Working Class Rage: A Field Guide to White Anger and Pain

by Tex Sample

White working-class people are the canary in the mine. Poorly understood and perceived as a threat to the common good – unintelligent, self-destructive, utterly incapable of leveraging their own privilege - white working-class people have recaptured the cultural and political imagination in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Pundits, politicos, cultural commentators, party leaders and many others are scrambling to understand what makes this demographic tick with mixed results. Scape-goated for all things racist and identified as the voting block that gave the country its most divisive leader in a generation, they are not what they so much more than common xenophobes and red-hat wearing nostalgics for a lost time of white supremacy, this group begs for a richer, more nuanced portrait if they are to be loved and impacted by Christian faith and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.



Tex Sample, acclaimed author of White Soul and Hard Living People , is a reliable and reader-friendly guide through the current literature with keen eye on the implications of understanding this group so pastors and leaders can better communicate the Good News of Jesus and work for a more just society that values black and white lives and creates the partnerships that lead to the good life for all.



This book also describes how our inability to sustain attention to the value of black lives is a traveling companion to our failure to understand or care about the pain and anger of working class whites.



Calling Christians (individuals, as well as communities of faith) to a concrete version of social well-being befitting faithful life in Jesus and God’s vision of justice for the world, Tex Sample drills deeper into the realities of a group of people whose suffering and anger is denied, ignored, or misunderstood.



The conclusion? Working for real-world, Gospel-centered change (spiritual, social, political, cultural) requires a field guide to the people we too often stereotype or misunderstand. They can be partners when we frame a message of hope built on a sense of vocation to life in Jesus – the good life for all.

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion

186 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 4, 2018

About the author

Is a specialist in church and society, a storyteller, author.

Reviews

[Duane Gosser · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting when I picked this book up to read. I think I was hoping for some insight on what the perception of white working class people is today for those outside this group. As I grew up in a low income farm family, the idea that this demographic could be so "mysterious" and misunderstood by the media and government is bewildering to me as it has been and remains (for a few more decades) the backbone of American society.
There were some interesting summaries of multiple studies on various aspects of white working class thinking, politics, etc. but overall unless you have lived a very privileged life I don't think you will find anything that really makes you think other than the oddly disturbing chapters on how to "integrate" into white working class society through indigenous language (cussing) and other customs.

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It would take a book to explain everything that's wrong in Samples' "Working Class Rage." As a matter of fact, there is such a book, Carol Anderson's "White Rage."

[Jeanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was listed in the UMW Reading Program as one to learn about Spiritual Growth. The only way I can see that it is about Spiritual Growth is that it attempts to make sense of a group of people that may have recently voted for Trump. The book was hard to understand for the casual reader that is trying to make sense of the world. It is very much like a textbook that would be read in a classroom.

There were some good observations about people that made the book "ok".