Tag: Racism

Book Review: Stolen Pride, by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. This is a follow-up to Strangers in Their Own Land, about Lousiana; the new book covers the rise of the right in rural Appalachia. Hochschild’s focus is on how rural men hold pride in rural ways and providing without government assistance, and how that pride is “stolen” when changing economic times destroy their jobs and way of life, bringing shame on them in their own eyes.

One of Hochschild’s focal points is a white nationalist march in Pikesville in the runup to 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. She interviewed local officials, a member of the group putting on the march, and men who might be drawn into the orbit of white nationalism. Part of the appeal of white nationalist politics is that it gives rural men something to be proud of in the face of lost jobs, drug addiction (the opiate crisis), and the strongly felt contempt of urban liberals.

I came away with a stronger understanding of why conservative men place such a high value on “owning the libs”. They generally share this pride versus shame orientation and project their shame onto their supposed opponents. Passing shame onward doesn’t work in online slapfights, but it does explain part of the “conservative” MAGA delight in undermining institutions perceived as liberal, such as universities and law firms. Even when it hurts MAGA supporters to burn down part of the government, as much of Project 2025 will, stealing the pride of liberals who “destroy” and deride their rural-based way of life is satisfying to men whose own pride has been stolen.

The story Hochschild elicits from her interviews and research wouldn’t work if she didn’t give all of her subjects a full three dimensions, even the man who led the white nationalist march in Pikesville and the imprisoned KKK devotee. But what was most intriguing for future research and practical politics was the concept of the empathy bridge, which Hochschild discusses in an appendix. The bridge connects the experiences of rural whites with Black Americans, either by an upper deck that educated, wealthy whites travel or a lower deck travelled by whites in precarious circumstances. In a time when unity across class and ethnic lines is vital to opposing American authoritarianism, Hochschild’s research points to a way forward that can include former MAGA men.

Book Review: We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

We Are Not Like Them: A Novel, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza. I usually avoid women’s book club fiction, but this book’s structure and topic interested me. The two authors, a Black woman and a white woman, wrote alternating first-person chapters about the friendship between an up-and-coming Black journalist and the wife of a white Philadelphia policeman who shoots and kills an unarmed Black teenager. The story is ripped from the headlines, but the approach is from an unusual angle.

The details of the friendship feel real as written but the backstory from which it emerged feel contorted (did the white girl’s mom have to be a drug addict?) to touch all the social issues the writers seemed to want. As events involving money, lawyers, journalistic ethics, deaths, births, etc., spiral, the two women circle each other, bound by history and affection but separated by the pain of racism as it affects their experiences and expectations.

I’m not in the socioeconomic class of the white woman in this story and while I come closer to the experience of the Black woman (good schools, good career, etc.) I don’t think I could tell her story. The writing was solid and portrayed the interior of each of the women well, along with their relationships with their families and supporting cast. But I felt that stuffing so many topical issues into the single story decreased the realism and credibility of the story overall.

I took particular issue with the ending, which I can’t describe as happy so much as less sad and more hopeful than I expected. I felt that some of the relationships that survived should have broken, and that at least one of the relationships that broke should have remained intact. It was obvious to me what the authors intended but one crucial decision a character made seemed out of character: not wrong for their heart but surprising given who they were and everything we knew about them.

My discomfort with the ending might have more do to with my unfamiliarity with women’s book club fiction, or with the need to tie up all the threads that I felt were awkwardly woven into the story. I’d read another similar book by these two authors again, but I’d go in with slightly lower expectations.