Jamelle Bouie - Opinion
Aug. 23, 2025
But if held too tightly, justified disdain for particularism — for rejecting the appeal to general interest so that one can cut the electorate into thin slices — can be counterproductive. “Policies and rhetoric framed in the interests of the working class as a whole are crucial,” Michael McCarthy, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes in Hammer and Hope magazine. “But organizers have always known that in order to build a movement, you need to address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone you want to draw into your base.”
It’s important to remember, McCarthy argues, that the American working class isn’t unitary. Workers are segmented by familiar identities such as race, gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as by immigration status, education and the many ways that capitalism generates difference and differentiation across the system. “Similar to the way a city can have both food deserts and extraordinary food waste,” McCarthy notes, “the working class encompasses credentialed workers who have job protections and good wages, people in rural and urban areas with concentrated poverty whose work is poorly paid and precarious and undocumented workers in the shadows earning below the minimum wage because of their citizenship status.”
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When I was a child growing up in Greenville, S.C., my grandmama could not afford a blanket. She didn’t complain, and we did not freeze. Instead she took pieces of old cloth — patches, wool, silk, gabardine, crockersack — only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with. But they didn’t stay that way very long. With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture. Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt.
Farmers, you seek fair prices, and you are right, but you cannot stand alone. Your patch is not big enough. Workers, you fight for fair wages. You are right, but your patch of labor is not big enough.
Women, you seek comparable worth and pay equity. You are right, but your patch is not big enough. Women, mothers who seek Head Start and day care and prenatal care on the front side of life, relevant jail care and welfare on the back side of life, you are right, but your patch is not big enough.
Students, you seek scholarships. You are right, but your patch is not big enough. Blacks and Hispanics, when we fight for civil rights, we are right, but our patch is not big enough. Gays and lesbians, when you fight against discrimination and a cure for AIDS, you are right, but your patch is not big enough.
This isn’t a set of individual appeals; it’s a call for collective recognition that stresses the common thread without losing sight of the challenges facing each group. It does not put each group in a silo; it asks people to see one another in their own struggles — a translation of the theological notion of I and thou, tuned for a more democratic and egalitarian politics.
I could go on about Jackson’s campaigns, but I’ll leave it there and end with this: As we navigate this dark time in American politics, McCarthy has given us a reminder — a very useful reminder — that we need not ignore the particular in our fight to dispel the darkness of the present moment. We just can’t let it consume us.