SINCE THE 2016 ELECTION, there has been a continuous, perhaps unresolvable, debate about whether deepening economic distress or ingrained racism led many whites to back Trump. Seen from the former empire of cotton in the US South, where surplus was extracted from black bodies, and industrial progress and good wages were allocated to whites who had only their own labor to sell, the notion that there would only be two opposed readings is impossibly simple.

We reap what we sew. Cotton made industrial capitalism possible by feeding the bodies of workers, enslaved and free, into its machine, and by voracious clearing of indigenous lands. At the back end of its historical arc, vulnerabilities that have long sundered workers along racial and national lines ensure that the race to the bottom continues. Sherry wants to fight against this by hanging on to the vestiges of her wages of whiteness, dependent on the subjugation of workers in Central America, prison labor, and the distinction that she posits between herself and other lazy whites.

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If the economic struggles of white Americans like Sherry are now more visible, it doesn’t mean she is specially or inexplicably vulnerable. Her challenges do not make her unique; they make her more like everyone else. To be a working person in America today is increasingly to join the ranks of workers everywhere. Such a realization is perhaps the first step toward generating the forms of collective political will and solidarity to chart a different course. Sherry herself understands that there is little to exempt her from the crisis that has engulfed her town and region. She knows that the ground continues to shift beneath her. “I hope it works out,” she says about Mill Store. But hedging her bets, she adds, “I don’t rule it out that I would go back to sewing, if I had to.”