American Dysfunction: A Review of Kevin Williamson’s ‘Big White Ghetto’
(REVIEW) During a 2012 visit to eastern Kentucky, New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof learned that parents were pulling their children out of literacy classes because children who read cannot collect monthly $698 federal disability checks.
“Conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency,” Kristof wrote.
Eastern Kentucky hosts the poorest counties in America. It is the heart of what Kevin Williamson calls The Big White Ghetto, the vast swath of “Wonderbread-hued towns and villages” that stretch from northern Mississippi to southern New York state. Life expectancies are short here, and they are getting shorter. The typical man in the Big White Ghetto dies ten years earlier than a man in Fairfax, Virginia.
“If the people here were not 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation,” Williamson writes.
The White underclass suffers from many of the same social problems as its Black urban counterparts. Williamson documents these pathologies in excruciating detail in his cool-headed yet warm-hearted new book, “Big White Ghetto” (Regnery Publishing, Nov. 17, 2020). Williamson introduces us to food stamp fraudsters in Eastern Kentucky; opioid and heroin junkies in Alabama; pornography aficionados in Las Vegas; and gambling addicts in Atlantic City.
Williamson grew up in the Big White Ghetto. He was an adopted child of a mother who married four times. As a child, Williamson was occasionally homeless because it was too dangerous for him to live in either of the two homes that his mother and stepfather owned. His mother and stepfather were always broke, even when they had good paying government jobs with pensions. His mother’s bingo and cigarette expenses were crushing, and she once paid for a new Cadillac with a credit card.
It never occurred to his parents to learn the habits of people who had come from the same circumstances as they had but had built prosperous, stable, productive lives. His parents did not lack money or property or opportunity; they lacked the discipline and the good sense that could put them on the road to prosperity.
All of this pathology was on vivid display in a courtroom where Williamson tried to evict his late mother’s fourth husband’s fifth wife from a modest home that he had inherited. In eviction court, people “rarely appear as subjects in their own sentences.” A “domestic event” just happens. Checks just don’t come. Husbands are in jail because a crime has been committed. Children are taken away by Child Protective Services. Disease descends.
Williamson insists that the first step in overcoming the dysfunction of the White underclass is to relinquish the lie that it has been victimized by outside forces. The White underclass is in thrall to “a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.” Telling these people that they are victims of outside forces wins votes, but it is also “the political equivalent of selling them heroin.” It deprives people of the sense of agency that alone can rescue them from their dysfunction.
“Nothing happened to them,” Williamson writes. “There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Capitalism didn’t do that, and neither did illegal immigrants or Chinese competition with local industries.”
In today’s political climate, Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty of promoting a narrative of White victimization. Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden all afflict their audiences with the same absurd romance of bringing back America’s lost factory life. The truth about our dying communities, Williamson writes, is that they deserve to die. “Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.”
Charismatic spiritual hucksters exploit the White underclass just as deftly as charismatic political hucksters. “The people in the pews are in a cult, but the men on the stage sell them conspiracies exactly like guys who want to sell you a vacation timeshare in Belize,” Williamson writes. Hot topics in the White ghetto are Satanic ritual abuse, White supremacy, flat earthism, and the fixation that Donald Trump is destined to purge the nation of Satanic pedophiles who secretly run the world.
“Big White Ghetto” could use a more nuanced treatment of the ways in which religious disaffiliation has shaped the underclass, making it vulnerable to the predations of political extremists and false prophets. Since 1970, church attendance has fallen more than twice as much among Whites without a college degree as among those who graduated from college. Missing from the lives of so many in the White underclass are the conventional religious commitments that have the power to bind people together in communities of mutual self-sacrifice in service of the common good. In the 1960s, Americans cut themselves loose from these tight communities with their strict moral norms. America’s underclass has paid a much steeper price for this loss of community than have cultured despisers of institutional religion.
Williamson believes that people in the Big White Ghetto would be better off dispersed than trapped together in self-reinforcing dysfunction. “Forget all that cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget about struggling rust-belt factory towns and conspiracies about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs,” Williamson writes. America is a land raining with jobs and opportunity, but the “native-born sons and daughters of this sweet land of liberty” are sleep-walking between the raindrops. Williamson’s advice to his brothers and sisters in the Big White Ghetto is to rent a U-Haul and go find a job in a prosperous part of the country. Follow in the footsteps of Mexican and Bangladeshi immigrants, who have neither money nor education, but who are opening convenience stores and gas stations from coast to coast.
A distinction that Williamson draws between the White working class and the White underclass points the way toward a cultural revitalization of the Big White Ghetto. In an interview, Williamson defined the White working class as “gainfully employed people who have taken control of their lives” and who are church going, financially prudent, and married. Whereas the manners of the White underclass are Trumpian (vulgar, promiscuous, consumerist), the manners of the White working class are formal to the point of icy politeness. It is “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am.” This formality signifies social respect rooted in genuine self-respect, and it asserts the equality and dignity of the speaker. These are the manners and morals that lie at the foundation of a successful republic.
The people in the Big White Ghetto are often not poor in any material sense. Rather, they are poor in spirit. In “Big White Ghetto”, Williamson’s animus is directed not against the forlorn inhabitants of the Ghetto but against the political and religious demagogues and charlatans who are spreading falsehoods and promoting conspiracy theories that trap their followers in vicious cycles of despair.
What members of the White underclass need to hear is the opposite message that they are getting from their politicians--that you must bear responsibility for your actions; that life is often hard and unfair; and that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem to solve. This is what American conservatism used to preach before it became a “white minstrel show.”
Robert Carle is a professor at The King’s College in Manhattan. Dr. Carle has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The American Interest, Religion Unplugged, Newsday, Society, Human Rights Review, Academic Questions and Reason.