The Right Kind of White

An interview with author Garrett Bucks on race and class in America

I have, for some reason, lately been inundated with people telling me I need to read a new book called “White Rural Rage.” I’m not a particularly rage-y person, and my white neighbors in this small city in a rural state are (usually) pretty chill, friendly folk. But there seems to be a perception in American politics that all white people who live outside of major urban centers in the United States are seething mad and vote based only on those vibes. The reality, as always in American politics, is far more complicated and interesting. We tend to skip over how socioeconomic class actually plays into all of this.

So instead of talking about the same old trop of white rural rage, a much better book interrogating American whiteness is out today called The Right Kind of White. I had a conversation with the author, Garrett Bucks, a fellow child of Montana. Garrett has written an insightful memoir about race and class in America, going far deeper than most into the heart of our confusion around all of this.

Our conversation follows.

Q: I've been following the journey of this book since your editor, Yahdon Israel, put a call out on Instagram that he was looking for a white author to tackle the topic of race in America. After reading it, I'm fascinated that it is, in many ways, a personal story of white perceptions of class. The deeply held American belief that some white people are superior to others. Did you know this would be a theme going in? How did the book evolve over time?

Surprise! The book about race is not-so-secretly a book about class! And of course that was always going to be the case, because American racial hierarchies were invented to keep capitalism humming. And while that story is well documented, it’s often told from a single lens, namely how racial divisions have been used as a wedge to tamp down working class organizing.

But one of the gifts of memoir is that you get to be surprised about how these societal truths play out in your personal story. And so while my project wasn’t to explicitly write a book about class, it was to examine the way that I learned, through the course of my life, the unspoken rules about how White people jockey to distinguish themselves from one another. And as I did so, one of the biggest patterns that emerged was a less explored way that classism keeps hierarchies in place– in this case through middle and upper class white people’s obsession with proving that they are not like “other” white people, which almost always means “not like the rednecks, not like the poor bigots.”

Q: You grew up in a progressive, white Montana family that was not poor. Your dad worked as a fairly high-profile Cabinet director for a Democrat governor. And yet, in one section of the book, you talk about knowingly leaning into the shitty classism about the place we come from in order to raise money for a project you believe deeply in. I've also leaned into classist stereotypes of where I come from that are also not true in my case. What the hell are we doing and do you have any better ideas on how to break the spell classism holds over so many people with power?

What the hell indeed! I’m so glad you picked up on that passage, though it was such a gut punch to write. 

You know, there are so many parallels between classism and racism, one of which is that they’re both so baked into the logic of how our society operates that it doesn’t matter how progressive your politics are– it takes way more than ideology to avoid falling into those traps. 

And classism isn’t just railing about how “those welfare queens and hillbillies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” In the section of the book you’re referencing, I assumed that the foundation staffers to whom I was pitching my organizing initiative would be more likely to fund me if I could prove I had a connection to the kind of poor white people that they viewed as “needing help.” So the stories I told them about Jefferson County, Montana (where I grew up) were super classist, but not necessarily in the “poor people are lazy” way. They were tokenizing, condescending and pitying. And as you mentioned, they also flattened and misrepresented my own class story. 

And I see that a lot in progressive discourse– from college educated socialists who talk about working class people in distanced, fetishized ways or suburban liberals who built J.D. Vance’s career by snatching up all those copies of Hillbilly Elegy. It’s even a risk for people who grew up poor but aren’t any more. There are benefits to reinforcing wealthy people’s sense of class superiority (just like there are benefits to flattering white people’s views of themselves as being “good white people”). In my case, I was worried that my nonprofit would fail if I couldn’t convince wealthy people that I was “helping” poor white people. In other cases it’s the difference between getting and keeping a job, or getting into college, or building social capital. No wonder we fall into it!

As for how to avoid it, I think that’s the benefit of getting involved in organizing efforts that are both class and racially conscious. Do you know who, in my experience, are less likely to do and say weirdo classist things? Union organizers, mutual aid group members, community organizers in working class areas, middle-and-upper class parents who don’t flee for the suburbs when their kids hit kindergarten (and who also don’t automatically take over the PTA at their Title I school). It sounds trite, but the answer to just about all the problems that bedevil us can be found through organizing. It’s hard to villainize or tokenize somebody when you’re working in partnership with them on projects that benefit both of you.

Q. There are heartbreaking moments in this book. In particular, when you leave the Navajo Nation in New Mexico after working as an elementary school teacher there. It seemed to me you were conflicted about your time there and about leaving. What's your opinion now on programs like Teach for America and parachuting into disadvantaged communities of color as a white person?

So, a big theme of the book is about my addiction to absolution. I spent so much of my life seeking external validation that the life I was leading was perfect and beyond reproach. And that’s how I used to judge both my own time as a teacher: either I was the best teacher in the world or I was a failure.

One thing I challenged myself to do in the book was to analyze my past choices in a way that didn’t let myself off the hook but also wasn't self-flagellating. Was I a good teacher or a bad teacher? Was whatever positive impact I had in the classroom worth the fact that I didn’t stay in my first teaching position long term? What was the true story of my final moments in New Mexico: the party with my kids celebrating all their academic accomplishments, or the playground graffiti I saw afterwards?

The actual answer to each of those questions is “all of the above,” of course.

But what I’ve now realized is that the most interesting question isn’t “was I good or bad?” but “what was I doing in the moments when I was best for my students and worst for them, both in the years I was there in Crownpoint and in my relationships with them afterwards?” And that’s where the book’s deeper lesson lies– the clear dichotomy between my impact on those around me when my implicit goal was trying to look good versus actually caring about the people around me, building community, and fighting the systems that harm all of us. 

As for TFA, my personal politics/theory of change are much more radical than that organization, but that’s true for me and most nonprofits! It’s why I run my own little writing/organizing shop now. With that said, a ton of the teachers and principals who I’d hold up as exemplars of community-centric, non-parachutey education came through the program, and I also have a lot of love for so many people who still work there. Like all nonprofits, it’s worth critiquing, but I’m much more critical about the mistakes I made when I was employed there than the organization as a whole.

Q. When your family moved to the Washington, DC, area when you were a child, you had several experiences right away with harmful class perceptions. What did living on the East Coast reveal to you about race and class as a kid?

So much! For context, we didn’t just move to any suburb, we moved to Columbia, Maryland, a sort of capitalist-utopia planned town that was hailed as a fully integrated beloved community. There was even a city commission that regulated home sales and apartment rentals (by both race and income) to ensure that every neighborhood was a perfect, cross-racial, cross-class mix. What I soon discovered, though, was that places like this– which were beloved by upper-middle-class white liberals– were less interested in justice than they were in sorting. Black, white, Latino and Asian students may have all gone to school together, but there were clear, consistent patterns as to who got put into “gifted” and “remedial” classes.

I come from a big family, so when we first moved to Columbia, my siblings and I all enrolled at different schools. Me and my sister were at the elementary school, I had a brother in middle school and a couple brothers in high school. But the same thing happened to all of us– this system, which was so obsessed with sorting– didn’t know what to do with us. On one hand we were white, and we didn’t look or sound poor, and our grades were good… but we came from rural Montana, so we must be rednecks, we must have received a substandard education. So one by one they invented reasons to hold us back or put us into remedial classes. And because of whiteness, our mother was eventually able to advocate for us (in a way that was not afforded to many of my Black classmates) but the lesson stuck: White upper class liberalism loves diversity, as long as their position at the top of the pile is secure. And so my job, if I didn’t want to be left behind, was to ensure that I was never again mistaken for a redneck.

Q. I think there may be people who come to this book looking for an instruction manual on how to be a better white person. What's your advice after this long journey you've been on?

Another surprise! The book won’t teach you to be a good white person! Not one bit, actually. In fact, I sincerely hope it leaves its white readers with a ton of reflections on what’s been lost in so many of our individual quests to be considered “good white people.”

Here’s the thing. It’s been eight years since Trump was elected. It’s been four years since George Floyd was murdered. And that’s a pretty good sample size to show that, if all it took to build a just economy and a multi-racial democracy was millions of white middle and upper class liberals reading the right books and saying the right things on social media, we’d have arrived at the beloved community right now. But in spite of so many of us “listening and learning” and trying to become the individual valedictorians of social justice– so little has changed. The gap between the rich and the rest of us is only getting bigger. Donad Trump is running for President again and 2023 saw the largest number of police killings of civilians in U.S. history. 

If we want a better world, we have to do something different. And for me, that “something” isn’t a mystery– it’s being willing to organize for justice– across geography, with a focus on the working class, without front-end ideological purity tests. But actually doing the organizing is the easy part. I run trainings on that, as do so many people. 

I wrote this book because the much harder part is getting past our internal barriers to organizing for justice. And for white people, especially middle class liberal white people, I’d argue that the biggest barrier is our obsession with trying to prove our moral superiority to other white people. And if I want others to really reflect– vulnerably, warts and all– on their tendency to care more about looking good than doing good than I had to model that reflection myself. That’s the spirit of the book. It’s a big-hearted, honest, outstretched hand, to a community of people that I’m no longer interested in running awry from.

You can order The Right Kind of White here at bookshop.org or anywhere you buy books.