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How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist, YouTube by Jay Smooth
Jay Smooth, the founder of New York City's longest-running hip hop radio program, is a cultural commentator.  Facing History used his 3 min How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist YouTube Video to discuss workshop guidelines.

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New Yorker Interview with Peggy McIntosh by Joshua Rothman, May 12, 2014

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I think it was because nobody else was writing so personally, and giving such clear examples, drawn from personal experience, which allowed readers to understand this rather complicated subject without feeling accused.
How did people respond?
Well, at first, the most common responses were from white people. Their most common response was "I never thought about this before." After a couple of years, that was accompanied by "You changed my life." From people of color, from the beginning, it was "You showed me I'm not crazy." And if they said more than that it was along the lines of "I knew there was something out there working against me."
But there was a negative reaction to it, too.
The right wing wanted to paint it as craziness. But there were so many people saying it wasn't crazy that I was able to put them aside. David Horowitz named me one of America's ten wackiest feminists; that used to get to me. Now I think, If you're going to do work for racial justice, you're going to get attacked.
Have those reactions changed much? It's been more than twenty-five years.
The truth is that it hasn't changed much, except in the universities. The colleges and the universities are the places where you get a hearing. They're where you learn to see both individually and systemically. In order to understand the way privilege works, you have to be able to see patterns and systems in social life, but you also have to care about individual experiences. I think one's own individual experience is sacred. Testifying to it is very important-but so is seeing that it is set within a framework outside of one's personal experience that is much bigger, and has repetitive statistical patterns in it.
Is that the challenge-or the usefulness-of the idea of privilege, as you see it? That it asks you to combine an individual view of life with an abstract one?
When Tal Fortgang was told, "Check your privilege"-which is a flip, get-with-it kind of statement-it infuriated him, because he didn't want to see himself systemically. But what I believe is that everybody has __a combination of unearned advantage and unearned disadvantage in life. Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting with, for example, one's place in the birth order, or your body type, or your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words, or your parents' places of origin, or your parents' relationship to education and to English, or what is projected onto your religious or ethnic background. We're all put ahead and behind by the circumstances of our birth. We all have a combination of both. And it changes minute by minute, depending on where we are, who we're seeing, or what we're required to do.

At SEED, thinking about privilege is deeply personal group work. We do an exercise where everybody reads out loud from something they've written based on Jamaica Kincaid's story called " Girl," which ran in The New Yorker in the seventies. In "Girl," Kincaid lists voices in her head from her early childhood, telling her how to be a girl. Everybody reads either their boy piece or their girl piece, and, listening, you get a systemic view of varieties of gender conditioning. One very sad thing-very major to me-is that almost all the men who are now over forty read, "Boys don't cry," or something like "Put the damn worm on the damn hook." And that's a lie-a huge social lie that makes men of that age have to act tougher than they feel. It's a tragedy for the entire world, and it's inflicted on boys; they're not guilty of it. Usually the boy's crying, or about to cry, when he's told boys don't. This is wreckage to the psyche.
You seem to relate to the idea of privilege in a very compassionate way. But isn't that hard, since the effects of privilege are so unjust? Isn't it natural for privilege to make people angry, rather than openhearted? I imagine Tal Fortgang in a college seminar, and the rancor that must accompany conversations about privilege in the classroom. How do you defeat that?
The key thing is to let people testify to their own experience. Then they'll stop fighting with each other. One of my colleagues at SEED says, "Unless you let the students testify to what they know, which schools usually don't let them do, they will continue to do just what the dominant society wants them to do, which is to tear each other apart." The students who are sitting there fighting with one another aren't allowed to have their lives become the source for their own growth and development. Adrienne Rich wrote, at the beginning of women's studies, "Nobody told us we have to study our lives, make of our lives a study."
It seems as though, for you, talking about privilege shouldn't lead to arguments; it should be a kind of therapy.
I wouldn't say therapy, because psychology isn't very good at taking in the sociological view. But it has to do with working on your inner history to understand that you were in systems, and that they are in you. It has to do with looking around yourself the way sociologists do and seeing the big patterns in the rest of society, while keeping a balance and really respecting your experience. Seeing the oppression of others is, of course, very important work. But so is seeing how the systems oppress oneself.

_

This interview has been edited and condensed.

_

Photograph courtesy Peggy McIntosh.

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The concept of privilege came into its own in the eighties, when the women's-studies scholar Peggy McIntosh started writing about it.

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Ballotpedia

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Four ballot measures were certified to appear on the Massachusetts ballot on November 8, 2016. Two measures were approved and two measures were defeated.

Paperwork was filed for 35 initiatives targeting spots on the 2016 ballot in Massachusetts. Some of these were repeat filings of the same or similar measures. Four distinct citizen-initiated measures qualified for the ballot. To qualify measure proposals for the ballot, petitioners had to file the requisite number of signatures by December 2, 2015. Since all four certified measures were statutes, a supplementary signature petition was required after the initiative statutes were considered by the Massachusetts State Legislature. The four certified measures are listed below:

For the initial round of signatures due on December 2, 2015, petitioners were required to file at least 64,750 valid signatures for initiated state statutes and initiated constitutional amendments. At least 32,375 valid signatures were required for veto referendums. The second round of signatures, a total of 10,792, was required for initiated statutes with a deadline on the first Wednesday of July 2016.

Citizens of Massachusetts may initiate legislation through the process of indirect initiative. In Massachusetts, successful petitions are first presented to the Massachusetts General Court. Once presented to the legislature, proposals for amendments and proposals for statutes face distinct requirements. Amendments must be approved by one-fourth of the legislators in joint session before proceeding to the ballot. Statutes may be adopted by the legislature by a majority vote in both houses. If a statute proposed by a valid initiative petition is not adopted, proponents must collect another, smaller round of signatures to place the statute on the ballot. In Massachusetts, citizens also have the power to repeal legislation via veto referendum.

The Massachusetts General Court can also place measures on the ballot as legislatively referred constitutional amendments. The 2016 legislative session ran from January 6, 2016, to July 31, 2016, during which time the Massachusetts State Legislature was able to place legislative referrals on the ballot.

Historical facts

See also: History of Initiative & Referendum in Massachusetts and List of Massachusetts ballot measures

A total of 36 measures have appeared on statewide ballots in Massachusetts from 1996 through 2016. Ballot measures only appear in even-numbered years in Massachusetts.

The number of measures appearing on statewide ballots from 1996 through 2016 ranged from one to eight.

Between 1996 and 2016, about 53 percent of statewide ballots (19 of 36) were approved by voters, and about 47 percent (17 of 36) were defeated.

On the ballot

Cost per required signatures

The cost of an initiative or veto referendum petition drive can be measured in two key ways:

1. According to the total cost of gathering the required signatures to put the initiative or veto referendum on the ballot

2. According to the total cost divided by the number of signatures required to qualify the measure for the ballot or Cost Per Required Signature (CPRS).

This data for Massachusetts initiatives and information about what petition drive companies were used are below:

Not on the ballot

State profile

This excerpt is reprinted here with the permission of the 2016 edition of the Almanac of American Politics and is up to date as of the publication date of that edition. All text is reproduced verbatim, though links have been added by Ballotpedia staff. To read the full chapter on Massachusetts, click here.

Massachusetts, an affluent, highly educated state at the top of its economic game, is one of the nation's bluest states, but it defies pigeonholing. The Bay State voted for Hillary Clinton by a 27-point margin - yet many of the same voters remained perfectly happy with their Republican governor, Charlie Baker, giving him one of the highest approval ratings in the country.

The Puritan leader John Winthrop wrote that Massachusetts would be a city upon a hill -- an example to the entire world. For 150 years, New England was partial to learning, but the Puritans' austere creed was also insular and hostile to outsiders, sending merchants and fishing boats out to sea but keeping the world at bay. After the American Revolution, the wars between royal Britain and revolutionary and Napoleonic France allowed New England ship owners to cross enemy lines to become the world's leading merchants. They made vast profits and invested the money in textile mills, then railroads, then coal mines and ...( read more)

Demographic data for Massachusetts

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, "American Community Survey" (5-year estimates 2010-2015)**Note: Percentages for race and ethnicity may add up to more than 100 percent because respondents may report more than one race and the Hispanic/Latino ethnicity may be selected in conjunction with any race. Read more about race and ethnicity in the Census here.

Presidential voting pattern

See also: Presidential voting trends in Massachusetts

Massachusetts voted for the Democratic candidate in all five presidential elections between 2000 and 2016.

More Massachusetts coverage on Ballotpedia

External links

The Humane Society of the United States and Massachusetts Society For The Prevention of Cruelty To Animals provided in-kind contributions for petition printing and petition mailing, volunteer training and transportation, and prizes for top volunteer signature gatherers. The campaign paid cash for some petition printing to Boston Business Printing.

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Massachusetts 2016 ballot measures - Ballotpedia

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Four ballot measures were certified to appear on the Massachusetts ballot on November 8, 2016. Two measures were approved and two measures were defeated. Paperwork was filed for 35 initiatives targeting spots on the 2016 ballot in Massachusetts. Some of these were repeat filings of the same or similar measures.

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MA Secretary of State: Elections Division
As of 9/8, MA has not prepared a summary of the 2016 ballot questions. The document called "Massachusetts Information for Voters 2016 Ballot Questions," will be available in the next few days (after the MA primaries).

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The Elections Division administers state and federal elections and provides information on voting and elections to the public, candidates and government officials.

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ProCon.org Comprehensive source for candidates’ positions on the issues, students can take quiz to see how their views align with candidates.

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At ProCon.org you and millions of others readers can get reliable, sourced information about where each presidential candidate stands on important issues. We have published candidate responses to 75 issues. Election Day is Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

To get started, click on a candidate, scroll down to click on an issue, or go straight to our presidential candidate matching quiz and the side-by-side candidate comparison .

ARCHIVED WEBSITE: No new data posted since Jan. 21, 2017. The 2016 Election website received 13,165,417 pageviews between Nov. 3, 2015, when the site first launched, through Election Day on Nov. 8, 2016. We kept it active until Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. The site is now archived - meaning we will no longer make any updates to it.

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Former Candidates (alphabetical order)

ISSUES AND CANDIDATE STATEMENTS

Health Care, Abortion, & End of Life Issues

2016 Presidential Election: The Candidates and Where They Stand on the Issues

At ProCon.org you and millions of others readers can get reliable, sourced information about where each presidential candidate stands on important issues. We have published candidate responses to 75 issues. Election Day is Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

To get started, click on a candidate, scroll down to click on an issue, or go straight to our presidential candidate matching quiz and the side-by-side candidate comparison .

ARCHIVED WEBSITE: No new data posted since Jan. 21, 2017. The 2016 Election website received 13,165,417 pageviews between Nov. 3, 2015, when the site first launched, through Election Day on Nov. 8, 2016. We kept it active until Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. The site is now archived - meaning we will no longer make any updates to it.

WINNER

Issues and Candidate Statements
Health Care, Abortion, & End of Life Issues

Our Latest Updates (archived after 30 days)

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At ProCon.org you and millions of others readers can get reliable, sourced information about where each presidential candidate stands on important issues. We have published candidate responses to 75 issues. Election Day is Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

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iSideWith
Started in March 2012 by two friends with two very different views of politics. We are constantly finding and building new ways to boost voter engagement and education using information, data, and breaking technologies.

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The 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings caused several states and cities to pass strict gun control measures. In response, state lawmakers in gun friendly states in the South and West passed bills that would strengthen Stand Your Ground laws and allow weapons in most public places. In 2014, 21 states passed laws that expanded the rights of gun owners allowing them to possess firearms in churches, bars, schools and college campuses. The federal government has not passed any gun control measures since the 1994 Brady Bill and 42 states now allow the possession of assault rifles. In the U.S. two-thirds of all gun deaths are suicides and in 2010 there were 19,000 firearm suicides and 11,000 firearm homicides. See recent gun control news

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The 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings caused several states and cities to pass strict gun control measures. In response, state lawmakers in gun friendly states in the South and West passed bills that would strengthen Stand Your Ground laws and allow weapons in most public places.

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The Kelly File interview with JD Vance

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Trump, white working class voters and what the media miss

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Author J.D. Vance explains on 'The Kelly File'

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Peggy McIntosh Sets Record Straight on White Privilege

What it is and, what it is not

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White privilege. It's been a hot topic in mainstream media in recent weeks because of a young Princetonian's controversial essay, "Checking my Privilege." What is privilege? And maybe more important, what is it not? The New Yorker has a must-read interview with the original expert. Now 79, Peggy McIntosh's 1988 essay, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," remains, more than 25 years on, the clearest elucidation of the topic. Some highlights:
How McIntosh came to write so authoritatively in the late '80s about privilege:

... About six years earlier, black women in the Boston area had written essays to the effect that white women were oppressive to work with. I remember back to what it had been like to read those essays. My first response was to say, "I don't see how they can say that about us-I think we're nice!" And my second response was deeply racist, but this is where I was in 1980. I thought, I especially think we're nice if we work with them.

On reaction, over the years, to speaking up about privilege:

Well, at first, the most common responses were from white people. Their most common response was "I never thought about this before." After a couple of years, that was accompanied by "You changed my life." From people of color, from the beginning, it was "You showed me I'm not crazy." And if they said more than that it was along the lines of "I knew there was something out there working against me."

On the value of honoring and telling individual stories:

I think one's own individual experience is sacred. Testifying to it is very important-but so is seeing that it is set within a framework outside of one's personal experience that is much bigger, and has repetitive statistical patterns in it.

There're more gems from McIntosh, who's still working on educational equity at Wellesley. Check out The New Yorker interview-as well as the Princeton essay that kicked off the mainstream media's recent white privilege coverage.

Related Articles

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Peggy McIntosh Sets Record Straight on White Privilege | Colorlines

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White privilege. It's been a hot topic in mainstream media in recent weeks because of a young Princetonian's controversial essay, "Checking my Privilege." What is privilege? And maybe more important, what is it not? The New Yorker has a must-read interview with the original expert.

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In an interview with Rob Dreher, author JD Vance analyzes Trump’s popularity among working class whites (blurb below is the intro to this interview):

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis"  by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s "The Fractured Republic," for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

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I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It's one of the best books I've ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin's The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what's happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates's book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump's convention speech) shows why.
RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she's never seen poverty and hopelessness like what's common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading "Hillbilly Elegy" tells me why. Explain it to people who haven't yet read your book.
J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people-my people-are really struggling, and there hasn't been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.

What many don't understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we're not talking about small enclaves or a few towns-we're talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a "stepdad" only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don't want handouts to begin with.

From the Right, they've gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump's candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can't because they lack a platform.

The last point I'll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud. A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well. We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother. I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old. Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate. Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy? My military service is the thing I'm most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can't help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

I'm not a hillbilly, nor do I descend from hillbilly stock, strictly speaking. But I do come from poor rural white people in the South. I have spent most of my life and career living among professional class urbanite, most of them on the East Coast, and the barely-banked contempt they - the professional-class whites, I mean - have for poor white people is visceral, and obvious to me. Yet it is invisible to them. Why is that? And what does it have to do with our politics today?

I know exactly what you mean. My grandma (Mamaw) recognized this instinctively. She said that most people were probably prejudiced, but they had to be secretive about it. "We"-meaning hillbillies-"are the only group of people you don't have to be ashamed to look down upon." During my final year at Yale Law, I took a small class with a professor I really admired (and still do). I was the only veteran in the class, and when this came up somehow in conversation, a young woman looked at me and said, "I can't believe you were in the Marines. You just seem so nice. I thought that people in the military had to act a certain way." It was incredibly insulting, and it was my first real introduction to the idea that this institution that was so important among my neighbors was looked down upon in such a personal way. To this lady, to be in the military meant that you had to be some sort of barbarian. I bit my tongue, but it's one of those comments I'll never forget.

The "why" is really difficult, but I have a few thoughts. The first is that humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there's just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us. And if you're an elite white professional, working class whites are an easy target: you don't have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe. So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.

A lot of it is pure disconnect-many elites just don't know a member of the white working class. A professor once told me that Yale Law shouldn't accept students who attended state universities for their undergraduate studies. (A bit of background: Yale Law takes well over half of its student body from very elite private schools.) "We don't do remedial education here," he said. Keep in mind that this guy was very progressive and cared a lot about income inequality and opportunity. But he just didn't realize that for a kid like me, Ohio State was my only chance-the one opportunity I had to do well in a good school. If you removed that path from my life, there was nothing else to give me a shot at Yale. When I explained that to him, he was actually really receptive. He may have even changed his mind.

What does it mean for our politics? To me, this condescension is a big part of Trump's appeal. He's the one politician who actively fights elite sensibilities, whether they're good or bad. I remember when Hillary Clinton casually talked about putting coal miners out of work, or when Obama years ago discussed working class whites clinging to their guns and religion. Each time someone talks like this, I'm reminded of Mamaw's feeling that hillbillies are the one group you don't have to be ashamed to look down upon. The people back home carry that condescension like a badge of honor, but it also hurts, and they've been looking for someone for a while who will declare war on the condescenders. If nothing else, Trump does that.

This is where, to me, there's a lot of ignorance around "Teflon Don." No one seems to understand why conventional blunders do nothing to Trump. But in a lot of ways, what elites see as blunders people back home see as someone who-finally-conducts themselves in a relatable way. He shoots from the hip; he's not constantly afraid of offending someone; he'll get angry about politics; he'll call someone a liar or a fraud. This is how a lot of people in the white working class actually talk about politics, and even many elites recognize how refreshing and entertaining it can be! So it's not really a blunder as much as it is a rich, privileged Wharton grad connecting to people back home through style and tone. Viewed like this, all the talk about "political correctness" isn't about any specific substantive point, as much as it is a way of expanding the scope of acceptable behavior. People don't want to believe they have to speak like Obama or Clinton to participate meaningfully in politics, because most of us don't speak like Obama or Clinton.

On the other hand, as Hillbilly Elegy says so well, that reflexive reverse-snobbery of the hillbillies and those like them is a real thing too, and something that undermines their prospects in life. Is there any way for it to be overcome, other than getting out of the bubble, as you did?

I'm not sure we can overcome it entirely. Nearly everyone in my family who has achieved some financial success for themselves, from Mamaw to me, has been told that they've become "too big for their britches." I don't think this value is all bad. It forces us to stay grounded, reminds us that money and education are no substitute for common sense and humility. But, it does create a lot of pressure not to make a better life for yourself, and let's face it: when you grow up in a dying steel town with very few middle class job prospects, making a better life for yourself is often a binary proposition: if you don't get a good job, you may be stuck on welfare for the rest of your life.

I'm a big believer in the power to change social norms. To take an obvious recent example, I see the decline of smoking as not just an economic or regulatory matter, but something our culture really flipped on. So there's value in all of us-whether we have a relatively large platform or if our platform is just the people who live with us-trying to be a little kinder to the kids who want to make a better future for themselves. That's a big part of the reason I wrote the book: it's meant not just for elites, but for people from my own clan, in the hopes that they'll better appreciate the ways they can help (or hurt) their own kin.

At the same time, the hostility between the working class and the elites is so great that there will always be some wariness toward those who go to the other side. And can you blame them? A lot of these people know nothing but judgment and condescension from those with financial and political power, and the thought of their children acquiring that same hostility is noxious. It may just be the sort of value we have to live with.

The odd thing is, the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery. It's the great privilege of my life that I'm deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism. Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else! But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18.

I live in the rural South now, where I was born, and I see the same kind of social pathologies among some poor whites that you write about in Hillbilly Elegy. I also see the same thing among poor blacks, and have heard from a few black friends who made it out as you did the same kind of stories about how their own people turned on them and accused them of being traitors to their family and class - this, only for getting an education and building stable lives for themselves. The thing that so few of us either understand or want to talk about is that nobody who lives the way these poor black and white people do is ever going to amount to anything. There's never going to be an economy rich enough or a government program strong enough to compensate for the lack of a stable family and the absence of self-discipline. Are Americans even capable of hearing that anymore?

Judging by the current political conversation, no: Americans are not capable of hearing that anymore. I was speaking with a friend the other night, and I made the point that the meta-narrative of the 2016 election is learned helplessness as a political value. We're no longer a country that believes in human agency, and as a formerly poor person, I find it incredibly insulting. To hear Trump or Clinton talk about the poor, one would draw the conclusion that they have no power to affect their own lives. Things have been done to them, from bad trade deals to Chinese labor competition, and they need help. And without that help, they're doomed to lives of misery they didn't choose.

Obviously, the idea that there aren't structural barriers facing both the white and black poor is ridiculous. Mamaw recognized that our lives were harder than rich white people, but she always tempered her recognition of the barriers with a hard-noses willfulness: "never be like those a-holes who think the deck is stacked against them." In hindsight, she was this incredibly perceptive woman. She recognized the message my environment had for me, and she actively fought against it.

There's good research on this stuff. Believing you have no control is incredibly destructive, and that may be especially true when you face unique barriers. The first time I encountered this idea was in my exposure to addiction subculture, which is quite supportive and admirable in its own way, but is full of literature that speaks about addiction as a disease. If you spend a day in these circles, you'll hear someone say something to the effect of, "You wouldn't judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so why judge an addict for drug use." This view is a perfect microcosm of the problem among poor Americans. On the one hand, the research is clear that there are biological elements to addiction-in that way, it does mimic a disease. On the other hand, the research is also clear that people who believe their addiction is a biologically mandated disease show less ability to resist it. It's this awful catch-22, where recognizing the true nature of the problem actually hinders the ability to overcome.

Interestingly, both in my conversations with poor blacks and whites, there's a recognition of the role of better choices in addressing these problems. The refusal to talk about individual agency is in some ways a consequence of a very detached elite, one too afraid to judge and consequently too handicapped to really understand. At the same time, poor people don't like to be judged, and a little bit of recognition that life has been unfair to them goes a long way. Since Hillbilly Elegy came out, I've gotten so many messages along the lines of: "Thank you for being sympathetic but also honest."

I think that's the only way to have this conversation and to make the necessary changes: sympathy and honesty. It's not easy, especially in our politically polarized world, to recognize both the structural and the cultural barriers that so many poor kids face. But I think that if you don't recognize both, you risk being heartless or condescending, and often both.

On the other hand, as a conservative, I grow weary of fellow middle-class conservatives acting as if it were possible simply to bootstrap your way out of poverty. My dad was able to raise my sister and me in the 1970s on a civil servant's salary, supplemented by my mom's small salary as a school bus driver. I doubt this would be possible today. You're a conservative who has known poverty and powerlessness as well as wealth and privilege. What do you have to say to your fellow conservatives?

I think you hit the nail right on the head: we need to judge less and understand more. It's so easy for conservatives to use "culture" as an ending point in a discussion-an excuse to rationalize their worldview and then move on-rather than a starting point. I try to do precisely the opposite in Hillbilly Elegy. This book should start conversations, and it is successful, it will.

The Atlantic 's Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I often disagree with, has made a really astute point about culture and the way it has been deployed against the black poor. His point, basically, is that "culture" is little more than an excuse to blame black people for various pathologies and then move on. So it's hardly surprising that when poor people, especially poor black folks, hear "culture," they instinctively run for the hills.

But let's just think about what culture really means, to borrow an example from my life. One of the things I mention in the book is that domestic strife and family violence are cultural traits-they're just there, and everyone experiences them in one form or another. I learned domestic strife from the moment I was born, from more than 15 stepdads and boyfriends I encountered, to the domestic violence case that nearly tore my family apart (I was the primary victim). So predictably, by the time I got married, I wasn't a great spouse. I had to learn, with the help of my aunt and sister (both of whom had successful marriages), but especially with the help of my wife, how not to turn every small disagreement into a shouting match or a public scene. Too many conservatives look at that situation, say "well that's a cultural problem, nothing we can do," and then move on. They're right that it's a cultural problem: I learned domestic strife from my mother, and she learned it from her parents.

But to speak "culture" and then move on is a total copout, and there are public policy solutions to draw from experiences like this: how could my school have better prepared me for domestic life? how could child welfare services have given me more opportunities to spend time with my Mamaw and my aunt, rather than threatening me-as they did-with the promise of foster care if I kept talking? These are tough, tough problems, but they're not totally immune to policy interventions. Neither are they entirely addressable by government. It's just complicated.

That's just one small example, obviously, and there are many more in the book. But I think this unwillingness to deal with tough issues-or worse, to pretend they'll all go away if we can hit 4 percent growth targets-is a significant failure of modern conservative politics. And looking at the political landscape, this failure may very well have destroyed the conservative movement as we used to know it.

And what do you have to say to liberals?

Well, it's almost the flip side: stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside. I see a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop. They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress. Undoubtedly, that's partially true. Some of these family problems run far deeper. They see school problems as the consequence of too little money (despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and ignore that, as a teacher from my hometown once told me, "They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by wolves." Again, they're not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly funded. But there's this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right. In some cases, the best that public policy can do is help people make better choices, or expose them to better influences through better family policy (like my Mamaw).

There was a huge study that came out a couple of years ago, led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty. He found that two of the biggest predictors of low upward mobility were 1) living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and 2) growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of single mothers. I recall that some of the news articles about the study didn't even mention the single mother conclusion. That's a massive oversight! Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are. I admire their refusal to look down on the least among us, but at some level, that can become an excuse to never really look at the problem at all.

In Hillbilly Elegy, I noticed the parallel between two disciplined forms of life that enabled you and your biological father to transcend the chaos that dragged down so many others y'all knew. You had the US Marine Corps; he had fundamentalist Christianity. How did they work inner transformation within you both?

Well, I think it's important to point out that Christianity, in the quirky way I've experienced it, was really important to me, too. For my dad, the way he tells it is that he was a hard partier, he drank a lot, and didn't have a lot of direction. His Christian faith gave him focus, forced him to think hard about his personal choices, and gave him a community of people who demanded, even if only implicitly, that he act a certain way. I think we all understate the importance of moral pressure, but it helped my dad, and it has certainly helped me! There's obviously a more explicitly religious argument here, too. If you believe as I do, you believe that the Holy Spirit works in people in a mysterious way. I recognize that a lot of secular folks may look down on that, but I'd make one important point: that not drinking, treating people well, working hard, and so forth, requires a lot of willpower when you didn't grow up in privilege. That feeling-whether it's real or entirely fake-that there's something divine helping you and directing your mind and body, is extraordinarily powerful.

General Chuck Krulak, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, once said that the most important thing the Corps does for the country is "win wars and make Marines." I didn't understand that statement the first time I heard it, but for a kid like me, the Marine Corps was basically a four-year education in character and self-management. The challenges start small-running two miles, then three, and more. But they build on each other. If you have good mentors (and I certainly did), you are constantly given tasks, yelled at for failing, advised on how not to fail next time, and then given another try. You learn, through sheer repetition, that you can do difficult things. And that was quite revelatory for me. It gave me a lot of self-confidence. If I had learned helplessness from my environment back home, four years in the Marine Corps taught me something quite different.

The other thing the Marine Corps did is hold our hands and prevent us from making stupid decisions. It didn't work on everyone, of course, but I remember telling my senior noncommissioned officer that I was going to buy a car, probably a BMW. "Stop being an idiot and go get a Honda." Then I told him that I had been approved for a new Honda, at the dealer's low interest rate of 21.9 percent. "Stop being an idiot and go to the credit union." He then ordered another Marine to take me to the credit union, open an account, and apply for a loan (the interest rate, despite my awful credit, was around 8 percent). A lot of elites rely on parents or other networks the first time they made these decisions, but I didn't even know what I didn't know. The Marine Corps ensured that I learned.

Finally, what did watching Donald Trump's speech last night make you think about this fall campaign, and the future of the country?

Well, I think the speech itself was a perfect microcosm of why I love and am terrified of Donald Trump. On the one hand, he criticized the elites and actually acknowledge the hurt of so many working class voters. After so many years of Republican politicians refusing to even talk about factory closures, Trump's message is an oasis in the desert. But of course he spent way too much time appealing to people's fears, and he offered zero substance for how to improve their lives. It was Trump at his best and worst.

My biggest fear with Trump is that, because of the failures of the Republican and Democratic elites, the bar for the white working class is too low. They're willing to listen to Trump about rapist immigrants and banning all Muslims because other parts of his message are clearly legitimate. A lot of people think Trump is just the first to appeal to the racism and xenophobia that were already there, but I think he's making the problem worse.

The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation. It's not just that he inflames the tribalism of the Right; it's that he encourages the worst impulses of the Left. In the past few weeks, I've heard from so many of my elite friends some version of, "Trump is the racist leader all of these racist white people deserve." These comments almost always come from white progressives who know literally zero culturally working class Americans. And I'm always left thinking: if this is the quality of thought of a Harvard Law graduate, then our society is truly doomed. In a world of Trump, we've abandoned the pretense of persuasion. The November election strikes me as little more than a referendum on whose tribe is bigger.

But I remain incredibly optimistic about the future. Maybe that's the hillbilly resilience in me. Or maybe I'm just an idiot. But if writing this book, and talking with friends and strangers about its message, has taught me anything, it's that most people are trying incredibly hard to make it, even in this more complicated and scary world. The short view of our country is that we're doomed. The long view, inherited from my grandparents' 1930s upbringing in coal country, is that all of us can still control some part of our fate. Even if we are doomed, there's reason to pretend otherwise.

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The book is Hillbilly Elegy. You really, really need to read it.

UPDATE: Best e-mail I've yet received about this interview:

Mr Dreher, I am writing to thank you for the impressive and thoughtful interview of JD Vance on his book. I am not a conservative. I am a black, gay, immigrant who has been blessed by the dynamic and productive American society we live in. So I am not the average reader of the American Conservative. I came to your article through a friend. So I just wanted to share how refreshing I found to have two white men being able to speak about class, their family experience and acknowledging an experience that is often not visible in our society. The poor rural south that you described and the communities that Mr.. Vance write about are familiar to me. Born in Haiti, growing up in Congo, Africa. I recognize that poverty, I recognize the marginalization and I SO APPRECIATED the conversation about individual agency! That is ultimately where the American dream (if it exists) lives. That deep belief that I as an individual am not a victim and can engage with the world around me! That has been my American lesson. That is the source of the dynamism of this society! Thank you!

UPDATE: Y'all might know that we draw from Shutterstock, a provider of stock photography, for most of our illustrations. That one above was the only one I could find on short notice that showed a normal-looking person at a Trump rally, up close. I thought, "You watch, in real life, that lady is probably rich."

Sure enough! A reader just wrote:

Your article is excellent and I enjoyed reading it. The woman whose photograph you used is [name, hometown], a friend of my family. She is a multi-millionaire and her daughter went to Mar-a-Lago for birthday parties many years ago. I love the irony of this and thought you would get a laugh.

I did!

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I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan.

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FACING HISTORY: FERGUSON LESSON LINKS

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FACING HISTORY WEBSITE: 11 UNITS ON FERGUSON

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Help students become informed and effective civic participants in today's digital landscape. This unit is designed to develop students' critical thinking, news literacy, civic engagement, and social-emotional skills and competencies.

Civics & Citizenship

History

Social Studies

Democracy & Civic Engagement

Racism

The resources I'm getting from my colleagues through Facing History have been just invaluable.

- Claudia Bautista, Santa Monica, Calif

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Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age

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Help students become informed and effective civic participants in today's digital landscape. This unit is designed to develop students' critical thinking, news literacy, civic engagement, and social-emotional skills and competencies.

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TEACHING TOLERANCE:
ELECTION RESOURCES

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According to the Teaching Tolerance report The Trump Effect: The Impact of the Presidential Campaign on Our Nation's Schools, nearly 40 percent of the 2,000 teachers who responded to TT's election survey are hesitant to teach about the election. Some educators cite concerns about the students who fear being ostracized or even deported if certain candidates win. Other teachers don't know how to handle the fact that students are repeating the hate-filled language they hear from candidates' speeches and social media posts. Still other teachers, like me, feel they must discuss this election with students.

Here are a two of the strategies I have used to teach students the skills to decode what is being said. Focusing on these skills has helped my students come to realizations all their own. Kids who were enjoying the excitement that comes with blaming and bullying have pumped the brakes and thought a little more carefully.
Talk with students about "they" and "them."
The use of "they" is a favorite campaign tactic. Candidates are making statements about what "they" do, how "they" are hurting our country. Sometimes "they" are Muslims. Sometimes "they" are women. Sometimes "they" are a particular minority or ethnicity. Sometimes "they" are the poor; sometimes "they" are the rich.

One quick exercise is to have students scan through the Twitter feeds of various candidates and count the number of times third-person pronouns are used. Have them search for those words in speeches and debates as well. Which groups are being replaced and generalized most frequently in their statements?

Talk about the use of stereotypes and what happens when you categorize an entire group of people with such a broad brush. Ask students to do a little research and find examples of individuals who are from that larger group but do not embody the characteristic being attributed to all of "them."

You need not do a lot of editorializing, as these patterns begin to speak for themselves.
Conduct formal debates in class.
Assign teams of two or more to opposing sides of the topics most frequently discussed in the campaign. Using a formal debate structure with constructive speeches, cross-examination and rebuttals makes students go through the process of researching the topic, formulating opinions and engaging in civil discourse.

My seniors just finished doing this, and the results were outstanding. Students claiming immigrants were bad for our economy had to provide statistics to support that claim, which they found tricky. The opposition arguing for the economic benefit these workers bring to our country also needed support. They found a great deal.

One of the greatest benefits came from the direct nature of cross-examination. Showing students a couple of clips from presidential debates-clips of candidates rolling their eyes as an opponent spoke or displaying body language that was aggressive or disrespectful-can provide a master class in how not to behave when the goal is an exchange of ideas.

We often stopped the questioning to discuss how to better phrase a question or response. We talked about the need to root responses in fact rather than opinion. We talked about the need to call out the opposition on empty and inflammatory rhetoric rather than simply throwing back your own.

Students may be susceptible to some of the biased language they're hearing from presidential candidates, but teachers are in a position to show them a better path.
Knoll is a writer and English teacher at a public school in New Jersey.

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A Need to Speak: Teaching About the 2016 Election

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.