Unmasking a Myth About White Women

A Widely Accepted Lie

A recent article called JD Vance Doesn't Want All Women to Be Trad Wives, Just White Women  makes a typical, progressive mistake. The article's author accepts the lie that decades ago, only black women were poor, while white women all lived comfortable lives as trad wives. The article says that black women have never had the luxury of being trad wives, and that is true as far as it goes. However, it is blatantly and completely false to say that in those days, all or even most white women lived as trad wives. In reality, only upper middle-class women could afford to live that way. Working-class white women have always worked.

I grew up in the nineteen forties and fifties, and I can assure you that in those days, working-class white women worked outside of their homes. Restaurants had waitresses, and supermarkets had women working their cash registers; banks had women working as tellers, and offices had typists. The women in those jobs were practically all white because the racism of the time generally prevented companies from hiring black women.  When I was in school, I was taught almost exclusively by white women. So, the idea that in those days, white women were all trad wives is a lie.

Where Does the Lie Come From?

Why do some people spread this lie about our past? They do so in order to prevent the emergence of class solidarity across racial lines. The lie helps to maintain the idea that white workers are above all white people rather than workers who happen to be white, and by so doing, the lie prevents white workers from seeing that their fate is bound together with the fate of black workers. 

If working-class whites and blacks got together, they could take over the country. They would form an unbeatable coalition, and to prevent that happening, lots of money is invested in the effort to persuade white working-class people that blacks are the enemy. White workers are told that, in the past, they were better off. They are told that their current poverty and insecurity are new things that are due to the encroachments of black and other non-white workers. The lie paints a rosy picture of an imaginary past when all white people were well off, and all white women looked and dressed like the models in magazine ads.

We Must Tell the Truth About Our History

We progressives could offer an alternative picture of our past. We could promote class solidarity by telling the truth about our history, but for reasons that I discussed in an earlier post on this blog, we do not do so. Like the author of the article referred to above, we buy into the view that in the past, all white people were comfortable, and all black people were oppressed. We differ from our political opponents only in saying that we should not return to that past. The truth is that in the past, working-class people of all races were oppressed. Blacks were more oppressed than whites, but focusing exclusively on that difference serves to perpetuate the shared oppression of all working-class people. We must free ourselves from the lie, and we must recognize that we will all rise together, or we will not rise at all.