On an airplane late last November, I sat next to a white, professional, Midwestern Catholic woman in her fifties who confessed, grudgingly, to voting for the US’s 45th president. She disavowed racism yet lamented “quotas” in education and hiring. Such views recapitulate an ongoing debate over whether support for Trump owes more to economic dispossession—many working and middle class whites feel anxious and abandoned in the global economy—or to racism, a white backlash against efforts to end discrimination and injustice.
This debate glosses over a crucial confound, however: what it means to be white and middle class depends on conceptions of race and class which are historically intertwined. Although elite and urban white professionals have maintained their social and cultural standing in a globalized economy, stable jobs have disappeared for many—not just in manufacturing, but in managerial positions. And while high-paying, skilled tech jobs (a form of “knowledge” work) concentrate in urban enclaves, middle class labor increasingly revolves around low-paid service work in the precarious “gig” economy, that is, temporary work without benefits or security.
Although this economic transformation has garnered plenty of attention, especially in the wake of the 2016 election, fewer have discussed the link between the rise of creative urban professionals, on one hand, and the cultural dispossession of non-elite whites. US…