Cotton Socks Are Good Enough for any Working Man's Wife

by Mona Shaw

“Herbert Hoover said, ‘Cotton socks are good enough for any working man’s wife,’ That’s all I needed to know about the man,” my granddad told me.

It’s the “little” slights that wear one down. Someone, something persuades us to let it go. “Pick your battles.”  

But, each time you say nothing, a piece of your soul dies, and larger and larger parts of yourself believe the lies that you and your kind are less worthy. You even repeat their jokes or slurs for their approval. Eventually you collude with your own oppressor.  A hundred times a day you hear things like:

“Don’t worry about the poor,” they don’t vote.

“I have a high credit rating, and they still discriminate against me as a lesbian.”

“She dresses like she shops at Walmart.”

“I didn’t buy a $400,000 house, so people could build houses next to me worth $100,000.”

“The poor wouldn’t be stressed if they just got a job.”

“No offense, but I prefer to socialize with people in my own economic stratum.  We have more in common.”

“We don’t care what Joe Six-pack thinks.  He’s not supporting this university.”

“I was stunned and repulsed.  They were using pots and pans for serving dishes.”

“It’s only $500.  Anyone I know has shoes worth more than that.”

“My father, the bank president, says we should do this.”

“He claims to be poor, but he was eating a Dove bar.”

Or, the time a director of the UI Labor Center told her own secretary, “If you want a better salary, get an education like I did.”

And all the jokes: about hard hats, red necks, polyester clothes, trailer parks, fake wood paneling, welfare, hair-styles, fake fingernails, dirty fingernails, subsidized housing, Jello or mayonnaise salads, cheap beer or cheap perfume, raggedy-ass cars, velvet paintings, country music, pressboard or plastic furniture, Jesus nightlights, dime-store jewelry, lunch meat, ice-berg lettuce, Jerry Springer or Maury Povich guests, and cat clocks with rhinestone eyes and a wagging tail, etc.

Let’s not even get started on dialects, speech-patterns or grammar.

It is bottomless, the reservoir containing all the quotidian and ubiquitous ways to render the underclass inferior and unworthy.

So, it came as no surprise to me when Hillary Clinton was praised by “progressives” for a recent speech in which she defended people of color by stating many Black people were well-off.  She called Trump’s assertions about poverty in communities of color as bigotry toward those communities.

No one in the mainstream media or politics (including Trump, perhaps especially Trump) thought to counter with the fact that being poor should not be an insult. She suggested that while there is no shame in being a person of color that to consider someone impoverished was shaming them.  She completely ignored that people of color are, indeed, far more likely to be poor.

In America there is no shame as pervasive as the shame of being poor. Racism can still get one killed by a cop, but the tragedy of the death will still be gauged by the economic status of the victim.  “And he was a counselor.”  “She was a teacher.”

It doesn’t matter that racism catalyzes every instance of poverty, including that poverty suffered by white people.  The ruling class can’t maintain an underclass to work for poverty wages without methods to control them.  Racism is their most effective whip.  No race in the underclass realizes that enough.  Far too many have bought the lies that white poor people really are just inferior or that people of color are getting something for nothing.

Martin Luther King, jr. saw through this divide and conquer strategy, and he was in the process of addressing and organizing all poor people when he was murdered.  History shows that effectively organizing poor people and workers will get you killed faster than anything else.  Even the big unions won’t do that anymore.

The poor are inferior in every way in America.  Class bigotry is almost considered good manners.  It demonstrates refinement and good taste.

It’s really telling that Hillary Clinton’s reaction to the Trump speech was to defend affluent people of color rather than show compassion for the suffering of those banished to poverty.

It was also telling that the Democratic National Convention was a parade of Horatio Alger stories, the one who overcame, who grabbed her bootstraps and made something of herself (not poor, no more). 

It serves the American agenda.  If she saw poor people as equal, if she admitted that not every little girl or boy can be president or even earn a living wage, then poor people might deserve things like housing, food, or healthcare.  But in today’s America, where we can’t do everything for everyone, we know who will be left out.  And, it’s not the woman in the $12,000 jacket or any of her friends.  Cotton socks are good enough for any working man’s wife.

Of course, getting rid of Hillary won’t solve the problem.  She’s a snob, but everyone who runs for president in America is a snob.  Hillary is just the current spokesmodel for the status quo. 

It doesn’t matter who you vote for.  It matters if you continue to collude with the lie.  Not everyone can make it in America.  That’s a wholesale lie.  Our forefather’s never intended for that to be the case, and no one in power--or seeking power--wants that now. Change, when it comes, will come from the bottom up.  It’s time for decent Americans to cry, “Foul,” no matter where or how they encounter class bigotry.

Mona Shaw is a low-income Iowa grandmother of no particular importance and has no credentials whatsoever.