Dr. Word Asks: Can You Be Black and Blue Collar?

by David Safier

In the media, the term “Blue Collar Voters” is both a euphemism and a code term for “White Working Class Voters,” and its use harms the political dialogue and has ugly racist overtones. Political campaigns use terms like this to spin the voters all the time, but here, as happens all too often, the spin is coming from the news people themselves.

The Merriam Webster definition of Blue Collar is: “of, relating to, or constituting the class of wage earners whose duties call for the wearing of work clothes or protective clothing.” I can’t find any racial tags in that definition. It simply denotes a certain type of working class person.

You might remember the 1978 film, “Blue Collar,” starring Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel, about three Detroit auto workers. Two of those actors are playing black men with blue collar jobs. Everyone on that Detroit assembly line was a blue collar worker, regardless of race, religion or any other distinctions people might decide to draw. The only color in the term is the blue of the collar, to distinguish it from the white collar worn by “professionals” who don’t get dirty at work.

This post is the result of my listening to an NPR interview this morning with Juan Williams about Obama’s candidacy. Williams’ point was that Obama is having trouble connecting “blue collar voters”. The host asked Williams if “Blue Collar” is just another term for white working class voters. Instead of answering the question, Williams replied with an audible smirk, “You’re so blunt, Steve!”

Williams, if you don’t know him, is a black journalist and commentator who was once fairly liberal, but he’s turned into quite the toady since he got a running gig on Fox News as a token liberal. He has absorbed the Fox culture enough that he always qualifies his once-progressive opinions with conservative caveats. His cagy answer to a direct question asking him to define the term he was using implied that it was impolite — poor form, “blunt” — for Steve to ask him to say what he meant.

As I see it, Williams had two reasonable answers. One was, “Yes, I’m referring to white working class voters.” The other was, “Everyone acknowledges Obama has the black vote sewn up, so the members of the working class he has to work on are the white voters.” Either would have cleared up any confusion, but instead, Williams, more like a politician than a journalist, evaded the question.

The misuse of the term “Blue Collar” masks a very important question in this presidential campaign: Is part of Obama’s problem with white working class voters that they don’t want to vote for a black man? When journalists substitute the term, “Blue Collar,” it’s not whites who won’t vote for him, it’s blue collar voters, so there’s no need to ask that troubling question. I’m not sure whether it would help or hurt Obama to have the question of race and voting patterns asked more frequently, but that shouldn’t be the journalists’ concern. If it’s a significant issue in this campaign, they should deal with it even if it makes them uncomfortable.

But there’s a far more dangerous problem with using “Blue Collar” to refer only to white workers. The unstated implication is that blacks aren’t members of the blue collar working class. I guess that means they’re in the welfare class, since they must not hold working class jobs. Maybe a few of them are in the rapper class or the pro-basketball-player class as well.

What’s happening is the perpetuation of the vicious stereotype of lazy, non-working blacks. It’s similar to the way terms like “Heartland” and “Middle America” are used to refer to good, upstanding, patriotic white families. Black families are left out of that mental picture, even though plenty of them live in the geographical “Heartland” and have qualities that put them right in the middle of “Middle America.” But since they’re not included in the definition, the implication is that they lack the patriotism and the values this nation holds dear. They’re not “real” Americans.

Hmm. Have you ever heard anyone question whether Obama is a real American? Anyone see a pattern developing here?

A CULTURAL NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to the great Louis Armstrong song, “What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue?” You can hear an early recording here. It may be the original 1929 recording, I don’t know.

UPDATE: I just heard a Republican strategist on TV say McCain is going after “lunchpail Democrats.” The term “lunchpail” evokes a bygone era when things were simpler, when the world was a better place. McCain’s America. I guess only white people carry lunchpails, and go to work, and belong in that wonderful, apple pie world we all yearn for where everyone knew their place and someone who wasn’t a “real” American would never think of running for President. Or something like that.