We're Still Here

The economy has been brutal to American workers for several decades. The chance to give one's children a better life than one's own -- the promise at the heart of the American Dream -- is withering away. While onlookers assume those suffering in marginalized working-class communities will
instinctively rise up, the 2016 election threw into sharp relief how little we know about how the working-class translate their grievances into politics.

In We're Still Here, Jennifer M. Silva tells a deep, multi-generational story of pain, place, and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva
reveals how the decline of the American Dream is lived and felt. The routines and rhythms of traditional working-class life such as manual labor, unions, marriage, church, and social clubs have diminished. In their place, she argues, individualized strategies for coping with pain, and finding
personal redemption, have themselves become sources of political stimulus and reaction among the working class. Understanding how generations of Democratic voters come to reject the social safety net and often politics altogether requires moving beyond simple partisanship into a maze of addiction,
joblessness, family disruption, violence, and trauma. Instead, Silva argues that we need to uncover the relationships, loyalties, longings, and moral visions that underlie and generate the civic and political disengagement of working-class people.

We're Still Here provides powerful, on the ground evidence of the remaking of working-class identity and politics that will spark new tensions but also open up the possibility for shifting alliances and new possibilities.


"Jennifer Silva's We're Still Here is one of the best such books I have read. Chief among its merits are the diverse range of people Silva interviews DS young, middle-aged, single, coupled, divorced, white, African American and Latinx DS and her skill at letting them tell their own stories in their
own distinctive and revealing ways." -- David C. Unger, Survival Journal

"We're Still Here is insightful, thoughtful and necessary... [it] combines
sociological theory and intimate, personal research for a revealing look at the heartbreak in
one of America's forgotten communities."- Foreword Reviews

"Anyone interested in the lives and motivations of blue-collar workers and their participation in the electoral process should read this insightful work."-Library Journal, Starred Review

"Silva demonstrates how the personal feeds into the political, how people project their frustrations--as well as their pain, disappointment, and anger--onto political candidates and onto each other."--Publisher's Weekly

"Silva's thoughtful, compelling study illustrates the complexities of work, race, and hope as the promise of the American Dream, for many, appears dim."--Booklist

"Silva's is an unforgiving book... 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."--Inside Higher Ed

"As Silva reveals, many white residents (perhaps reluctantly) accepted an exchange of economic insecurity for the psychological comfort of white racial exceptionalism to deal with the changes. In fact, many whites interviewed for this book had constructed a working-class identity that rested
primarily on their whiteness, leading one-time Democratic Party loyalists to support Donald Trump . . . Highly recommended." -- CHOICE