The face of the United States is changing, and as society becomes more diverse, it is understandable there will be people who are unwilling to share power, people who are afraid that as whites become another minority, they will lose the default benefits that come with being the dominant group.
While it is tempting to brush these people aside and decry that change can’t come fast enough, that attitude will only exacerbate the problems we’re facing now: the descent into tribalism, the reveling in xenophobia, the indulgence of racism. Understanding these fears, however misplaced, is important, but bumbling attempts — such as The Washington Post’s recent story headlined “White, and in the minority” — do more harm than good.
The piece focuses on 20-year-old Heaven Engle and her boyfriend, Venson Heim, 25. Both work at a Bell & Evans chicken processing plant in Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania. According to the story, they are part of only a handful of white workers in a plant filled with Puerto Rican and Dominican employees, or, as the subhead spells out, “She speaks English. Her co-workers don’t. Inside a rural chicken plant, whites struggle to fit in.”
As written by Terrence McCoy, the initial section reads like it belongs in a white supremacist romance novel, perhaps titled “Chicken, Tender.”
“…the two held the embrace, swaying slightly, their world outside the plant’s walls — white, rural, conservative — feeling distant in this world within, where they were the outsiders, the ones who couldn’t communicate, the minority.”
Although the article tries to put things in context, covering its bases by using experts to talk about “demographic anxiety” and “group identity,” it’s the framing of the story that is wrongheaded. I don’t doubt the intention was good, but its execution does more to contribute to racial anxiety than to dispel stereotypes or truly explore the interaction between different groups.
“In a country where whites will lose majority status in about a quarter-century… the story of the coming decades will be, to some degree, the story of how white people adapt to a changing country…”
The way white people “adapt to a changing country” is by acknowledging the benefits of white privilege and understanding those days will eventually come to an end — and that that’s all right. But that’s not the story the Post is telling. Instead, it focuses on how Engle feels isolated because they speak Spanish and she doesn’t, how they cluster together and she feels ignored, how they are taking over jobs.
The article asks us to sympathize and understand where Engle and her boyfriend are coming from, it asks how else are they going to feel when the world they knew is changing around them — yet it barely extends the same courtesy to the Latino workers at the plant, who are mostly portrayed as a mass of brown faces that wants nothing to do with our heroes.
It seems the Post was seduced by the high-concept premise of the story and failed not only to adequately represent the Latino community in that region of Pennsylvania, it also faltered in its representation of white rural or working-class America. Its easy classification of both the white couple and the Hispanic workers speaks to the blinders of the … I hate to say this, but … coastal media elite (happy, Mr. President?).
As described in the story, Heaven Engle — who is being asked to stand in for white anxiety — is stuck in a go-nowhere job with a go-nowhere attitude. She is presented as dull and uninteresting, lacking curiosity or motivation. It’s fitting that a story that otherizes Latinos would also present the image of shiftless rural culture.
After the mainstream media was sandbagged by Donald Trump’s victory, there has been a knee-jerk reaction to try and understand the people and places that voted for the president. As I said, that’s all very well and good, but national media outlets continue to be run and staffed, in general, by people whose experience ill prepares them to be anything but monocled anthropologists carefully examining some exotic tribe (I can do stereotypes, too).
Reporter McCoy should have given the same attention to the Latino workers as he did the white couple, understanding where both were coming from and why there was this chasm between them. If that had happened, I can bet that Engel and her boyfriend would have found they share more things in common with their Hispanic co-workers than they do with the white Washington Post reporter who profiled them.
