“My supporters are racist,” explained Hillary Clinton on why she was the best candidate to be the Democratic nominee.  This biting impersonation by Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live struck me more sad than funny.  Like any successful satire, it directly grabs and shoves it in your face the popular notion of the white working class as generally racist.  According to legend, President Lyndon B. Johnson, shortly after signing the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, had commented, “We have the lost the South for a generation.”   Since Johnson, significant white working class majorities have eluded every Democratic presidential candidate.   However, white working families are not unthinking automons driven by their fear of the “black man.”  Like Obama surmised, white working people’s experience “is the immigrant experience — as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch.”

Political scientist Peter Dreier, drawing from voter statistics, argued that wealthy whites, who largely vote in Republican primaries, are more likely than working class whites to consider race in the voting booth.  Wealthy whites, not working class whites, control the institutions responsible for much of the racial disparities in the nation.  Race plays a lesser role when white workers know their allies.  Peter cited the 2004 presidential elections where Bush won 62 percent to 38 percent of white males but Kerry swept white male union members by 59 percent to 44 percent.  Bush took the white women vote by 55 percent to 44 percent but Kerry won white women union members by 67 percent to 27 percent.  Unions largely shaped the vote of the white working class by tapping into people’s inherent sense of dignity and belief in strength in unity.

Peter’s analysis resonates with my own personal experience as a former union organizer.  I am reminded of Linda, a white woman in her 40’s, who cleaned the tables and rooms of a hotel casino for a living.  Each time we talked, I dealt with her incessant degradations of every community of color, including my own.  She would complain about driving through “darky” town and criticize Asian immigrants for having strong accents and strange smells.  However, she played a leadership role in forming a union at her worksite.  When they succeeded in improving their workplace conditions, she partied without prejudice with every worker of color in the room.  She never let go of her offensive stereotypes but she always stood alongside her co-workers, regardless of race.

The movement of the white working class away from the Democratic Party comes from a real sense of betrayal, rather than racial prejudice.  Obama understood the concerns of the white working class when he observed, "…to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding."  In the eyes of some white workers, the Republican Party seemed to have done more for them than the Democratic Party.  When race is raised, it resurrects uncomfortable feelings of abandonment and defensiveness from a group of people who continue to deal with difficult economic trials of job loss and declining wages.  I encountered something similar with an old friend who is a white male.  It took me a long time to understand his frustrations and ambivalence when I got more involved in the AAPI community.  I got angry when he reduced my experience to “political correctness.”  In truth, he felt abandoned.  I was involved in something he could not connect with in the same way.  Does my personal story of confronting racism necessarily have to negate his experience of alienation?  It is too easy to forget that “whiteness” became first codified into law when it became the central criteria for naturalization in 1790, enabling Irish, German and other European immigrants to gain full rights as a citizen.  It also cut them from their roots and erased the historical memories that could have forged links between all people.  Divisive tactics based on race, not racial prejudice, is a much more substantive stumbling block to progress.

When Democratic Party candidates are tagged with being “elitist,” it stems from a real sense of isolation exacerbated by a lack of understanding of their disadvantaged position by majority of pundits and electeds.  With the decline of unions and the success of the Republicans in discrediting a communal role of government, churches remain the sole public circles for connection.

For Asian American Pacific Islanders, understanding the social construction of whiteness is necessary if we are to work in coalition with other communities to move forward as a nation.    As a racial group, to quote historian Scott Kurashige, “we are seen as Casper the Friendly Ghost—we are either white or invisible.”  Being heralded as success stories while still feeling the real effects of discrimination, we also occupy an uneasy space that finds both fault and faith in the American Dream.

With Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, an opportunity presents itself for us to advance as a country.  It would require a belief in government and a national community again.  Recently, the War in Iraq and the failing economy has led to young white evangelicals beginning to break away from ranks of the Republican Party.  Maybe, this time, we will forge a new Democratic Party coalition that brings white working class back and reflects the emerging new progressive majority.