Keep What You Got Until You Get What You Need
The Invisible Black Working Class and the Privilege of Resentment
Working-class Black Americans earn less that American workers overall, work in industries that are less economically stable, and are routinely confronted with discrimination (like their Hispanic peers) when it comes to housing outcomes in the rental markets. And according to a 2022 CNN article, “as inflation soars, Black Americans bear the brunt of rising grocery, gas and housing prices.”
So why didn’t working-class Black Americans vote for Trump?
Shouldn’t they have voted based on their own economic anxieties? The reason why, we are told, so many of their fellow working-class Americans voted for Trump? Surely it has to be the case that the price of rent, gas, bacon, eggs, and milk is too high for working-class Black folk as well.
Was it because Black workers have been so loyal to the Democratic Party for so long that they are no longer able to separate their economic self-interests from the party’s economic policies, regardless of the impact of those policies on their daily lives? Maybe Black workers are merely dupes and pawns of the Democratic Party, so warped by racial grievance that they can’t see the economic prosperity that would be theirs if they cast their political lot with Republicans?
Or maybe Black workers have accumulated for themselves, through close study of our national customs, traditions, habits, and sensibilities, the kind of time tested, hard-earned practical wisdom, nuanced tactics, and talent for improvisational strategizing that other working-class Americans would have done well to have followed.
As we go about the important business of performing our quadrennial, post-election post-mortems, understanding why these second-sighted Americans voted against reelecting Mr. Trump, while struggling with their own economic anxieties, may disclose important and unexpected findings. It will also guarantee that we give ourselves the best shot at examining all the causes that contributed to Trump’s reelection.
Which is to say that if, as a nation, we understood the pain and the power of what it means to have been shaped by the peculiar and strange institutions that inform the more beautiful and more terrible, and singular, experience of working class Black American, I’d think we’d all be just a little bit antsy about wanting to know why working class Black Americans are so dramatically out of syncopation with other working class Americans when it comes to the reelection of Donald Trump.
Unsurprisingly, the question of why working class Black Americans didn’t vote for Trump, is precisely the kind of complicating—or is it clarifying?—question our twenty-four-hour cable news media information complexes have not been airing out in one segment after another, not even with their casts of fast-talking weathervanes, news performers, and opinion spinners, also known as pundits. Instead, our national punditry has leaned into lobbing the same critiques they have been lobbing since the Age of Reagan was ushered in forty-three years ago: the Democratic Party had better get about the business of catering to the economic anxieties and working-class resentments of White Americans if they want to be returned to political power. Never anywhere in this truncated conversation does our punditry ask if working-class Black folk have resentments. Or why even why some working-class White Americans, a third, didn’t for Donald Trump either. I mean shouldn’t we want to know why all the working-class Americans who didn’t vote for Trump found a way not to give into their anxieties? And while we’re at it, what accounts for why all the economically wealthy Americans who are not experiencing the economic anxiety of precarious living at all.
But to ask complicating questions would be to render visible the confluence of difficulties facing our nation, and would require our pundit class to toss aside the ratings tested plots and simple stories they love to tell us in favor of telling thicker, difficult, more honest story about who we have been as Americans, and are. It would also render visible the uneven and unfair, often times discriminatory, circumstances working-class Black Americans have always had to navigate.
And isn’t it curious that in a country so studiously committed to avoiding, at all costs, talking about wealth disparity for fear of igniting a class war, that when we are permitted to talk about class it is to remind ourselves that when fail to cater to working-class White American resentment we do so at our own political peril? Only White working-class resentments is given a fair hearing by our punditry even if it places our constitutional arrangements in jeopardy. My hunch is that all working class Americans have resentments. I’d think, in a democracy as plural as ours is becoming, we’d want to give those a hearing as well.
At the same time, and on the hand, I, for one, don’t find it the least bit curious that resentment is not a privilege extended to working-class Black Americans, even if, they, more than most Americans have past and present reasons aplenty for feeling resentful.
And I honestly don’t believe that working-class Black folk—the very same Black folk who raised and nurtured and loved me into existence—would trade-in resentment even if it were a commodity that they could purchase, because it runs so counter to how they got over in America. It runs counter to what they’ve learned about and how they’ve responded to generations of hard, unrelenting experience. Which is that resentment, regardless of its color, is not only a privilege, it is an indulgence and a corruption that warps the soul and the mind and leads inevitably to blaming some other, any other, for having to share something you believed you, and only you, were all along owed. There is no possible way Black folk could come through all that we’ve come through with our humanity fully intact if we had given into resentment.
Something else that our close study of our national customs, traditions, habits, and sensibilities of this nation has taught us is that bad things can always get worse. More, we also know, that when the fire of populist resentment—are we at the point in the story when we discuss, honestly, the rise in hate crimes during Trump’s first term?—is supplied oxygen by the toxic winds of xenophobia, it is always the most vulnerable Americans who suffer. Of course the practical wisdom of working class Black folk (known in some quarters as phronesis) has never been taken seriously, instead it has been much more politically expedient to characterize them, falsely and cynically, as welfare queens, one of many, in a seemingly endless flood insulting characterizations.
(My God what we have and continue to endure in our own country—my soul looks back and wonders, indeed.)
I was born at Howard University Hospital when it was still named Freedmen’s Hospital in 1969. So, like every other native Washingtonian, I claim as my birthright, Mambo Sauce, Go-Go music, and the verbal practice of dropping my “g’s.” Suffice it to say that I was not at all surprised when the opening lyrics of Chuck Brown’s (The Godfather of Go-Go) 1979 hit Bustin Loose was one of the first things to come to my mind when last week’s election results were returned: Keep what you got until you get what you need y'all. You got to give a lot just to get what you need sometimes y'all—the song, itself, displays that strange irony, present in all good Blues: the feeling of wanting to bust loose and go all out balanced against the reality of keeping what you already got—I digress.
These two lines capture, make vivid, for me, why working-class Black folk voted for Kamala Harris instead of Donald Trump despite the economic precarity they face in greater measure than most Americans. (There is no doubt that pride in her played a part in casting a vote for her, like it was for Obama, and if you believe working-class Black folk would have voted for Tim Scott running on Trump’s platform because he’s Black, there’s a large structure in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.) But rather than compromise their sense of what is decent in leaders and good for the most vulnerable Americans, and not just their own, working class Black voters kept faith (an unrequited faith to be sure) with our founding principles, while so many other working Americans cast those same principles aside, unable to resist the siren call of Trumpian innovations and the promises For working-class Black Americans, who do not enjoy the privilege of indulging our resentments, we know that sometimes the smart political play is to protect what you have while always vigilantly working to secure all that you need.
We also know that voting your conscience includes thinking about how your vote impacts others, especially the most vulnerable, and not just your own most vulnerable.
It is, I fear, a lesson many more Americans will learn over the next four years. One that I’m happy and sad to report that we have already learned. This is why even through these next four years we will get over and come through, whole and human and fully intact, just as we have gotten over and come through before.
And even with all that I will be fervently praying that things don’t go from bad to worse. For the sake of the most vulnerable, ourselves included of course, and for the preservation of our Union, I sincerely pray that, in this instance, we, Black folk, are wrong.
Spot on! Thank you.