White Working Class: The Myth of the Monolith

Here's what I just replied to the article in the San Francisco Chronicle's online version, sfgate, about the "real gaffe" that Barack Obama made at a San Francisco fund-raiser :

I guess what disturbs me about the whole discussion by all candidates is that they talk about white working class people as if all working class people feel the same thing. Like all large groups of people, white working class people have a full range of beliefs. I was raised working class but was fortunate -- had a good education among other things -- and now live a middle class life. Some working class people are not bitter about politicians, some are and are activists, some don't think about it at all, some focus on their spiritual lives, some focus on their sex lives, some focus on the drink in front of them. All kinds of ways to deal with life. But there is a large group that are bitter. There is a large group of us -- formerly working class -- who are also bitter. We feel that the gains we've made in life are slowly being eaten away at and, soon, in our elderly years we will be faced with poverty again. We want change and believe that Obama is the answer.

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