Thoughts on “We’re Still Here”

Jennifer Silva’s new book, “We’re Still Here,” is one of the more disturbing books I’ve ever read, and I mean that as a compliment. It’s short and well-written, but hard to get through because it’s so profoundly dispiriting. But it’s worthwhile, and even necessary. Almost despite itself, it offers a kind of hope.

Silva’s first book, “Coming Up Short,” was a thoughtful examination of the ways that young people in the U.S. mark their own emergence into adulthood. With many of the older milestones of adulthood out of reach for economic reasons -- home ownership, marriage, children -- they’ve instead developed narratives of overcoming trauma.  By coming through something awful and coming out on the other side, they’ve identified themselves as mature. Silva is clear that this is largely a compensatory move on their part, motivated by the lack of better alternatives, but it’s important all the same.

Her newer book takes that insight and runs with it. She does ethnographic work in rural Pennsylvania, in a town she calls Coal Brook. She talks extensively to the residents there, trying to understand how they see the world, and especially the political world.  The fieldwork was done in the two years leading up to the 2016 election, so although the whole “Trump voter” question hovers over the book, that wasn’t what motivated it.  The book is less about political allegiances as such -- in many cases, the people she interviews reject voting altogether -- and more about how they understand the political world.  

Coal Brook is portrayed as a low-cost, but low-income, area that was historically white and Democratic, but that is changing rapidly.  As more Latinx and African-American people move in, the white people who stay get more conservative. It’s economically depressed, and the opioid addiction epidemic has hit it hard, across racial lines.  References to the pill-pushing doctor in town crop up repeatedly throughout the book.

Silva focuses on residents without college degrees. Even allowing for the location and the demographic she chose, I’ll admit being shocked by the sheer magnitude and depth of trauma that many of her interviewees reported.  Many of the interviewees reported childhood sexual abuse, parental and/or personal drug addictions, domestic violence, bouts of homelessness or severe food insecurity, run-ins with the criminal justice system, and multiple involuntary job losses.  Most report not voting, but when pressed, indicate that if they did, they’d vote for either Trump or Bernie Sanders. The consistency of antipathy towards Hillary Clinton is notable; she is widely seen as a sellout, or as a failure for tolerating her husband’s adultery. (Notably, several of the women in the book who condemn her for that speak well of Bill.) Trump’s and Sanders’ bluntness convey trustworthiness; Hillary’s careful locutions come off as institutional, and therefore suspect.

Her interlocutors are profoundly skeptical of institutions. There’s plenty of reason for that, including a few who mention bitterly taking on unpayable debts for for-profit colleges that left them no better off than when they enrolled.  Some of them report having registered with one party or another, but very few vote, and registration is an unreliable guide to how they vote when they do. Very few report church attendance.  None are members of unions. Civic organizations are entirely missing. Many of her interviewees live transient lives, having dealt with institutions at all only in the negative.  

In the absence of mediating institutions, the residents there largely turn inward. They see their own pain -- often quite vividly -- and tune out anything that gets in the way of drawing meaning from it.  As in her previous book, tales of trauma overcome become sources of individual pride. Many of the longtime residents draw on an older vision of masculinity based on stoicism and provision; they can’t provide, but they can still endure, and they have open contempt for people they consider malingerers.  Silva notes in passing that nobody in her book receives welfare, but you wouldn’t know that from her interviewees, who imagine a great number of people living well on public benefits. Welfare as we know it may have ended, but the imaginary image of the welfare queen appears alive and well. Strikingly, many of the people who are most contemptuous of ‘freeloaders’ are unemployed.  But they see the (imaginary) welfare cheats as devaluing the pain they endure and the sacrifices they’ve made, and those sacrifices are the only claims they have to moral dignity.  

To her credit, Silva acknowledged a racial distinction among the residents of Coal Brook, and looked closely at the different perceptions between longtime residents -- mostly white -- and the mostly Latinx or black newer \residents who moved in from more expensive and dangerous places.  The longtime residents evinced despair, but the newer ones were more optimistic. They repeatedly mentioned the lower cost of living there, as opposed to, say, Philly. Most jobs in the area pay minimum wage or close to it, but when housing costs $300 per month, it’s possible to scrape by on that.  The older residents who compare the new reality to the wages and benefits offered by unionized coal mines tell a tale of decline, even as they acknowledge the family members lost to black lung disease; the newer arrivals compare Coal Brook to North Philly, favorably. Both groups suffer from a lack of health insurance, which leads to an ad hoc strategy of stoicism and pills, with predictable consequences.  

Looking for a way out, Silva refers to a rare community meeting at which some of the more judgmental locals become much more compassionate when confronted by the lived realities of other people they had otherwise condemned.  She suggests that a “therapeutic politics” may make it possible for people to turn shared pain into collective action, the better to address the sources of that pain. I’ll admit getting twitchy whenever someone invokes therapy and politics in the same sentence, but it’s certainly true that, say, the #MeToo movement drew strength from women telling stories of their trauma in public.  For that matter, the entire “the personal is political” slogan drew on the basic truth that many previously “private” pains were amenable, at least in part, to public solutions. Once your own reality is affirmed, it’s easier to affirm others’ realities, too.  

Even more than in her previous book, the desperation of her interviewees came through.  They feel unnoticed, so they withdraw from public engagement, and thereby fail to notice others.  Without connections to others, it’s easy to demonize or stereotype them; candidates who do the same come across as “saying what I’m thinking.”  Without real connections to actual people, it’s easy to get lost in fragments of ideologies, or dreamworlds online.  

A few days ago, my wife semi-teasingly asked me why I took women’s studies courses in college and grad school. I answered, honestly, that they got me to look at things I thought I knew in new ways. That seemed important, if I wanted to understand politics.  It still does. Although classes like those are often contrasted to the classic “liberal arts,” they may be among the best current exemplars of the liberal arts ideal.  They broaden perspectives, simply by virtue of bringing up voices and points of view that aren’t always brought up. They didn’t just add new information, although they also did that; they threw old information into new light.  Go through that a few times, and it becomes more difficult to simply deny others’ realities. The world starts to look more complicated, and simple explanations start to look simplistic.

Truly public places may not be mediating institutions, in the sense that unions and 19th century political parties were, but they’re something.  Community colleges, public libraries, public parks, and even public schools (when segregation isn’t catastrophic) can bring together people who might not ordinarily come together.  They can allow for those accidental moments in which somebody else’s vivid, lived reality forces me to rethink something I thought I knew. They’re a far cry from the postwar unionized blue collar economy, but they exist.  They’re a place to start building.

Silva’s is an unforgiving book, probably best read over several sittings, with a pen.  But it’s essential. It lays out one of the most fundamental cultural challenges of our time, and does so in a clear and thoughtful, if disturbing, way. It got me to look at things I thought I knew in a new way. I can’t offer higher praise than that.