Thanks to Black and other Democrats in Georgia, for the first time in a long time forces of light may yet prevail in at least some portions of the Deep South. We are reminded that, no matter what, we must never give up our Gramscian optimism of the will (en.wikipedia.org/...).
However, the demographics of Trumpism abundantly show that the forces of light cannot rely on most of the southern white working class at this point in time, and quite the opposite. This presents a major question of praxis. I argue from an admittedly personal perspective that we should not exclude the southern white working class from potentially coming to the light. I know I won’t. I only have to look in the eyes of my 82-year-old mother to not want to do that.
Some of you may, like me, have had a wealthy white overtly racist Georgia farmer grandfather. (Hint: If he were alive, he would have bankrolled Trump in his county.) In case you didn’t, let me briefly describe him and my grandmother, and give you pertinent examples of his conduct and the lasting impression it left on me. I was fortunate not to know him well, but just well enough.
Perhaps my lingering resentment coupled with hope for my own kin unnecessarily biases my critique to the personal. But I actually think it causes me to have hope, even for the seemingly hopeless. Describing the race and class struggles in the context of my southern forebearers may serve the purpose of illustrating in a small way where we are in the Deep South in the welcome glow of the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
My maternal grandfather’s father owned the general store in town and held the crop liens of the county’s desperate farmers. This led to my grandfather’s family being relatively well off and powerful in a southwest Georgia county of mostly otherwise powerless and poor farmers, a political-economic position it holds to this day, if anything increased because of the endless cycle of farming centralization.
My grandmother, orphaned along with several siblings just as the Great Depression started, was raised in acute poverty by the oldest orphan, her teenage brother Cleon, on a small farm on the other side of the highway from my grandfather’s family’s much larger farm. Her teenage brother made moonshine to support his siblings, who went to school in filthy rags when they weren’t working the red Georgia clay. He sadly became a alcoholic but never stopped trying to do his best for his siblings.
In contrast, my grandfather soon abandoned his young wife, mother of his first child and pregnant with his second, my mother. In 1937 my grandmother left the farm to live until she gave birth with a sister married to a man working in the automobile manufacturing industry. That’s how my mother came to have a Michigan birth certificate.
Eventually my grandmother returned with her two small girls to the farm. Occasionally Uncle Cleon would get sick of my grandfather’s selfishness and go kick his ass until he gave a little money to help with his kids. One day my grandfather was faced by a Georgia judge with a choice: pay child support or go fight in the war. He chose to go fight in the war. After the war he returned from Europe even more resentful of my mother and her sister, committed to never leaving the county or sleeping on the ground again, and to living his life for himself, a properous Georgia white man with no apologies for his white privilege and self-centeredness (a far less buffoonish, sexually non-predatory southern agrarian version of a president we know, with an added difference being that at least my grandfather worked hard, I will give him that much credit).
After never having paid any attention to his sole two offspring, in the 1980’s when he was old my grandfather invited my mother and her sister to spend a little time with him. It was good for my mother to get to know her father a little. I joined her and my brown Hispanic father a couple of times as we drove from the southern city where we then lived to my grandfather’s farm for lunch.
It was bittersweet to sit in his living room and then move to the dining room for a delicious southern lunch prepared by the Black sharecropper’s wife still living in near slave conditions on his property. The casually vicious words of his that are forever seared in my anti-fascist consciousness were directed to his second wife, my mother’s stepmother, on my behalf: “Hattie C, tell that n***** to bring this boy some more tea.”
I, that boy, went back only once after that. I had heard enough. And thankfully neither my mom nor her sister received any of his ill-gotten gain when he died, so we don’t have his money on our conscience. But it did deeply hurt my mother that he never treated her like she even had a father. It seemed like she was never much more than accidental poor white trash to him.
So that’s 50% of my white southern heritage. Mean, racist, selfish, land-grabbing, labor-stealing oppressors. Nothing hopeful there to my mind.
We the people can never form a more perfect union with people like that. We can only fight to protect and liberate innocent oppressed people from them. We can only engage in the race and class struggles against them. We can only try to win Georgia and other southern elections over their cheating, vote-suppressing opposition. We must never stop fighting their sorry selfish asses. We may forgive them in death and choose not to spit on their graves when they are gone, but we cannot trust them and cannot allow them to hold power. We must take a vigilant adversarial anti-fascist stance against them and their racist society, and all its badges, incidents, and symbols.
But there is another 50% of my white southern heritage that does give me a little hope. They were desperate small farmers who were easily swept up into racism but never completely unconscious of their own subjugation to the other 50% of my maternal lineage. They were made to feel superior to blacks as part of divide and rule, but ruled they still were and pretty much still are. Now, rather than working full-time on farms that have long since been seized by folks like my grandfather, many take whatever local job they can find, join the now “all volunteer” military, leave for metropolitan areas, or, if they are extremely fortunate, go off to college. Others have given up, or are pushed back down each time they try to get back up, and joined the growing white southern lumpenproletariat, addicted to opiates or methamphetamine, and clinging to guns and white privilege even if they no longer cling to an image of a loving God.
To these I will not give in, never sacrificing Persons of Color or women or LGBTQ’s or Jews or Muslims or immigrants to their prejudices. But neither will I give up on them entirely. Optimism of the will applies. They are, despite their often hideous and totally unacceptable attitudes and conduct, unacknowledging and unactualized potential work class siblings. We should somehow work to love them, often in spite of themselves. We should fight to get them the same decent wages, food, housing, medical, and dental care all human beings need and deserve.
Those of us who move to or remain in the Deep South must live in variable solidarity with all of our oppressed neighbors as much as we can while surviving ourselves and remaining in solidarity with the targets of oppression. We must not gawk at the other, whoever they may be. We must not wash our hands of their real suffering and degradation by an inhumane political-economic system.
The “cast” of seemingly bizarre white “southern gothic characters” are real people, not reality show actors. True enough that the effort to “stay back home and care for momma” can be overwhelming. But it is fascistic manipulative characters like Trump who want us to be sucked into visualizing mere drama all around us when we should be seeing real alienation and pain. We need to be careful what we look for with curious eyes.
John is all of the following: a queer liberal conspiracist who socializes with neighborhood racists; a manic depressive consumed by predictions of cataclysmic global catastrophe; an off-the-grid hoarder of gold who takes in stray dogs; a genius with a photographic memory who’s spent his whole life caring for his mother while designing a massive and elaborate hedge maze in his backyard; and one of the most skilled antique clock restorers in the world.
All that, and he may be sitting on a fortune in buried treasure.
(www.vox.com/…)
We are not living in a southern gothic movie scene but in materially-depressed and culturally-devastated communities where many convince themselves that all they have left are their Trump flags, their firearms, their nostalgia, and their resentments. Trumpism is a sick reality show that should never have been made. But it did not materialize out of thin air or the mind of a solitary bad man from Queens by way of Manhattan and Palm Beach. It is built on a centuries-old multi-faceted foundation of wickedness, injustice, and prejudice, manifested by far most unjustly on the flogged backs of Native and Black people, but also on the generally unflogged backs but often worn out red necks of white people like my mother, with brown people like my father at best wondering where they fit in.
I choose to believe in my heart even when I cannot believe it with my mind that whether or not literally millions of regular southern white people will be in conscious solidarity with the broader working class or strive to abandon the broader working class to join in mercenary league with the oppressors (i.e., the political-economic descendants of my wealthy white racist grandfather) is a democratic work in progress. You and I are each part of that democratic work in progress.
Optimistic anti-fascist consciousness, in addition to its necessarily adversarial commitment against fascism, is loving, kindhearted, and even potentially forgiving. Now that Trumpism, unfortunately having been created, hopefully is for at least the time being prevented from destroying democracy, all of the suffering remains, vivid yet decidedly unromantic, in a apartment, trailer park, motel room, car, or tent near me, abandoned like my grandmother long ago on a farm in southwest Georgia and, a decade later, my mother on that same farm. Today the poverty and desperation remain; only the farms are gone. May that circle be broken.