Joan Williams audience 1

Why did Trump win? Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

Wednesday 10th May

Speaker: Professor Joan C. Williams (Professor of Law, UC Hastings Foundation and Chair and Director of the Center for WorkLife Law)

Chair: Dr Michael McQuarrie (LSE Sociology)

Dismissing the white working class as racist is not an excuse for disregarding your own class privilege.

Much analysis has focused on the fact that Donald Trump won the U.S. Election because liberals lost the white working class vote. The same might well be said about Brexit. That being the case, what exactly does the left need to do to regain those votes? And can it do so without ignoring the needs of immigrant and other minority groups? Joan C. Williams, whose evaluation of Trump's electoral victory in the Harvard Business Review has been read over 3.5 million times, explained how the left can regain white working class votes while remaining true to their principles.

This talk marked the publication of Joan C. Williams’ latest book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. It addresses why so much of the elite’s analysis of the white working class is misguided and rooted in class cluelessness; dismissing white working-class motivations as racist or xenophobic and wrongly conflating ‘working class’ with ‘poor’. Williams shows us how to increase our own class consciousness. 

Why did Trump win? Overcoming class cluelessness in America Why did Trump win? Overcoming class cluelessness in America