The America that CNN and Washington DC Forgot

Sarah Kendzior, The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America

Why, in the midst of Barack Obama’s celebrated middle class resurgence, did so many working-class Americans get trapped in jobs with no future? If the 2010s saw such a storied economic resurgence, why are people with graduate degrees accepting service industry jobs? Has anyone else noticed that the Internet Revolution has made it harder, not easier, to break into meritocratic jobs like entertainment and finance? Somebody needed to write about it.

Sarah Kendzior has a doctorate in anthropology, and a cold familiarity with authoritarian states. She made her initial career translating news from Central Asia into language English-speaking audiences could understand. She never intended to become a journalist but, living in St. Louis, one of America’s most chronically impoverished cities, she began seeing chilling similarities between the post-Soviet “Stans” and the Midwest. So she wrote about it.

With a scholar’s eye and an urban mother’s sensibilities, Kendzior quickly established a reputation for explaining America to itself. Writing mainly in Al Jazeera English, she gained a cult following online for saying, with journalistic precision, what many Americans believed intuitively, that the recovery hadn’t benefited everyone. Dwindling jobs, stagnant schools, racial intolerance, a tone-deaf media… Kendzior calls out all of them.

First published between 2012 and 2014, Kendzior’s essays expressed what many people, regardless of political party, felt during the middle Obama years: left out, broke, and voiceless. As she describes it, though, her publisher wanted more mainstream acceptance, and she found herself without a venue. So she compiled thirty-six essays into a book and published it herself. It became a surprise bestseller during and after the 2016 election.

Sarah Kendzior

As millions of Americans with only a high school diploma or less abandoned the last vestiges of hope for economic mobility in the 2010s, college graduates realized that their degrees weren’t worth much either—”a promise the economy does not keep,” in Kendzior’s words. Unpaid internships and adjunct teaching positions became the norm. In other words, people worked without pay, or mostly so, in hopes of getting a paying job eventually, someday.

This doesn’t just influence jobs, though. It’s almost impossible to get into policy-making jobs, journalism, and other fields without an unpaid internship. This means the people making our laws, and the other people reporting on those other people and supposedly holding them to account, could only get into their fields because their parents could support them while they worked for free. Poor people’s children can’t get into those fields.

Meanwhile, the people who dominate our discourse paint others with a broad brush. They describe working mothers in language that might have made sense in 1975, but reveals our politicians and pundits don’t understand how much child care costs. They use terms like “the Muslim world” to create the impression of monolithic forces out there, somewhere, looming. They use words like “paranoid” to condemn anyone who questions their consensus.

As stories mount up, Kendzior guides us to realize these problems don’t exist in isolation. Tragedies like Trayvon Martin’s death aren’t separate from, say, the disappearance of scholarship behind a paywall; dying American malls go hand-in-hand with America’s overwhelmingly male policy establishment. Cynical proclamations from American newspapers get echoed in international leaders’ war speeches. We’ve created a system that keeps most of us quiet, confused, and left out.

Kendzior’s essays about these interconnected problems feel too massive to comprehend.  Indeed, she doesn’t include several ongoing issues: no mention of President Obama’s massively expanded drone warfare, only one mention of the Iraq war. Even with her scientific scrutiny, it’s easy to believe she’s just scratched the surface. Defenders of the status quo will certainly bring their most common complaint against her, that she names problems without presenting a solution.

But works like this are never about presenting the solution. They allow citizens suffering under the problem to understand that their pain, their dislocation, has been heard. We know we don’t suffer alone, because Kendzior acknowledges us, even shows us others suffering likewise. As she writes in “In Defense of Complaining,” simply naming the problem gives people power to organize and resist the forces keeping us down.

This collection, first privately published in 2015, has been republished for a mass audience, with a new introduction and epilogue, which put the essays into a Trump-era context. These problems, as Kendzior acknowledges, haven’t gotten better. They fueled the outrage that brought us 2016’s two biggest outliers, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. We must fix these problems soon, or the rule of law, already fraying, may snap altogether.