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Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Brian today. With us now is the author, Sarah Smarsh. You may know her 2018 book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her new book is Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. She has her take on what people casually call the working class. Of course, however you define it, the working class is battleground USA in the presidential race right now. In fact, Kamala Harris was making a specific pitch to some people who might identify with the term in her economy speech in Pittsburgh just last week. Here’s a short soundbite from the speech.

Kamala Harris: You see, for Donald Trump, our economy works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers, not those who actually build them, not those who wire them, [applause] not those who mop the floors [applause]. Well, I have a very different, I have a very different vision for our economy.

Brigid Bergin: With that as prelude, we welcome Sarah Smarsh, author now of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. Sarah, thanks for joining us with your new book. Welcome back to WNYC.

Sarah Smarsh: Hi, Brigid. It's good to be back.

Brigid Bergin: We'll get to some of your takes on Harris and Trump, as you definitely do get political in these essays. But first, let's talk about the title, Bone of the Bone. You write that you are "bone of the bone of them that live in trailer parks.: Can you talk a little bit about what it means for people not yet familiar with your story or your work?

Sarah Smarsh: Sure. That is a direct reference you just made to one of my, I guess, most successful essays, if we're engaging by readership, in the collection called Poor Teeth, in which I examine dentistry or access to dental care as a class signifier in our country, not just in health terms, but also social and cultural terms. That essay, as much of my work does, extends solidarity, I suppose, to the place and the people that I come from.

The outcomes of my life have been quite different from those of my family and the community where I originate in socioeconomic terms. Nonetheless, in my writing, I have sought to continue to speak from that place and to that place and with that place, rather than writing about it in the rearview mirror.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. We obviously have a lot of listeners here in New York City. Would you like to describe some of the stereotypes you might think it's important to break about the people and places that you come from and write about?

Sarah Smarsh: Sure. When I write about class, one of the challenges is that we don't have a great vocabulary around that concept or that aspect of identity in this country, in large part because we've been denying that we have a class structure here in this supposed meritocracy for some time. Because of that, I'm not sure that we're all even talking about the same thing when we use the term class. It's not just about money. It's also, to some extent, about place. It's about access. It's about vocabulary.

That said, there are people in New York who had very parallel lives to mine in terms of just real economics and struggled to access health care and pay the bills, housing precarity, and so on. For me, my class experience is also very specifically tied to a rural lifestyle in the middle of the country. There, right in the middle in rural Kansas, I grew up on a fifth-generation wheat farm in that place that's so often referred to as flyover country.

I do believe that is an aspect of my class experience. It's part of why I believe I'm well suited to write against or to reject some of the easy stereotypes that you just referenced in your question about that place and people specifically as backwards, stupid, just homogenous in racial and political and ideological terms. In fact, it's a diverse place, racially, politically, in every other way, maybe less so than other pockets of the country, depending on where you're homing in.

That's problem one, this white working-class fixation and rural whites and so on. If we're talking about the working class, even here in the middle of the country, it's a much more diverse truth on the ground than those terms get at, and this notion of the uneducated, a term I don't care for much because there are different sorts of education, of course.

Vice President Harris, in that speech, is, I hope, authentically and sincerely referencing and exalting the good work of all sorts of people who might not hold four or even two-year degrees, who indeed carry their own brilliance and skill sets and so loving and coming from people who are referred to are derided as uneducated or are discussed as this problematic moral scourge on our country, as though they're the base of the nastiest and worst political movements of our moment, a framework I take issue with, too.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. Sarah, I'd like to bring a little more politics into our conversation from this week's vice presidential debate. Both candidates gave some of their own biographical details, I think to appeal to some of the voters you might be describing. Here’s trumps running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance.

Senator JD Vance: I was raised in a working-class family. My mother acquired food assistance for periods of her life. My grandmother required Social Security help to raise me. She raised me in part because my own mother struggled with addiction for a big chunk of my early life. I went to college on the GI Bill after I enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Iraq.

Brigid Bergin: Here’s Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democrat running for vice president.

Governor Tim Walz: I grew up in small rural Nebraska, town of 400, town that you rode your bike with your buddies till the streetlights come on. I'm proud of that service. I joined the National Guard at 17, worked on family farms, and then I used the GI Bill to become a teacher.

Brigid Bergin: Sarah, you wrote an op-ed for the Times titled Democrats have needed someone like Tim Walz for Decades, and you were an early critic of JD Vance's claims to the word 'hillbilly' in the title of his book. Are they not both from the same communities you write about?

Sarah Smarsh: Well, they're from very different communities in that, again, to go back to this notion of flyover country as some monolith, Appalachia or even just like an industrial part of Ohio, very different from small town corn country, Nebraska, in cultural and many other terms, topography, climate, and so on.

In terms of that experience of a marginalization, that's both in class terms and also to some extent geographic and just lack of proximity to certain power centers and opportunities, sure, they've got plenty in common in that regard. They, of course, approach that identity and have created their politics around centering very different value sets. I think that in itself reflects--

To me, I was indeed an early critic of some of Vance's, what I would say was the conservative polemic of his very successful book, Hillbilly Elegy. I have, as you say, been a fan of Tim walls approach. One of those guys looks at the individual and the onus for bootstrapping your way out of struggle, and the other looks at more structural and institutional frameworks. I favor the latter in my own perspective.

Brigid Bergin: I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you define working class.

Sarah Smarsh: I alluded to this a moment ago. It's not just money. Yes, indeed it is your financial resources, how much money is or isn't in the bank. It's also culture. It's language. There might be a dialect. I tell people sometimes I speak two versions of English, country and fancy. Sometimes we use the term code-switching more often in discussions of, say, race. I think that that happens for me, certainly depending on if I'm drinking Bud Light with my family out in the country or if I'm in a professional setting in New York. There's language.

There's also just like, the inherited understandings. Like, as a first-generation college student, I got a Pell Grant because of our poverty, and I also worked hard to get academic scholarships, bartended along the way, made my way through college financially independent from age 17. Well, along the way, those were some of the most painful and difficult years of my life because I was not just struggling to pay the bills, but I was coming up against, over and over, these just shared understandings among my mostly middle-class peers that I myself did not inherit from my parents or my family.

Graduate school, for example, as an undergrad, and I did very well in school, I kept hearing this term 'grad school.' By the time I was an upperclassman at that state university who was being encouraged in that direction to seek a higher degree, I still didn't understand what grad school was. Just the fundamental grip on the levers that exist within the middle and upper classes was a void for me.

Now, by the same token, if someone from those spaces came into my world and were tasked with helping build a house or grow food out of a field, there are shared understandings that we have in which they would be lost. The thing is, though, that we value a certain set of understandings and cultural touchstones to a much greater degree than the other. Therein lies the class structure.

Brigid Bergin: If you're just tuning in, I'm Brigid Bergin filling in for Brian Lehrer today. I'm wondering, listeners out there, is there anyone who comes from a background like Sarah Smarsh that can relate to what she's saying and want to tell a little bit of your own story, give it the cultural and political context. The number is 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692 for anyone with a question or comment for Sarah Smarsh, author now of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class.

Sarah, while we get some of those calls in, you made a really interesting distinction there between the working class and the middle class. Going back to some of what we're hearing in this campaign, I think we're hearing Walz` identify himself as middle class. Vice President Harris sometimes uses the phrase middle-class capitalism. Do you think that they're making the distinction correctly from your perspective, or are they generally using it in the same way you understand the media and other politicians to use it?

Sarah Smarsh: They're failing to make a distinction at all. That is just a gross inaccuracy in terms of discussing class. When Tim Walz was introduced as her vice presidential pick, I believe that in the introduction he was framed as having a middle-class upbringing. I think his dad might have been a school administrator. Maybe within the context of that very small town in rural Nebraska, they were, as my family would say, high on the hog within the context of that place.

Middle class in small town Nebraska, very different thing than middle class in New York City. That language, I have seen them just shying away from the term. Even in that economic policy speech you played that excerpt from, I didn't hear the term working class once. I think that's a huge mistake. It is for sure a political calculation. The term middle class, the concept, the idea is forever beloved by politicians at the expense of talking about working class and people in poverty.

I think it's a huge mistake. You've got to acknowledge the identity that people carry in that way, that they have been referred to as uneducated, so to speak. They are building the structures and indeed mopping the floors, as Vice President Harris said, but that has a name. It's different than middle class.

If we're going to talk about it on these political frameworks like polling and this and that, but then only make overtures to this broad concept of a middle class that indeed most Americans identify as, which in itself is problematic. It's a huge range of people who would call themselves middle class. I think it's a huge mistake to not use the term working class, as indeed the Republicans have been doing for some time.

Brigid Bergin: I'm wondering, where for you does class intersect with race? You're white, if I may say that. Politically we see Black working class Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, and white working-class Americans vote much more for Republicans. Attempts to form class-based multiracial coalitions, maybe, for example, by Bernie Sanders or others, haven't worked as well. Where does race come into your take on class in America today?

Sarah Smarsh: Yes, thank you for that question. Indeed, I am white, and from a majority-white area. Class and race and gender and all other sorts of identities intersect and interweave, and ultimately cannot be pried apart from one's experience nor our collective experience. They are also identities unto themselves that deserve isolated consideration. What does this mean? What is it? How does it work? In this person's life and in our society?

We do a better job than we used to. That discussion in looking at race, in looking at gender, in looking at sexual orientation and so on, not so much class, often a conversation about diversity or equity and inclusion leaves out the notion of socioeconomic class. The intersectionality of all these things means that, to my mind, we're never going to solve all those other ones without also solving for class. They are of a piece.

In my case, just to put it in very granular terms, I was raised on a poor wheat farm. We nonetheless owned a bit of land, and that ownership would have been likely denied to people of color over the decades in our history. Indeed, that very land was stolen from indigenous peoples. There's a way in which racial privilege and economic distress can happen simultaneously. We've got to grow up as a society and be able to talk about all these things being true at the same time.

Brigid Bergin: I want to go to some of our callers. Let's try Jeff in Wichita, Kansas. Jeff, thanks for listening. Thanks for calling.

Jeff: Oh, hi. Good morning, Bridget. Good morning, Sarah. I'm struggling with the Trump issue, and this is the question I'd like to pose to Sara Smarsh. I walked into a healthcare provider yesterday in Wichita, Kansas. On my way out, there was a gentleman not too much older than myself, sitting on the couch waiting to see the same healthcare provider wearing his red Donald Trump Make America Great hat. We smiled at each other and howdyed each other up, as Kansans do, whether they know each other or not.

The hat and the person seems to trigger me these days in the sense that I look at this man and his broad smile, and I ask myself, "Exactly who is this guy who doesn't see Donald Trump as the existential threat that I do?" The question I have for Sarah maybe can best be put by quoting a line from an old Woody Allen movie called Annie Hall.

Actress Tony Roberts and Woody Allen in their characters, or walking down a New York street. Tony Roberts says to Woody Allen, "My wife thinks she's a chicken." Woody Allen says to Tony Roberts's character, "Have you taken her to a psychiatrist? " Tony Roberts says, "No, we need the eggs."

The question for Sarah is, when you strip away all the rhetoric and all the talking points, exactly what are the deliverables, the eggs that that man wearing the Make America Great Again thinks he's going to get from Donald Trump that wipes away all the other indicting portions of Donald Trump's life.

Brigid Bergin: Jeff, thank you for that. very, very interesting framed question. Sarah, what do you think?

Sarah Smarsh: This is a question I've gotten a lot over the years. I've mostly circumvented it to say, hey, why don't we talk about the large political minorities, even in red places like Kansas? I believe that we have had our attention just hyper-focused on this particular MAGA group to the detriment of truly understanding how we can shift the politics of a culture of a place.

That said, I'll go ahead and give you my answer. How could he? How do they? Why would they,? I think it's as simple as this. It goes back to a point I made a moment ago about who talks to and about the working class, regardless of in what manner, and how problematically, and how dishonestly. If you look at someone and you say, I know that you're struggling and I understand and I validate it, that goes a long way in a place where Democrats haven't shown up in a long time. I'd say it's as simple as that. I'm not saying it's right and I'm not defending that movement.

Politics is an emotional impulse more often than it is a rational one. I believe that sociology studies have borne that out. I think that there was a moment over the past few decades when a lot of communities in the middle of this country, whether agricultural or industrial, were hollowed out. They are indeed racially diverse and ideologically diverse places, but yes, largely white.

The electoral college shaped the resource investment of the Democratic Party in such a way that they stopped going there. Meanwhile, NAFTA left a really bitter taste in a lot of people's mouths, and so did decades of policy privileging, privileging big ag over small family farms. I'm not saying that that wasn't the Republican Party's fault, too, if not more so. What I'm saying is in the meantime, conservative talk radio, Fox News, a messaging about rural equals conservative in some way that wasn't even true when I was a kid, came forth into that space and claimed it and leveraged the sense of desperation. This is what we got.

Brigid Bergin: Well, thank you for taking on that question. I want to give another caller a chance. Patrick in Brooklyn. Patrick, thanks for calling.

Patrick: Thanks for having me. I wanted to mention that I really appreciate the person that you have right now. I actually came from the projects in Queens. It's funny to me because when she's speaking, it fascinates me how it's not part of the general conversation that people from such disparate upbringings or whatever could have very similar experiences.

I was in a program that ended up sending me to private school and then an Ivy League university. University. Similarly, there was a lot of code-switching going on. There was a lot of realizing that people from different backgrounds and middle and upper middle class have a certain understanding of the machinations of these things, or their parents do things for them, where if you don't and your parents don't understand it or don't even speak the language necessarily, like those students have to go through a completely different process and have to learn a lot of things a lot quicker and a lot harder.

It's also interesting. I appreciate that she mentioned how although she grew up poor, she did grow up with land, which is something that a lot of Black people would not have been allowed to have. It's funny to me because that's one of those things where it would be incumbent upon our leaders to understand how to talk to the citizenry about bridging those gaps. She talks about how she's poor. My automatic thought is, "Oh, yes, but you had land." That's, that's poor, but different poor.

Somebody from there might say, "Oh, well, you grew up poor, but you grew up in New York City where there's so many social services." It's poor, but it's different poor. You have a hospital every five minutes. It's poor, but it's different poor. Meanwhile, there are other experiences that we all go through trying to move through society in America and move through class in America that's very similar. I feel like the Democratic Party in particular has done itself in the citizenry a very big disservice by not being willing to actually address that and speak on those aspects of class.

Brigid Bergin: Patrick, thank you so much for that call. Sarah, I definitely want to give you a chance to respond to a lot of what Patrick raised there.

Sarah Smarsh: Well, it made my heart sing. Thank you, Patrick. Poor, but different poor. That's exactly right. What keeps me going in this work, which I've been talking class as a journalist for like 20 years now, about 10 years more pointedly through personal narrative and essays and memoir. When I hear from folks like Patrick who say, like, I, too, have a class story and where it's a different place, but also there's this parallel thing, that sense of connection and validation around discussing this thing we're not talking about as a country, it helps everybody.

It's one of the reasons it's so frustrating to me that the only time you see the term in headlines today is about the white working class, and it's about the Trump movements. Class is such a bigger discussion than that. We, as Patrick said, are doing ourselves a disservice when we don't let ourselves dig into that conversation and find the solidarity, or at least the connection and sense of shared understanding across place, across state lines, across this notion of red and blue. It's so much more complicated than that on the ground.

Everywhere I go and over these years of writing, I hear from thousands of people from all different walks of life, all skin colors, all political stripes, even to some extent, who are like, yes, we need to talk about this thing. It seems like at the moment, our leaders are not quite sure how to do it with integrity.

Brigid Bergin: Well, Sarah, I want to thank you so much. We're going to leave it there for today. Sarah Smarsh is a journalist and the author of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. I'm really grateful you made some time for us. It's been a fascinating conversation.

Sarah Smarsh: Thanks so much, Brigid. Appreciate it.

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