Trump's trash talking is so gratuitously hurtful and so illuminating of how white nationalism works that it is worth lingering on.
After November 8, 2016, invoking the "white working class" suddenly seemed to explain everything.
This essay was first published in The Year Left Vol. 3: Reshaping the US Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s, edited by Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker, and published by Verso in 1988. It was later reprinted in Roediger's Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History.
Solidarity is a central concept in the left political lexicon, yet, as David Roediger shows in this extract from Class, Race and Marxism, solidarity is anything but simple and easy. See all our race and class reading here.
