Sherman Alexie: An Ode to the White Urban Working Class

These days we associate the white working class with rural and small town red America, whereas big blue cities are perceived largely as the playgrounds of the educated and affluent. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the socioeconomics and demographics of blue cities were very different. As early Gen Xers, we vividly remember that during our youth the culture of urban America was indelibly associated with non-college educated white people, and their worldview was deeply ingrained within the broader cultural consciousness. 

So for this episode we asked one of our favorite cultural commentators, Native American author and writer Sherman Alexie, to rejoin us on the pod to for a walk down memory lane as we remembered the lost world of the white urban working class. We were inspired to take up the topic by Sherman’s poem, “Ode to Tonya Harding,” in which he uses Harding as a symbol of the young white working class women he grew up around and interacted with in his youth, vibrant and talented women he laments were destined to be excluded from elite cultural spaces because of class divides, style differences and cultural codes. 

We key off the poem to spark a wide-ranging conversation about class, race and the sharp cultural shifts within urban America since the days of our youth. Sherman reflects on growing up among poor white communities in rural Eastern Washington as a Native American, describing both solidarity and pervasive dysfunction across racial lines. He argues that poverty creates shared experiences across race, while criticizing modern Democratic Party politics for moving away from class-based concerns and decentering working-class interests.

We wax more than a bit nostalgic for 1970s–1990s working-class culture: restaurant and delivery jobs, service work, heavy-metal parking lots, bowling leagues, mall ice rinks, and the informal cross-racial friendships formed through shared labor, music, and youth culture. We don’t shy away from the racism that was prevalent in that era, but we nonetheless lament how deepening political divides, the rise of social media, and an increasingly insular elite culture have weakened those shared spaces and killed the social spontaneity and the capacity for joy that characterized youth culture when we were young. 

“When I was delivering pizzas, it was a bunch of poor white kids. I was the only person of color, I was the only person with more melanin than average, and race wasn’t a part of it,” Alexie recalls. “Inside the place we were all working, we all smelled like pepperoni, we all hated the boss, we all had a crush on that one young woman who had no interest in any of us…”

OUTSIDE SOURCES:

Sherman Alexie, "Ode to Tonya Harding," April 10. 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Knuckle Sandwich," May 19, 2026.

Sherman Alexie, "Billy Elliot," Jan. 24. 2024.

And if you haven't seen it, we highly recommend you watch the short (17 mins) documentary "Heavy Metal Parking Lot," a cult classic. 

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to bluecitypodcast@gmail.com