The Thousand Injuries: The Not-Qwhite Voter and the Politics of Recognition

In the fall of 2003, Howard Dean said he wanted to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in the back windows of their pickup trucks. It was clumsy but not dishonest. He meant that his party had written off a whole category of American voter and wanted to change that. He was attacked at once, mostly by his own side, and walked it back within forty-eight hours. The lesson his party drew was not that the outreach had been badly phrased; It was that the outreach itself was impermissible, that to pursue the rural white working class voter was to be complicit with everything he was presumed to represent. Dean was the last major Democrat to try, and the consequences have accumulated in the shape of the electoral map.

Edgar Allan Poe understood something the party still does not. "The Cask of Amontillado" opens with a line that ought to hang in every campaign office: the thousand injuries of Fortunato the narrator had borne as best he could, but when Fortunato ventured upon insult, he vowed revenge. Injuries can be borne as long as the injured man believes his tormentors still regard his suffering as real. The insult is different. It reframes the injuries as deserved, telling the sufferer he is the kind of person who deserves to suffer. Poe's narrator does not recalculate his interests; he takes his revenge at great cost to himself. That is not irrational but human, and it is the most precise framework we have for what has happened to rural white working-class voters over the last twenty years.

In my book "Homo Redneckus: On Being Not Qwhite in America," I argued that the redneck and the white trash figure occupy a position our politics almost never acknowledges. They are white by blood and invisible by class, neither inside the privileges whiteness is supposed to guarantee nor excluded from it the way racial minorities are. I called the position Not Qwhite, spelled that way to mark it as more than a simple negation of whiteness. The system recognizes the figure only when it wants a scapegoat or a soldier. He is the butt of the joke, the embarrassing cousin at the reunion, almost never a subject whose dignity is a legitimate object of concern. What happens when he works out that one of the two parties has decided, however politely, that he is not welcome at the front door?

A few days after the 2016 election, Toni Morrison published "Making America White Again" in The New Yorker, reading the Trump voter through Faulkner's Sutpen family in "Absalom, Absalom!" choosing murder over the acknowledgment of Black blood in the line. It is powerful, but it reads that voter as the Southern aristocrat for whom racial hierarchy is a first-order investment, not the poor white in eastern Kentucky who has never collected the dividends of white privilege and who looked at the Democratic coalition and saw himself, once again, sent around to the back. The parallel Morrison does not quite reach is not the family protecting its bloodline. It is Thomas Sutpen himself, the poor white boy from the Virginia mountains sent as a child to the back door of a Tidewater plantation house, who spent his life building a design that would carry him to the front. Sutpen is Not Qwhite. His wound is not racial in the ordinary sense, but the wound of nonrecognition, the discovery that whiteness alone is not enough, that the order has a front door and a back door, and that where a man is sent turns on more than his skin. He does not challenge the system that humiliated him; he adopts its logic, reproducing the order that shamed him because it is the only one with a place for him. The design destroys him, but the back door was never an alternative, only a continuation of the injury, and when injury is compounded by insult the answer is not the calculation of material interest. It is something older and more combustible.

The Democratic Party has not, in any deliberate sense, built a plantation. But it has built a coalition whose visible logic tells the Not Qwhite voter something that functions like being sent to the back door. It is organized around identity categories: racial minorities, women, LGBTQ Americans, undocumented immigrants, and its project of extending them recognition and rights is largely just. But the rural white working class man does not see himself in it. The signifiers he carries—the truck, the gun, the Christian faith, the flag, the manual labor—are treated by the coalition's visible face not as a legitimate identity but as the problem itself, and the deplorables comment did not create that reading. It crystallized it. It named the injury as deserved, which is what an insult does. His response is less irrational than liberal analysis assumes. The Democratic coalition is built around categories I do not belong to and cannot join; the Republican coalition is built around categories I already belong to, Christianity and masculinity and a whiteness understood not as supremacy but as an identity that does not have to apologize for itself. I may never be rich, but I will never be Black or undocumented or trans, and so I throw in with the coalition that has a place for me, even if the men running it use me in ways that do not serve my interests, because at least they use me through the front door. That is not false consciousness. It is Sutpen's logic, reproduced in the voting booth.

I am not writing a policy prescription, and I do not think the party should adopt the flag or abandon the constituencies it has spent decades building. My argument is that treating the Not Qwhite voter as either a moral problem to be corrected or a demographic to be written off is not only electorally costly but analytically wrong. It misreads the motive, reading the vote as racial resentment when it is, at least as much, the need for recognition that every human being carries and that the political system ignores at its peril.

In 1954, William Faulkner wrote that "you don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults." It is the ambivalence behind Quentin Compson's desperate "I don't hate it, I don't hate it" at the end of "Absalom, Absalom!" To love despite rather than because is not nostalgia. It is the recognition that people formed by a place are not reducible to the worst reading of them, that the flag and the faith and the labor and the poverty mark a life and a dignity that has waited a long time to be taken seriously. The thousand injuries were borne as well as they could be. The insult could not be absorbed. And until someone goes back to the front door and knocks, and means it, the design will keep being reproduced, it will keep destroying the people who build it, and the autopsies will keep recommending that someone show up and listen without asking why nobody ever has.

Matt McCarter is a professor of literature and composition, the author of Homo Redneckus: On Being Not Qwhite in America, and an associate editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.