How does it feel to be white, rural and in the minority?
This is only going to get worse. Alienation will transform into isolation and then desperation, and ultimately, resentment. If you can’t see a civil war on the horizon, you aren’t looking hard enough.
FREDERICKSBURG, Pa. — It was minutes before the end of the first shift, and the beginning of the second, and the hallways at the chicken plant swarmed with workers coming and going. One pulled a hairnet over her curly hair, giggling at a joke. Two others exchanged kisses on the cheek. A woman with a black ponytail hugged everyone within reach. And a thin, ashen woman, whom no one greeted or even seemed to notice, suddenly smiled.
There he was. Standing near the lockers. Tall and crew-cut. Her boyfriend.
“Hi,” said Heaven Engle, 20.
“Hey,” replied Venson Heim, 25.
They met every day at this time, before he started his shift as a mechanic at Bell & Evans Plant 2, and she started hers as “I don’t know what they call it; I just check the chicken.” It was the hardest moment of her day. She knew she was about to go at least eight hours without speaking English, or probably anything at all, in a plant where nearly all of the workers were Latino and spoke Spanish, and she was one of the few who wasn’t and didn’t.
She slowly took out her earrings, nose ring and lip ring, placing them into her knapsack, and he turned to leave. “I got to go in 10 seconds,” he said, and she grabbed onto him. “Why are you trying to act like you want to leave me or something?” she said, and 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.
In a country where whites will lose majority status in about a quarter-century, and where research suggests that demographic anxiety is contributing to many of the social fissures polarizing the United States, from immigration policy to welfare reform to the election of President Trump, the story of the coming decades will be, to some degree, the story of how white people adapt to a changing country. It will be the story of people like Heaven Engle and Venson Heim, both of whom were beginning careers on the bottom rung of an industry remade by Latinos, whose population growth is fueling that of America, and were now, in unusually intense circumstances, coming to understand what it means to be outnumbered.
They didn’t know the heavy burden of discrimination familiar to members of historically oppressed minority groups, including biased policing and unequal access to jobs and housing. But some of the everyday experiences that have long challenged millions of black, Latino and immigrant Americans — the struggle to understand and be understood, feeling unseen, fear of rapid judgments — were beginning to challenge them, too.
Venson let go of Heaven. He told her he had to clock in. She watched him disappear around a corner, then stood there for a moment, alone. She pulled on a winter hat, a wool scarf and a thick coat, knowing how cold the factory can get, then went to a different clock-in station. In the nearly vacant hallway, she watched the clock, waiting for her shift to begin at 3:20.
Seven minutes left: Employees gathered around Heaven, first three, then four, then six.
Studies have shown how some whites, who are dying faster than they’re being born in 26 states, react when they become aware of a tectonic demographic shift that will, with little historic precedent, reconfigure the racial and ethnic geography of an entire country. They swing to the right, either becoming conservative for the first time, or increasingly conservative — “politically activated,” explained Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard University, who among others found that white Democrats voted for Trump in higher numbers in places where the Latino population had recently grown the most.
Four minutes left: Heaven, looking at the floor, heard laughter and jokes exchanged in the rapid Spanish of the Dominican Republic.
They feel threatened, even if not directly affected by the change, and adopt positions targeting minorities out of “fears of what America will look like,” said Rachel Wetts of the University of California at Berkeley, who argued in one study that recent calls by whites to cut welfare were born of racial resentment inflamed by demographic anxiety, even though whites benefit from the social safety net as well.
Two minutes left: Heaven pressed closer and closer to the wall in a hallway that was now filled with workers, all Latino.
They empathize more deeply with other whites — a sense of group identity ignited — because “they feel like ‘We’re part of a threatened group, and we need to band together,’ ” said René Flores, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Chicago who has analyzed how whites reacted to the growing Latino presence in rural Pennsylvania.
And they feel as Heaven did now, clocking in, then following the others out onto the production floor: Either she’d find a way to fit in, or she’d find a way to get out.
Irrepressible anger at this entire article.
The Satanic glee of the journalist at our destruction can not be understated.
All right, apparently a number of people have seen fit to reblog this, so I’m going to ask –
Where are you getting “Satanic glee” from? What makes you think that this article is anything other than melancholy, and indeed sympathetic? There’s no explicit author’s-voice commentary on What Should Be Done, anywhere, and the portrait of Venson and Heaven makes them out to be woobies and #relatable (if maybe kind of dim).
…is this really just seeing what you expect to see from the Post, and not reading?