On rural whites, in the context of Mississippi politics

The race to fill a U.S. Senate seat from Mississippi has been drawing lots of media attention, in part because it pits a white Republican woman, Cindy Hyde-Smith, against an African-American man, Mike Espy.  The other reason the race is attracting attention is that Cindy Hyde Smith has been--depending on your perspective--either dog-whistling or flat out race-baiting, as she has made comments about, for example, wanting a front-row seat if invited to a public hanging by one of her donors.  To that, Espy, who served as Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton, said the comment was "awful" and called it "tone deaf," though he did not square respond when questioned whether it was racist.  Both Walmart Corporation and Major League Baseball asked Hyde-Smith to return their campaign donations following that episode.  Hyde-Smith has also been recorded making comments about the desirability of suppressing the vote among liberal-leaning college students.  A few days ago, media outlets like USA Today began pointing out that Hyde-Smith attended high school at a "segregation academy," a private school set up to cater to wealthy whites (and even less wealthy ones) lest they be compelled to attend integrated public high schools.  Phil McCausland, reporting for NBC news, explains:

About 200,000 students moved to private schools between the 1960s and 1980s immediately after a series of Supreme Court decisions that began with that 1954 case. Two-thirds of those students came from six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, according to the Southern Education Foundation.

Personally, I blame Hyde-Smith much more for what she has said recently, as an adult, than for the decision her parents made to send her to a segregation academy.  The sins of the parents should not be visited on their children.  That said, her education in such a setting might explain her current views, and her lack of sensitization to issues regarding race and the ugly racial history of the South.   Further, a well-educated woman like Hyde-Smith should have caught up on a more accurate version of U.S. history by now.

The New York Times reported yesterday on this Mississippi race, and I thought some of the observations there were especially interesting regarding the views of "rural whites," a term that is sometimes a proxy for working-class whites.  The headline for Jonathan Martin's story is, "Across South, Democrats Who Speak Boldly Risk Alienating Rural White Voters" and here's part of the lede focusing on Espy's apparent effort not to alienate "rural white" voters:

When Mike Espy ... faced his opponent at a debate ahead of this Tuesday’s runoff election, he had to make a choice: confront Ms. Hyde-Smith over her comments about attending “a public hanging,” which evoked the state’s racist history, or take a milder approach to avoid alienating the conservative-leaning white voters who will most likely decide the election. 

He chose the latter. 

“The world knows what she said, the world knows that those comments were harmful and hurtful,” Mr. Espy said afterward, sounding not entirely convinced.

In a state where politics has long been cleaved by race, Mr. Espy was reckoning with a conundrum that Democrats face across the South — from Mississippi and Alabama, which have been hostile to the party for years, to states like Florida and Georgia that are more hospitable in cities but still challenging in many predominantly white areas. Even as they made gains in the 2018 elections in the suburbs that were once Republican pillars, Democrats are seeing their already weak standing in rural America erode even further.

Comparing Espy's situation to those of Stacy Abrams (Georgia), Andrew Gillum (Florida) and Beto O'Rourke,  Martin notes that "in rural county after rural county, this trio of next-generation Democrats performed worse than President Barack Obama did in 2012."  The Democrats also lost Senate seats and governor's race outside the South, in places like Iowa and Ohio "with more conventional candidates whose strength in cities and upper-income suburbs was not enough to overcome their deficits in less densely populated areas."

The story quotes Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist, saying something I keep hearing in the wake of the mid-term elections:  Democrats don't have to "win" the white working class--they just need to lose them by a smaller margin than they did in 2016 and 2018:

There’s a baseline percent of the white vote you have to get to win and you can’t get to it just through young and progressive excitement. The path from 48 to 50 is like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen.

How do you do that?  Some suggest you have to avoid making white people uncomfortable, and when there's too much focus on race and racism, "rural" whites are put off.  (What are the salient characteristics of "rural" here?  low-education?  traditional?  static?  insular?)   Is it guilt that causes them to be put off?  or "white fragility"?  Espy's avoidance of calling out Hyde-Smith's comments as "racist" seems consistent with this need to coddle whites--not to remind them of this nation's horrific racist past and the legacy of that history.  An anecdote illustrating that can be found here, from this Washington Post story about evangelical Christians in Alabama.  One feared "the racial divide" was getting worse. 

The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”  [See related stories regarding how we teach slavery here, here and here]  

She was suspicious of what she saw as the constant agitation of blacks against whites, the taking down of Confederate memorials and the raising of others, such as the new memorial to the victims of lynching, just up the highway in Montgomery. 

“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne. 

“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?” 

“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila. 

It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives. 

“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”

This also reminds me of a topic I've been preoccupied with in recent years, especially since the election of 2016:  the divide between the chattering classes' understanding of racism (which is very broad) and the much narrower definition of racism associated with less educated folks.  I wrote about it some here.  How are we going to bridge this gap and get white people to be more comfortable with --or at least more willing--to see how they have been beneficiaries of a racist past and that they have a responsibility to denounce that history and take the nation clearly in a different direction.  Surely it's going to include better educating our students (I'm talking public primary and secondary education) about slavery and its aftermath, something our nation has not done effectively.  Read more here and here.

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.