Public discourse in the United States has always neglected or suppressed discussions of class. In her new collection Bone of the Bone, which includes a wide variety of articles published between 2013 and 2022 and a fascinating new essay on her mother, the journalist and National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh challenges the foundational myth that the country is, “a democracy without castes.” Her argument is particularly timely in an election season in which the fantasy of a nation defined by the absence of stable hierarchies has been reproduced politicians of all major parties, most obviously in the image of an all-encompassing middle class. Although the word “middle” denotes a position within a structure, drawing attention to what is above and below, “middle class” is used in America to describe everyone from precarious workers earning the minimum wage to prosperous businesswomen; there is by implication nothing beneath it save what Victorians described as the “undeserving poor.” The term consequently obscures social and economic divisions in the United States and renders the working class in particular invisible.
W.E.B. Du Bois argued in 1903 that the “problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” In her widely-read 2014 essay “Poor Teeth,” Smarsh insists that the “problem of the twenty-first century is that of the class line.” As she acknowledges, some readers objected to this claim, believing she was privileging class over other forms of inequality. She was not. Her argument is that there is currently no popular discussion of class in America equivalent in seriousness and sophistication to the discussion of race initiated by figures such as Du Bois. Racism remains an integral part of the fabric of American life, a stain on the nation, but the conversation about it is prominent, wide-ranging, and has a direct impact on political practice. In contrast, class prejudice is largely unnoticed and uncontested; it has “become less acceptable in recent decades to make racist or sexist statements, but blatant classism generally goes unchecked,” something demonstrated by the successful, long-running blog People of Walmart, which “viciously ridicules people who look like contemporary US poverty.”
Hostility to the poor is not confined to conservatives. In her essay “Dangerous Idiots,” Smarsh argues that after the 2016 election, liberal commentators propagated a “two-fold myth about the White working class” in particular, arguing “that they are to blame for Trump’s rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest.” The claims ignore the evidence, which shows that even Hilary Clinton won a majority of working-class votes, but persist because they enable prosperous Americans to justify their hostility to the impoverished as racist, misogynistic nationalists undeserving of sympathy or support. As Smarsh argues, this does White supremacy “a great service,” ignoring workers of color, “along with humane, even progressive White workers,” and the fact that Trump has always relied on “well-informed, formally educated White conservatives.”
The idea that the representative worker is “male, White, conservative, racist, sexist” has been particularly damaging for areas such as Kansas, where Smarsh was born, raised, and still lives, compounding well-established images of backward, reactionary rural communities. As she insists, seeing “a ‘red state’ as a field of ‘deplorables’ leads some self-righteous liberals to say those states ‘get what they deserve’,” and legitimizes their abandonment by the Democratic establishment. The decision to cede much of the Midwest and South to the right has a long, ignoble history; Smarsh recalls that when she was a child “[w]e were starved for someone to even feign to care about us,” and that for decades it has been Republicans who “have done the feigning.” A polarized electoral college map has produced a cycle of neglect, with both parties ignoring regions whose votes are taken for granted. The shared view of the countryside as inherently conservative has been disastrous for the Democrats; their inability to attract rural voters contributed significantly to Clinton’s defeat in Pennsylvania in 2016 and means they have not won North Carolina since 2008.
The accounts of rural America that dominate the media are overwhelmingly produced by people who have little investment in these regions. Their engagement with their subjects is limited to attempts at sympathy that emphasize social and political divisions in the very act of trying to bridge them. Smarsh argues that “We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told.”
The word “we” matters. Smarsh describes herself as “bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes,” and her arguments are grounded in her impoverished childhood in Kansas. Although she achieved her teenage “longing to fly away,” she not only returned to her home state but in 2022 was living in “a working-poor neighborhood of cracked sidewalks and condemned houses.” These roots are one of her strengths. The best essays in the volume are consistently those that discuss her family, whose lives remain precarious; she describes her father, a construction worker, losing his house after the 2008 financial crisis and moving into a “Wichita mobile-home park,” and her brother, who “worked hard to go to college instead of to prison or the fields,” selling his plasma to cover his “basic living costs.” Smarsh never idealizes her family, and her close adult relationship with her mother, who she describes as “cruel and unhappy” during her early years, is hard won, but her commitment to them is a source of productive anger as well as knowledge.
Like almost all collections, Bone of the Bone contains some weaker work; “Linguistic Notice for Homo Sapiens Heretofore Known as ‘Pussies’ and ‘Little Bitches’,” is as flawed as its clumsy title suggests. It is a rare misstep. Taken as a whole, Bone of the Bone is a valuable book that addresses significant but neglected political problems. The chronological arrangement of the essays demonstrates Smarsh’s developing skills and assurance, but her investment in questions of class, region, and community is there from the beginning. At its best, her writing is characterized by precise analysis and controlled fury, an effective combination exemplified in her description of her brother “selling out his veins” to enable the production of “[v]ery expensive pharmaceuticals” he “could never afford.” As the essay demonstrates, capitalism literally consumes the bodies of the poor. Her central arguments, that “there never was a ‘Trump country’” and that this crude image obscures the diversity of the regions it purports to describe, will remain important regardless of who wins the election in November. Progressive politics cannot accept the contempt for the rural working class that currently pervades even ostensibly liberal discourse. Smarsh was offered a chance to run for the Senate and refused on the grounds that she can contribute to change most effectively as a writer. Bone of the Bone suggests she made the right decision.
NONFICTION
Bone of the Bone
By Sarah Smarsh
Scribner Book Company
Published September 10, 2024
