I am of two minds in regards to this book. One one hand, I feel like Williams's statements largely reflect what I've seen growing up surrounded by the white working class in Appalachian Ohio and the cluelessness I've seen since moving to large East Coast metros. She lays out arguments that I've struggled to put words to: the white working class tends to resent social safety nets because they're not poor enough to benefit from them; Trump voters did have a higher average income than Hillary voter...

Who voted for Trump? Williams sets out to identify these voters with this almost entirely anecdotal book (perhaps because it was literally begun the night of HRC's defeat), more of a pamphlet than its $23 hardcover price tag would indicate. Williams inserts herself into this story of the forgotten "white working class" with unaware disdain, writing harshly about her working class stepfather and old boyfriend as if they are from another planet than her self-professed "professional managerial elit...

I thought when I walked into Collected Works, an independent bookstore in Santa Fe and saw this on display I grabbed it thinking to myself (I have a habit of visiting a bookstore, not a Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores when I am in new places) ah, perhaps it will shed some light on the current mess that we find ourselves in. It did not. I am glad that I read it as it has all the things I have seen elsewhere in multiple publications and blogs and newspapers in 131 pages, in nicely defined c...

A thought provoking analysis of class in United States from an Ivy League educated lawyer. This was written around the 2016 election as a “window into the souls of the working class” or some other such ethnographic tourism. That said, it seems to be a solid aggregation of information on class, and it’s presented in a way that I imagine is very digestible to the New Yorker types. (No not in snarky cartoon form) It’s interesting in regards to both how the author presents ideas and the ideas presen...

Since November 8, there have been hundreds – possibly thousands – of published articles about that branch of humanity famously labeled “the deplorables” by Hillary Clinton. Many of these election postmortems are clueless and/or condescending attempts to dissect and explain (to liberals) the strain of American voter that supported and continues to support Donald Trump.But some of these election analyses are insightful. Joan Williams’s "White Working Class" expands on a previously published essay

Right after the 2016 presidential election, Joan C. Williams wrote an article for the Harvard Business review, then expanded that article into the present book. The very first thing I learned, which sounds obvious until you think about it, is that the working class isn't the same as the poor. I had conflated the two. Basically, the dividing line between the white working class and the elites is not income level but education. The elites, that is, the managerial-professional class, is college edu...

This book is an expanded version of an article the author wrote just after the election: https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-... .The author describes herself as a member of the professional/managerial elite, born and bred, but says that forty years ago she married a “class migrant”, a man from a blue-collar background, and has spent her married life coming to understand his working-class family. This book is mostly a series of questions someone from her class may ask about the working class (a...

There is a widespread narrative on the American political left that the people who voted for Donald Trump did so because they are stupid and racist. Joan Williams wrote this book to suggest that this is not necessarily so and, even if it is, it is counterproductive to say it out loud. Her counter narrative is that the Trump voter is reacting to the condescension of what she calls the professional, managerial elite (PME). They see this largely liberal group as wanting to combat climate change by

2.5 stars rounded up for attempting and at times clearly setting perimeters for definitions such as "middle class" or "poor" or "working class". She tried. It must be said that STILL they are not completely accurate, IMHO. All of the "classes" she designates do not connote with those same exact words re similar entities when they discuss them with each other presently. They don't. For instance, in many places in the USA, those who have a family income of $120,000 are NOT considered "middle class...

This was a delightfully illuminating book that really showed me a few things about my own stereotypes and generalizations about white working-class people. The author goes through each one of the major criticisms that elites have for blue-collar people. Then, in short order, she clearly and insightfully explains the motivations behind their choices. This book answers the question "what the hell are they thinking!?"This is a delightfully short book full of pithy insights that those of us not rais...

Class, more than anything else, is the crucial divide. Class trumps everything. But class isn’t just about how much money you earn. Nor is it an abiding characteristic of individuals. Class is a cultural tradition.Williams spends the majority of this short, acerbic book explaining the worldview of the white working class, why they believe and behave as they do. And her message for the professional managerial class is blunt, just as elites ascribe structural reasons for poverty, so too should the...

Easily digestible and accessible, thought provoking and deeply relevant. Williams goes beyond the talk on the 2016 election, which inspired this book, to discuss HOW and WHY we talk about the white working class the way we do ("we" being twenty-first century Americans generally, and Democrats/Progressives specifically), and how that must change if we truly want everyone to have a seat at the table.

Joan Williams wants to “Overcome Class Cluelessness in America.” This is an admirable goal, and in many ways this is an admirable book (or brochure—it’s very short). But reading “White Working Class” (which, despite its title, gives equal time to both the white and black working class) makes the reader squirm. The reader appreciates the author’s, Joan Williams’s, attempts to objectively examine her class, that of the “professional-management elite,” or “PME,” but winces at her frequent inability...

If a webcam had been trained at my face while I was reading this book my expression would probably have been one of slowly dawning horror. If a comic-strip thought balloon had been connected to my head, it might have read, "Oh dear. I guess I really do live in even more of a bubble than I thought I did."This is the best of the 18 books I've read so far this year, and it is certainly the most illuminating of the four "How did Trump become president?" books I've read.Emerging from a celebrated HBR...

There's a certain underlying logic to many of these arguments, and it goes something like this: Democrats are actually better for the (white) working class than Republicans are, but Republicans win because they have better messaging. Therefore, Democrats need to work on their messaging.Williams intuits that it's the first part of this logic that needs some re-examining: the point isn't that Democrats are *better than* Republicans--the point is, are Democrats *doing enough*? But the siren song of...

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/review/R1NJM8P...I thought the first part of this book was interesting and educational. In the first part, the author, Joan C. Williams, examines the situation of the "white working class" ("WWC"). Williams attempts to be objective and sympathetic, and, frankly, chides her own class,i.e., the "professional managerial elite" ("PME"), for its snobbery against the WWC. Williams' diagnosis is that the WWC is under substantial stres...

This timely book compacted unique insights about growing class divide among different income levels, race, gender and educational backgrounds in our society today. I appreciated the researched and nuanced approach the author took to define commonly used labels of “poor”, “middle class” and “elite”. We can all agree that these terms were often overlapping, contradicting and confusing. With clarity, the author simply defined the “poor” as individual or family making less than $41,000 annually, whe...

A Review of the AudiobookPublished in June of 2017 by Blackstone AudioRead by Liisa IvaryDuration: 3 hours, 28 minutesUnabridgedThis small book grew from an article that the author wrote after the 2016 Presidential Election. She wrote this article to explain the results to her friends in what she calls the "professional elite". The article created a lot of buzz so she expanded it into a small, accessible book that I found to be very accurate.Williams distinguishes the working class from the poor...

I am not particularly impressed with this book. Perhaps I expected too much. As a former counterinsurgency advisor I was trained to analyze social disorder and the elements that lead to insurgency. The class differences referenced in this book are: a lack of political representation, economic instability, and the degree of distinction in our current form of government. This last element coupled with economic instability has created a perceived crisis in legitimacy. While many also see the financ...

In White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017, 192 pages, $15.31/13.49) Joan C. Williams has written a challenging, persuasive book helping to answer questions often asked by people seeking to understand why and how Donald Trump won election as President of the United States by gaining the votes of people who seemed to have been voting against their own interests. In presenting her argument, Williams details how to coalition of liberal inte...