Portside

Much of the political debate this election season concerns who will win the support of working class white voters. At the same time, as Alec MacGillis notes in this review of two new books on the history and present conditions of this sector of the population, much of this discourse strains under the influence of condescension, sentimentalism, and a host of explicitly or implicitly stated biases.

Huerta encouraged people to consider both what is at stake and why their voting rights might be targeted in the first place. “What we have to think about is, if they’re doing so much to suppress the vote of the Latino and the African-American community, that means that that vote really counts. It really matters or else why would they be trying to suppress them?”