The Reality of America’s Multi-Racial Working Class
The multi-racial working class exists—and it’s tired of elite division and empty promises
This is a guest post from Robert Ordway, a Republican policy analyst. He has his own Substack you should be sure to subscribe to.
People talk today about creating a political movement around the “multi-racial working class.” But this class, and its politics, already exist. The political parties have just not yet found a way to connect with it.
The history of Northwest Indiana, my family’s southern migration from western Kentucky, and my own childhood on the fringe of the nation’s once murder capital, Gary, Indiana tells the story of the evolution of the multi-ethnic working-class, the issues they face, and what matters to them.
I grew up in Northwest Indiana in a small mill town called Lake Station, founded around 1850. It was at the terminus of the first train through Lake County, but the community failed because George Pullman decided to locate his sleeper train cars on Chicago’s South Side. The city was renamed East Gary in 1908, just two years after the founding of the City of Gary, where J.P. Morgan removed the dunes from Lake Michigan and built the world’s largest fully integrated steel mill. It was part of the world’s first billion-dollar company, U.S. Steel. East Gary was marketed as a suburb for steel executives, but the plan didn’t work, and the city failed again.
Over the next 15 years, Gary became a destination for 50+ different ethnicities, primarily uneducated men from Eastern and Central European poor countries. World War I prohibited the immigration of workers from European nations that were at war with the United States. During the Great Steel Strike of 1919, Inland Steel, located next door in East Chicago, recruited Mexicans to the area as strikebreakers. In Gary, the founder of the local chapter NAACP helped organize interracial solidarity during the strike.
Two years later, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, limiting immigration again. U.S. Steel then went on to aggressively recruit southern whites and blacks to fill the gap but also to stop unionization.
After 150 years as subsistence farmers in western Kentucky, my Papaw’s family moved to Gary where he gained employment in the Sheet & Tin Mill at U.S Steel in the late 50s. It was dirty and dangerous, but it was one of the few places where blacks and whites worked together. The local history is well covered in Ruth Needleman’s book Black Freedom Fighters in Steel. “People helped each other, and a guy would come up to you and ask for a dime or nickel, and if you had it, you’d give it to them, white or black.” As one family member recounts, Papaw did the same; he regularly invited black union colleagues to work on their cars and never charged them for even the parts, much less the labor.
After the 1959 steel strike, the longest in U.S. history, my Papaw, his wife, and two kids bought a house next door in the much more affordable and agrarian-feeling East Gary.
The community already had a significant Polish, Slovak, and Croatian contingent. Still, the migration of southern whites and some Mexicans to the area was so intense during the second wave in the late 1950s that the township had to build a new high school in an emergency. We are called the Ingots in honor of steelmaking, and our mascot is Joe Macarac, a Croatian steelworker hero of folklore.
As Gary began to decline from imports, automation, and white flight after the election of the nation’s first black mayor of a major city, East Gary returned to its original name, Lake Station, in 1977. There are claims this was driven by racism; however, as a historically heavily Democrat voting city, in 1984, the locals voted for Katie Hall in the three-way primary, the first and only black woman to represent Indiana in Congress.
After my Dad graduated from River Forest, he followed Papaw’s steps into Gary Sheet & Tin, but he was laid off during the mass consolidation of the industry in the 1980s. That decade shows Chicagoland and Gary losing more black population than anywhere in the nation, a story rarely written about.
A generation later, Mamaw and Papaw retired back to Crayne in Crittenden County, KY, and gave my Dad and uncle that little 864 sq. ft. home. I was raised in the same house, which sat on “the color line,” which included Mexicans and Puerto Ricans along with multi-ethnic and multi-racial folks. Interstate 65 separated and segregated us from the city of Gary, which by then had been coded for ‘black,’ which meant poor, and dangerous.
When I was a kid in the 1990s, Gary was the murder capital of the nation for multiple years running. In 1997, my Dad and I traveled to the Black Oak neighborhood, the city's original multiracial now only white-majority neighborhood, to help one of his Hungarian friends build a house. On our way over, I saw both prostitutes and drug dealers in broad daylight. This flew in the face of what I witnessed on TV, as all of my favorite athletes, musicians, and actors were black.
Perhaps it’s part of the crude steelworker language from earlier generations or a product of the time with ‘Parental Advisory’ labels on music albums, but we used ethnic and racial epithets toward each other with impunity at school. When you’re all part of the same social class, owning a particular stereotype is humorous because it is at least partially true. My peers were known by hyphenated ethnicities, from Mexi-rican to Polish-Mexican and a personal favorite, Czechoslovakian-Mexican or “Chex-Mex.” Others were so mixed that 23andMe DNA testing still can’t figure them out. Today, I couldn’t guess the ethnic or racial background of my peers’ kids.
Most importantly, these groups have done a good job retaining their religious and ethnic identity, as noted by the area’s Orthodox churches and events like Pierogi Fest and Serb Fest. My sister married a Greek and subsequently became Greek Orthodox. My friends had such pride in their heritage I never even heard the word “Hispanic” growing up, much less terms like “LatinX” dreamed up by out-of-touch elites. My first job in 1999 was doing dishes at a purely Polish Catholic reception hall in the one-square-mile town of New Chicago. It connected to a church where the hardest working 70-year-old ladies I met regularly told Polish jokes. Magnetized to the side of the industrial kitchen fridge was a Polish (square) rolling pin.
When I graduated high school in 2003, River Forest was 60/40 white ethnic majority. However, our state representatives and state senators were always black Democrats from Gary. Throughout college and a few years after, I serviced the steel mills as an engineering contractor based on the west side of Gary.
Working Class Pragmatism
As documented in Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash, the elites created the concept of race in the 1700s not only to promote the slave trade but also to drive identity politics, giving poor whites the fictitious belief that at least they were better than anyone with darker skin. They have been using such rhetoric to divide working-class people of all types in their quest to maintain power and control.
The working class isn’t buying it anymore.
The politics in communities where I am from don’t neatly orient along traditional party lines, and working-class voters there are driven by what a politician will do, not what demographic groups they belong to. In 2019, Lake Station was the first city in Northwest Indiana to elect an openly gay mayor by a 2:1 margin. He’s half Mexican, quarter Irish, quarter Italian, a Democrat, and a person I consider a friend. The working-class community was far more interested in what he could do for the city in his 9-5 than what he did in his personal life 5-9. Interestingly enough, he won re-election in 2023 by over 22 points yet was wrapped by two Trump victories amongst the city’s voters in 2020 and 2024.
During the summer of 2020, I served as the commencement speaker at River Forest on a socially distanced football field while COVID-19 raged. The valedictorian was a black female, and the salutatorian was a Mexican female who delivered part of her speech in Spanish. With Indiana’s school choice program, today, over 25% of the student body (nearly 500 kids) at River Forest commute from outside the school district, with the largest number coming from the City of Gary. It would seem counterintuitive to move one’s kid from one poor public school system to another, but I firmly believe River Forest has a unique culture that is superior to others. It’s a melting pot of working-class Americans, unified by the ideology of hard work and perseverance, not a victimhood mindset based on identity groups. The school is now just 35% white, and despite increasing free and reduced lunch tickets, the kids continue to outperform their poverty.
My (non-southern maternal side) grandma still lives in Lake Station, and I visited her every time I return home from the East Coast. On one trip back, I decided to drive around my home precinct, Lake Station 11, where I took pictures of over 100 American, a few Mexican, one Puerto Rican, and one Confederate flag. There is something to be said about the patriotism of this multi-ethnic working class. They still believe in America, while the elites treat the nation as irredeemable based on transgressions of the past.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Washington, D.C., where I lived for the past eight years until the end of 2024. Despite the many row houses surrounding the Capitol, I never saw an American flag on private property but instead, the virtue-signaling flags of various hyper-niche victim groups working-class people couldn’t name.
The Bill Bishop book The Big Sort came out in 2008, but it continues to give us insight into how Americans have been moving around the country and self-selecting communities based on more than just jobs and economic status but also political beliefs. I watched my neighborhood, Navy Yard, become the most gentrified yet racially segregated place in the city despite the hypocritical rhetoric of progress spouted by locally elected leaders. In a city that’s never seen a recession, the elites couldn’t name a working-class person, much less understand their issues. They love to quote (near) useless macroeconomic data like “GDP” and “Consumer Spending” but don’t understand that statistics do not indicate how the individual or family is actually doing.
Blue-collar folks are anchored to their place of employment. They can’t just pick up and leave with their remote jobs, so the working class is more ethnically integrated than ever. The higher-ups in white-collar and remote work are clustering into homogenous, segregated group-think. They create undefinable concepts like “non-binary” so they can “relate” to actual groups who have faced historical discrimination in our country.
It is the elite, particularly on the left, who started the culture wars, because they didn’t have any material needs to survive. The population of my family’s ancestral homeland of western Kentucky peaked in 1900 and has been in a slow decline since. The ruling class destroyed their historical economic anchors of tobacco and coal with no plan for a replacement, then called them ‘privileged’ while dismissing their faith as ‘primitive’ and ‘close-minded '. That’s exactly how their politics went from 80% Democrat for nearly 200 years to nearly 85% Republican within the last 25. This transition is well covered in the 2022 book, The Fall of Kentucky’s Rock. Because the elites never touch down in fly-over country, they don’t even recognize, much less respect, that 25% of those ‘rural rubes’ are now non-white.
For the millions of people who migrated to the industrial north during the 20th century looking for a better life, many of their jobs were eliminated by more than just automation. Poor trade agreements with countries with no labor or environmental laws are unfair not to mention some of the unlimited subsidies foreign governments provide to particular industries. Wall Street got richer while the Main Street of many small communities across the country evaporated. Today, all those people are looking for a good job that is stable, a safe community, and the ability to raise a family while obtaining home ownership – perhaps the core pursuits of what many would call the American Dream. Their daily concerns are far more practical, not ideological.
Identity politics is division and it is fatiguing. A race to the bottom as to “who has it worse” is not good for anyone. The working class doesn’t have the time for it anymore.
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