Abstract
The US presidential election of 2016 shocked the world. News outlets argued it was a mobilization of white working-class voters, feeling economically left out, that carried Donald Trump to the White House. Make America Great Again conjured an America where peace, prosperity, safety, and white identity were revered. This chapter explores how poor whites have been duped, once again, into aligning themselves with rich white elites in an effort to fortify white power structures at the expense of Black and Brown folks (and unknowingly poor whites themselves), and to reimagine an America devoid of conflicts of color, while portraying an illusion of meritocracy. Therefore, how does the US deal with the real or perceived grievances of working-class whites, in a landscape where neoliberal economics and globalization have created a new racial and socioeconomic caste system throughout the world?
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Ritter, Z.S. (2019). Estranged in Their Own Land: Real and Imagined White Marginality in the Era of Trump. In: Brug, P., Ritter, Z., Roth, K. (eds) Marginality in the Urban Center. Neighborhoods, Communities, and Urban Marginality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96466-9_3
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