough. We wear corduroys of self-doubt and overalls of self-loathing. Our self-suicides have no trace of self-pity. For even in our early deaths, there is a great pride that presides over our condition. The dignity of the down-and-out emits a certain working-class chauvinism towards those who never had to survive what we have. We have an ax to grind. We are well balanced. We have a chip on both shoulders. 

We inhabit an entire world the liberals can never understand. We, the army of the indebted, bankrupt and unemployed. They have already taken so much from us. What do we have to defend? Our battered self-esteems? The most limited of property? When we break out from under their liberal tutelage and MAGA hegemony, our revolt will be the Third American Revolution. 

Fear, Fearlessness & The Great Divide

It is the material reality of food insecurity, the projects and the overdoses which mold our personalities and dictate our actions. The foppish and the fastidious cannot roll with the hardened and the hustlers. We do not speak the same language nor do we seek to. All of your high-falutin smugness creates the distance only revolt can shrink. We feel the urgency. We inject, swallow and cut to outrun ourselves in a race we can never win… 

Liberals hold their tongue afraid to offend anyone. Our very being is repellant so why would we hold back? 

How many liberals think we “talk black” or “talk like a Puerto Rican.” They forgot poor whites also grew up in similar class terrain? Liberals “wannabe;” We are. The race-blind bullets, needles and alcoholic fathers breed a different set of knee-jerk class reactions to life. Hollywood and commercial Hip-Hop over-glorify a reality we would not wish on our worst enemies. As has been said by the street philosophers who breathe life into these words: Being Broke is No Joke!

The liberal is hobbled by fear, for his horizons are seemingly endless. Fear is foreign to us. We’ll do what we have to, just to get by. For the liberal, the revolution provokes feelings of instability; for us, the revolution is the only hope to quell our hunger. 

The liberal has everything to lose. What does the poor white have to lose but his self-hatred, class chains and humiliation?

What then can the liberal feel in the presence of the poor white, his arch-nemesis, but envy? The envy of seeing him let go of that which is rotten and decaying. The liberal cannot bring himself to admit the raw truth, and speak up like a woman and post like a man against the genocide in Gaza. Such actions would dictate that they too would have to rise up and confront history. The liberal is comfortable and quite willing to turn his back on humanity. He is a lamenter, but not an actor. The spineless cannot even confront themselves, much less the holocausts they hide and justify. 

The petty bourgeoisies’ moral compass always leads to the same place, opportunism and careerism. 

Liberals despise us because we have broken free. We are the herd of stallions, emerging from the dust and ashes, hardened by deficit and foreclosure. What do we have left? What did we ever have? We threaten to trample over our enemies, but society’s blinders hold us back. We had better identify our enemy clearly or all of America will remain in the crosshairs of our half a billion guns… 

This system was never ours. But it did afford us strategic crumbs to convince us we had a significant material stake in it. From day one in colonial America, many poor European settlers fled here as religious, political and economic refugees and accumulated as much free land as they could conquer and defend. While they might not have run the system, they willingly and even enthusiastically made the system run. This continued the span of American history. The Homestead Act of 1862 exclusively afforded white farmers the ability to own land. The GI Bill of 1944 allowed returning white GIs to purchase a home in suburbia, which was understood to be “white suburbia.” Law professor Wilfred Codrington III posits that “the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.” Like poll taxes and voter-ID laws, historically designed to disenfranchise non-white voters, the electoral college gives more weight to small state and suburban voters, who are usually whiter and more conservative voters. Even the least privileged among us were afforded relative privileges denied to our brethren in darker skin. 

We never had to do anything to be “down” because we were born at the bottom. When you are born into Dante’s 9th rung of incest and self-mutilation, where else is there to go but up? 

When you are born into a resilient family who always had your back, what else is there to feel but gratitude? We wake up every morning to Let Go, Let God and Let Good…

Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Eve meant family, food and presents. The simple or eccentric gifts from aunts and uncles who had so little meant as much as the fancier gifts. We shoveled plates of the yummiest food into our tummies, playing with our new lego sets and action figures. Often, dad or mom had a new boyfriend or girlfriend they were dating. We did not always bother to learn their names because we knew it was a wasted investment. They would soon be gone with the wind. And often it was a toss-up, if the turkey would stay on the table. This is AA code for when things went wrong for us drunks and addicts on the most holy of days, often turned hell-days by our generational trauma. This is why every July 4th and every birthday, we are there in the front row of church and our 12-step meetings. We will not close the door on the past, but we will also not be a prisoner to it. United, we start and close every meeting:

The poor white may not know history nor the bonds he shares intrinsically with people fighting around the world for dignity, but I have seen the Haiti and Palestine that blaze within many of us. If we can tap into solidarity and internationalism, we could help reshape history. 

We have a different approach to the streets. The liberal looks tepidly over his shoulder, full of fear, fear of being consumed by the irascible flames of history. We strut and gallop forward trying to escape a history that lives within. 

My mentor’s mentor John Black walked into a bar in rural Pennsylvania and said to a group of young comrades: “You see these stout men here? They can either turn their guns on us the communists or on the billionaires. It is our historical task to win them over so we can turn on our oppressors or we are all finished.” 30 years later, my mentor Dr. Andy McInerny told me this tale on Kingsbridge and Jerome in the Bronx. Today, I share it with my two sons. 

This is me and 9-month old Chichi the day after a hard-fought contest against Shaine Stuart in Madison Square Garden. The two silver gloves I won have always meant the world to me! That silver and red ruby are cut from the finest and rarest Blood, Sweat and Tears. 

Poor Skin, white Masks

While we live in denial, there is no hiding our organic disdain for the rich.  

Liberals inherit wealth; poor whites abhor wealth. 

At the same time, like the servants who cannot sit at the main table, we covet wealth. The paradox consumes the sanity and the serenity we never knew. Fighting for the commoner is both foreign and native to us. 

We hate privileges, not because we don’t need them but because they are out of our reach. 

The liberal blows with the winds of self-interest; we are loyal to the only ones who ever had our backs.

No one ever sought to represent us honestly in the media or in Hollywood. We were never allowed to cultivate our own voice. Only the voices from us but against our interests were amplified. Alien interests who earn one thousand times what we do insist on speaking for us. 

Does that sound familiar to any other oppressed social groups? 

Our alienation is yours; your humiliation is ours. 

Our empowerment is yours; your uprising is ours.  

Part III. Death by Capitalism 

An estimated 50 million of us Americans fight addiction. 60 million of us have a mental health condition. 

Dear 8 billion fellow human beings: 

“Despised: A Poor white Trash Manifesto” is a cry for help. We are not living well. The American dream that appears on your Netflix and Hollywood movies is a brittle myth. We are so busy surviving the capitalist nightmare, most of us have never even had the opportunity to learn about your struggles in Nigeria, Bolivia or Indonesia. The earth’s radius along the equator is almost 4,000 miles but the longest mile is between our two ears. When we are in our heads, we are in a bad neighborhood. We are a shortsighted breed, but now at least you know the perplexing origins of our myopia. Most of us never even thought about getting a passport. For many of us a machine gun and courses in hatred for humanity from the Marines and the Army were the only passport we had out of this misery. Reality weighs on us everyday until we sign up for their navy, army and air force to occupy and invade rich foreign countries. 

Capitalist existence has robbed us of the ability to see beyond our own trauma, individualism and dogged quest for survival. Here we stand in Neopit, Wisconsin, Hayti Heights, Missouri and Porcupine, South Dakota, at the crossroads of thirst for truth and despondency. We hate politicians. We have long given up on any saviors and know in our heart of hearts, only we can save ourselves. We have all the necessary anger but little of the discipline needed for Revolution. 

My youngest son, Cauã Amaru: the young prince of growth, overstanding and spirituality. 

The People’s Vigils: Gone but not forgotten

Dual Diagnosis

Some 200,000 of us overdose every year. Millions more are traumatized. That means every year 28 times as many of us disappear as the US. government war machine disappeared in the U.S.’s failed conquests of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

There is a war on us too, we just have not figured out how to make common cause with the rest of the hunted. Our lives are often worth less than a five or ten dollar bill.  We bury our loved ones swearing revenge on the scumball drug dealer who mixed fentanyl in our supply chain to save a few bucks. We blame Mexico and China as the “American dream” murders us. Isolated in our tragedies and rages, we don’t know how to mourn and fight back together. The People’s Vigils are the vision so that we never have to cry alone again as we bury our sons and daughters, and mothers and fathers from death by capitalism. As we hear Tucker Carlson blame China and Trump invades Mexico, do we stop to think that it is this very system, “American democracy,” that is murdering us in mass? “American de-mo-cra-cy” in the 5th Ward of Houston, the Bronx and the 9th Ward of New Orleans is dem-mock-ing-me > they-are-mocking-we > the rich are mocking us. Only we, the 340,000,000 Americans, can create the “Democracy” that has eluded us and has only ever existed for the George Washingtons, John D. Rockefellers and Bill Gates.   

We are the panopticon the godfather of wokeness Michel Foucault obsessively studied. The social workers, Department of Youth Service workers and teachers feel pity for us. They blame us and get crocodile tears in their eyes for “our victims,” so as not to understand and make common cause with us. 

We are fantasy addicts. We hope to live long, prosperous lives with our children, partners and family. We defend an American dream that has never included us. We are the anti-Patriot Patriots. We defend a flag that we long ago relinquished to our exploiters and enemies. Is your red white and blue the flag of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk or the flag of your parents and grandparents? Old Glory cannot shine for the Haves and Have-nots at the same time. What is our flag? What banner can we carry that represents our aspirations? Why do we see ourselves through the eyes of our bosses and masters?

Our high schools and churches banned Karl Marx for a reason. They were and continue to be afraid that we will find ourselves in our 9th great grandfather’s reasoning: 

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

We have OCD. We do things in threes to control the untamable trauma. We cannot let up. We take an ass-whopping but keep punching forward. The superior classes have humiliated us since the womb. We failed every Anger Management class. They were the only extra-curricular activities we were ever invited to participate in. Therapy for us is a “rich-people thing.”

We are your ADHD test cases. We produce mental illness at scientific rates, corresponding to the rates of our alienation. Many such diagnoses are but a maladaptive coping mechanism to deal with our trauma. It is a learned lifestyle, when you never had a lifestyle choice. Survival instincts are a matter of life and death. Dr. Gabor Maté, a true godfather and defender of the evicted, speaks to us gently and with respect. Scattered, we collect the shattered pieces and spilt drugs off the carpet, trying to reassemble our brokenness. We are embarrassed by junkies, winos and bums, failing to see that they are us, and we are them, the oppressed, cast-off layers of society. We are the but of Dave Chapelle’s Ohio and Midwest jokes, but we never take it personal because we love a good laugh. Self-deprecating humor is native to us. 

We are marked by obsessions. If you whoop us in a fight, we show up at your doorstep the next day for Round Two. Regret is foreign to us. Resentment is the number one offender. 

We are the deflectors and denialists who scream “Fuckin’ Cunt” and “Cocksucker” at you on Route 2, 95 and 80. We are the first to flip out, yell and fight, but somehow the rage always returns stronger. We mock social workers and place our hopes in the Mega Millions. We see psychiatrists to cop a script and sell it for $200 to pay the rent. 

Caffeine lightens the weight of routine. Caffeine gives us a reason to get out of bed. Caffeine is the beautiful mistress that inspires us to do ten more pushups. 

We are judgemental. The anorexic judges the obese as ghastly. The cutter quivers upon thinking about the heroin addict. The gossips entertain themselves with the failures of the alcoholics. The gamblers murder themselves with promises of “I got to hit next time.” 

We are the oxyelectorate. We do not vote based on our own best interests, but rather based on our alienation. How can we “Make America Great Again,” when for almost three centuries the haves never stopped stepping on the necks of the have-nots? Our exploiters, “the globalists,” moved their capital abroad to pay Dominicans and Vietnamese a day’s pay on an assembly line which is the equivalent of what they once had to pay us per hour in the 1980’s. Journalist Thomas Frank asks this very question in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Why do we vote for haughty politicians who would never sit down with us for a cup of coffee or a cold Bud Light?

In Germ vs. Terrain theory, we are the germs that inevitably sprout up from the alienating social terrain. 

We are a scientific people. Our DOCs (Drugs of Choice) tell our stories. 

An addiction to heroin and fentynol tells a story of a childhood of incest and rape. Combat veterans suffer from similar afflictions. This is reflective of severe PTSD. The cutters and anorexics are not far behind. Of course, there are comorbidities and we have cousins who check all of these boxes. 

Stoners and codependents most often had some degree of healing and have a much lighter load of PTSD. Of course, there is great variation across these oversimplified columns. What is scientific and predictable is that the severity of the addiction corresponds to the severity of the trauma. The capitalism-trauma-addiction-recovery-socialism nexus is our only hope of breaking the generational and historical cycle. We just don’t know it yet. 

The Red, White and Blue means different things to different people. But you cannot tell us that! If you step on “our flag,” you will have to deal with us. But Bezos, Musk and Trump have been disrespecting us, our families and flag for decades and we never protested. We are a most contradictory people. 

The Class Schism

The poor white offends every polite sensibility. He is the walking mockery of liberal illusions. He is the concrete matter of your surveys and sociological studies. We are 75 percent of the guests you mocked and jeered on the Jerry Springer and the Dr. Phil show. We seek a way out but all you ever offered was humiliation. Our deaths of despair are the only time we are headlines, as you hate us, mock us and tuck us under the analytical rug.

Your theories of the racialized and sexualized have no room for us. Identity politics offers you an out and a satisfactory explanation. You can blame capitalism’s failures on detached single issues, like racism, sexism and heterosexism. Then, you only have to attend your next self-castigating “white privilege” workshop of the year to feel you are playing your role in fixing society’s ills. You ignore proletarian black, white and brown leadership because their analysis is real and calls out your contradictions. Cancel culture is a one-way street. Take note of the class who is cancelled and that class that does the cancelling. Not much has changed in American history. Censorship is a class reality.    

You practice “progressive stack” and make “points of privilege” at DSA conventions. We watch your workshops and conventions to entertain ourselves with your meekness. You can’t read the room because you have never lived outside your bubble. You attend picket lines and lecture workers on the way forward but have never had to work a 9-to-5 yourself. You preach about not taking up too much space but you are the professionals, pundits and professors. You debate on Kick whether baristas are workers or not, but have never done a day’s work like them in your life.

We are the human filth and flotsam you removed from South Boston, Dorchester and Charlestown. You pushed us and our generational trauma to Gardner, the Cape and Manchester. You form groups targeting “white privilege” to appease your consciences, never reflecting on who you displaced. The DSA and PSL kicked us out because we made the wrong joke or stopped talking to us because they think they are better than us. Hipsters and professional activists gentrified our old neighborhoods and pushed us far away from the expensive city limits. This was never about skin color; This was all about Benjamins, Grants and Jacksons. Neither dead presidents nor living presidents represent us. Every president held up as a hero has been but a mouthpiece and rep of the rich. In 1848 in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote: “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” This is exactly what we mean everytime we say “you can’t trust these dirty, corrupt politicians.” Though we have yet to read him and have been taught to fear and hate him, we are Marx. And the workers who fought before us are us. 

We know who has put us in this rut and it is not us. Does the identity-politics-funded left know who their true enemy is? Surely, it is not their funders. Upton Sinclair reminds us: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The superficial is a liberal’s best friend. We are his feeble conscience, the inverted mirror to his ideal stability and perfect equilibrium. We are the surest proof that perfection and trying to please everyone is the closest thing to death. We, in our trailer parks, alongside the reservations and ghettos, are the surest proof that your entire system is irreformable and your destiny is to be overthrown. 

The Virtue Hoarders

Social critic Frederick Deboer brilliantly captures the liberal’s paternalism: 

“They [liberal whites] wage this effort to justify their position with a different kind of virtue: not that of hard work and frugal living, but political virtue, identity virtue, the virtue of having the right kinds of opinions. And those opinions, amount to a benevolent, quietly condescending love for minority identities–the black, brown, the gay, the transgender, the Muslim, the disabled.” 

Everyone is worthy of your pity except for your own “rejects” and “failures.” We are the virtue transgressors and virtue outlaws. We say what we think and don’t think when we say it. Like Frank Talk, we are fearless, “We write what we like.”

Liberals drive around with their children giving their leftovers to the homeless and then preach about their principles. They elevate theatrics over solidarity and illusions over sacrifice. They defend Biden and Kamala, because “at least they are better than Trump,” the poor white trash billionaire. There is only one problem. The conman billionaire sounds so much realer to us because the liberal epitomizes paternalism. We will break with him as his class war devours his glitzy press conferences.

The poor white can spot the plastic, penny-pinching, patronizing Biden-voters from a mile away. Kamala-voters smile as they rudely gawk at and touch a black woman’s hair with curiosity, only to turn around and snub a downtrodden white. For what is exotic or special about us? 

Liberals are the face of incrementalism; We are the physiognomy of struggle.

If we had to set the table at someone else’s house, we hated it and contemplated smashing the entire home to pieces, because we never had a table of our own to set. Before we were 13, we lived in 14 different places. Our only role models showed up with different boyfriends and girlfriends every holiday season. One night stands turned into move ins.

The left hates us; the right manipulates us. The gritless, cowardly left has delivered us to the doorstep of the right, like a stork arriving with a basket and a tender baby. 

I always felt a certain resentment when people observed my early access to books on the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and concluded that I was a red diaper baby. I wasn’t a red diaper baby, I was a crack diaper baby. I was a survivor of the womb and of history. But looking back, it is true. My mother, a warrioress in the mold of Afeni Shakur, exposed me to so much. The combination of book smarts and street smarts carry the traveler and the revolutionary far in life.  

The liberal trades in appearance, attention and validation politics. His activist hobbies, on full display in “White Dudes for Harris” and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), are self-flagellation and civility. The liberal self-segregates, marching at the back of the Black Lives Matter rallies; we march out of the welfare office irate, calling the case manager “a faggot” and the Child Protection Service (CPS) worker “a cunt.” 

The liberal provokes mockery; We provoke disgust. 

They feel guilt; We feel hunger. 

The liberal has stripped the word “progressive” of any meaning. They have a fetish for mediocre workshops, empty words and hollow slogans. One bright morning at Boston University, after receiving their tenth report from Ibram X, Kendy’s ten-million-dollar team, they decided by academic committee to cease calling us “homeless” and label us “unhoused.” At Brown, they lecture us not to say “slaves,” but rather “enslaved people.” We are no longer “convicts” or “locked up,” we are “state impacted.” 

We ask: “What the fuck is the difference?” How did you academics become so corny?”

You worry about vacuous words; We worry about putting food on the table. 

We do not measure our progress and emancipation by liberal linguistic yardsticks; We measure “progress” according to our material reality. Liberals offer us nothing, so we give them the finger and embrace their enemies. MAGA Republicans also despise “the despised,” but have been able to lasso up tens of millions of us and our rage. They have convinced us that our destiny is intertwined with a bigwigpig who is worth billions more than us, even though he has never worked like us a day in his life. 

Every diversity initiative focuses on the underrepresented. Has anyone thought that poor whites, like all human beings, deserve a shot too? Why is this framed as a threat to the interests of black America or any other oppressed groups? Why do we fight over scraps from the masters’ table? No other oppressed person is our enemy, rival or competition because you never exploited us, spoke down to us or mocked our condition. You are our natural allies. While today this is far from being realized, the reality is that only together can we seize what belongs to us all. In the words of Bobby Seale and dozens of Black Panthers armed to the teeth before the legislature in Sacramento: “Up against the wall motherfucker! We’ve come for what’s ours!”

Liberalism, Fascism and Guilt

Timidity never made it in history. 

Nor did liberals. Liberals have paved the way for holocausts and genocides. Liberals are cowardice and vacillation personified. Liberals are afraid to offend a Jewish friend or colleague as a nation is incinerated and a 76-year holocaust accelerates beyond Gaza into the West Bank, all of Occupied Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Facebook and X likes, self-promotion and silence are more important than 2.4 million incinerated Gazan lives. 

Like the Germans of 1939 and 2024 who cheer on genocide, the liberals are permanently attached to their guilt over their grandparents’ crimes of yesteryear. This provoked me to ask all my German friends: Are you against the genocide in Palestine? Why do you take great pride in feeling guilty about the Holocaust? Of what use is your guilt-pride, as you arm the modern-day Nazis to the teeth? From the Occupied and Genocided West Bank, Tamara Nassar and Abdaljawad Omar attempt to teach us “Westerners” and “whites” something about what it means to be honest and civilized. 

For how many centuries have we collectively failed humanity? 

The New York Times 1619 project serves this very ideological function. Liberals can mourn over past crimes as they ignore them today. They can cry over the need for reparations for Haiti, Black America and individual groups that were oppressed, while leaving the ongoing oppression and occupation untouched. Trump and Vance are the overtly racist dog whistler against Haitian immigrants. Biden and Harris are the savvy invaders and occupiers of Haiti for the fourth time in the past century. 

The German, English and U.S. governments once competed for the gold medal in invasions, occupations and bombing campaigns against innocent human beings. The Western European colonial powers are but junior partners today in genocide. Once the colonizer, Western Europe today is the backyard of empire, occupied from England to Romania, from Italy to Ukraine, by over 75,000 U.S. troops. Now, the U.S. military prepares to occupy Palestine, the Navajos and Lakota of the Middle East. Germany, the U.S. and the lot of the Western world, the colonial and genocidal parties of yesteryear, perform the same crimes today. What are “reparations” but the liberal crumbs Malcolm warned about as an entire colonial system remains more rapacious than ever. The only real, living reparations entail not just a restoration of all that was stolen and squeezed from the enslaved, but a social formation that ends the exploitation and bleeding today. 

Don’t Conflate Us with Our Enemies

We poor whites are sick of being the crabs in the barrel that hate all the Mexican and Muslim crabs as Robert Kraft and Steve Ballmer degrade us all. Because we hate ourselves, it comes across that we hate you. How can we hate those whom we only know through the eyes of our enemies? 

Liberals tiptoe on eggshells and gossip behind our backs. We say what’s on our minds. Alfred Lubrano, author of Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, highlights the culture shock we feel if we are among the few selected for college scholarships. He hints at the passive-aggressive way of expression and the difficulty of learning to adapt to their alien norms and expectations. It was clear to Lubrano that Columbia University was a place that would never accept his father and family. This was how we scholarship students felt on Ivy League campuses. Homesickness and culture shock appeared in their naked class iteration. We may not have had much where we came from, but we had acceptance and love. On UPenn and Stanford’s campuses, we had to learn to be somebody else. 

The liberal quotes Gandhi, Barack Obama and Kamala. The poor white quotes Jefferson, Jesus and Trump. He rarely talks about peace because it is not part of his reality. 

They have sold us false prophets from Ronald to Donald. How many disgruntled whites were about to go Biden-huntin’ on July 15th, after Trump was shot? We fail to see the origins of our despised state. We are high off The New York Post and drunk off Fox because it is all we have ever known. 

Liberalism represents nothing but petty concessions, proceduralism and a fake spirit of “kumbaya,” encouraging us to get along with elites who do everything to separate from us. We don’t want your crumbs; we want our own bakery in which to make our own bread. Your charity degrades us. Our cooperation with our own class, with its infinite hues and personal expressions, uplifts us. 

We don’t judge you by your appearance or words. We could care less whom you sleep with. We give you our trust until you betray us. We can see through you. There is a transparency to both your hypocrisy and sincerity. Trauma, if survived and transcended, provides a special lens to gaze upon the souls of all folks. 

I graduated from high school on this day in May 1996. 

Part IV: The Class Antidote to Hillbilly Elegy

40-year-old Ohio native JD Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy shows us the misery, but ignores the source. The poor boy didn’t forget where he came; He never knew to begin with. Vast structures of violence and poverty have our mothers, sisters and daughters trapped in a vortex of abuse and low self-esteem. We are not junkies, winos or bums; We are fighters and survivors. Vance is all image, no heart. Vance is all Hollywood, no Middletown. Vance is venture capital, not steel. The GOP brass used Vance’s story as their own antidote to the pandemic of early deaths ravaging our families.  

The rich propped up a fake. Black America has their uncle Toms and Latinos have their vendepatrias; We too have our booklickers and asskissers. The bootstrapper-extraordinaire, Vance, laments his own individual memories but ignores a society that has produced millions of us survivors. Unfortunately, Yale and the mega billionaire Peter Thiel‘s firm, Mithril Capital, didn’t have room for all of us, just sellouts like Vance willing to abandon the rest of us behind in Kentucky, West Virginia and across Appalachia. The ruling class flexes its handful of Oprah, rags-to-riches stories to impress upon us that there is room for millions of Vances in their board rooms, firms and Oval Offices. Lies! Vance like all the corporate politicians sold us out, using his own elegy to gloss over ours. Anyone who would use his own trauma to consolidate a traumatizing system is a carpetbagger. Vance is not welcome in Jackson, Eastern Kentucky, Middletown Northern Ohio nor Brockton, Southern Massachusetts. We the American people don’t need artificially elevated celebrities; We need friends. We don’t need egos; We need jobs. The only melancholic and heartwarming redneck, hillbilly or poor white trash elegy we need is one that grants us a fair, peaceful place under God’s broad sun. 

Where I grew up in Brockton, on 66 French Ave, off Calmar Street. This is little Cape Verde, two blocks away from the legendary Cape Cod Cafe. 

Sellin’ Our Souls

How can you cancel the canceled? Long ago, we were canceled. Politicians only care about us every four years when they need to cash in our unenlightenment. We are out of sight and out of mind for most of America. Exiled in our own land, we make common cause with the most dastardly of enemies, who most of the time hate us as well. As the 1677 Bacon’s Rebellion and 1787 Shay’s Rebellion showed us, the aristocracy’s worst fear is that we unite with the red man and the black man on the basis of our common impoverishment. And it was then, at this historical moment when we made common cause with our fellow man that our overlords rechristened us as “white.” De jure laws written into the Virginia colony are the first time the word “white” appears on the law books as a social category enshrined as superior to other “racial groups.” “Whiteness” became the psychological mechanism to wed us to our czars and emperors and divorce us from our fellow man. Three centuries later we continue to take the bait.   

Shunned and canceled as “deplorables,” the offensive poor white trash has no liberal baggage to shed. We were born “despicable,” dispossessed and disposed of long ago. Our wrath and lack of horizons are inherently illiberal. Our fate is unknown. 

We are Joe Biden‘s “garbage” people. We have no political home. Nobody wants us. Not the jackass or the elephant. We are only good for our votes and many of us cannot even organize ourselves to do that. We are the defuturized, the disaffected and the spiritually homeless.  

The liberals high five for Hillary, Kamala, Joe, Bill, Barack and Michelle. The poor whites’ only wish is to spit in their phoney faces and call them by their true first names, “fakes and bitches.” My family members’ words are offensive but at least they are real. It is telling that the very way we speak causes outrage among the upper strata. Has anything changed in history? The Politics of Resentment by political scientist Katherine Cramer examines the anger among working-class families across Wisconsin at “being looked down upon by the big-city elites in Madison.” Working-class chauvinism, pride in making due with no outside help, is not just a concept, but a way of being. 

“Rich Men North of Richmond”

Former factory worker Oliver Anthony wrote our 2023 national anthem, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The Farmville, Virginia, native whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford speaks for all of us with his opening lyrics:

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day 
Overtime hours for bullshit pay
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away.
It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to
For people like me and people like you
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true
But it is, oh, it is.

Although the song reached over 200 million people, the woke twitterati expressed nothing but disgust for Oliver Anthony’s work. They hyper-focused on one line: 

I wish politicians would look out for miners
And not just minors on an island somewhere
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re five-foot-three and you’re three-hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds
Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground
‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down

One “offensive” line spurred phalanxes of commentators to condemn “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The liberal loses sight of the forest because of one “bad” or misunderstood tree. His line about Americans “milking welfare” pushed all the liberal buttons. They denounced this rare, algorithm-breaking, working-class hero as “fat phobic” and other non-politically-correct labels. Anthony’s popular outrage sparked other anthems like “Poor Men South of Portland” by Jon Reep. But because we are not perfect enough for the liberals and do not express things like them, they cancel us and our anthems. The poor white does not have the benefit of a dialectical materialist bird’s eye view of class society and its infinite contradictions. Yes, we get it wrong sometimes. In the trenches and on the shop floor, it behooves us to have thick skin or we will annihilate one another as the banksters laugh all the way to D.C., just north of Richmond. It is true that “the obese” are just as much victims and survivors of this moribund, late capitalist society as the anorexic, the cutters and the fentanyl fiends. It is true. We have swallowed tropes about “black welfare queens” and “lazy Puerto Rican families exploiting the system.” Does that make us “chuds” and “incels,” two derogatory words used by Compact Magazine to describe Oliver? Yet Oliver was clear on where he stands and who his enemies are, stating: “It’s aggravating to see people on conservative news try to identify with me like I’m one of them.” 

No one from the working class is going to be a ready-made, flawless cadre of the revolution. Malcolm X cautions us against judging and canceling others: “There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.” Is canceling us and dismissing us the way forward or is it counterproductive? Is there no way to meet us halfway? Are these petty bourgeois forces in firm control of the left interested in forming a true working-class army? History has proven that only real, everyday struggle can unite us and wash away these distant tertiary contradictions that exist among the people. 

We are not the problem. The problem is that dialectics are the kryptonite of liberals. By looking down on and canceling Trump country, liberalism has handed large swaths of America’s working poor to Trump and his billionaire cabinet.  

‘The Most Dangerous Thing in the Western Hemisphere’

At Harvard University, which costs an average of $76,763 to attend, in 2016, 91 percent of faculty donations went to Hillary Clinton. 80 percent of Harvard students vote for the Democratic Party and 6 percent for the Republicans. How could it be that the flyover states see the world so differently and vote the polar opposite way? 

I wrote the following poem as part of an eulogy to a fellow who passed from a “death of despair” recently:

The “cultured” vs the uncouth
The snooty vs the real
Behold the
Salt of the Earth
Breaking balls
over sarcasm and beer
No airs
Humble as dirt
A man’s man
A woman’s woman
A guy’s guy
A gal’s gal
…..
Balls to the wall

To the radlib, I am nothing beyond my appearance, “a white cis male.” To the liberal, it is of little consequence that my siblings, cousins and I have picked up three generations of our loved ones from the callous concrete, overdosed and discarded. No amount of generational trauma undoes our “whiteness,” “cis-ness” and “toxic and hyper masculinity.” To those who peddle in virtuousness, our “deplorable-ness” is unforgivable. Poverty was our birthright; abandon, our middle name. We speak a language unintelligible to the liberal, the dialect of survival. We are as alien and offensive to one another as foxes are to chickens. All your arrogance and guilt are foreign to us. We have too little to feel guilt. You want attention and validation; we want survival and dignity.

This is why Malcolm called liberals “the most dangerous thing in the Western hemisphere.” They do not act out of conviction; they act out of convenience. They think so highly of themselves and what they perceive as their uprightness that they frame themselves as part of the solution. They deplore “the deplorables,” but do not question the deplorable social, cultural and economic conditions that give birth to us. 

The liberal white is a most excitable creature. He is fully capable of ignoring all the poor whites’ obnoxious cries for help — the school shootings, the overdoses, the xenophobia, the hate crimes — but the moment the poor white scapegoats the fleeing Mexican or the refugized Somalian, they make a PBS news special about us. That is the only time we are worthy of any sociological attention. How strikingly similar to how the Southern historians describe us as pursuing nothing but black death for the span of American history. Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels urge us to question: Which class would have a material interest in narrowly focusing on the worst of our attributes and actions? Is it fair to think that at no point we poor whites pursued our own collective goals? Has it occurred to anyone that the liberals’ disdain for the working American plays right into the hands of the billionaires? 

And here we are, under the liberals’ microscope, a petri dish of immiserated whites run afoul. 

We carry out our executions in circles, the puppet master dangling the strings from above and beyond. We are preoccupied with every type of alien, except the one with the knife in our neck.

Liberals enjoy nothing more than making fun of Donald Trump and his lack of enlightenment. Trump’s racist and asinine comments are more offensive and devastating for the liberal than the ten Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombs dropped over the Gaza Reservation. Complaining and fretting is their pastime. At no point do they take responsibility for having rubbed this white supremacist genie warmly out of his bottle. It is your neglect, your deindustrialization and your forked tongue that abandoned the other white America to the MAGA movement. You turned your back on us yesterday! Today you have no right to rebuke and mock us! The sleek liberal politician never offered us anything, but despises our decisions in a decisionless world.  

The racist conservatives mislead us equally successfully, but that is their job and they are more honest about it. The wolf in the grass pretends to be nothing other than the ravenous beast that he is. The liberal fox and snakes in the grass double deal in passive aggression. This essay has mostly targeted the foxes because we have no illusions about the wolves and their desire to devour us.  

We are a resentful breed, hellbent on leveling the American playing field.  

I could only grow into who I am because of this woman. Karen Joyce Sypher Mahoney, my mother, never met a working man or woman she did not learn from and never picked up a book she didn’t finish. In some ways mom, it will always be: “Just us against the world…”

PTSD

We are the 9-year-old bed wetters. We are the 10-year-olds who smear our shit all over the walls, screaming for help but are never heard. We are the sexually condemned. We are the generationally doomed. We are reminded since we were old enough to understand that it was all “our fault.”

Trauma is not being seen and not being heard. 

Our fathers are torches in the street and darkness at home. Our mothers are survival, personified. We had “step fathers and mothers,” who were like Christmas presents, they came and went with the season. We asked our moms, mas, and mamas once after decades: “What percentage of your existence has been survival? What percentage has been living?” “80-90 percent survival and 10–20 percent living my son” was the most common response. We carry the legacy of single mothers who taught us: “Fight through the tough moments, savor the rest.” Our fathers were so busy chasing manhood and dopamine, the corners and alleyways raised us. 

We are the children sexually abused by uncles, basketball coaches and priests. We are the dreams invaded by cold sweats and nightmares. We are the latchkey kids who fall asleep in first and eighth period. Read our medical files. We were robbed of a chance before we were conscious of what life was. Instead of listening to our truths, you label us as “ADHD,” “anxious” and “autistic.” Branded, we are misunderstood and further ignored. Everyday your psychiatrists and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) have fresh diagnoses and fresh pills for us. We are the little wanderers you see at the Welfare and Food Stamp offices. Guidance counselors, doctors and psychiatrists collect their six digit salaries, building up our files without ever questioning the roots of our trauma. Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD), Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) and Social Communication Disorder (SCD) are your latest diagnoses. 

How much easier is it to label us than to take a hard, non-liberal look at the social forces that hatched us? 

“Special Education” for us was always an empty, high-falutin euphemism for the special violence delivered onto us. Physical, mental, emotional and sexual violence were our families legacies, dating back to Belfast, Glasgow and Liverpool. We and our siblings were called “idiots,” “assholes” and “retards” so much, it was more common than being called Mikey, Danny or Greg. We strike first and ask questions later. The violence you deposited in our being and the hatred you surrounded us with now comes home to roost from Columbine to New Orleans to Las Vegas.   

For some of us, it was a baptism by fire, for others it was baptism by incest. 

We were told it was our fault. We were told not to tell anybody. We were told we were dirty. If we survived, we discovered we were only as unhealthy as our secrets. 

We were Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting”), full of aggression and self-hatred lashing out at everyone around us. Very few of us in real life had a therapist like Sean Maguire (played by Robin Williams) to tell us, “It’s not your fault.” If ever in cinematic history, there were four words that speak to us, it was those spoken by one of the world’s most beloved artists and actors. 

We trust no one. We internalized your sins, never to be spoken of again. The alcohol and the crystal meth dredged up more truths than any social worker or sexual education class. We wandered the halls of your schools, DYS offices and the homeless shelters, the guardians of the greatest secrets. Here within these cold stares and heavy left hooks, are secrets no one dares to utter. We bear secrets you would not even dare to place on the shoulders of gods. You stored all your secrets away right here within us. We are a well-balanced breed. We carry a chip the size of the mighty Redwoods on both shoulders. We are the precise accumulation of all your transgressions. 

Like the indomitable Chris Herren from Fall River, Massachusetts, our heart and heartlessness are unprotected and “Unguarded.”  

We are the survivors of your cowardice and broken system. It is true that most of us do not know anything other than your racist tropes about Haiti or Palestine. And what we know least of all, is that we have an eternal Palestinian and Haitian flame burning within. It is only the discovery and organization of that blaze that breathes revolutionary optimism into future global winds…

We Don’t Need Your White Saviors

Bussing inner-city children out of the ghetto and into the suburbs brings the liberal unadulterated elation. METCO integration programs “liberate” another child for the capitalist journey, all the while ignoring the nefarious social terrain upon which we seek to eke out an existence. In his house of mirrors, the progressive fashions himself the most advanced of his species. Masters of niceties and pleasantries, the liberals roll out the red carpet of identity politics for all to apply. Except the poor whites. For they are identityless. Despotic. Hopeless. Barren. The embarrassment of the nation. They search in the liberals’ soul for scraps of sustenance and find denial. Terminally online, our children search for belonging in a cesspool of algorithm-reinforced fear and identity narcissism. Too craven and uncritical to dig deeper, liberal parents embrace the dogmas of pharmaceutical companies and government agencies. 

Before the liberal’s affirmative actions programs, the poor white anxiously opens up an envelope with a bad check. 

Liberals are all-knowing, ignoring the alienation they’ve contributed to creating.

The liberal needs to be needed. This is colloquially referred to as “the white savior complex.” They are the perennial missionaries, gallivanting across the globe with their Bibles and Ford Foundation grants. They promise the “uneducated” and “backward” natives of Bangladesh and Haiti that they will send them aid, but only if they adopt foreign priorities. They define the human rights of Nigerians and Chinese, and the humanitarian causes most deserving of attention. They donate to USAID even though only 10 percent of their $25 billion dollar budget ever makes it to “the third world.” 

You poisoned us. Your heroes are John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama and Ellen. Our mentors were alcoholics, womanizers and child molesters. 

Many of us have unknowingly made mistakes that stem from liberalism. But most of our sins are of the illiberal variety. It is ok. We learn as we go. Unless we were born and raised in an alternate communist universe, it is inevitable that we internalize liberal ideology. The ruling class would not be the ruling class if they did not have full or close-to-full ideological control over us. And as the screws tighten on the Gaza coffin, they fasten the bolts of Western democracy. 

The sons of Bacon’s Rebellion, the daughters of Shay’s Rebellion: only those who are not invested in the system can step outside of it, question it and turn on it. Malcolm X offered up his antidote to white liberal hegemony. His name was John Brown. 

John Brown, torch, bible and rifle in hand, burned down every liberal illusion, reminding his rivals, haters and enemies: “These men are all talk. What we need is action — action!”

The 1 4 9 Boxing Crew: Mambo, Pablo, Boo Boo Smooth and Matt. 

Part V. The Deplorables: In their Own Words

A comrade once asked me: why do liberals seem to abstractly love poor people of color, but hate poor white people? 

That is a question my material existence has forced me to sit with for 46 years since I came out shadowboxing from my mother’s womb. After I was snubbed as the best man by some “friends” who turned their noses up at me at a wedding in Ithaca, NY, I meditated on this definitive class schism.  

No Beef but Class Beef, No War but Class War

The white liberal suffer from a crisis of validation. Thoroughly groomed by the hegemonic identity politics of this day and age, they seek to please black and brown people by behaving in non-offensive ways and saying politically-correct things. These are their symbolic, surface-level “victories” they need to appease their consciences. Their workshops hyperfocus on what a generation ago was called “political correctness.” The constantly evolving liberal elites now promote political correctness on steroids. Children across this country are taught terms like “Latinx” in Spanish class, a term most of their Mexican and Puerto Rican peers have never even heard, nevermind understand. This does not stop the language overlords from stepping up their vocabulary and expression policing. Patrolling people’s language ingratiates them with their POCPMC  friends. The PMC or Professional Managerial Class are the millionaires and petty bourgeois managers who dominate “the movement.” Armed with foundation grants and nonprofit budgets, these are the “goodies” or goodie-two-shoes liberals. Liberal “victories” specialize in targeting workers, as the rich laugh all the way to the bank. 

For the “progressive,” attention and approval from a person of color is worth its weight in gold. The downtrodden whites are politically incorrect by definition. Liberalism, the most superficial of ideologies, has no use for the poor white, who provides no validation. The presence and proliferation of the LGBTQBIPOC community is the liberals’ hit of validation. Poor white trash lack such exotic, alphabetical qualities. They are the blight. The debris. The eyesore. The monstrosity. The down-and-out client the public defender needs a cup of coffee and a cigarette in order to turn in a plea deal. 

The petit-bourgeois whites are a non-thinking tail to the kite of the dominant wing of capitalism. Appearance is everything; dialectics is a cross to the liberal vampire. 

It is not uncommon that they recruit, artificially elevate and reward “diverse” members of the oppressed class who do their bidding. There are such examples which Fox News unabashedly refers to as “diversity hires.” On our side of the class barricades, we should be careful of those possessing the appearance of militancy but not critically grasping the essence of Marxism. Independent thinkers are a problem for the PMC. Dialectics demands creativity; the PMC demands obedience. These two diametrically opposed forces are on a permanent collision course. Today, identity politics and class politics battle for the soul of our class. 

A Peculiar Historical Character

Liberals look down on us; conservatives try to convince us everyone else is the problem, except those who are the problem. Our bosses tell us our enemies are black people, immigrants and Muslims. Everyone, except our real enemy, an overwhelmingly white ruling class who hides behind fake Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. 

We poor whites insist on being the same peculiar historical character who has perfectly hated everyone, including ourselves, but cannot identify the exploiter that towers over us. In times past, “the only heave that attracted [us] was the life of the great Souther planter (Du Bois 27). Dave Chappelle comedically explores our gullibility in a skit about the 2016 elections:

“I stood with them in line like all Americans are required to do in a democracy — nobody skips the line to vote — and I listened to them. I listened to them say naive poor white people things. ‘Man, Donald Trump’s gonna go to Washington and he’s gonna fight for us. I’m standing there thinking in my mind, ‘You dumb motherfucker. … You are poor. He’s fighting for me.” 

We have a history of trusting our exploiters and masters. Behold our most peculiar social behavior. We hate anyone who lives like us but is not us. How many of us ever expressed outrage at the fact that native people and Africans were being genocided and viciously exploited for their labor power, let alone raised one finger in protest?  History will name very few such white people. Du Bois takes us there:

“This brings us down to the period of the Civil War. Up to the time that the war actually broke out, American labor simply refused, in the main, to envisage black labor as a part of its problem. Right up to the edge of the war, it was talking about the emancipation of white labor and the organization of stronger unions without saying a word, or apparently giving a thought, to four million black slaves. During the war, labor was resentful. Workers were forced to fight in a strife between capitalists in which they had no interest and they showed their resentment in the peculiarly human way of beating and murdering the innocent victims of it all, the black free Negroes of New York and other Northern cities; while in the South, five million non-slaveholding poor white farmers and laborers sent their manhood by the thousands to fight and die for a system that had degraded them equally with the black slave. Could one imagine anything more paradoxical than this whole situation?” 

What innocent victims of capitalism do we beat and murder today? What are hate crimes and school shootings but the projection of our incomplete liberation struggle? We are the abandoned, defamed chickens coming home to roost, harvesting harsh hatred all around us.  

While far too few John Browns and Newton Knights arose in the South, slavery was inimical to poor whites’ class interests. 

The historical materialist uses precision to thwart his ideological rivals. There were 5,000,000 whites in the South in 1860 who owned no slaves. There were 2,000,000 whites who owned smaller numbers of slaves. According to Du Bois, 8,000 slave-owning white oligarchs ruled the entire South. Du Bois offers this social portrait so as to disprove of a central bourgeois lie. It was a tiny sliver of gilded white men who owned the bulk of slaves and the middle and upper class that directly benefited from slavery. They were the Arnaults, Ellisons and Zuckerburgs of the 19th-century South. 99 percent of us whites did not exist for them. Like the billionaires of today, they did not consider us as constituting any part of what they called “the South.” Why is blame distributed evenly across all whites for slavery and colonization? Those busy trying to feed themselves have not the power to exploit and imprison others. 25 percent of Southern whites could not read or write (Du Bois p. 26). The bricks in the wall of the fascist and white supremacist state are not the same as its facilitators and managers. This is what the liberal class has forgotten. How convenient to blame the whipping boy, as the true crackers grow more emboldened to crack the whip of capitalism over all of our destinies. 

How can we be said to benefit from a state that humiliates and encages us all? 

Oppression Olympics is not a game that benefits any of us. There is but one fundamental contradiction to be resolved, and then, and only then, will all secondary and tertiary contradictions wither away. 

The Simple Man

On full display and explored here are two peoples, at odds. Before the class divide, whom do you stand with? 

The ranchers, the farmers, the herders, the marines, the fishermen, the NFL fans, the highwaymen, the patriots and those imprisoned in their own land?

Or our supervisors, bosses and CEOs?  

We have our own poems, creeds and anthems. We are Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man:”

Forget your lust for the rich man’s gold
All that you need is in your soul
And you can do this, oh, baby, if you try
All that I want for you, my son, is to be satisfied
And be a simple kind of man
Oh, be something you love and understand
Baby, be a simple kind of man
Oh, won’t you do this for me son, if you can?
Oh, yes, I will…

We are the friends of Bill W. We learned no one could confront and transcend the trauma but us. Self-pity was our drug of choice. We 12-steppers fight like Pink, Mark Ruffalo and Josh Gad in “Thanks for Sharing.” Our world record for sobriety is 24 hours. All we have is today. We picked up the shattered pieces of our pasts and knitted together an existence of self-respect. 

You have been taught to fear us and hate us. 

We are the big men with the red flannel shirts. Our presence makes you cringe and back up. We are the hardened women with a cigarette hanging out of our mouths and a hoarse voice, whose life expectancy is drastically lower than yours. Our deaths of despair constitute an ongoing pandemic but are largely dismissed given our rank in this American caste system. We have more guns than friends. We know whom we can trust. According to the noble historians, all we have ever done for the length of time is hate black people. We are told that for the lot of history we were merely the overseers, cracker-ass-crackers and lynchers. We never had a vision for ourselves and our families? We never built or constructed anything, even though we were the ones who wielded the drills, chisels and hammers? Our skin was draped in soot. Our lungs drowned in coal dust. We are anti-history. 

The anti-nazi poet Bertolt Brecht raised this very point in 1935 in his poem “Questions From a Worker Who Reads:”

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock? 
And Babylon, many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times? 
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live?
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them ? 
Over whom did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants? 
Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, The drowning still cried out for their slaves. 
The young Alexander conquered India.Was he alone? 
Caesar defeated the Gauls. Did he not even have a cook with him? 
Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down. Was he the only one to weep?  
Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War. Who else won it? 
Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors? 
Every 10 years a great man. Who paid the bill? 
So many reports.  
So many questions.

Brecht’s brilliant commentary is a critique of capitalist history writing which focuses on the great generals and presidents but ignores the masses of workers who made history. We have a responsibility to rescue from oblivion, what Frederick Engels called “prehistory,” all of our ancestors’ mettle and contributions. For who would allow their enemy to teach them and write their history? Our own history has been stolen from us. Our enemies have created a self-hating, obedient class in their image. 

Part VI: The Anti-Woke Proclamation 

We know all about Kimberly Crenshaw’s intersectionality even if we are unworthy of her pied-piper pen. Crenshaw claims to want social change but charges $100,000 per lecture to share her anti-worker, identity-politics gobbledygook. You love to write about us and accuse us. Why don’t we ever have the right to appear and reply in our own voice?

Professor Chenshaw: if our ideological and class enemies so consistently elevate you, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, what does that say about your work? Why do they pay you to examine every atomized niche of poverty in the United States but to ignore the biggest financial famine? You are fascinated by the pathologies but are too good to descend to talk to the pathologized. Every portrait you paint of poverty in America focuses on “black trans women” and other subsets to the detriment of us all. The only way black trans women can rise up is if we all rise up. Our great uncle Eugene Debs said it from his Chicago prison cell where he received 1,000,000 votes for U.S. president in 1920: “My purpose is not to rise up from the working class; my purpose is to rise up with the working class.” 

Wokeness vs The Vengeance of the Bankrupt and Canceled

10 million of us lost our homes in 2008 when the government bailed out the banks and left us out in the cold. Hundreds of thousands of us lose our homes every year. 26 million of us have no health insurance. Over 100 million of us do not have a job or an adequate one. All economic signs as the billionaires attack our hard-earned social safety net indicate that these patterns are intensifying everyday. 

It matters little what color our skin is or who we lay down next to at night; We are all fucked. 

The elites divide us over what we think about people born men using women’s bathrooms and whether a woman has the right to have an abortion or not. We won’t fall for your make-believe Culture Wars. Black, white, brown, yellow, rainbow and every shade in between, we are all losing. We will not divide ourselves over who can play on kids’ sports teams or whether you ban assault rifles or not. We are simple people; We want housing, health care and jobs. Like the Irish Easter legend, James Connolly, “our demands most moderate they are — we only want the earth.” 

Friends and Enemies

We are Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Realpolitik. No one gives a fuck about us and we don’t give a fuck about nobody. We snorted, bet and inhaled every last poison to get through the day. But we still never made it and have 25 hours to go. 

We are dope-sick, dope-thirsty and dope-hungry. Our eyes are greedy; our emptiness eternal. Our alter egos rob our grandmothers and hustle our aunts. Here we are, Chasing the Scream, bobbin’ and weavin’ through a chemical obstacle course designed to consume us. We answer the door with an empty syringe in a vein crashed and emptied by the elites. We take our pain out on who is closest. We practice our executions in circles. 

We never learned to look another human being in their eyes, until and unless we made it to our 30s. We are the walking, self-mocking contradiction. We exist at the interstices of centuries of abandon. 

My great grandfathers and grandfathers were also men of science, standing at the material intersections of debt, distress and destitution. To confuse the propagandized with the propagandists is unacceptable. You help build the academic superstructure that ignores and condemns the majority of poor people. We are the book Adrienne Marie Brown will never write and the skit Alok V. Menon will never perform. Loyal to the publishing industry and algorithms, we are the truths deemed damnable. We are Noah Chomsky’s “unworthy victims” and Chris Hedges’ Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. We are not invested in the system; we live at its margins invested in survival. The trailer parks hate the police as much as the ghettos and reservations do. Only the unity of these necessary hatreds gives us a shot… 

“The class-conscious worker is the greatest danger to capitalism,” not tiny infinitely oppressed sects who are taught to hate other poor people while letting our common exploiter sit pretty with his boots on all of our necks. To confuse class exploitation and elevate individual oppressions above it is to sublimate folly and cowardice. 

We say with you: “Fuck Trump!” But to say “Fuck Trump Country” is to say fuck ourselves, and this is what we have been doing since we were brought or came to these shores. 

In 1977, on a cold November night, my 24-year-old hippie mother wandered into an Irish pub called “Ye Old Town House,” owned by this man, my father, the 40-year-old stone mason and mayor of Maynard, George Bernard Shaw. He looked into her eyes and told her: “I have never seen such sad, hazel eyes. Can I take you out to breakfast?” The rest is history…

Poor white Reconstruction

My father wore the sweat of labor on his sun-burnt neck until his lungs could not swallow more nicotine. His last smile and words were flirting with a Puerto Rican nurse in the VA hospital as his son learned to internalize trauma and run from it. But everywhere I ran, there I was.  

My mother is the seven-year-old girl within who never had the time or resources to heal. Violence, trauma and addiction devoured her inner child. I absorbed the best and worst of generations of fighters spread across the Irish, Scottish, English and American landscapes. A heritage of resiliency and resistance roams my veins, hardened by 2,781 knife thrusts and back stabs. 

Du Bois, the scribe of Black Reconstruction and the burgeoning science of American sociology, spotted this contradictory axis upon whose fortunes America’s future pivots. What most pained and fascinated Du Bois was how the worker in white skin ignored the slave in dark skin. Labor and early American unions were the slaves’ natural comrades in arms, but class unity, thus far in our timeline, has been multiracial, American pie in the sky. The historian tasked his dialectical materialist pen with framing the poor white’s condition. 

In all this consideration, we have so far ignored the white workers of the South and we have done this because the labor movement ignored them and the abolitionists ignored them; and above all, they were ignored by Northern capitalists and Southern planters. They were in many respects almost a forgotten mass of men. Cairnes describes the slave South, the period just before the war: 
It resolves itself into three classes, broadly distinguished from each other, and connected by no common interest-the slaves on whom devolves all the regular industry, the slaveholders who reap all its fruits, and an idle and lawless rabble who live dispersed over vast plains in a condition little removed from absolute barbarism.

Yes, we too have roots and family lineage that provoke both pride and shame. We continue to be ignored and we continue to be barbaric. We vote for the most obnoxious, who captures the insidiousness that surrounds and consumes us. We are the WWE crowd who vote for the dude who will bomb the most “Hamas and Hezbollah bad guys.” We are the butts of your jokes and the Honey-Boo-Boo caricatures of your Hollywood.  

Where are the curriculum, textbooks and state exams that elevate us? Where are the teachers who don’t care about regents and bureaucracy but want to hear our voices? Who cares about us? Are we more than a political football to be tossed around every four years? Who will tell our stories? 

Those who seek to put all whites into one neat box understand little about America. They do the work of the elites. They throw away and cancel a most forgotten and rebellious element. We poor whites and liberals despise one another. When do we come into contact with one another? When we clean your pools or landscape your bushes, you keep us as distant as any other worker. We are the illegals and aliens whom you have not yet figured out how to deport. Shut out of your psychiatric hospitals, we pass through the revolving doors of the jails, shelters and streets, in search of three hots and a cot. 

The Catskills brussel sprout farmer asks: Fear? What is Fear to the manchild who who has seen more than most 40-year-old men? Fear is a thief. FEAR: False Evidence Appearing Real. What fear are we entitled to, when our very survival is a miracle. We are on borrowed time, so we make every second count. You only get 1 shot! 

Baby-mama drama, screamin’ on her, too much for me to wanna
“Stay in one spot, another day of monotony’s gotten me
To the point I’m like a snail, I’ve got
To formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot
Success is my only motherfuckin’ option, failure’s not
Mom, I love you, but this trailer’s got
To go, I cannot grow old in Salem’s Lot
So here I go, it’s my shot; feet, fail me not
This may be the only opportunity that I got”
-”Eminen,” Marshall Bruce Mathers III

Me and Chichi on Broadway in 2004, performing “Yo Soy Fred Hampton. Yo soy Hugo Chávez.” 

The White-Hot Blaze

Liberals are roadblocks who seek to retard the momentum of history. The poor white then is the spur on the liberal’s conscience, the all-too-real refraction of his timidity. The poor white is a threat. Covetous and carnivorous, balls to the wall, fists raised, we have nothing to lose. 

The liberal will go to jail for the cause, as long as he is out by dinnertime; the poor white was born in jail. 

You are sensitivity and fragility politics; we are gallows humor, laughing the entire way to the cemetery. No one dares to speak on our behalf at our wakes. We have to import priests in from Rwanda and Burundi because the local clergy despise us too. 

The liberal will experiment with drugs; the poor white smoked, snorted, gambled away and drank every last potion to get through the day. For you drugs are a hobby; for us drugs were survival until we could turn on this system. We are not ashamed. Every swig, snort and injection aided the quest for life or took it. Those of us who made it are the greatest magic show on earth. 

We turned Huey P. Newton’s reactionary suicide into Revolutionary Suicide.

We refuse to die from the needle or bottle for nothing; We want to live and die on our own dignified terms. 

The liberal is guided by fear, the poor white by resentment.

The showdown is between cowardice and courage, liberalism versus strength.

As Julia De Burgos wrote of the Puerto Rican quest for nationhood and anti-colonial salvation: 

and when with the torch of the seven virtues,
after the seven sins, the multitudes run,
against you, and against everything unjust
and the inhuman, I will go in the midst of
them with the torch in hand.

And so, at last, here it is. Denied the pen and history books, today, we got to have our say. Before the insults and half-truths, now you have a sense of what makes us poor whites tick. Before both our friends and foes, here is The Wretched of the Earth for Appalachians. The Vengeance of the Bankrupt and Canceled. The Pedagogy of the Deplorables. The Poor white Trash Manifesto. An Anti-Woke Proclamation. An Illiberal, Anti-Republican Promulgation. This is the necessary antidote to Hillbilly Elegy. This is a calling. Fuck Trump! But giving up on “Trump country” is giving up on America, which we will never do!

To all the liberals and fake leftists:
Fuck your internet cancel culture 
You’ll never bury the people’s soldiers!