Country Roads

Marginal Whiteness and the Highland South in the Mainstream Imaginary

A few weeks ago, I was driving through Kentucky with my partner. We were visiting a couple friends and, as bookends, I gave a talk at a university in southern Ohio I’d been invited to and she gave one at a university she’d been invited to in the western part of the Bluegrass State. It had been a long time since I’d been on a proper road trip, and if there’s one thing I’d missed about life in the blight that is the US, it was road trips. And root beer. And brownie fudge sundaes. And that hint of a feeling of how hugely meaningful it would be, on a planetary scale, if this settler state could be abolished by all the various peoples who have been dispossessed and recruited by it. Okay, it’s a long list.

And even though I have a wee grudge against that guy from Colorado singing an ode to West Virginia by naming, exclusively, rivers and mountains that are found in Virginia, nonetheless I was belting out “Country Roads” for what was probably, for my poor companion, an obnoxious number of hours, because, well, it’s a nice little song, and we were avoiding the interstates and driving on some beautiful little country roads through those winding hills, roads that just beg to be sung to, and besides, fuck Virginia. Though I’m fully partial to the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains, them having been my neighbors during many of my younger years, Virginia was the first (successful) British colony in North America (Death to Roanoke!), and West Virginia split off from Virginia to oppose the plantation owners’ drive to protect slavery.

Fortunately for everyone, my vocals were not our only entertainment through our long hours of driving. Actually, it was one of the best singers and songwriters around who was the center of our carbound attention, Dolly Parton, star of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America. The podcast has a couple wretched moments, like when they buddy up to a military veteran who does security for Dolly and gratuitously, gushingly, ask him to shine a wholly uncritical light on his time in one of the US government’s overseas occupations. But overall, the interviews are artful and illuminating, and Dolly herself is simultaneously a guru and a sweetheart.

For me, the most engaging segments have to do with love and musicology, but there are also interesting tidbits for a conversation on racism and capitalism in the South, even though the podcast sidesteps race and even though Dolly is a fixture of the capitalist economy in Tennessee, one state to the south of Kentucky.

One such tidbit is a historical and linguistic fact I wish many more North Americans were aware of: that two of the most common slurs for those caricatured as backwards whites, “redneck” and “hillbilly”, actually tell a story that greatly problematizes the mainstream conception of what racism is and how it works.

In a nutshell, the rednecks were union organizers in early 20^th century Appalachia, wearing red bandannas around their necks in the heady days of West Virginia’s Coal Wars, which occurred not long after the Mexican and Russian revolutions. This I already knew. But what the podcast said about the origins of the epithet “hillbilly” seemed equally exciting, but a little confused. Something about poor white people in the mountains who refused to scab or who showed solidarity with Black people during the days of segregation. The Wikipedia article on the term presents the opposite picture, claiming that the hillbillies were the ones who scabbed during something called the Black Patch Wars, and the article on that conflict doesn’t mention anything about race. I did some research, resulting in this article, about how what is presented as an early 20^th century class conflict in Kentucky and Tennessee against monopoly capitalists actually obscures a central theme of white supremacy and social control.

The full histories are complicated, but suffice it to say, both “redneck” and “hillbilly” are insults popularized by elites to demean a subversive or potentially subversive social group, presenting them as ignorant, backwards, and—in more recent decades—racist.

The force of these tropes is present and severe. After my partner gave a talk at that university and was speaking with students, several mentioned how fear of falling into that stereotype affected their choices around where to live, what to study, where to work. And it seems that after moving to a small city or going to university, they all suppressed their accent.

Incidentally, my grandma and—for some of his youthful years—my grandpa grew up in the Deep South, but in the war my grandpa joined the Navy and stayed in it afterwards, so they moved around a lot and largely suppressed their accents, too. I grew up speaking CNN English with only the slightest Virginia polish, but it never felt fully comfortable, like I was always making an extra effort. Unlike my brothers, after high school I moved deeper south and before long it felt like my mouth was relaxing, and a little twang sprouted up.

One time, going back to visit a friend near where I grew up, we spotted a newly installed sign above the bend in the creek where we always played. Suspecting bullshit, we approached and read with trepidation. It turned out to be a treasure and a tragedy. A historical marker, identifying this as the spot where Confederate troops executed a white abolitionist preacher. They also tried to execute a Black abolitionist but he took a bullet, played dead, escaped, and as near as they can tell spent the rest of the war working the Underground Railroad.

Since moving to Catalunya, I’ve sometimes identified to people not very familiar with US geography as coming from the South. When they see Virginia on a map, they invariably say, “that’s the middle, isn’t it?” But there is no middle. It is presented as an antagonism with two sides. A little bit of history, pondering on how the West largely escapes this bifurcation, makes it plain that North and South, which are still common identifiers today, refer back to slavery and the Civil War.

But this was another conflict in which the two major sides were just different flavors of bad. Contrary to wavers of the Confederate flag, the South was most definitely fighting to preserve and expand slavery, as their own articles of secession make clear, but the North was not fighting to abolish it. That wasn’t even a goal of theirs in the first years of the war, and they only adopted it to stop England and France from aiding the South and to make it easier to recruit emancipated Blacks into their flagging military.

The real heroes were the abolitionists and activists of the Underground Railroad; the Black people who revolted, killed or chased off the plantation owners, and set up communes (which were subsequently suppressed by the Union army); the people, largely poor immigrants, developing early forms of labor resistance in the nascent factories that would constitute the new regime of forced labor; and the Native peoples in the Great Plains and over the Rockies who were fighting with everything they had against the expansion of that horrible death machine that animated every move of both North and South.

Nonetheless, it’s an easy point to score for white progressives today to position themselves as not being southerners, and if they do suffer the misfortune of being from the South, to suppress their accent and shunt off all the opprobrium onto those despicable hillbillies and rednecks. It’s another example of the South acting as a container, a stand-in for all the ugliness of whiteness.

Curiously, this is symmetrical to what we saw around “carpetbaggers” in the Black Patch Wars. The carpetbaggers—exploitative entrepreneurs who hoarded wealth, monopolized resources, and made life worse for people in the post-war South—were cast as northerners, but in fact many of them were southerners. Because to be a carpetbagger, you didn’t need a yankee background. You needed to be a capitalist. Turning it into a geographical distinction was a clever bait-and-switch, which makes me wonder, how many carpetbaggers were plantation owners, or the owners of cotton warehouses, who were turning their fortunes to new uses and who also had enough sway in the commercial media to popularize a trope like that of the yankee carpetbagger?

Nowadays, when one can regularly spot Confederate flags in New York and Ohio, the meaning of the South, at least among white people, has shifted. For one half, it’s part of the narrative of victimization and betrayal, a classic strategy by which a privileged group, in this case white people, prepare and solidify a reactionary movement against their social enemies. This time around, they have their sights set on Black people, Indigenous people, trans and queer people and others who threaten a patriarchal gender binary, immigrants who don’t try hard enough to broadcast the anglo brand of whiteness, the political party that doesn’t follow their agenda, and progressive and radical whites.

For the other half, the South is a caricature that proves that they are the good whites. It’s electoral strategies that chalk up the southern states as losses so that the Democrats never have to embrace or even understand real anti-racism, they just have to be better than the Republicans. It’s a far away place devoid of interest to the globetrotters who have gone on vacation in Kenya and Malaysia, who are vocally shocked by the utterances of conservative politicians, who shook a Black person’s hand at a fundraiser, who are noticeably scared when they pass a Black person on the street, on those few occasions they have to walk in a mixed neighborhood. And it’s an accent they can put on to signify ignorance, backwardness, the bad whites.

Where does the South lie, for this second half? Who is more southern? Is it the resident of a trailer tucked back in a holler, up Briery Branch, Virginia, the person who cuts the grass at the cemetery outside Mt Carmel, Kentucky? Or is it a real estate agent in Atlanta, Georgia, a hotel manager in Miami, Florida? Clearly, the answer is that the former two better fit the caricature of who is more southern, even though the latter two are located geographically farther south. In other words, South favors the rural over the cosmopolitan, and poor over rich.

A boundary has shifted, as far as Kentucky is concerned. When the Civil War broke out, the western part of the state was firmly in the hands of the slave-owning, plantation aristocracy, whereas the mountainous eastern part was mostly free of slavery, home to some free Black communities and abolitionist whites. But as I drive through the winding country roads of the Bluegrass State in the present day, it is clearly, firmly, in the southern camp. And then a thought occurs to me.

If North and South is a false opposition, and the South isn’t even really a geographical concept, what is the true opposite of the South? What social category most pretends to represent that which is unsouthern, at least that which opposes the rural, redneck corner of the South. What epitomizes the values of the cosmopolitan and upper class? And the answer, paradoxically, is whiteness. Whiteness owns access to cosmopolitanism, it gives out the membership cards for who can be considered worldly, because it consumes the flesh and the labor of the entire world. It invented the class system and presents itself as upper class to orient the entire world towards the science and culture and achievements of those who have been the architects of colonialism since the first slave ships set sail.

It’s not actually a question of opposites. A force that exerts hegemony must contain itself and its opposite as well. Just as whiteness projects its own brutal methods (scalping, rape, pillage) onto those it deems “savage,” it must also condition those mercenaries, overseers, and workers who are invited into whiteness without being economically and politically integrated into the structures of social control: lower class whites.

White trash are basically white people who do not act like white people, who do not aspire to whiteness, in the eyes of the upper classes who define and organize it. Rednecks and hillbillies are white people who did not act like white people because, historically, they put solidarity ahead of the colonial project or they did not heed the orders of the plantation owners. They were signalled out as ignorant, backward, and violent as a warning: that if they continued, they might not be treated like white people anymore, they might lose the protections of privilege.

It’s a highly effective arrangement, and it’s worked to sabotage what could become revolutionary struggles, in one form or another, for centuries. My next question is, how do we overcome it? And my impulse is to look towards the fires of solidarity that are sparked in the streets. And while those fires are real, and transformative, they have not done enough to sow the seeds of profound, lasting solidarity across the frameworks of race and colonialism.

So next my brain gets a little less dramatic, seeks out a more humble scale, and connects with a memory. We’re in that small Kentucky college town, at a restaurant. Professors, department heads, figures whose position I don’t fully understand, are taking my partner out for dinner after her lecture and classroom talk. Two students have been invited as well, and I get to tag along as the bf. It’s my first time at one of these things. I’ve been invited to plenty of universities, in fact my talk in southern Ohio was just a few days earlier, but I’m not an academic, it’s usually grad students or adjuncts calling for my rabble-rousing services, not a whole department, so I’ve never gotten the backstage pass or the after-party or whatever you’d call this part of the whole thing.

My partner killed it today, seamlessly weaving together threads of gender and race and class and trauma and transformation. Memoir was the loom she was using, personal experience the yarns, and the frames and shuttles were all built from the solid wood of theory. She casts unsettling anarchist and feminist subversions into relief, giving them a texture anyone can reach out and run their fingers through.

I can tell it’s been a really meaningful conversation for the students at the dinner. They feel validated, alert to a new angle on a problem they’ve been grappling with their whole lives. (It’s also been meaningful for me, another reminder that I don’t have to present as some angry or arrogant intellectual, hiding my lived experiences, hiding how when I talk about anarchism and ecology and patriarchy I’m actually talking about things that are as intimate as an open wound or as the one beautiful thing that keeps you going.)

They mention their accents, the stigma, their conservative surroundings and need to distinguish themselves somehow. I’m guessing, but I’d say the majority of their university experience would teach them that in order to be engaged feminists and anti-racists, to fight the oppressive systems that are dominant in their surroundings, they would need to suppress their accents even more, get degrees, find a job in some city on one of the coasts, and make enough money to be able to donate to NGOs.

The same bullshit that has allowed patriarchal, white supremacist systems to glide along, scot-free, for centuries.

This humble answer, then, is about stories. Concrete stories, like the ones my partner told in her lecture, or like the one I discovered about the Black Patch Wars, following up on a serendipitous loose thread I came across in my path through this story I’m telling you now. But also, the practice of storytelling, of being honest about where we’re coming from so we can more honestly decide where we want to go. Of putting out all the awkward details and not shutting up about the ones that don’t fit neatly into the theory of the hour (or the century, in the case of some academic dinosaurs).

And even moreso, the practice of listening. Because I don’t think you can learn to be a storyteller—much less a good anarchist, a good feminist, someone participating meaningfully in the abolition of whiteness and colonialism—without learning to listen to the stories being told around you every moment.

I hope that the stories those students heard that day help them consider other options. Not the straight interstate out of here, but the winding roads that lead us back home, to places of origin, to places of discomfort and pain we’ve been avoiding too long, and also to places of safety, where we can be who we are and who we need to be.

Songs

John Denver, “Country Roads”

Dolly Parton, “Hold Me”

Nora Brown, “The Very Day I’m Gone”

Recommended Reading

My article on “The Black Patch Wars,” which I researched and wrote, rather unexpectedly, in the midst of writing this newsletter

Denise Giardina, Storming Heaven, one of a trilogy of novels I highly recommend, historical fiction set amidst the backdrop of class conflict in rural West Virginia

I keep recommending this and I won’t stop, Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, Dixie Be Damned, an insurrectionary history of the US South

And finally, this article from Science is pretty damning, “Historians expose early scientists’ debt to the slave trade”. It gives a sense of the scope to which early scientific research was tied up in and dependent on the slave trade, and also a brutally illuminating anecdote on one scientist who started off opposed to slavery, spent a lot of time with slavers in order to gather research materials in western Africa, came to sympathize with them, and ended up entering the slave trade.