Strangers in Their Own Land

Strangers in Their Own Land

by

Arlie Russell Hochschild

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Preface Quotes

As a sociologist I had a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right—that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes. Trying this, I came upon their “deep story,” a narrative as felt.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: xi
Explanation and Analysis:

We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of the bridge that the most important analysis can begin.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Sharon Galicia
Page Number: xiii
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

Looking out the window of the truck, it’s clear that Mike and I see different things. Mike sees a busy, beloved, bygone world. I see a field of green.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Mike Schaff
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

How can a system both create pain and deflect blame for that pain?

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:

But first, the people.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 16
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

In the life of one man, Lee Sherman, I saw reflected both sides of the paradox—the need for help and a principled refusal of it.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Lee Sherman, PPG Management
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

The Arenos didn't simply remember the good old days of a clean Bayou d'Inde. They remembered against the great forgetting of industry and state government. This institutional forgetting altered the private act of mourning. And not just that. It altered the Arenos’ very identity. They had not left Bayou d'Inde. They were stayers. They didn't want to leave, and even if they had wanted to, they couldn't afford to. The polluting companies had given them no money to enable them to move. And the value of their house had now fallen, for who would want to live on Bayou d'Inde Pass Road, even in a home as beautifully kept up as theirs? The Arenos had become stay-at-home migrants. They had stayed. The environment had left.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Harold Areno, Annette Areno, Derwin Areno
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

At least the authors of the protocol were honest in what was a terrible answer to the Great Paradox. “You got a problem? Get used to it.”

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Mike Schaff
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Churches typically ask parishioners to tithe—to give 10 percent of their income. For many this is a large sum, but it is considered an honor to give it. They pay taxes, but they give at church.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Madonna Massey
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:

As a powerful influence over the views of the people I came to know, Fox News stands next to industry, state government, church, and the regular media as an extra pillar of political culture all its own.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:

The Tea Party listener felt Christiane Amanpour was implicitly scolding her. The woman didn't want to be told she should feel sorry for, or responsible for, the fate of the [sick or starving] child. Amanpour was overstepping her role as a commentator by suggesting how to feel. The woman had her feeling guard up.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 128
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

As an ideal, the American Dream proposed a right way of feeling. You should feel hopeful, energetic, focused, mobilized. Progress—its core idea—didn't go with feeling confused or mournful.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 140-141
Explanation and Analysis:

You are a stranger in your own land. You do not recognize yourself in how others see you. It is a struggle to feel seen and honored. And to feel honored you have to feel—and feel seen as—moving forward. But through no fault of your own, and in ways that are hidden, you are moving backward.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:

Missing from the image of blacks in most of the minds of those I came to know was a man or woman standing patiently in line next to them waiting for a well-deserved reward.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

“I don't mind somebody being gay if they want to be gay. Just be a regular person, go to work, mow the lawn, fish. You don't have to be shouting it from the mountaintops. Don't make me change and don't call me a bigot if I don't.”

Related Characters: Janice Areno (speaker), Arlie Russell Hochschild
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:

Sometimes Team Players had to suck it up and just cope.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Janice Areno
Page Number: 163
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Jackie's lesson ran counter to the deep story; one shouldn't wish too much for what seems like the next step toward the American Dream. That was grabbing. On the other hand, she had struggled hard emotionally not to grab for it.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Jackie Tabor
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

“We need Mikes.” Don't be a Cowboy in enduring pollution, he seemed to say. Be a Cowboy fighting it.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Russel Honoré (speaker), Mike Schaff , Donny McCorquodale
Related Symbols: The Bayou Corne Sinkhole
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:

Without a national vision based on the common good, none of us could leave a natural heritage to our children, or, as the General said, be “free.” A free market didn't make us a free people, I thought. But I had slipped way over to my side of the empathy wall again.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Russel Honoré
Page Number: 201-202
Explanation and Analysis:

The “federal government” filled a mental space in Mike's mind—and the minds of all those on the right I came to know—associated with a financial sinkhole.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Mike Schaff
Related Symbols: The Bayou Corne Sinkhole
Page Number: 202
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

How do you join the identity politics parade and also bring it to a halt?

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 212
Explanation and Analysis:

For the Tea Party around the country, the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream had turned them into strangers in their own land, afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line. The undeclared class war transpiring on a different stage, with different actors, and evoking a different notion of fairness was leading those engaged in it to blame the “supplier” of the impostors—the federal government.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

While economic self-interest is never entirely absent, what I discovered was the profound importance of emotional self-interest—a giddy release from the feeling of being a stranger in one’s own land.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Donald Trump
Page Number: 228
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

Louisianans are sacrificial lambs to the entire American industrial system. Left or right, we all happily use plastic combs, toothbrushes, cell phones, and cars, but we don't all pay for it with high pollution. As research for this book shows, red states pay for it more—partly through their own votes for easier regulation and partly through their exposure to a social terrain of politics, industry, television channels, and a pulpit that invites them to do so. In one way, people in blue states have their cake and cat it too, while many in red states have neither. Paradoxically, politicians on the right appeal to this sense of victimhood, even when policies such as those of former governor Jindal exacerbate the problem.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker), Bobby Jindal
Page Number: 232
Explanation and Analysis:
Afterword Quotes

Disaggregated, such smaller narratives hung free, maybe to gather in some new way downstream. And to all this was the background presence of a powerful truth—life had been hard for them and it could get a lot worse.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 256
Explanation and Analysis:

The history of the United States has been the history of whites cutting ahead of blacks, first of all through slavery, and later through Jim Crow laws and then through New Deal legislation and the post-World War II GI Bill, which offered help to millions of Americans with the exception of those in farm and domestic work, occupations in which blacks were overrepresented. And racial discrimination continues today.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 260-1
Explanation and Analysis:

For the most part, the real line cutters are not people one can blame or politicians [one] can thunder against. That’s because they’re not people. They’re robots. Nothing is changing the face of American industry faster than automation, and nowhere is that change more stark than in the cornerstone of Louisiana’s industrial wealth, oil.

Related Characters: Arlie Russell Hochschild (speaker)
Page Number: 261
Explanation and Analysis:
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