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March 12 - April 29, 2021
A good number of voices paid special attention to poor whites who haunted the South. The problem was not: “No one knows what to do with him.” It was this: “No one wants to see him as he really is: one of us, an American.”
As president, when he advocated civil rights, Lyndon Johnson spoke the language of brotherly love and inclusiveness. In spite of all this, the old country-boy image still haunted him.
Buddy Ebsen’s prime-time hillbillies appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, sketched as characters in Grant Wood’s iconic painting of 1930, American Gothic. This was yet another unsubtle allusion to the long-held belief that white trash were an evolutionary throwback.
Holy cow!
The differences between Jed and Davy were stark. Hollywood hillbillies could only be crude objects of audience laughter—mockery, not admiration. They conjured none of the frontier fantasy of the rugged individualist Crockett (or Fess Parker’s TV Daniel Boone). Nothing could redeem them. The Clampetts drove a 1930s-era Ford jalopy, and Granny sat on board in a rocking chair—a camp version of John Ford’s desperate Joad family.11
This will make me think about the portrayals of other minorities in media.
Instead of eliminating class distinctions, suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses. Zoning ordinances set lot sizes and restricted the construction of apartment buildings, emphasizing single-dwelling homes to keep out undesirable lower-class families.
Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class.
Sad.
Unlike the dull but safe middle American suburb, trailer parks contain folks who appear on the way out, not up: retired persons, migrant workers, and the troubled poor. This remains true today.
Again, sad.
By 1968, only 13 percent of mobile homeowners held white-collar jobs,
From Appalachia to the Big Apple, then, those without economic security and with the least political clout were seen as the most likely candidates for the trailer park.
Noted for later.
Hazel Bryan. A year later, at the age of sixteen, she would drop out of high school, marry, and go to live in a trailer. But it is what she was at fifteen that matters: the face of white trash. Ignorant. Unrepentant. Congenitally cruel. Only capable of replicating the pathetic life into which she was born.
Hazel Bryan is the ugly face of white trash in Will Counts’s famous photograph taken on September 4, 1957.
“Redneck” was a loaded term, as he well knew. His purpose was to remind the white working class of the city that the school board elites looked down on them.46
"Redneck" is a racist term.
Of all the films that belong to this cultural moment, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) was the most highly regarded, and offered the most damning picture of poor whites.
“No American family should settle for anything less than three warm meals a day, a warm house, a good education for their children . . . and sometimes simply to plain enjoy life.” This was the Johnsonian translation of FDR’s 1944 exhortation on behalf of a second Bill of Rights that included “the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation,” “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” “the right of every family to a decent home,” and “the right to a good education.”
“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Like the Nobel Prize–winning writer William Faulkner, LBJ knew about the debilitating nature of false poor white pride.
“forgotten Americans”
Like Arthur Fleck.
The American dream is double-edged in that those who are able to carve out their own destiny are also hard-pressed not to condemn those who get stuck between the cracks.
When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.
The sad fact is, if we have no class analysis, then we will continue to be shocked at the numbers of waste people who inhabit what self-anointed patriots have styled the “greatest civilization in the history of the world.”
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Location is everything. Location determines access to a privileged school, a safe neighborhood, infrastructural improvements, the best hospitals, the best grocery stores.
Antiabortion activists, like eugenicists, think that the state has the right to intervene in the breeding habits of poor single women.
If the American dream were real, upward mobility would be far more in evidence.
Our very identity as a nation, no matter what we tell ourselves, is intimately tied up with the dispossessed.
