When I saw the clip of the Daily Show's Jon Stewart apeing a misinformed West Virginia voter last week, I had a flashback to a Saturday Night Live "Appalachian ER" skit, which featured rocker Neil Young embroiled in a mess of incest and depravity.
How the media loves its hillbillies.
Makes me wanna holler: The hand-wringing aftermath of the recent presidential primaries in Appalachia -- from western Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia and Kentucky -- says more about the media's prejudice and misperception of the Mountain South than any insights into the voting ranks and their racism or religious narrowness.
In the process, most pundits missed the two best kept secrets about Appalachia: In a region that has historically witnessed tremendous industrial upheaval and transition, there is no single Appalachia or Appalachian culture. Secondly, Appalachia has been a burning ground of change and an arena for rebellion and innovation for the past 250 years.
Yet, for a media quick to scapegoat or collect a soundbite for the evening news, the ignorant hillbilly gets trotted out of the woods as the exclusive symbol of the region, or, in fact, as the last acceptable slur in the country. Just as SNL has never aired a "Jewish ER" or "Black Sambo ER" skit -- thank God, recognizing that our nation has grown up on these matters -- the Daily Show's host probably will never track down and mock an elderly Jewish voter in Florida or an older African American in Michigan. Let's hope not.
Take hillbillies, on the other hand. Dating back to the 1850s, when George W. Harris created the character of Sut Lovingood, the "durn'd fool" with his "brains onhook'd" from eastern Tennessee for a New York newspaper, the media has obsessed over hillbillies, as if they have cornered the market on provincialism or racism in America. From bloggers on the liberal Daily Kos to untold television interviews, this same obsession has reared its ugly head in one commentary after another, blinding the writers from any historical truths about Appalachia.
One guest blogger for the environmental website Grist, a wonderful venue for investigative writers, completely wrote off the region as the "Deliverance" vote. Did this blogger ever consider the fact that the "Deliverance" vote in West Virginia overwhelmingly elects liberal Democrat Jay Rockefeller and anti-Iraq war icon Robert Byrd to the Senate, or that both senators have endorsed Obama?
New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, hands down one of the most insightful writers in the country and one of my literary exemplars, simply concluded in his latest missive: Goodbye Appalachia. (New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, who launched the newspaper on its course for world acclaim in the 1890s, came from Appalachia and modeled the Times on his Chattanooga editorial approach.)
Let's compare the coverage of the West Virginia with Rhode Island primaries. Unless we want to split hairs, a similar number of voters -- 8% versus 5% -- ranked race as the SINGLE most important factor in their vote for Senator Hillary Clinton. The media, though, never raised any concerns about racism in Rhode Island. This is New England, home of the free and brave, and the leaders in our nation's historical pursuit for independence, emancipation, and a higher literary purpose.
In West Virginia (and Kentucky), on the other hand, disregarding the fact that the Clintons have had a several decades-long relationship with southern Democrats in West Virginia, that Bill Clinton's folksy southern accent still goes down among the aging electorate like molasses, that Sen. Barack Obama ran a poor operation and did very little campaigning in the state and mainly invoked his Illinois coal state credentials in an anachronistic pitch for votes, the media preferred to dwell on the region's perceived legacy of backwardness. In truth, Obama blew it in Appalachia; Hillary reaped the rewards of the Clinton legacy.
Still, most reporters, exclusively interviewing older voters, went out of their way to find the most outrageous examples to confirm their hillbilly-biased pronouncements.
Outside of NPR, most of the media completely overlooked a new generation of deeply rooted activists, extremely organized around the critical issues of mountaintop removal and sustainable development, that has emerged as a strong voice in Appalachia.
Sut Lovingood and Jon Stewart notwithstanding, if the media had done a little homework on the true legacy of Appalachia, they have might had the chance to take a more profound look at the region's voters.
Consider this: Though Obama was trounced in the coalfield regions, the United Mine Workers of America holds the distinction of being one of the oldest integrated unions in the country, and in fact, endorsed Obama this week; that Black History Month founder, Carter Woodson, emerged out of the coalfields of West Virginia, as did 19th Century African American spokesman Booker T. Washington, and pioneering black nationalist Martin Delany; that the legendary John Henry pounded those rails through Appalachia. In more recent times, imminent African American critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Harvard University emerged out of the West Virginia experience, as did acclaimed novelist William Demby, one of the last living writers from the Harlem Renaissance.
A brief look at the larger mountain region further debunks this backward misperception.
Long before Rhode Island bucked the British Crown or their Boston neighbors tossed a little tea into the harbors, backwoods folks in Appalachia had already declared their independence from the British in 1772, incorporated their own articles of association, elected their own courts and sheriffs, and declared themselves the District of Washington.
A generation before New Englander William Lloyd Garrison launched his anti-slavery crusade, Appalachians launched the first newspaper dedicated to the anti-slavery issue in 1819, sent out abolitionist emissaries to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and eventually trained the famed Boston liberator. Garrison recognized Appalachian preacher John Rankin as the godfather of the anti-slavery movement.
In 1861, Rebecca Harding, a young woman writer from western Virginia, shattered the indifference of New England's literary elite to the working class and immigrant travails by publishing "Life in the Iron Mills," the first story of literary naturalism in the hallowed Atlantic Monthly and the nation. Harding Davis went on to deal with the issue of race and misperceptions by outsiders as early as the 1870s.
Nearly a century later, self-proclaimed "radical hillbillies" at the Highlander Folk School in Appalachia trained the shock troops of the Civil Rights Movements -- including Rosa Parks, four months before her historic refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 -- and refashioned and taught the anthem "We Shall Overcome" to young civil rights advocates as early as 1946. The first school to graduate an African American youth from its integrated high school ranks took place in the Cumberland mountains of Tennessee.
Random examples of Appalachia's progressive heritage? No, this is the backstory on our contemporary elections that should have informed some of the knee-jerk reactions to the region's complex role in the Democratic Primaries.
Perhaps the media, and Sen. Obama, will make a better attempt to understand Appalachia in the general election in November.
don't like us - fine - don't come here. North, South, East, West, Urban, Suburban, Rural - all y'all got issues like we do. Racism, classism, homophobia, pollution, exploitation, police brutality, war mongers, baby killers, billboards, suburbs and strip mauls that all look the same, whatever. Y'all don't have anything we don't have 'cept one big thing:
Appalachian ecosystems are the most biologically diverse and productive in North America (outside the tropics of Southern Mexico). Almost all the major river systems of the East, South and midwest form in our mountains. We got more different forms of life - plants, animals, trees, salamanders, mushrooms, etc... than all y'all. Got oak cabinets or hardwood floors? Thank our forests. Got electricity - thank our coal fields. Got clean water outta them big rivers flowin' through your little urban yuppie enclaves, thank our mountains (which, by the way, are being blasted to hell so you scared little suburbanites can leave the lights and nintendo games on all night long).
you can kick around hillbillies all you want. You got some in your town too, just without the accent or the mountains.
signed,
an Appalachian treehuggin' freak who knows that ALL the corporate candidates are lying sacs of business class crap, no matter their color or gender.
Mr. Jeff Biggers has never lived here- he only knows Appalachia from digging through libraries, and briefly visiting, mostly to promote his book. His pithy narrative is as superficial as it gets.
Booker T. Washington, Martin Delany, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and every other notable Biggers cites all LEFT Appalachia early in their life, and never moved back.
My kids hear the N word in public schools, sometimes from teachers. In an AP science class, a teacher was shouted down while trying to teach evolution, with idiocies such as "I didn't come from no apes, I came from Jesus." Violence and hatred of immigrants is systemic.
Biggers' rose colored glasses need a lens correction, and his blaming Obama for the low support is unconscionable. As high as 40% of Ky and WVA voters cited race as a factor in their choice of candidates; Biggers cites 8% because the surveys didn't ask for his criteria of "the SINGLE most important factor."
Very shoddy.
There are activists here doing truly noble work. It diminishes our lives to claim that we are any kind of status quo here.
When I was in law school, a "shorthand" way to depict a losing argument was to adopt a Southern or hill country accent because "everybody knows" "those people" are ignorant (and talk funny). A reductionist view of rural voters as "people who cling to guns and religion" and hate outsiders feels to me like the same kind of shorthand. It may have truth in it, but it is cynical and divisive and plays to liberal bias.
I grew up in the urban North and saw a great deal of racial stereotyping there. Michelle Obama has talked about experiencing racism at Princeton. Senator Obama was a community activist in Altgeld Gardens in Chicago, a public housing development that would not exist if racism did not exist in Chicago. So much for the enlightened Northeast.
These false distinctions (North versus South; Appalachia versus San Francisco; old versus young) only embolden the Republicans. We are missing a historic opportunity to move forward and heal this party and this nation (if that's what we really want to do and not just win an election).
This cuts both ways, both for and against. Why do you have to skew the statistics to make them seem worse than they are?
Many of us will never forget this.
Rumsfeld in particular. Maybe they should brows it up.
Interesting that no one has picked up on the article in yesterday's New York Times which quotes some Jewish voters in Florida saying that Obama is Arab, that he's a Palestinian, that he supports al Qaeda, and that they won't vote for him because he's black.
So do we make anti-semitic remarks because some Jews say these things? Why then do we make bigoted remarks about Appalachians when some say these things? Why do we assume its a majority when it is not?
Bigotry is bigotry. No real liberal is bigoted against mountain people.
Usually we call them Buddhas.
Bwahahahahahahahaha!
Look, I'm from and still live and work in Western PA. In my work volunteering for the Obama campaign here, I can tell you that I have heard my fellow citizens say some of the most ignorant, racist, sexist, closed-minded garbage imaginable about Obama AND Clinton. Most of my neighbors who are registered Democrats tell me they only voted for Clinton because they couldn't vote for McCain in the primary. And all of the people who told me that also said that they'd never vote for a woman for president. They are uneducated and proud of it. They call me an elitist because I have a graduate degree, never mind that my generation in my family were the first to even go to college or even, for the most part, to finish high school. They still are yearning for the steel industry to come back, never mind that it hasn't been here for 25 years. They fear and hate African Americans, Latinos, strong and outspoken women, Asians, city dwellers, and anyone with a college degree. They will complain all day long about the war, the price of gas, the price of food, their inability to afford health insurance, the poor educational system, the lack of good jobs, and government interference in their personal lives but will vote for the one person who has no solutions to any of those problems simply because he is white and panders to their fears and religious fantasies.
Try this: In my eyes, anyone and everyone who DIDN'T vote for Lord Prince Obama from PA, WV and KY, is a KKK member and therefore not worthy of even mentioning.
I think this was a very very good article, myself.
notice the last example of progressive appalacia you gave was 50 years ago
the only reason virginia elects democrats is because of the eastern part of the state
I was just in western virginia and I certianly didn't need to go out of my way to find ignorance and intolerance.
Having said that, I'm also offended by the entire Democratic Party. There is no way a Democrat should ever fail to carry West Virginia in a general election. Many people retain a Dem predisposition, and rightly so given that FDR and LBJ did more for the state than all the other presidents put together.
Today the state is a virtual third world colony of the out-of-state coal companies. A Democrat could easily win by promising to put at end to that, and to help restore the industrial jobs that have been lost. Of course that requires a repudiation of NAFTA, a commitment to environmental protection, and an end to the "clean coal" mythology. Hillary used race and her faux populism to exploit people's legitimate dissatisfaction. Let's see if Obama has the guts to appeal to West Virginians' legitimate anger and to win by playing on the level.