Here is a picture of five books, all published between 1969 and 1972:
And here is a sixth, published in 1969:
I came across these while unpacking books into a new bookshelf, and had for the most part forgotten about both owning them and having once read each of them. (The occasion for first reading them was a dissertation chapter on Norman Mailer's journalism.) The books are striking today for their contemporary relevance.
Each deals with what, in the wake of Richard Nixon's election, seemed to be a movement toward a kind of white identity politics. White Americans, particularly working-class white Americans, these writers argue, had come to see themselves as a kind of aggrieved identity group and were now voting on those grievances. The result was the election of Nixon and a a cultural "backlash" against the Civil Rights movement and the counterculture. The writers presented here disagree considerably both about the legitimacy of these grievances and the likely longterm political consequences of them.
What they agree upon, however, is that whiteness had been, in the late 1960s, politicised. Once taken as simply the given background of American life, whiteness was now the terrain of political discussion, its meaning and value argued over by professional critics and shop foremen alike.
This is perhaps the first lesson these books hold for our current cultural and political moment. It is not so much that Donald Trump is like Nixon (to the extent that either of them is psychologically knowable from afar, they seem strikingly different). Rather, it is that the politicisation of whiteness was a necessary precondition for the rise of both. To put that more starkly: politicised whiteness would seem to be a threat to progressive politics, and perhaps to the political order as a whole.
The second lesson these books hold is that not all identities are politicised equally. Each of these books speaks to the concerns of white voters and of working-class voters and they for the most part see the working class as white by default. All of that remains mostly true of our current concern with and politicisation of white Americans. (The one important difference might be the post-industrial blurring of the distinctions between working-class, unemployed, and chronically under-employed people.)
The Nixon-era books, however, politicise another identity category, one that is almost entirely absent from political discussion today: White ethnicity. Pieces of a Dream is subtitled The Ethnic Worker's Crisis with America, and that concern with ethnicity is a theme that runs through all six books. The difference between a descendent of English Americans and a descendent of Italian or Lithuanian ones was, in the Nixon era, front and centre. Today, it hardly registers.
There is, maybe, a glimmer of hope here. Not that the identity category of "white" might be segmented into different ethnicities and pitted against itself, but that identity categories might be re-articulated in different and more productive directions. To put that another way, the importance of ethnicity to writers 50 years ago is a reminder that all politics is identity politics. A person is no more "naturally" an Italian American than she is a white American, nor more naturally a "worker" than she is a "Christian." Cultural work is required to create and then to politicise each of those ideas. And if our culture has, at this moment, created and then politicised the idea of a monolithic whiteness, then it might in the future create and then politicise categories which today seem irrelevant to politics and which might, looked at from a distance, hold more political promise: neighbour, producer, conservationist, caregiver, etc.
Writers once thought it crucial to figure out the meaning of Slavic-Americanness; today they could hardly care less. Perhaps, then, we might one day worry not at all about what it means to be white, having turned our attention instead toward what it means to look after children or care for the elderly.
