I can barely contain my enthusiasm about this series - it's about time we talked about 'class' issues on Daily Kos. We read a lot of 'oh, woe is...' about the middle class but few seem to acknowledge that you can't have a middle-class unless there is some group below, on the bottom. There is a permanent under-class in this country because the existence of any middle-class demands it. And that under-class sector of the population often ends up serving as the vulnerable underbelly of populism.
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Issues of class and labor seem to pop up quite a bit on Daily Kos as sidebars or as impacting other topics in important ways, but they don't get their own diaries as often as they perhaps should. Yet work and class have enormous relevance in American life. Almost all of us must work for a living. Most of us who work owe a great debt to organized labor - even if we are not ourselves members of unions, we benefit from the advances unions have made over the years, in safety conditions, limited hours and overtime pay, benefits, child labor laws. And while a shrinking percentage of American workers are represented by unions, not only do union members earn more than their nonunion counterparts, but nonunion workers in highly unionized industries and areas benefit from employer competition for workers, leading to better pay and conditions. Class issues, too, apart from the question of organized labor, are central in many of the political struggles of the day. From bankruptcy legislation to the minimum wage to student loans, legislation affects people differently based on how much they make, what kind of access to power and support they have.
With this series we aim to develop an ongoing discussion around class and labor issues. Such ongoing discussions have emerged in the Feminisms and Kossacks Under 35 series, and, given the frequent requests for more (and more commented-in) diaries on these issues, we hope this series will accomplish the same. Entries will be posted every Tuesday night between 8 and 9pm eastern. If you are interested in a writing a diary for this series, please email Elise or MissLaura and we will arrange for you to be put on the schedule.
A handful of events – involving a book, a speaker, and an old friend – stand out of the blur of my first graduate courses in 1993. The first was reading David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness in a labor history seminar. Whoa! This could be fun - Appalachian archival holdings and literature, I already knew, were drenched with assertions of whiteness.
The second event involved a guest-lecture by historian Nell Irvin Painter in which she challenged her audience to recognize our facile capitulation to race-coded language loaded with multiple meanings. Her first example was the term ‘middle-class blacks’ often used in direct opposition to what, she asked? According to newspapers and other mainstream media, it would appear that there is no black upper-class, just entertainers and athletes. Our barely-conscious presumption is that there are only two real demographic categories on the ground: middle-class blacks versus, simply, regular blacks. The descriptor ‘low-class’ or under-class need not be spoken aloud.
I remember the moment vividly. Despite growing glare from the emergent light-bulb over my head, I can still visualize Painter’s profile. Well, actually, I best recall the elegant drape of her scarf and her jewelry. But it was her next example that made me sit up and squirm. "Appalachian Whites," she said, reminding us that they bore little resemblance to regular garden-variety whites in America. "Separated by more than mere geography, the phrase ‘Appalachian whites’ evokes mainstream presumptions of pathological (possibly genetic) differences – a genuine ‘other’ status."
I wanted to shout, Whoa, Nell(y)!, but my mind was spinning already, thinking about how similar intimations of race, caste, and class had been encoded colorfully in Appalachia’s documents and in the vernacular history.
The third event during that first graduate-school year of 1993-94 involved someone I’d known since high school in the mid 1960s, Brent Kennedy. I also knew his mother, his father, and a lot of his extended family – I’d lived in their midst since I was three years old, gone to school with their children, attended the same church, collected trick-and-treat offerings at their doors, and had hundreds of other contacts over the decades. According to the local paper, in the early 1990s, Brent had had some kind of epiphany while convalescing from a serious illness and had written a book about his Melungeon-ness and his family's closeted struggle to be considered part of the white middle-class in our home community.
Hmmm. First I’d heard of it. I knew that m-word, of course, as an epithet used to describe a bunch of real hillbilly-types who lived somewhere else... maybe in the next county? Definitely in Kentucky. Or West Virginia. Or Tennessee. They were ‘different’ – less-than-white, lots of incest, drunkenness, debauchery – but this didn’t describe any of the people that I knew best in Brent’s family. So I read the book, talked with Brent about it, politely suggested some works he needed to read, and shared some syllabi I’d been recently handed. I also shared some hand-written references to Melungeons I’d found in the private papers of Kentucky author John Fox Jr. (1861-1919), the subject of my dissertation, including a notation in a pocket notebook he carried c. 1892: "malungian = mountain nigger".
I then wished Brent luck with his reading and went on back to grad school where I was occasionally challenged to summarize his book which had become a best-seller, despite attempts by established historians to dismiss it. I preferred to call it a memoir. Of course, no one would consider it a ‘history’ since Brent's PhD was in communications. I placed it, within my growing hierarchy of primary viz-a-viz secondary sources, at the same level of output that emerges locally from the antiquarians who run the county historical society. Some truth(s), some errors, but never the whole story. Still I gleefully recognized a color-ed challenge to the conventional wisdom, custom and tradition surrounding Appalachian ethnicity. If Brent’s family had been ‘colored,’ then, a whole lot of their peers had been fooled by their bleached-out social performance as middle-class Appalachian whites.
Meanwhile, back at home, his book had set off such a firestorm that I began to think he’d written a ‘manifesto.' Certainly his wee text sparked something of a revolution. Race-drenched conversation now buzzed loudly from breakfast-tables to barbershops and the benches in front of Wal-Mart. Brent’s horrified great-aunt (my childhood Sunday School teacher) withdrew behind locked doors and closed her curtains to avoid inquiring kin and the gaze of newspaper reporters. My mother couldn’t say the word Melungeon without spitting but quietly hid a bunch of family pictures, such as those of her Aunt Mary who’d definitely been something other than lily-white (we just never talked about it out loud). More than a few Appalachian holidays got disrupted by someone newly wired to the Internet who decided, over turkey and cornbread dressing, to enlighten their kinfolk by sharing a recent discovery:
Listen up, our great-great grandma Collins was once listed on the census as ‘M’ for mulatto and her mama’s folks were listed as "Free Persons of Color."
What do you mean, boy, that her people ain’t white, never was white?
Well, now, it appears they just weren’t white enough to pass.
A single drop of color is still too much in most of the hollers of Appalachian Virginia. Desserts were abandoned; fistfights moved out onto the porch.
But Brent’s race card couldn’t be just re-shuffled or discarded. Too many historically valid documents with references to labels-of-color – Melungeon, Mulatto, Miscegenation, Mixed-blood - had been located to challenge Appalachia’s collective ethnic memories. Antebellum church minutes and court records from the time of Removal offered rich resources. In addition to the Fox archives, I have other favorites:
Stony Creek Primitive Baptist church minutes 1801-1811
Littell’s Living Age, 1849 pp. 618-20
'And you're a darned Melungen.'
'Well, if I am, I ain't nigger-Melungen, anyhow--I'm Indian-Melungen, and that's more 'an you is.'
References to mixed bands of East Kentucky guerrillas and southwest Virginia ‘Malungians’ in Bluegrass Confederate: The Headquarters Diary of Edward O. Guerrant by William C. Davis (Editor), Meredith L. Swentor (Editor), Edward O. Guerrant (Louisiana State University Press; November 1999)
The 1890s writings of Will Allen Dromgoole of Tennessee (online transcripts)
But it was the 20th-century realm of white supremacy and eugenics that produced the mother-lode of Melungeon texts. The well-documented crusade of Walter Plecker, Virginia’s preeminent eugenicist, to rid that state of the threat of undetected miscegenation gave me yet another m-word. In 1943, at the height of WW2, he wrote to all "Local Registrars, Physicians, Health Officers, Nurses, School Superintendents and Clerks of the Courts" to beware of color-ed Virginians attempting to pass as ‘white.’ "Some of these mongrels ...", he wrote, had been allowed by careless officials to register for the draft as white or Indian; he threatened all these officials with prison if the practice weren’t halted. To make their task easier, he enclosed a list of surnames that he’d determined to be less-than-white. (I have a verified copy from the Wise County, Virginia, Health Department archives - a good online transcript can be found here - the attached surname list reads like the phone books of towns and counties along the VA / KY / TN / WV borders.)
I also began to suspect that other documents might have been selectively purged to eliminate evidence proving any ethnic diversity other than the chosen interpretation of Scotch-Irish (plus an occasional Indian granny about whom little was known). In 1927, Plecker – also acting in his official capacity as director of the state’s first Bureau of Vital Statistics – had produced a certificate of racial impurity that he’d demanded be attached to the marriage and birth records of those suspected of having a drop of color in their veins. Western Virginia county officials had apparently been lax in obeying this mandate or had done so then turned their heads as people stole the documents from the courthouse. Plecker wrote prolifically to Virginia's school administrators and courthouse dwellers demanding that these mongrel Melungeons be purged from schools and voter rolls and that his office be kept informed of their progress in doing so:
Plecker Letter to Trustee of Lee County, Va. Schools
Bureau of Vital Statistics
State Department of Health
Richmond
August 5, 1930
Mr. J. P. Kelly
Trustee of Schools,
Pennington Gap,
Lee County, Virginia
Dear Sir,
Our office has had a great deal of trouble in reference to the persistence of a group of people living in that section known as "Melungeons," whose families came from Newman’s Ridge, Tennessee. They are evidently of negro origin and are so recognized in Tennessee, but when they have come over into Virginia they have been trying to pass as white. In a few instances we learn that they have married a low type of white people which increases the problem.
We understand that some of these negroes have attempted to send their children to the Pennington Gap white school and that they were turned out by the School Board. Will you please give us a statement as to the names of the children that were refused admittance into the white schools and the names and addresses of their parents. If possible, we desire the full name of the father and the maiden name of the mother.
As these families originated out of Virginia, our old birth, death, and marriage records covering the period, 1853 through 1896, do not have them listed by color as are those whose families have lived in Virginia a number of generations. They are demanding of us that we register them as white, which we persistently refuse to do. If we can get a statement that the School Board refused them admittance into the white schools, we can use that as one of the grounds upon which we would refuse to classify them as white. That, of course, is a matter of history and does not involve any individual but the whole School Board, the responsibility thus being divided up, while few individuals who write to us as to their negro characteristics are willing to have their names used or to appear in court should it become necessary. This makes it very difficult for us to secure necessary information to properly classify them in our office. If the School Trustees will co-operate with our office and will refuse admittance into the white schools and give us information when such refusals are made, we can without great difficulty hold them in their place, but this co-operation is very essential.
I do not know who is the Clerk of the School Board or who would be the proper one to apply to but your name has been given to me.
Yours very truly,
Walter A. Plecker
State Registrar
Shortly after I found this document, a close friend and colleague (a public high school teacher and Democratic party activist) revealed to me that, when the census takers came around in both 1950 and 1960, her grandmother had hidden with her and her younger sister in a back bedroom, admonishing them to stay quiet. As a Melungeon matriarch, she was, even then, still terrified that their tainted-surname and swarthy phenotypes might get on a 'Roll' of some kind that would bring them to the attention of authorities. When it came time for my friend and her sister to go to school, her parents moved with them out-of-the-state for the academic year - their father was a coal miner, their mother was a bookkeeper and both could usually find some work - but they returned every weekend possible and each summer to the homeplace in Appalachian Virginia.
Out of all this, I began to write my own lesson plan for Appalachian history:
Lesson 1: Appalachia is that place where people ain’t ever going to get white enough but they have an ugly history of trying.
Lesson 2: Like the rest of America, Appalachia by the 20th century had become a two-class, two caste society. Two classes: Men and not-men. Two castes: People-of-Color and the Un-Colored. Un-Colored men rule but only sometimes easily.
Lesson 3: Appalachia - it’s terrain, its people, their history – is neither mysterious nor isolated – indeed, the people and their landscapes have consistently bled out along modernity’s razor-sharp edge.
Lesson 4: A true-r history of Appalachia might be located in the ongoing conflict between white-winged patriarchy (Euro-American) and metis matriarchy (Indigenous). Not THE history, I know, but certainly a potential way of looking through the 19th-century’s strangling triangle of race, class, and gender and, hopefully, well beyond old, tired analyses of progress versus tradition.
Undergraduates like it. Together we search for the ‘spotted hillbilly’ where Appalachian communities survive, a matri-lineal, matri-local, matri-focal matrix of kinship and eco-social convergence. We also mark the Appalachian nests of uncolored men – some sport Confederate flags and make it easy. A lot of them strip-mine or haul coal. A few work in academia, politics, and finance but are just more subtle than their sweaty peers.
My lesson plan also opens a window for students to consider the distorted histories of other marginalized groups - Native Americans, the Irish, Chinese immigrants, etc. Cherokee history provides rich examples of ongoing conflict and contradiction between a) the cultural self-definition of simply being 'Cherokee' or other ethnic minority and experiencing a true ‘communitas' sense of inclusion and belonging; versus b) the dehumanization and alienation that resulted from 19th century policies that dictated blood-quantum mandates which, not accidentally, privileged the dominant white-winged patriarchy. The quest for ‘Melungeon’ identity or acquiescence to less-than-white ethnic markers is similarly conflicted and contradictory. That’s what makes it such great fun for historians and other humanists who recognize that even the best documentary sources (such as census records) bear the prejudices, perceptions, and preconceptions of their authors.
Kennedy’s work aptly demonstrated the contradictions between documentary and 'vernacular' sources and has now become, in and of itself, a primary source in studying socialized memory. As it should be. America's middle-class needed Appalachia to serve as their low-class, no-class, never-white-enough underbelly. It's a no-brainer that, in turn, some Un-Colored Men based in Appalachia needed their own mongrel under-class to dig their coal, cut their timber, and service their domestic needs. The Melungeons are / were Appalachian Virginia's permanent under-class - can't have a middle without some beings underneath. When mountain natives balked at industrialization and loss of their ancestral lands, coal and timber camps were erected and large numbers of immigrants from central and Eastern Europe were brought in, along with African-Americans from Alabama, and assigned to strictly-segregated housing - these populations have since been eliminated as mechanization after 1950 ended the need for a large pool of labor. We're back to a core population that's still squabbling over class-status and race - listen to strip-mine workers speaking to one another and you'll hear racist and xeonophobic commentary that could almost make Rush Limbaugh blush. Even sadder - you'll often get an anti-union rant as well.
Let me allow David Roediger to have the last word. The following excerpt is taken from his Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press. Spring, 2002, Chapter 8: "The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and National Expansion, 1790-1860", pg. 131-2):
Very recent work and neglected older studies move us decisively beyond a Black-white binary and toward consideration of settler colonialism... Philip Deloria's impressive Playing Indian, for example, uses the history of Indian impersonation to pose broad questions of race and nation. Deloria writes, "Blackness, in a range of cultural guises, has been an essential precondition for American whiteness, [and] the figure of 'the Indian' holds an equally critical position in American culture." Susan Scheckel, in her Insistence of the Indian, makes similar arguments where connections of race and nation are drawn. Darlene Wilson [aka 'va dare'] and Patricia Beaver point out that the history of ethnically mixed "Melungeon" people in Appalachia raises large questions about Native American identity, coercion, gender, whiteness, and property in that region and the nation at large. ... Strongly attentive to questions of property as well as to religion, gender, and racial ideas within subordinated groups, these studies signal rising sophistication and provide models for future work. Likewise important for studies of whiteness, and of race generally, are the friendly challenges by leading Asian Americanists to the tendency of some to assume that the categories of "labor" and "reserve army" of the unemployed are abstract and raceless ...
Amen. The American Revolution goes on...
Always the mountains,
va dare