In her new book, White Working Class, Joan Williams scolds her fellow professors, lawyers, and other professional types for their indifference and intolerance toward their less educated white fellow-citizens. She relates the story of a friend who tells her: “The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class.” Williams's response: “A few days' paid leave ain't gonna support a family. Nor is minimum wage.” Later on in the book, she writes, “When I hear some environmentalists talk, I feel like I'm listening to my German Jewish grandmother calling Russian Jews peasants.”
Williams is a prominent feminist legal scholar with degrees from Yale, MIT, and Harvard. Unbending Gender, her best-known book, is the sort of tract you'd expect to find at an intersectionality conference or a Portlandia bookstore. This is why her insightful, empathic book comes as such a surprise.
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