Owsley County, Ky. — There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants.
Earlier this week, President Obama gave a rather tepid and safe State of the Union Address. It did not address in any serious or broad way the national crisis regarding wealth inequality or stagnant wages. Interestingly, and very odd to my ears, Obama did wink to the "challenges" faced by "young men of color" in the labor market. And of course, the president offered nothing concrete about how to address said problem.
Obama's speech, and the much discussed assumption that he would address the United States' criminally high rates of income and wealth inequality, reminded me of a recent essay that was featured by the Right-wing website and publication The National Review.
It begins like a bad joke; the story is real. What would happen if a prominent conservative and Right-wing publication sent a black man to research and subsequently write an expose about white rural poverty?
The answer is simple: a train wreck of cognitive dissonance would occur among the National Review's commenters as they are forced to confront the fact that is white poverty, and how their default scripts about lazy black and brown people are challenged and upset.
The National Review piece is also clumsy and obvious in how it is trying to transpose its narrative about coddled, criminal, and hustling black and brown poor people who have it easy--and therefore deserve their fates--onto the white poor.
I wanted to laugh about the day-to-day conditions of the white rural poor as I read Kevin Williamson's expose "The White Ghetto". My sense of human decency and home training would not let me do so.
However, I did savor a tale of poor white people in a publication which has historically advanced Right-wing talking points and wicked stereotypes about black and brown people via the racist Southern Strategy.
As a practical matter, I also learned from Williamson about how poor white rural people use soda as a type of money. The comedian David Chappelle could not have written a better scene:
“Well, you try paying that much for a case of pop,” says the irritated proprietor of a nearby café, who is curt with whoever is on the other end of the telephone but greets customers with the perfect manners that small-town restaurateurs reliably develop. I don’t think much of that overheard remark at the time, but it turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions.
It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda.
Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices.
Poor white people are maligned by many on the Left, Progressives, and others for having supposedly abandoned their material self-interest for the psychological wages of whiteness. This is a fair and well-deserved accusation.
However, we must also push back against the contemporary mythology that poor white people support the Republican Party in overwhelming numbers.
In fact, the reality of voting dynamics among the white poor is much more complicated than "common sense" would suggest. Poor people of all colors are much more likely to support the Democratic Party. The white "working class" that both parties chase--and that the Republicans have (more often than not) won over in recent elections--is comprised of relatively well to do white men in the skilled trades. The shift in voting patterns in Red State America from the Democrats to Republicans is not with the white poor in mass, but rather among more upper and lower middle class voters who are drunk on Christian Dominionist and Evangelical "social" and "culture war" issues.
The empirical data suggests that the above dynamics are driving the macro-political story. However, the micro-level story, the one Democrats like to tell each other, suggests otherwise.
Stereotypes are cognitive scripts and cues that serve as shortcuts to aid human beings' decision-making. Yet, the "pictures inside our heads" are often inaccurate because they do not capture individual complexity. Stereotypes also make political decision-making more efficient while simultaneously encouraging deleterious and short-sighted outcomes that do not serve the Common Good. In all, stereotypes are a type of "fuzzy" heuristic.
"The White Ghetto's" comment section is a great example of that phenomena.
From the 1960s to the present, Republicans (and their neoliberal Democrat allies) have circulated a set of powerful stereotypes about poor and underclass Americans.
For them, the poor are black and brown, lazy, useless eaters, possessed of bad culture, and perhaps even, defunct genes. When confronted by the "bad culture" of the white rural poor, many of the National Review's commenters tried to fit those poor whites into a box they have constructed around the black urban poor.
There is metaphorical steam coming out of the ears of some of the National Review's readers as they cannot process Kevin Williamson's story while reconciling it with their stereotypes about people of color.
In the most compelling comments on "The White Ghetto" essay, some readers even try to suggest that the denizens of Appalachia are actually free and empowered because they have guns--jobs and food be damned as the fruits of basic citizenship and membership in the polity. Other commenters apply mental gymnastics as they reconcile their right-wing ideology with the fact of the white poor, and try to rationalize how the latter are somehow fundamentally different--and better--than poor people of color.
The White Ghetto is, using one of my favorite phrases, a human zoo. The material realities of the people who live in the poorest parts of Appalachia are not funny: the conditions are pathetic and miserable.
My sense of empathy remains limited. I "get" the empirical facts surrounding the social and political experiences and identities of the white poor. Nonetheless, I worry how if the white poor are politically mobilized that they will simply pursue the material wages of whiteness as payment for how they, like other white folks, are psychologically invested in what it means to be "White" in America.
Brother Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. considered poverty in America to be a fire that is burning down our collective house. An impolitic thought. Empowered by white skin privilege, would the white poor fan the fire if they thought that it would burn black and brown people, and bring the metaphorical house down on the latter's heads?
