Browning Our Trousers
20th October 2016
David Cole reviews the ethnography of California.
Regarding field labor, you can’t compare the needs of a place like Canada with California regarding agribusiness. My state could buy out that entire country with our agri-dollars. And I’ll tell you, whites won’t work those fields. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by “struggling” actors and actresses. They’re the only women I date, and they’ve always made up the majority of my white friends. Meaning, I’ve known poor whites here in Cali. Very poor whites. Because most actors out here make zero bucks at acting. So believe me when I say this: When young white Angelenos go broke, they DON’T sign up to pick lettuce. That’s not even on their radar. They either find a rich dude to support them (if they’re female or gay), they go back to living with mommy and daddy, or they go on SSI.
Southern California attracts a very specific type of white. We get the artistic “dreamers” from other states. We don’t get the Tom Joads. Here in L.A., pretty young white people with endearingly unrealistic dreams are an industry. It’s a huge business, not so much for them, but for those who make money off them. The steady influx of pretty white wannabe stars is a massive income-generator for the “high-IQ whites” and “high-IQ Jews” (redundant?) who live and work in “the biz.” Our entertainment industry is a billion-dollar concern, and as long as that’s so, the largest plurality of poor whites who move here will not be the type who do field labor.
October 20th, 2016 at 10:20
Some things don’t change. My g-g-g-grandfather was a 49er. (Looking for gold, not the end zone.) He wrote that men wanted outrageous amounts of money to do any sort of labor and many would rather go hungry than do any labor at all. As for women, “..The only women here are women of pleasure..” who are looking for money and not to raise a family.