Abstract
This essay examines the limitations of the “white privilege” framework when applied uncritically to working-class rural communities. While whiteness undeniably functions as a system of racial hierarchy, its effects are neither uniform nor evenly distributed. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, bell hooks’s critique of whiteness studies, and Nancy Isenberg’s history of poor whites, the essay situates rural, working-class whites within a paradox: stigmatized for failing to embody bourgeois norms of whiteness while simultaneously excluded from discourses of racial oppression. Through personal and cultural examples from Iron County, Missouri, alongside key theoretical texts, the essay argues that current rhetoric around whiteness often obscures class and silences those who might complicate our understanding of privilege. Integrating class into conversations about whiteness is essential for capturing the full complexity of inequality in the United States.
Recommended Citation
McCarter, William M.
(2025)
"Beyond the Knapsack: Rethinking Whiteness, Privilege, and Class in Rural America,"
Class, Race and Corporate Power: Vol. 13:
Iss.
2, Article 4.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol13/iss2/4
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