Arkansas bureaucrat (essentially) calls state's rural residents "white trash"

In early November, the State of Arkansas announced the purchase of 815 acres in rural Franklin County where the Department of Corrections intends to build a 3000-bed prison.  The state government did not consult with people in the region about the decision when the land was being purchased and the project planned.  My understanding is that they announced it after the land deal was done.  

Since then, local opposition has arisen, most prominently from an organization called the Franklin County and River Valley Coalition (Franklin County straddles the Arkansas River).  That organization's Freedom of Information Act requests surfaced offensive emails from Jonathan Duran, Deputy Director of the Arkansas Geographic Information Systems office, a division of the Arkansas Department of Transformation and Shared Services.  Some prior coverage of the controversy is here and here. 

Below are some excerpts from today's coverage of the matter in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, beginning with more back story on the emails:  Duran  emailed his boss a "'white trash' clip from the satirical animated TV show "South Park..

With the subject line "Franklin County town hall meeting," the first email from Duran states: "Do you think a possible townhall meeting in Franklin County about the proposed state prison might go a little like this?"

Below that in the email is a link to YouTube to a segment from "South Park" titled "They Took Our Jobs!"

* * * 

One of the characters is labeled "pissed off white trash redneck conservative." The cartoon characters in the clip repeatedly chant, "They took our jobs!"

Below the link Duran provided in the Oct. 31 email to Johnson [his boss], Duran typed: "They took our land!"

Yesterday, the River Valley coalition released a second email from Duran.  It says, "Do y'all feel like spy plane pilots now?" A smiling face emoji with a wink is inserted at that point.   "Is that an outhouse or an old refrigerator to the right of the house in the drone pic?" 

The coalition commented: 

His email was intended to mock and belittle the hardworking, law-abiding citizens Duran serves, undermining the integrity of public service in Arkansas. Such a comparison is a gross disrespect to the people he represents.

The coalition is calling for Duran to be terminated because what he said "disrespects rural Arkansas."  Their statement read: 

A simple apology or reassignment will not suffice. Duran's behavior demands more decisive action: the complete removal of Jonathan Duran from his position.  We call on Governor Sarah Sanders to take immediate action to uphold the values of professionalism, respect, and fairness within Arkansas' leadership.

The coalition's attorney declared,"The people of Franklin County and the River Valley deserve public servants who treat them with dignity and respect."  I could not agree more.  

I looked up Mr. Duran, and I see he proudly claims his status as a native of Arkansas, and with a degree from the University of Arkansas at Monticello, he may be from rural Arkansas himself.   That makes it even more disappointing, in some ways, that he's now the city boy ridiculing his country cousins. 

It will be interesting to see where all of this goes--both the prison siting and the State of Arkansas bureaucrat ridiculing rural folks--given Governor Sanders' popularity with rural voters--at least up until now.   

Here is a link to the Arkansas Times coverage of these events, including information on the land purchase being concealed until it was a done deal.  And here is Arkansas Democrat-Gazette coverage from on December 12, revealing that most of the locations the state considered were in Western Arkansas--and several were metropolitan by some measure, including a number in greater Fort Smith, on the Oklahoma state line.  Here's the "short list"; note that the Alma sites are in Crawford County, which has a population of just over 60,000, but is part of the Fort Smith metropolitan area:  

* Alma -- ball field;

* Alma -- train tracks;
* Alma -- south of ball field;
* Clarksville [Johnson County];
* Fort Smith -- end of airport/industrial park;
* Fort Smith -- Stephens;
* Fort Smith -- Treece;
* Greenwood -- Holland Farm 2;
* Huntington -- Holland Farm;
* Mansfield;
* Menifee -- ruled out due to water availability;
* Mulberry; and
* Rudy

The story also notes the search criteria for a site:  

* Minimum of 250-300 contiguous acres, relatively flat and not in a floodplain;
* Not within 60 miles of an existing state Department of Corrections facility (to avoid workforce cannibalization);
* Available regional workforce based on commute times;
* Availability of primary infrastructure (water, electric, feasibility of wastewater treatment, etc.); and
* Proximity to emergency services and medical facilities.

The document states that the Franklin County site "meets or exceeds our search criteria."  However, "[a]ccording to the site assessment, research and the whittling down of an initial 25,000 'candidate parcels', 6000 were within "[two] miles of a U.S. or Interstate Highway."  The Franklin County site ultimately chosen is 22 miles from the nearest Interstate, which is I-40, via the city of Ozark. 

On rural and white working class identity as favored in higher education admissions? The case of J.D. Vance

Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times must have had this in the pipeline because it was published moments after Joe Biden announced he would not seek or accept the Democratic nomination for President--leaving Kamala Harris his heir apparent.  Indeed, not long after he said he would not run, Biden endorsed Harris.  The headline for Polgren's column is "If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance."  Here's the lede: 

Ever since speculation began that Vice President Kamala Harris might replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, there has been a steady, ugly chorus on the right. The New York Post published a column that declared that Harris would be a “D.E.I. president,” and quickly the phrase ricocheted across the conservative media ecosystem.

Polgreen goes on to make the argument that J.D. Vance, Trump's selection to be Vice President, is also a D.E.I. candidate.  Here's how the argument goes: 

Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scottish-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.

And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’.

* * * 

Vance benefited from one of the most powerful forms of affirmative action that elite universities practice to attract low-income students: need-blind admissions.

* * * 

The sort of affirmative action that helped Vance gets easily overlooked; it’s less visible than race, making it easier to ascribe the achievements of white men to merit alone.

Polgreen goes on to note Vance's slim résumé.  She points out, "This champion of forgotten America made his fortune by writing a best-selling book that portrayed the rural white community he came from as lazy and undisciplined, responsible for its poverty and misery."

Then Polgreen turns back to Harris and the comparison she makes to Vance: 

Kamala Harris and JD Vance, despite their political differences, have a few things in common... They both come from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the halls of power. And now they are both engaged in the core work of politics — translating their stories into power.

This is a provocative thesis, and Polgreen may be right about Vance:  He may well have benefitted from a variety of affirmative action although, as she points out, we know nothing of his numerical metrics, e.g, LSAT score or undergraduate GPA.  But Vance entered Yale well over a decade ago, and I"m not at all sure that any of the benefits he may have enjoyed by virtue of his background are alive and well today.  In my world, I don't see any benefit to being a working-class white in higher education admissions.  Indeed, I see a lack of understanding of the working-class white struggle in that context--and an assumption that these students are retrograde in their political values and therefore not welcome, let alone favored.  

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.

Postscript:  Here, a week later, is Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post making a point similar to Polgreen's on identity politics and, one might say, what's good for the goose is good for the gander: 

Harris’s main qualification, at [the point when she was picked to be Biden's Vice Presidential running mate], was that she was easily the safest choice. Absent her identity, it’s hard to imagine she would have been anywhere near Biden’s top choice.

But you know what? You could say the same for almost every vice-presidential pick in recent memory. Would JD Vance be on Donald Trump’s ticket if he weren’t a rural White guy from Ohio? Was Sarah Palin chosen for her vast policy experience? Would Barack Obama have chosen Biden if he hadn’t felt he needed a validator for White working-class voters?

Further postscript:  On August 2, the New York Times Matter of Opinions titled its episode, "‘Mountain Dew and Racism’: Identity Enters the Election."  The first few comments, which I found disjointed, follow:

Carlos Lozada:  Wait, we’re going to talk about identity politics in this campaign and not talk about —

Lydia Polgreen:  Childless cat ladies? 

Carlos Lozada:  — JD Vance and women and parents?

* * * 

Lydia Polgreen:  Well, surprise, surprise. It didn’t take long for Kamala Harris’s identity to be politicized now that she’s running for president. Just this week, Trump questioned her racial identity at a Black journalist conference, insisting that she wasn’t really Black.

Archived Recording from Black journalist conference: 

Trump:  I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she Black? 

Interviewer:  She has always identified as a Black woman.  She went to a historically Black college.

Trump:  I respect either one. But she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way. And then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she went she became a Black person.

Interviewer:  Just to be clear, sir. Do you believe that she is — 

Trump: And I think somebody should look into that, too...

Lydia Polgreen:  And at the same time, race and gender seem to be animating Harris supporters. Have either of you guys seen merch for White Dudes for Harris? Have you stocked up? Or Carlos, maybe the Latinos for Harris is more your speed?

Here's more on the reference to Mountain Dew--specifically on J.D. Vance's assertion that Mountain Dew is considered racist by the woke left. 

The school vouchers story I've been waiting for because it centers rural schools and communities

This excellent long read comes from Alec MacGillis for ProPublica, and it came to my attention only because it was on the New York Times audio site.   Bottom line:  rural folks, normally conservative, have lots of reasons to oppose conservative state leaders when it comes to school vouchers.  Why:  school vouchers, by depriving public schools of money, will lead to the closure of those schools.  Of course, school vouchers, by channeling public tax dollars to private schools, will hurt all public schools.  But rural schools are more vulnerable to falling student enrollment and therefore to closure.  All of that has big implications for rural communities.  I've blogged about this issue previously, such as here, here and here (among others) 

Following are some key quotes from the story, which features vignettes from rural parts of many states, including Ohio, Georgia, and Texas.  But first, there's this lede from Tennessee:

Drive an hour south of Nashville into the rolling countryside of Marshall County, Tennessee — past horse farms, mobile homes and McMansions — and you will arrive in Chapel Hill, population 1,796. It’s the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s the home of Todd Warner, one of the most unlikely and important defenders of America’s besieged public schools.

Warner is the gregarious 53-year-old owner of PCS of TN, a 30-person company that does site grading for shopping centers and other construction projects. The second-term Republican state representative “absolutely” supports Donald Trump, who won Marshall County by 50 points in 2020. Warner likes to talk of the threats posed by culture-war bogeymen, such as critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion; and Shariah law.

And yet, one May afternoon in his office, under a TV playing Fox News and a mounted buck that he’d bagged in Alabama, he told me about his effort to halt Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s push for private school vouchers in Tennessee. Warner’s objections are rooted in the reality of his district: It contains not a single private school, so to Warner, taxpayer money for the new vouchers would clearly be flowing elsewhere, mostly to well-off families in metro Nashville, Memphis and other cities whose kids are already enrolled in private schools. Why should his small-town constituents be subsidizing the private education of metropolitan rich kids?

A further quote from Warner follows:   

I’m for less government, but it’s government’s role to provide a good public education.  If you want to send your kid to private school, then you should pay for it.

Here are some other excerpts, after McGillis notes that 11 states "now have "universal or near-universal vouchers, meaning that even affluent families can receive thousands of dollars toward their kids’ private school tuition" in the name of "school choice."  

Voucher advocates are "again and again ... running against rural Republicans like Warner," the Tennessee politician.  Those rural Republicans are also increasingly "joining forces with Democratic lawmakers in a rare bipartisan alliance.  That is, it’s the reddest regions of these red and purple states that are putting up some of the strongest resistance to the conservative assault on public schools."

Conservative orthodoxy at the national level holds that parents must be given an out from a failing public education system that force-feeds children progressive fads. But many rural Republican lawmakers have trouble reconciling this with the reality in their districts, where many public schools are not only the sole educational option, but also the largest employer and the hub of the community — where everyone goes for holiday concerts, Friday night football and basketball. Unlike schools in blue metro areas, rural schools mostly reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020, and they are far less likely to be courting controversy on issues involving race and gender.

* * *

The response from voucher proponents to the resistance from fellow Republicans has taken several forms, all of which implicitly grant the critics’ case that voucher programs currently offer little benefit to rural areas. In some states, funding for vouchers is being paired with more money for public schools, to offer support for rural districts. In Ohio, voucher advocates are proposing to fund the construction of new private schools in rural areas where none exist, giving families places to use vouchers.

But the overriding Republican response to rural skeptics has been a political threat: Get with the program on vouchers, or else.

That’s what played out this year in Ohio’s 83rd District, in the state’s rural northwest.

* * * 

In Georgia, of the 15 Republican state representatives who blocked a voucher proposal last year, more than half came from rural areas with substantial Black populations. One of them was Gerald Greene, who spent more than three decades as a high school social studies teacher and has managed to survive as a Republican in his majority-Black district in the state’s southwestern corner after switching parties in 2010.

Greene believes vouchers will harm his district. It has a couple of small private schools in it or just outside it — with student bodies that are starkly more white than the district’s public schools — but the majority of his constituents rely on the public schools, and he worries that vouchers will leave less money for them.

The story next turns to Texas: 

The highest-profile rural Republican resistance to vouchers has come in Texas, the land of Friday Night Lights and far-flung oil country settlements where the public schools anchor communities.

* * * 

Among those [legislators] targeted was Drew Darby, who represents a sprawling 10-county district in West Texas and who frames the issue in starkly regional terms: The state’s metro areas depend on his constituents to provide “food, fiber and hide,” to “tend the oil wells and wind turbines to provide electricity to people who want to be just a little cooler in the cities.” But without good public schools, these rural areas will wither. “Robert Lee, Winters, Sterling, Blackwell,” he said, listing some hamlets — “these communities exist because they have strong public schools. They would literally not exist without a good public school system.”

* * * 

“In rural Texas, there’s not a whole lot of private school options, and we want our schools to get every dollar they can. This doesn’t add $1, and it’s not good for rural Texas.”

* * * 

But in Tennessee, Todd Warner and his allies staved off the threat again this year. To overcome rural resistance, voucher proponents in the Tennessee House felt the need to constrain them and pair them with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for public schools, but this was at odds with the state Senate’s more straightforward voucher legislation.

Then the story circles back to Warner, the rural Tennessee Republican, with a vignette hitting on rural intergenerational roots in a place:  

For Democratic voucher opponents in the state, the alliance with Warner and other rural Republicans was as helpful as it was unusual.

* * * 

Warner remains unfazed by all this. He is pretty sure that his voucher opposition in fact helped him win his seat in 2020, after the incumbent Republican voted for a pilot voucher system limited to Nashville and Memphis. And he notes that no one has registered to challenge him in the state’s Aug. 1 primary.

Warner is quoted as saying, with a chuckle,

They tried to find a primary opponent but couldn’t.  I was born and raised here all my life. My family’s been here since the 18th century. I won’t say I can’t be beat, but bring your big-boy pants and come on, let’s go.

I'm just remembering that my most recent post on "school choice" is here, out of my home state, Arkansas.  It links to prior related posts, too.  Those posts are about school choice in the context of consolidation.  But vouchers are now also a thing in Arkansas, and a rural school advocate and patron is among the plaintiffs challenging Arkansas' new LEARNS Act, a voucher program and the product of a big push by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  Here's an October 2023 guest opinion piece in the Arkansas Times that makes the link between the LEARNS Act and the threat to rural Arkansas, "Disappearing towns: The LEARNS Act and the myth of schools as community panacea."  

"Rural" makes an appearance in chatter about J.D. Vance, but not in his convention speech

This is from the New York Times right now:  

Live Election Updates: J.D. Vance Addresses Republican Convention

A night focused on foreign policy featured fiery denouncements of President Biden on his policies and age. Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, assailed Democrats and the president.

Here’s what’s happening:

In the biggest speech of his political career, Senator J.D. Vance connected his difficult upbringing in rural Ohio to challenges now confronting the working class, decrying Democratic policies and Wall Street.

To be clear, Middletown, Ohio, population 50,000, is not rural by any measure.  Also, Vance did not himself use the word "rural" in his speech. 

Here's a report from The Hill's live reporting on Vance's speech, which played to "rural" and/or "hillbilly" themes:

Vance shared a story about his grandmother that drew loud applause from the audience.

“My Mamaw died shortly before I left for Iraq in 2005, and when we went through her things we found 19 loaded handguns,” Vance said, prompting cheers and chants of “Mamaw.”

“Now, the thing is, they were stashed all over her house … This frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family,” Vance said as the crowd cheered. 

— Julia Mueller

This is a quote from the NewYork Times story about Usha Vance's introduction of her husband's acceptance speech (emphasis mine):  

She leaned into the story about her husband’s impoverished upbringing and the laws of opposites attracting, highlighting their different backgrounds.

“When J.D. met me, he approached our differences with curiosity and enthusiasm,” Ms. Vance said. “He wanted to know everything about me, where I came from, what my life had been like.”

The couple met at Yale Law School, where Ms. Vance helped Mr. Vance organize his ideas about social decline in rural white America, the basis of his breakout memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” They were married in 2014 in Kentucky and have three children. She is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Here's an interesting tweet from the right, but it doesn't ring true.  

I exist in a very lefty media ecosystem, and I've not (yet) seen the left talking of Vance's "insufficiencies."  I've not seen his class of origin made an issue--nor, as of yet, any "insufficiency."  What I am seeing made an issue of is Vance's increasingly intolerant leanings.  

"How 'Rural Studies' is thinking about the Heartland" in the NYT

That's the headline for a feature story by Emma Goldberg in the New York Times.  The subhead is "What’s the matter with America’s rural voters? Many scholars believe that the question itself is the problem."

Goldberg's story leads with a mini profile of Kristin Lunz Trujillo, a political science professor at the University of South Carolina.  Goldberg tells of how Lunz Trujillo, who grew up on a farm in Minnesota, felt alienated culturally when she headed off to Carleton College as a college freshman.  (And a lot of scholars who grew up in rural America have probably had similar experiences; I'm reminded of this 2006 essay, "Farming Made Her Stupid.").

Some excerpts from Goldberg's feature story follow: 

A Rural Renaissance

There is an obvious reason for academics’ neglect of the political urban-rural divide until recently: It barely existed.

From the 1970s to the early 1990s, rural counties resembled urban ones in their presidential choices, including supporting the Republicans Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan and the Democrat Bill Clinton. It’s only since the late 1990s that there has been a marked gap between rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections, and it has widened ever since. In 2016, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of rural voters. Four years later, that climbed to 65 percent, according to Pew. And in the 2022 midterms, Republicans won 69 percent of the rural vote.

* * *

[R]ural communities can be wildly different socially. “When you aggregate to the national level, you lose so much,” said Zoe Nemerever, a political scientist at Utah Valley University. “I get frustrated especially when people talk about rural America as white America. In some states, it’s Latino America. In the Deep South, it’s Black America.”

Traditionally, political scientists argued that measuring the effects of place was just a proxy for looking at other parts of identity, like race or education. And because many did not come from rural areas, growing up rural didn’t tend to strike academics as a salient part of political identity.

Maybe because so few people fashioned themselves as “rural political experts” until recently, the few high-profile explanations for the rise of rural Republicanism were widely embraced by the chattering classes.

Goldberg discusses how Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas (2004) fueled some of the current generation of political scientists who are creating more nuanced narratives about rural voters based on carefully designed empirical research.  

Michael Shepherd read the book in high school, college and again in graduate school, and never changed his opinion. “I felt like it was pretty snooty,” said Mr. Shepherd, now a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, who grew up in Bardstown, Ky., the heart of bourbon making. “It really missed a lot of what was going on in communities like mine.”

And here's a great quote from Nick Jacobs, co-author of The Rural Voter (Columbia University Press 2023), a book that has attracted considerable attention.  

We contribute to the further denigration of expertise when we say, ‘This is what the experts say about these rubes and bumpkins.'  Who’s going to trust the experts when that’s what the experts have to say about you?

Importantly, Goldberg picks up on one of the key points Jacobs made following publication of Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman's White Rural Rage (and Paul Krugman's columns also using the word "rage" to describe rural white folks):  the distinction between resentment and rage. 

My beef with this Goldberg article:  she conflates "rural studies" with political science scholars who focus on rural voters.  That completely ignores the very robust discipline of rural sociology.  

You'll find lots of commentary on The Rural Voter and White Rural Rage (2024) here and here, among other posts on this blog. 

Literary Ruralism (Part XXXVIII): Jason Mott's Hell of a Book

Jason Mott's Hell of a Book is just that--in more ways than one.  I'm not surprised it won the National Book Award (2021).  

The most striking thing about the book, most readers would agree, is its insights into race in America, with particular attention to police violence against Black men. 

But another striking thing--at least to me as a ruralist who grew up in a tiny town in the American South--is the role of the small town in the story.  Indeed, more precisely, it is the role that growing up in a small town, Bolton, North Carolina (population 691), plays in the narrative.  Bolton, by the way, is not only the hometown of the novel's protagonist--the narrator telling the story in first person--Bolton is also the hometown of author Jason Mott.  Thus, Mott comes by his insights honestly.  

The book's opening vignette is set in a farm house, but the reader has no idea that this is of any significance until relatively late in the book, when the protagonist reveals his own small-town roots.  The author/protagonist returns there, which gives him an opportunity to comment on the impact of growing up in such a place.  Here are some representative excerpts, all from his return to visit his hometown after he becomes a famous author.  In the first, the narrator is entering Bolton with his agent, Sharon.  This excerpt at least hints at the attachment to place associated with rural America, as well as the major role played by religion:   

[Sharon] scans the small town as we pass. Coming through, we cross paths with nine churches over the course of the town. “Why does a town this small have so many churches?” Sharon asks.

“Because God needs the little people more than he needs anyone,” I say. There’s a knot in my stomach the size of Texas all of a sudden. I haven’t been back to Bolton in years, and with good reason. It’s a town with tendrils. And as soon as those tendrils get into your skin, you can never get rid of them. You can never get away. The truth of the matter is that I’d managed to get out of Bolton only because I snuck away under cover of darkness and something akin to invisibility. I never really fit into this town when I was a kid. I was always too much of something for the other kids I grew up with. I was too much of a bookworm. Too nerdy. Too weird. Too clumsy. Too skinny. Too black of skin. Too white of temperament. I never liked hunting and fishing enough. I never liked fighting or chasing girls enough. I never liked God or hated the devil enough. I never grew things in the garden. I didn’t eat okra and butterbeans. I couldn’t stand dumplings.

My family did the best they could to not make me feel like the freak that I always was. My cousins, God bless ’em, they loved me like I was one of their own even though I’d argue that I didn’t really belong to anyone. Especially after the emergence of my condition [elsewhere revealed as an overactive imagination that causes the narrator not to be able to distinguish between reality and the imaginary].

I can’t say exactly when it began, but I can definitely say that it’s linked to this small town of Bolton and my childhood. From what I remember, I’ve always been living in a different world. My therapist says that can’t be the case, not for the type of condition I’ve got. She swears that what I’ve got comes about only after a person has gone through some sort of trauma. And, typically, when you talk about this type of trauma, it’s got to be something beyond the scope of school bullying and general low self-esteem—both of which I had no shortage of in my youth.

My therapist and I have been through more than a few loops about what might have caused my imagination and persistent daydreaming to work the way it does.

“Can you think of any event that might have occurred?” she asks, over and over again, for the past five years since I’ve started seeing her.

“No,” I reply. “I had a pretty normal childhood. I grew up in a small town that nobody’s heard of in the ass end of North Carolina. Well, now that I think of it, maybe you could count that as a trauma.” (pp. 221-23)

This, too, is quite negative about small-town America, in particular small towns in the American South and how they treat Black folks:

Nestled in the sweaty armpit of Carolina swampland, surrounded by gum trees, and pines, and cedars, and oak, and wild grapevines, the town of Bolton is the land that time forgot. Go back far enough into the town history, and there used to be a railroad stop and a sawmill here. And that was at its pinnacle, somewhere around sixty years ago or so. Back then, the town had a population of maybe around three thousand people.

The main exports of Bolton are lumber and Black manual labor. The wood comes from the forests and swampland—all of which are owned by the local paper mill—and the labor comes from the town’s seven-hundred-odd residents. I wish that I could tell you that something more than those two chief exports comes out of Bolton, but there’s nothing else. Bolton isn’t a town that gives, but neither is it a town that takes. It’s the type of place that keeps to itself. It’s self-sustaining, the way the past always is. And though it changes a little now and again, the way an old piece of metal seems to change colors over the years as some thin patina comes along and begins to grow over it, at its core the town is the same that it has always been. And that’s how the people like it.  (pp. 220-21)

The next excerpt reminds me of the nostalgia associated with rural folks:

“There’s a field like that not far from my house too. Looks almost the exact same. My daddy said that it was where they used to grow cotton a long time ago. My daddy was always talking about the way things used to be back before I was born.”

“That a fact?”

“Yeah. It was like that was all he wanted to talk about. He used to have these books he would read to me on the weekend. These encyclopedias about Black people.” (p. 227)

Then there's this--also about religion--a familiar phenomenon for those who've grown up rural: 

Bolton Town Hall also doubles as a church because there is no separation of church and state in southern Black towns. God is everywhere, especially in the law. At least, He’s supposed to be. But I can tell by the tone and timbre of the people inside the walls of this small, ruined church that they’re beginning to believe less and less in the ability of God to come along and do the right thing in their lives. (p. 242)

This scene reveals both positive and negative associations with rurality in relation to the power and pain of memory: 

And one thing I always forgot is just how much I love the quiet of small towns and the long roads that seem to lead nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. Only a fistful of buildings to speak of. Houses that pop up like memories along the side of pavement and gravel sometimes. It’s a hell of a splendor.

But maybe it’s a good thing that I can’t remember everything the right way. I know what happened to my old man. But the old lady . . . something tells me not to think about that. It’s like the thought of having lost them both is too much to fit in my head so it chooses not to know either way. But there’s a catch to convincing yourself that you don’t know a thing: yeah, it keeps your life on track, but for the thing or person you’re choosing not to see or know, you’re taking away their whole entirety. And ain’t that something to do to a person? To a group of people? Ain’t willful ignorance a hell of a thing?

Being back here in my hometown, I think I can feel that box opening . . . and it terrifies me.  (pp. 253-54)

And then there's this, which shows Mott really knows a thing or two about the practicalities of living in rural America: 

“I wonder if there’s internet out here,” Sharon asks, eyeing the house suspiciously. “How in God’s name do people live like this? It’s barbaric.”

I can’t help but smirk. (p. 226).  

In any event, while the book is not primarily about rurality and the small-town phenomenon, Mott does show off his home-grown observations of rural culture and rural realities--as well as how urbanites (Sharon, the literary agent, is the quintessential city dweller of the northeastern variety) view them.  

Rural Policing (Part 2): Community solutions

In my previous post, I discussed police shortages in rural areas, some adverse effects of these shortages, and the rise in sheriffs making individual determinations as to what laws they will enforce. 

I am extending the discussion from that post by exploring how communities, particularly those of color, have found their own solutions for the lack of adequate policing and general lack of resources. I also explore the "punishments" these communities receive while police officers are kept mostly unaccountable. 

I was inspired to continue this discussion after watching Check-It, a documentary in which a queer community forms a self-defense group after multiple people experience brutal attacks for their sexuality. While the self-defense group was initially characterized as a "gang" because of their brutal attacks on homophobic assailants, the group has now created a clothing label and funded a community center where they provide members with resources, help people develop practical skills, and organize fashion shows. Check-Its change was triggered when some of its members ended up in jail, causing others to realize that their violence inevitably kept some members in the cycle of poverty they all wished to escape. 

Key to the development of the Check-It community was the lack of adequate police response and even violence by the police against victims who sought help from them. Similarly, rural people take up arms to defend themselves because of a similar lack of adequate police responses to violent crimes, as I discussed in part I. Like those in Urban, D.C., many rural people believe their individual gun ownership will reduce crime rates.  It seems that police everywhere are failing people everywhere.

However, a crucial problem arises when abandoned groups of people take their defense and protection into their own hands: the court system fails them after every other part of the criminal justice system has done so. For instance, when queer people, and more predominantly people of color, engage in self-defense, they disproportionately end up in jail.

That was the case in Out at Night, a documentary discussing the lives of four lesbian women who each were sentenced to over eight years of prison for stabbing a man that charged at them after yelling homophobic epithets. Despite meeting all the elements of self-defense and having video and witness evidence, the women's self-defense claims were rejected, and all four women were charged with gang assault. 

This was also the case for Luke O Donovan, who ended up serving 2 years for pulling a knife on a group of men that attacked him and yelled derogatory remarks at him. Surely, these are not the only instances in which self-defense claims have resulted in the imprisonment of innocent people. 

Furthermore, it is often the case that women will end up in jail for fighting back against men who abuse them. This hole in the legal system can be particularly damaging to rural women who often face heightened instances of domestic violence. Exemplified by Brenda Golden, an attorney, and Muscogee Nation citizen, who had the police called on her for hitting her ex-husband with an ashtray after he would not stop abusing her. 

The horror of these instances is that, after being failed by the police, who cannot or will not help them, people take matters into their own hands and end up in jail anyway. This punishment happens at the hands of those who would not help victims in the first place. What's worse is that the root of this problem is not particularly clear or simple. Cynthia Lee's, Minnesota law review article suggests that self-defense's "reasonable person" standard is to blame for the horrors. While Phyllis Chesler suggests that the problem arises out of our gendered expectations, " Women are held to higher and different standards than men, who are expected to be violent; people do not expect and will not tolerate women to be violent, even in self-defense." 

The silver lining that comes from this issue is that communities find ways to help their members, even when the state and police fail to step in. This brings me back to Check-It, who seemingly came to the realization that self-defense measures can have varying results, instead, they turned their efforts to providing resources that help people change their lives. 

While rural members who take up arms and stay at home might not experience such devastating outcomes, similar resource centers are created in rural communities. This often occurs through churches, as exemplified in The Overnighters, (another documentary), where homeless rural people, including homeless LGBT+ people, seek refuge in their local churches.

It seems that community work is crucial to solving policing issues; something that marginalized communities have always known and provided for each other. How many problems could be fixed or reduced if we offered more funding for communities to provide better resources for themselves? And should we leave communities to resolve these issues alone? Or is a complete revamping of our criminal justice system? 

Hollywood stereotypes of rural America

When I was a kid, I loved day trips to Chicago. I remember my grandmother having to sign a clearance contract because I "accidentally" stumbled onto the “Transformers 3” set and got picked up by a camera. Movies about Chicago, or even just ones filmed there, have always been my favorite because I get to see a little slice of my childhood on the screen. But when it comes to movies from my real childhood, tucked away in the rural Midwest, I often find myself cringing at the media stereotypes.

I was recently encouraged to watch the movie, “Hillbilly Elegy”, for a class about whiteness in Rural America. However, I fail to see how this movie was anything more than a jaundiced example of media tactics. Stories of underdogs overcoming poverty, abuse, and addiction can be found on any street in America, not just the rural backroads. Yet, Hollywood only uses this type of plot-line as a heartstring blockbuster for people of color, such as “The Blind Side”, or to further depreciate the image of rural whiteness.

Rural America is shown by the media to be either "hicks and hayseeds" or "criminal kingpins and murderers." Dramatic television shows such as Ozark and Sons of Anarchy depict a rural lifestyle of crime, whereas "reality" shows such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty uphold the hillbilly tropes. This is seen across Hollywood and has been around since the early 1900s. A 1904 film, "The Moonshiner", depicts rural Americans breaking the law in order to drink. The behavior shown in media such as this culminates and fosters these rural cliches to the point where Rosann Kent, Appalachian studies professor at the University of North Georgia, asks, "Why are we the last acceptable stereotype?" 

This cliche becomes particularly harmful when the political climate of America is considered. The US is increasingly politically polarized and this difference in opinion has been leading to violence. From the January 6 insurrection to protests that turned violent against speakers on college campuses, politics have become a method of assuming one’s moral character and can even determine one's safety and social acceptance. Rural Americans get portrayed as being alt-right and are even being credited as the reason Trump won in 2016. 

Rurality is painted by the media as being predominantly white, with a culture of poverty and addiction. Although there is some truth to both poverty and addiction rates in rural communities, many rural areas thrive culturally. A previous article can be found here describing how music is an integral part of Appalachian culture. By whitewashing rurality, Hollywood loses any appreciation for minority groups who inspire and elevate rural livelihoods.

Furthermore, there are many parallels exist in how rural Americans and people of color are depicted. Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film examines this further and argues:

Appalachian people in cinema have been portrayed as phenotypically white, but using the same tropes that have long been used to portray non-whites in film . . . The similarity in the way these groups are portrayed draws a connection between the treatment of non-whites and the treatment of Appalachians, both of which maintain and protect a particular image of whiteness.

I have personally experienced the negative impact of this "white trash" stereotype. When I moved to California, I experienced a culture shock so large I felt like I was in a different country. Being thrust into high-level academia with a background that matched these stereotypes, I was set up to be looked down upon. After the intro week of law school, I began to state that I was instead from Chicago, hoping that people would think I belonged there. I recategorized my uncle's hand-me-down tees into "vintage thrift finds" and made an aesthetic out of never owning clothes nice enough to ruin. However, I can't blame the people around me for making those assumptions. Most of my classmates are from urban areas and likely gathered their understanding of rurality through their media consumption. Even though many of the Hollywood portrayals are hyperbolic, the cumulation of negative stereotypes is othering rural people, and the misunderstood cliches need to be retired.

Rural women are vital to global food systems

As the United Nations Women Watch's overview on food security identifies, rural women not only act as food producers and agricultural entrepreneurs, they also informally facilitate food security and stability in their households and communities (another post on women in farming is here). Expanding on the latter point, both the UN Women's research on rural women and girls and a 2019 Root Capital article, "How Climate Change Impacts Women Farmers," suggests that rural women are well positioned to foster resilient agricultural hubs, due to demonstrated skill at community networking, mobilization, and adaption in the face of environmental threats and economic crises. 

Over the past few years, the International Day of Rural Women has consistently endeavored to draw attention to this often unappreciated reality. In 2021 the theme, "Rural Women Cultivating Good Food for All," spotlighted how investing in rural women engaged in agribusiness could help alleviate global food insecurity. Food insecurity, which has been exacerbated by recent climate crises (discussed here) and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (discussed here), affects upwards of 800 million people worldwide, including over 33 million Americans, who are disproportionately from communities of color and in rural areas (previous posts on food insecurity in the U.S. here and here). 

The premise, as informed by National Geographic's article, "Empowering female farmers to feed the world," is that gender-specific barriers, such as discriminatory practices, limited access to resources, and misogynistic social norms, prevent rural women from maximizing their agricultural and economic potentials. Consider, despite equivalent competency, on average women-run farms tend to produce smaller crop yields and generate less profit than those run by men. If barriers were eliminated, rural women might be able to close the gap between them and their male counterparts, in ways that would also strategically amplify their existing contributions to global poverty and hunger reduction. Citing the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the National Geographic article estimates that if women farmers were provided equal access to resources, then global food production by women could increase by up to 30%, providing food to roughly 150 million additional people. 

While obstacles to rural women farmers vary depending on regional particularities, certain impediments can be identified fairly consistently across contexts. Specifically, as discussed in a 2018 World Bank story, "Breaking the 'Grass Ceiling': Empowering Women Farmers," inequitable access to both land rights and financing opportunities, influenced by historic and ongoing gender-bias, emerges as a common limiting phenomenon. Synthesizing the World Bank story and the National Geographic article, this can be seen in certain developing countries where women comprise half of the agricultural labor force, but only make up 10% of landowners. Without autonomy over the land they are farming, women cannot structure land use and farming agreements to maximize their benefit. As a related matter, smallholder women farmers in these areas can struggle to access credit in the face of insufficient collateral and sexist cultural norms. Accordingly, they must operate under a funding deficit that can place advanced tools and techniques capable of improving production out of reach.

Focusing now on rural America, one can see that parallel limitations similarly inhibit women farmers. On one hand, as noted by the American Farmland Trust's 2021 report on "Women in Agriculture," women are currently outpacing men in agricultural education programs throughout the country (at UC Davis, in 2019-2020, 75% of students who earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture-related majors were women). Despite this, women are the principle operator on only 14% of U.S. farming operations. The American Farmland Trust report contextualizes this statistic within additional research documenting women farmers' obstacles to obtaining land, including exclusion from networks, challenges accessing credit and obtaining conservation support, and patriarchal norms that prioritize male heirs.

The American Farmland Trust report further notes that disparities in access to loans and capital hit women farmers of color the hardest. This is, in part, a result of women and farmers of color tending to run relatively smaller operations with lower revenues and weaker credit histories, but also the product of implicit bias in resource and loan provision. Additionally, as theorized in a 2022 National Institute of Health study, "Decolonizing agriculture in the United States," the predominant agricultural narrative in the U.S. has been constructed around white masculinity in ways that exclude women and people of color from our cultural imaginary of who a farmer is and should be. 

Juxtaposition of two feminist projects grappling with these issues shows a range of approaches being employed to support women farmers in the United States. The first, a One Earth-backed project, "Supporting Black Women farmers working to expand regenerative agriculture in the Southeastern US," embodies concrete resource-based programmatic support that must be paramount. Specifically, this project will expand on the American Farmland Trust's existing partnership with the Black Family Land Trust in order to promote land access, enhanced viability, and increased resilience for black women farmers. The second, FarmHer, a social media campaign initiated by Marji Guyler-Alaniz in 2013, represents a supplementary resistance strategy. This internet-based photo project aims to update modern conceptions of farmers in ways that recognize, celebrate, and recruit women.

Beyond these select examples, SeedChange, an organization committed to supporting farmers and combatting hunger, poverty, and climate change, provides broader recommendations for empowering women farmers. Specifically, its publication, "Women Seed Change," advocates for the following actions:

(1) strengthen women's leadership by funding women-led farmer organizations ... (2) prioritize women's knowledge and agency in climate resilient agriculture ... (3) invest in women farmers, including youth and indigenous women ... (4) develop gender equity frameworks to guide policies ... (5) enhance women's agency, decision-making power and rights over land and productive resources [and] (6) uphold the rights of women ...    

In short, rural women in agriculture are vital to global food systems, and they need robust support from a range of domestic and international institutions.

"White trash," rurality, and revenge in Percival Everett's new novel "The Trees"

The novel, The Trees, out next week, was featured on National Public Radio this morning, and Guggenheim award-winning author Percival Everett's discussion with NPR host Scott Simon intrigued me because it implicated both rurality and, more prominently, race and whiteness.  Here's an excerpt from the interview: 

Special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are the big-city heat from Hattiesburg. They're with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and they're in the small town of Money to investigate the murder of two men in the back room of the same shotgun-style house - one, a white man who's disfigured in a way so gruesome we can't tell you without a trigger warning, if you please; the other, a Black man, seems to just walk out of the morgue.

Simon observes near the end of the interview:

SIMON: I've got to ask you. I enjoyed the book a lot. So many of the white Southerners in this book are not just bigots. They're obese. They're dumb. They smell, as you write, memorably, of one, of excrement - and you don't say excrement - Aqua Velva and pimento cheese, which is an awfully clever phrase. And with no apologies made for white bigots, are you stereotyping white Southerners?

EVERETT: Welcome to club. Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

EVERETT: I am, in fact. How does it feel? That's my question. Yes, I'm not fair in this novel. It's not a novel about fairness. In fact, after I wrote the first page, my admission to my wife was, well, I'm not being fair, and I'm not going to do anything about it.

This left me wanting to know more, and then I found this by Christian Lorentzen on Book Forum.  This explains the premise of the book, which implicates revenge for the murder of Emmett Till.  I'll just excerpt a quote here from the lengthy commentary titled "Hillbilly Effigy": 

Not much present in The Trees are white liberals or leftists. The novel isn’t about them (us), unless perhaps it’s meant to flatter them with a vision of their redneck white-trash cousins getting a comeuppance at the hands of cunning and ruthless Black assassins (spoiler: the Black corpse is not the real killer, nor is it a ghost) and their Asian counterparts, avenging their own victims of lynching. Everett has had his go at white liberals elsewhere, most notably in Erasure, his satire of the publishing industry and the Quality Lit Biz. The Trees is looser and more freewheeling than that novel, Everett’s masterpiece.

Prior to that is this, also touching on class in relation to whiteness:

Most of the white characters in this novel are guilty: even if they are merely the descendants of the perpetrators of lynchings, they are unrepentant racists (or “know-nothing, pre–Civil War, inbred peckerwoods,” as one character puts it), frequent users of the N-word (with the hard r), stealers of livestock, or members of a pathetically diminished Ku Klux Klan. The racists are present all the way up the chain of American power.

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.  

Radicalization in rural America

Brian Groh, a novelist, published this piece in the New York Times titled, "The Radicalization of a Small American Town."  The "small town" is Lawrenceburg, Indiana, population 5,042, in the southern part of the state, not far west of Cincinnati.  Here's an excerpt: 

Over the past four years, my hometown has become radicalized. This is a loaded word, but it’s the only way to describe it.

As recently as 2008, I saw Bill Clinton speak at our community center, where the crowd was so large that people had to listen to him from loudspeakers in a nearby firehouse. The mood was electric. “People are broke at the end of every month,” he said. “This has to change.” He promised that with Democratic leadership, it would. An aggressive new energy policy would bring jobs, with higher incomes.

And this promise was very welcome. At the time, the best job I could find was at a call center, selling home security systems. But I felt hopeful. I stuck an Obama sign in my yard and a campaign bumper sticker on my old Corolla. Like a lot of my neighbors, I believed that Democrats would, in fact, improve the town’s fortunes, and on election night, Barack Obama carried the state.

But things didn’t improve. Not really.

In other words, Obama didn't/couldn't follow through on his promise of change.   And that became fertile ground for others to move in and influence rural politics.  In that vein, it is a strategy of People's Action to fight that radicalization.  I first learned of founder George Goehl and his work in this regard in an episode of Chris Hayes' podcast, "Why Is This Happening," which provides a great overview of this organization that is working actively to counter the actual white supremacy and white nationalist organizing that is radicalizing many parts of the rural United States.  

Black Lives Matter in rural America (Part VII): The flip side of the coin

I wrote this post in early June about the many rural and small town places where Black Lives Matters activists were taking the issue to the streets.

Among the small towns I was delighted to be able to mention in my June post was Harrison, Arkansas, population 12,943.  Harrison happens to be the place where I was born, and I grew up 20 miles south of there in neighboring Newton County, a place I've frequently written about here on the blog (see "my hometown" tag/label and the "Law and Order in the Ozarks" series).

Well, in contrast to that May protest in sympathy with Black Lives Matter, great obloquy fell on Harrison a few weeks ago when a YouTuber named Rob Bliss, having spent at least three days there, made and published a video about the place and its people--a video that has gone viral.  Bliss spent his time mostly holding a Black Lives Matter sign near the WalMart, and he had a go pro camera under his shirt, the lens peeking out from a hole or some such to record his interactions.  He then released a video montage of the most racist things people said in response to him and his sign.  After the video went viral, and the Washington Post picked it up, along with a number of other media outlets, including the nearby Springfield News-Leader, about 80 miles away in southwest Missouri.  The short video--just over 2 minutes--has now been viewed several million times on YouTube.  

Here's an excerpt from Gregory J. Holman's story for the News-Leader:

"Harrison, Arkansas is the most racist town in the United States," a man in the video says, characterizing Harrison as "Ku Klux Klan Headquarters." (According to public records databases, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan national director Thomas Robb uses at least three Harrison post office boxes, and the KKK website published makes reference to "The Knights Party whose national headquarters is in Harrison, AR.")

Then the video shifts to the parking lot of a Walmart and depicts a number of interactions between people visiting the store location — none of whom appeared dressed in stereotypical Klan hooded robes — and the man making the video.

"Have a little pride in your race, brother," shouted the male driver of a minivan. "White pride worldwide!"

"I wouldn't stay after dark, man," another man tells the filmmaker.

The video also shows several people making obscene hand gestures toward the camera and using profanity. In one brief conversation, a person says "(Expletive redacted) Black lives!" In another, a person uses a slur word typically intended to dehumanize Jewish people.

The video also shows a man wearing a Walmart employee badge asking the filmmaker to leave the store location.

The Washington Post story by Jaclyn Peiser includes this paragraph:

Bliss is a director and producer based in Los Angeles and is known for making viral stunts aimed at socially conscious messages — including a video from 2014 when he recorded a woman being constantly heckled while walking around New York. .... [Bliss] edited his [Harrison] footage down to a two-minute video, which he argues provides vivid firsthand evidence that racism is alive and well in parts of the country.

The Post story's link to the Bliss video shows the opening screen, which features Bliss standing in front of a billboard for two entities I'd never previously heard of "AltRightTV.com" and "WhitePride Radio.com."

Screenshot from Rob Bliss video taken in Harrison, Arkansas, July 2020

To me, the presence of this billboard is a big part of the story--a bigger deal than what folks said in Bliss's carefully curated video.  Here's my thinking:  I believe if Bliss stood for three days holding a Black Lives Matter sign, on virtually any street corner in America--or outside any Walmart in the country--he could gather an equivalent or greater number of racist or racially insensitive comments than appear in his Harrison video.  In fact, when I think about the Walmart closest to where I live in suburban Sacramento, the Walmart in Orangevale, California, I have no doubt of that.  This does not in any way justify what the people in the Harrison video said--nor what the ones in Orangevale might say given the chance.  My point is that these racist attitudes exist everywhere--not just in a place where a branch of the KKK has decided to set up shop, which is why Bliss selected that place.

What you would not see in Orangevale, California--or anywhere else in greater Sacramento--is a billboard like this one.  Why, I wondered, would the owners of the billboard, the Harrison Sign Company, permit this sort of advertising?  More on that below.

By the way, I did open the home pages of AltRightTV.com and WhitePrideRadio.com, and the headlines didn't look different from those you'd see on Fox News or OAN.   I'm not saying this makes these media outlets ok or unproblematic.  I'm saying that, on the surface, the only clear red flags the day I visited the sites were the names of the sites themselves.  I didn't click through to any content. 

Here's what the Mayor of Harrison said in response to this statement at the end of July:

On July 27 a video recorded in Harrison was released on various social media platforms. It has since been viewed by over 3 million people, who now know Harrison only through this distorted portrayal. On July 28, Harrison Regional Chamber of Commerce President and CEO, Bob Largent; Boone County Judge, Robert Hathaway; and I released a joint statement denouncing the video as unfairly representing Harrison and eroding decades of work to overcome our past racist reputation. I would like to take this opportunity to share some thoughts, feelings, and opinions I have about the situation.

​When the video first aired, several people, including me, came together to look into the truth behind this video and its creator, Rob Bliss. I believe this was nothing less than a professional “hit job.” Our opinion became clear: Rob Bliss, and a partner, both from Los Angeles, are professional agitators who saw an opportunity to exploit Harrison. Bliss presents himself as an “agent of change” when, in fact, he is only interested in making money, and doesn’t actually care about the issue. He has done similar stunts in other places. After posting his highly edited videos, he immediately starts a “Go Fund Me” page where he collects thousands of dollars in donations, in addition to the money he is paid by YouTube and other social media for views. He promotes his video and “GoFundMe” page until he has eked out all the money he can, and then he moves on to his next project. If you doubt this, I challenge you to do your own investigation. The words of the people in the video were way beyond horrible and cannot be justified. 

Those individuals should be ashamed of themselves. However, it is important to know that Bliss and partner spent at least three days in Harrison on a very busy street and in front of a very busy Wal-Mart. We estimate that about 80,000 people would have passed by in those 3 days. They were able to, through provocative comments of their own, which they did not record, get just a couple dozen of those people to respond with disgusting comments, making up just two minutes of highly inflammatory video. We have a local Black Lives Matter group that have been leading peaceful and productive protests. Rob Bliss did not contact this group at all for a partnership. Quinn Foster, organizer of the local Black Lives Matter protests, denounces Rob Bliss as a profiteer, out to make money from a movement in which he has no real interest. Visit the Facebook page of Ozark Hate Watch for more information.

​Many other southern towns and Harrison’s distant past includes some well-documented racist acts of violence. The town and our local race relations group have worked over many decades to overcome our history of racism and its lingering reputation. We are not the racist town we have been made out to be. The fact that the Ku Klux Klan and leader, have settled in nearby Zinc Arkansas, and that a few supporters have rented billboards to display their hateful message has only added to Harrison’s undeserved notoriety. Our race relations task force has worked to successfully remove four of the five privately owned billboards. They continue trying to remove the last one. Neither Bliss, nor the media has contacted our task force or our Black Lives Matter group for comments or insight into the true nature of the majority of people in Harrison.

​Since the video went “viral,” over three million people have seen. The story has reached at least 14 major media outlets, including an article yesterday in the Washington Post. We have been flooded with emails, social media posts, and phone calls from people spewing hate, vile comments and vague threats. This is one of the most devastating things that I have been through as Mayor, and there have been many. I know that when we are attacked, our community can come together to fight this. We must pray that we can move beyond this and become a better community because of it. I urge you to combat hateful comments with something good. Your opinion is powerful. Please respectfully stand up for our town whenever you get the chance.

These comments made by some of our very own citizens were reprehensible and horrible beyond belief. Like many communities across the country, we do have racist people among us, but we are not going to let a few define our city going forward. In the last few decades, we have taken community efforts to denounce racism on all fronts and we are committed to doing more.

The Harrison Chamber of Commerce issued a statement on August 9 that included this language:

The Board of Directors of the Harrison Regional Chamber of Commerce voted unanimously on August 7th to condemn racism in all forms and the hateful speech heard in a recent viral video filmed in the city. The Board’s action also formally requested the Boone County Quorum Court and Harrison City Council to do the same, as well as support legislation imposing enhanced sentencing for convictions associated with hate crimes. A proposed resolution for each body accompanied the Chamber’s letter. 

“To do what is right, our city and county must immediately address the legitimate concern of racism in Harrison and Boone County,” said Melissa Collins, principal broker at Weichert, Realtors-Market Edge, and chair of the Chamber Board. She continued, “Simply put, there should be zero tolerance for hate speech in our community. The Chamber’s unanimous vote on Friday, coupled with immediate action by the Court and Council, will be the largest show of community unity in anyone’s memory.”

Dr. Stewart Pratt, Superintendent of the Harrison Public Schools and a three-year Chamber Director, noted that the suggested resolutions reflect the core beliefs of area schools that all students are of equal value. Dr. Pratt stated, “I hope the Board’s action and suggested resolutions will encourage and assist our governmental entities to reflect the same beliefs about the importance of all persons and denounce the use of ‘Hate Speech’ and violence based on an individual’s race, sex, or socioeconomic status.”

A 2013 Democrat-Gazette story about a Harrison billboard that said "Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White," included this information about the history of Harrison as a "sundown town," as well as its current association with the KKK:

Harrison has been dogged by image problems since race riots more than a century ago. The problem was exacerbated in the 1980s when Thom Robb, leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, moved to Zinc in Boone County and began using a Harrison post office box for the group’s mailing address.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture says, “Though nowhere near as murderous as other race riots across the state, the Harrison Race Riots of 1905 and 1909 drove all but one African American from Harrison, creating by violence an allwhite community similar to other such ‘sundown towns’ in northern and western Arkansas” where blacks were not welcome at night.

The passage of time hasn’t put to rest Harrison’s reputation as racially biased. Harrison’s City Advertising Tourist Promotion Commission continues to consider hiring a marketing firm at an initial cost of $30,000 to combat the bad image.

That 2013 Democrat-Gazette story also included this information about who paid for that prior billboard:

Claude West, who owns Harrison Sign Co., said he had the “wrap” — the printed material — put on the billboard but he’s “just the middleman.” West wouldn’t say who leased the 12-by-24-foot billboard at $200 a month for a year.

A young man leased the billboard about three weeks ago, saying the statement on the billboard referred to the government, West said. The man told West anyone who complains about the government is called a racist, apparently referring to the fact that President Barack Obama is black.

“I’m not a racist, but I don’t like Obamacare,” West said, paraphrasing the man’s explanation.

“Listening to him, I didn’t see anything wrong with this,” said West. “Would I do it again? Probably. I don’t know why it has exploded like this. I think there’s a tension. I think people are uncomfortable about where the country is going.”

People, including the man who leased the billboard, have a right to free speech, he said.

* * * 

He said he has taken calls from around the country about the billboard and has been called “racist” for allowing it, an accusation he denies. He plans to make himself available during the protest today to answer questions, he said.

Also on the point about Harrison, Arkansas as the headquarters  of the KKK, I note from this piece published in the Chronicle of Higher Education two years ago that a town in North Carolina also claimed that "distinction," or more precisely that it was the home of the KKK.  Those may be two different things:  current headquarters v. home.  Hmmm.  Anyway, as I have written earlier, it's interesting to have grown up so nearby and never to have heard in my youth that Harrison had this reputation and supposed distinction.

I did not see this YouTuber story covered at all by the Harrison Daily Times, but I don't subscribe and may have missed something.  I do get the Harrison Daily Times daily newsletter by email--a default because I subscribe to the sister publication, the Newton County Times.  I understand from a friend who writes for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette that the statewide paper didn't cover vlogger Bliss's Harrison expedition because his intended audience was not local or Arkansas, but rather national.  Also, importantly, Mr. Bliss did not return the reporter's phone calls.  So, that statewide outlet did not run it as a news story, though Democrat-Gazette columnist Mike Masterson has written two columns about the matter.  I don't have access to them since I don't subscribe to the paper. 

In other "Black Lives Matter" news out of rural America, is this story, dateline Douglas County, Nevada (population 46,997), where the County Sheriff Daniel J. Coverley told the county library not to call 911 in case of an emergency.  Why was he miffed (and acting like a child)?  Because the library trustees had indicated their intention to discuss at an upcoming meeting a "statement supporting diversity and inclusion."  Here's what the sheriff wrote to the library:

Due to your support of Black Lives Matter and the obvious lack of support or trust with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, please do not feel the need to call 911 for help. I wish you good luck with disturbances and lewd behavior, since those are just some of the recent calls my office has assisted you with in the past.

The sheriff later recanted his threat.

Postscript August 23:  Re my comments above comparing Harrison, Arkansas to Orangevale, California, here's a headline from the Sacramento Bee a few days ago:  "Orangevale man accused of leading white supremacist group has gun order extended for year."  The judge commented in court in announcing the decision:

No one has the right to instill fear in other members of the community or act insidiously toward a targeted group such as a Jewish community or an African-American community. ... These are not jokes. He shouldn’t have the privilege of owing a firearm.

Like I said, sadly, white supremacists are everywhere.  

More conflation of rurality with whiteness in national media

I wrote about this a few days ago in relation to Paul Krugman's recent column, and now Eli Stokols of the Los Angeles Times reports: 

Trump’s denigration of cities is part of an effort to animate a base of rural, mostly white supporters while depressing minority turnout in places like Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia — a repeat of the two-pronged strategy that helped him to a surprising electoral college victory in 2016 and could be determinative again four years later.

* * * 

In reality, the country’s largest urban areas are major engines of the national economy and generate more tax money than they receive from the federal government. By contrast, most rural areas receive more from Washington than they generate.

Stokols' highlighting Trump's dog-whistling is fair enough, but I'd like to see writers with national platforms like his and Krugman's do more to acknowledge the racial diversity in rural America. 

On escapes, literary and otherwise, from Trump country

Don't miss Timothy Egan's op-ed piece in the New York Times today, in which he brings together Hillbilly Elegy (by J.D. Vance) and Educated (by Tara Westover) as documenting how to escape from "Trump country"--namely by access to education.  The piece is titled, "A Hillbilly and a Survivalist Show the Way out of Trump Country."  Here's a short excerpt:

The two great literary bookends of President Trump’s half-term of grift and chaos have come from survivors of the most broken white communities that helped put him in office. They also show us the best way out of the basement of American despair. 

How J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” and Tara Westover, who wrote “Educated,” escaped physical and psychological horror is the dose of Charles Dickens that makes these two memoirs so memorable.

I admit I liked Westover's Educated better than Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, though each resonated with me in powerful ways.  As for the latter, I have written a published response, which is included in a collection of essays just out from West Virginia University Press, Appalachian Reckoning:  A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy.  The book is available for pre-order now and has received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Forward Reviews, which called it "[s]tunning in its intellectual and creative riches." Publishers's Weekly also gave it a very positive review.  My chapter is called "What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Race in 21st Century America." 

I'll be on a panel discussing the book in March at the Appalachian Studies Association meeting in Asheville, North Carolina.  Below is a screenshot of a Tweet by one of the volume's editors, Meredith McCarroll.  I think we're all still in shock that Ron Howard has paid $45 million for one man's very skewed and partial insights into his upbringing.   

Cross-posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law.

Colleges and universities (including elite ones) paying more attention (in a good way) to rural students

National Public Radio ran a lengthy feature yesterday on rural college students as part of its series, the Changing Face of College.  This piece is chock full of sensitivity to the rural student experience, and it features profiles of students who hail from a range of rural-ish places in Michigan, from the Upper Peninsula to not-that-far from Ann Arbor and close-to Holland, in the western part of the state.

The title of the piece by Alissa Nadworny is "'Going to Office Hours is Terrifying' And Other Tales of Rural Students in College."  Here is the post I wrote for Working Class Whites and the Law, which features some excepts from the story as well as other recent media coverage of socioeconomic class diversity in higher ed.  In this post for Legal Ruralism, I want to focus more on "rural" and less on "working class white" generally, though it seems that the rural students in the Nadworny feature are all white (and seemingly all working-class white). 

The story (as well as my WCW post about it) focuses in part on the culture shock rural students experience when they go to large, urban-ish campuses. The following quote from Alexandra Rammacher of Charlotte, Michigan, population 9,074, highlights the lack of anonymity of rural places in contrast to the the 46,000-student Ann Arbor campus:

There were so many people!

Every day you would see a face you had never seen before — many faces you had never seen before.  I was used to seeing a group of people I already knew. It was just a huge there-are-people-in-the-world revelation.

Keep in mind that her hometown Charlotte, as the crow flies, is not that far from Ann Arbor.  Here is an excerpt regarding Kendra Beaudoin of Lake Linden, population 993, in the storied Upper Peninsula, a 10-hour drive from Ann Arbor:

Beaudoin is the daughter of a single mother, and she helped raise her four younger siblings. Back home, she didn't know a lot of people with a bachelor's degree; fewer than 1 in 5 rural adults aged 25 and older have them, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.  

(Here's a really old post on the extent to which people in my home town had college degrees.)

At Michigan, Beaudoin is majoring in biopsychology, cognition and neural science and has co-founded a club for first-generation students to give one another moral support and advice. 

"I'm still intimidated by professors. Going to office hours is terrifying," she says. "There were definitely moments when I was like, 'I'm only going here to fill a diversity quota and I don't really belong here and everybody else is so much smarter than me.' "

* * *  

Other obstacles are more mundane. Take crosswalks. "Those don't exist where I lived," Beaudoin says. She stops and waits for the light to change while other pedestrians brush past her. When her phone broke, leaving her without one for several months, she used a paper map to find her way around campus. She still has trouble figuring out the bus system. Yet, as someone from a rural place where self-sufficiency is valued, "The idea of going to someone and asking how this works ... it was almost like I felt bad for not knowing."

Beaudoin also offers a comment that goes to students' different attitudes stemming from class:

It's almost like a sense of entitlement.  Some students, they're comfortable, they're relaxed, they're OK with talking back to the teachers or arguing a grade.

Speaking of entitlement, the story also comments on the shock to some students of seeing others wearing designer labels.  A student from Au Gres, Michigan, population 889, observes:

Everybody else has got the coin that I don't have. Those Canada Goose jackets? You're kidding.  I'm walking down the road and I see people with Gucci or Versace.

Canada Goose parkas can cost up to $1500.  (Here's a recent story out of England about a high school that banned Canada Goose coats by way of "poverty proofing" the school and making it less alienating for students whose families cannot afford ht pricey jackets).

NPR reports that some colleges and universities are doing more to attract and support rural students qua rural students--because they are rural and not merely working-class white.  (Note the contrast between this news and recent rhetoric regarding the Harvard affirmative action litigation, which implied that rural students don't represent diversity or bring perspectives that would be valuable in higher education).  Nadworny quotes Naomi Norman, associate vice president for instruction at the University of Georgia, which recently launched a program to provide scholarships and mentors to support rural students:

We never really came to terms with the fact that they needed extra support.

The story continues by noting what the the University of Georgia is on the vanguard of four-year institutions that is providing financial and academic support to rural students, just as they do urban ones. 

The Georgia program came about after a task force found that rural students have higher dropout rates than their classmates and couldn't afford the $1,500 fee for the existing summer program for incoming freshmen. The University of North Carolina system plans to increase rural enrollment by 11 percent by 2021, and several Pennsylvania universities and colleges have started scholarships for students from rural Schuylkill County, a onetime coal-producing area.

It is exciting to see colleges and universities, both small and large, public and private, setting rural-specific goals like these.  Most such initiatives are recent.  Kent Trachte, president of Lycoming College, where 20% of students hail from rural Pennsylvania, says: 

It's fair to say that until fairly recently, we just took our rural students for granted.           

That's an interesting way of expressing things for a few reasons, not least because it draws attention to the fact that enrollment of rural students has been declining nationally. 
   
Lycoming College recently received "the second half of a $1 million grant to go toward scholarships for residents of two such counties."

Nadworny notes that the University of Michigan is now being intentional about extending to more rural students the range of academic and financial support it provides to others in the first-generation category.  When its Kessler Presidential Scholarship Program was founded a decade ago, 90% of participants came from nearby Detroit and other urban areas, but "nearly a third of this year's 36 Kessler Scholars are from rural places."

Michigan is adding scholarships and academic support for as many as 20 students from the Upper Peninsula next fall, and Cornell University is launching its own program, modeled on Michigan's.

The NPR story also touches, importantly, on the (in)visibility of the "rural" student and the optics of diversity:

One challenge faculty and staff face in helping rural students: They often don't realize that rural students, who are predominantly white, need the extra help. "If you are an instructor in a class looking out, you cannot identify [a first-generation rural student] in the way you might say, 'Well, I have an African-American student in this class,' or, 'I have a student of Muslim identity in this class.' So we start there," Gibson says. "What the student is experiencing in a classroom situation or in a dorm situation may or may not be visible."

I wrote some about that here and here.

One really exciting aspect of this piece is that it suggests that some universities are beginning to see  rural as a desirable characteristic because it broadens political diversity, even as it also (at least partly) re-affirms stereotypes of rural as conservative and Republican. 

Check out this quote from a University of Michigan student from rural (or at least exurban) Louisiana:

They expect a yee-haw.  They expect me to be some extreme bigot.

The student from Au Gres, Michigan, one of 55 students in his high school class, notes that people in Ann Arbor often assume he is "Republican. And poor. And a farmer."

Another rural University of Michigan student states:

It's right that a lot of people from rural towns are conservative, and that's not me so I don't love going home and butting heads with people who never leave and never open themselves up to something different. They're just going to stay on the same farm their whole life with the same values and do the same thing. I'm just trying to experience everything.

And here is an excerpt that suggests appreciation for what rural students bring to the broader discourse, especially in this extremely polarized political moment:

"If we want to increase conversations across party lines and ideologies, we have to be exposed to one another," says Sonja Ardoin, assistant professor for student affairs administration at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and a onetime rural student herself.

Kent Trachte of Lycoming College notes, in a similar vein,

We in higher education had better be thinking about how do we bring together young people from these different backgrounds to a place where they can hopefully have civil discourse.

Again, contrast that constructive view with the scoffing at rural perspectives we saw in commentary about the trial over Harvard's affirmative action program this fall.

And all of this leads me to the big question I've been asking for several years:  What are scholars doing to ensure that the sorts of knowledge and cultural capital that rural students bring to college are appreciated?  Are we conveying to our rural students (however defined?) that they are valued?  (A very provocative piece of scholarship related to that question is here).  Are we doing what it takes to retain them in higher education?

These questions are near to my heart (and mind) right now because I've just finished teaching a seminar to first-gen, first-year (formerly freshman) students at UC Davis--undergrads, not law students.  I created the seminar, called "The First-Gen Experience in Scholarly and Popular Literature," and in it, my students reflected on and told their own stories of how they got to college.  Who were the key mentors?  What were the primary obstacles? They also reflected on the support they need to succeed at UC Davis.  Almost all of the students were urban, but a few had some claim to knowing something about rurality.  One was from Sonoma, an example of rural gentrification, and one was from Stockton, in the great Central Valley.  Some of the students' parents had worked as agricultural laborers.   By and large, the students weren't rural--and they also were not white, but I felt like a lot of the obstacles they are facing cross color lines and geographic lines.

All of this takes me back to what I wrote here.  Don't we want the greatest talent from all of America, rural or urban, whatever skin color, in our best colleges?  Don't we want--indeed, need--to develop it for the common good?

For more posts on rural students and higher education, check out the ones here (2008, the first year of this blog!, which shows how long this issue has been on my mind), here (2017), here (2010), here (suggesting elite admissions bias against rural students, 2013), or here (back to 2008) or just search Legal Ruralism for "college degree."