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truepennyWhen I was in junior high, I was afraid of the black girls.
Not because they were black per se, but because they were aggressive and loud and whatever they valued, it wasn't books. It's the same reason I was afraid of the redneck girls.
(If I ran afoul of the black girls, though, it was only as collateral damage. To the redneck girls, I was a target.)
Let me unpack this a little.
I grew up in Oak Ridge, which at the time had, and may still have, the highest density of PhDs per square mile of anywhere in the world. It's located in eastern Tennessee, and if you suspect there may be a lack of harmony between foreground and background here, you would not be wrong.
Let's unpack some more.
The Civil War is one of those wars in which neither side was right. It's just that the South was even less right than the North.
Another way to put what I'm trying to get at is: Reconstruction didn't.
Did slavery need to be abolished? Hell yes and absofuckinglutely.
Is that the only cause of the Civil War? No.
Did the North go about the abolition of slavery in a constructive and humane fashion, either for their defeated foes or for the slaves whom they were allegedly helping? No.
Where does this leave us? In a region that's still economically depressed more than a hundred years later, and where the tangle of class and race resentments is all but impossible to sort tidily into categories.
Example: the phrase "white trash."
What does that mean, exactly? What is it pointing to? Southern white people who are in the same dire economic and social straits as most Southern black people. (The phrase can also, of course, be applied in other parts of the U.S.A., but let me stick to my subject here.)
Think about that for a minute.
Oak Ridge is in the foothills of the Appalachians (the Museum of Appalachia is nearby); there are a lot of people to whom the term "white trash" could be applied, since even when cotton was king, this was a poor region.
(It's also a region that wanted to secede from the Confederacy to become the Free State of Franklin, although very few people remember that now.)
And then you have Oak Ridge, which was built, by the Army, during World War II. (Much of the "temporary" housing they put up is still extant and in use as housing today.) They evicted the natives as they saw fit, and then employed them. And imported scientists and technicians who became Oak Ridge's middle and upper class.
Now, most of these scientists were white. Almost none of them were black. (I don't actually have data on this; I'm just making an educated guess.) By the 1980s, when I was going to school, some of the scientists were Asian. Some of them were from South America. I went to school with kids of Chinese descent, Indian, Pakistani, Argentinian, Korean. Some of them were first generation Americans and first generation English speakers; others were as purely American in accent, mores, and tastes as any kid in the room. But still, almost none of the scientists, and ergo none of the scientists' kids, were black.
So you've got two incompletely overlapping Venn diagrams of race and class. The upper and middle classes are mostly white and Asian. The lower class is white and black. There were very few Hispanic kids, very few Native American.
I can name the four people I knew of African descent who were not lower class (or, perhaps more accurately, chose not to adopt the markers of the black lower class--I don't have actual economic data). Two of them were from Trinidad. The white part of my schools' population was much more evenly divided, but the two groups were very distinct1; the scientists' kids and the native kids. You could tell them apart by how they dressed, what courses they took, how they sounded.
And here we are back around again to the redneck girls and the black girls. I.e., the lower class girls. Who wore a lot of makeup and dressed in various versions of what the 80s considered "provocative" clothing. Who didn't take AP classes. Who spoke Black English or the mid-South dialect (which is what Mildmay's dialect is based on). Who were confrontational, aggressive, who shouted and laughed like hyenas in the halls.
I didn't know how to talk to those girls. We had no language in common. Even when the redneck girls tried to be nice to me ("You could be so pretty if you'd just wear some makeup."), it was like chimpanzees trying to communicate with orangutans.
And, you know, a lot of it was class difference. Some of it--with the non-Caucasian girls, obviously--was race. (As I managed to articulate in the comments to my previous ibarw post, I was brought up in the belief that talking about race, in any context, was just excruciatingly impolite, which meant that I felt automatically uneasy and guilty--and therefore tongue-tied--in the company of African-American girls.) But a lot of it was the gender/geek axis. Because these lower class girls performed their femininity in a way that made me feel like I'd just beamed down from Mars. (The black girls also made me feel like I'd beamed down from Mars, but for them it was mostly in passing. I never felt like it was worth it to them to bother with me. I didn't know quite what to do with the girls of my own class and race who performed femininity in a femme way, either. But the hallmark of class difference is decorum; the middle class white girls, who had picked on me in elementary school, had mostly become quiet and polite by junior high. And they were in the AP classes with me, so didn't have quite as much room to talk. Not that there wasn't peer pressure to conform to the standard of femininity, but it wasn't open, aggressive attack.) And they--the lower class white girls--used that as a weapon. When they picked on me, it was for being a geek, for not wearing makeup or shaving my legs, for not having a boyfriend. For failing to conform to the standard of womanhood that prevailed across class and race boundaries in the piranha tank environment of junior high.
I forget Patricia Hill Collins' exact phrasing (and my copy of Black Feminist Thought has gone scudding off into nowhere), but essentially she says that race, gender, and class are all interconnected. You can't talk about one without talking about the other two, and any attempt to do so will result in misrepresentation and the suppression of truth. And I think I've proved her point. I started out talking about race, which led almost immediately to class, and finally worked its way around explicitly to gender.
You'll notice I didn't talk about boys at all, in this whole long post. That's partly because, at that stage in my life, boys were pretty much uniformly the enemy--although I can't remember the black boys EVER picking on me.2 The white boys did (both middle and lower class), and in the same way the redneck girls did. And partly because I don't know how things worked for the boys, because they had football, and that made things very different. (On the girls' side, black girls played sports. Volleyball, basketball. Middle class white girls played soccer. Softball teams were more racially diverse (though I think perhaps socioecononically homogenous), but those were also mostly church league--which is a whole 'nother social dimension of which I wot not. But sports for girls did not bring down social barriers.)
I'm also talking almost exclusively about white/black race relations. Partly because I'm American, and we're obsessed. Partly because the Asian kids were either fully assimilated into white American culture, or were working hard at it. It was the black kids who were struggling to assert and maintain an independent identity--publicly and as a group, anyway. I'm sure the Asian kids were fighting their own battles. (And, yes, the black kids who were middle class, or passing for middle class, spoke standard English; although I think some of them code-switched, I don't have any personal memories distinct enough to confirm that.)
You'll also notice that my perspective wavers back and forth between the adult and the child. As an adult, I can talk about the economic, racial, historical, and social factors that conditioned the piranha in the piranha tank. As a child, I can only talk about who picked on me and about what. And about how I felt.
As an adult, I can also be grateful that I am no longer a child, and that difference can be talked about instead of used as ammunition.
Like Bear said, This is bigger than our own hurt. And that's the difference between the child's perception (for in the child's perception, my hurt is the whole world) and the adult's perception.
I'm glad to be an adult; I'm glad to be able to see farther than the confines of my own skull.
So now I'm going to hit Update Journal, and see what false givens--where I'm still not seeing farther than my own skull--y'all point out in what I've said.
---
1One of the things that made high school SO MUCH BETTER than junior high was that some of the class and race boundaries started breaking down. It was possible to have friends who weren't Just Like You.
2Except for one. And he was the extrovert natural-born stand-up comedian type who couldn't open his mouth without being funny at someone's expense. His teasing of me even became kind of affectionate, and I certainly don't remember him with the same feelings of dread and frustration and anger that I do certain other people.
Not because they were black per se, but because they were aggressive and loud and whatever they valued, it wasn't books. It's the same reason I was afraid of the redneck girls.
(If I ran afoul of the black girls, though, it was only as collateral damage. To the redneck girls, I was a target.)
Let me unpack this a little.
I grew up in Oak Ridge, which at the time had, and may still have, the highest density of PhDs per square mile of anywhere in the world. It's located in eastern Tennessee, and if you suspect there may be a lack of harmony between foreground and background here, you would not be wrong.
Let's unpack some more.
The Civil War is one of those wars in which neither side was right. It's just that the South was even less right than the North.
Another way to put what I'm trying to get at is: Reconstruction didn't.
Did slavery need to be abolished? Hell yes and absofuckinglutely.
Is that the only cause of the Civil War? No.
Did the North go about the abolition of slavery in a constructive and humane fashion, either for their defeated foes or for the slaves whom they were allegedly helping? No.
Where does this leave us? In a region that's still economically depressed more than a hundred years later, and where the tangle of class and race resentments is all but impossible to sort tidily into categories.
Example: the phrase "white trash."
What does that mean, exactly? What is it pointing to? Southern white people who are in the same dire economic and social straits as most Southern black people. (The phrase can also, of course, be applied in other parts of the U.S.A., but let me stick to my subject here.)
Think about that for a minute.
Oak Ridge is in the foothills of the Appalachians (the Museum of Appalachia is nearby); there are a lot of people to whom the term "white trash" could be applied, since even when cotton was king, this was a poor region.
(It's also a region that wanted to secede from the Confederacy to become the Free State of Franklin, although very few people remember that now.)
And then you have Oak Ridge, which was built, by the Army, during World War II. (Much of the "temporary" housing they put up is still extant and in use as housing today.) They evicted the natives as they saw fit, and then employed them. And imported scientists and technicians who became Oak Ridge's middle and upper class.
Now, most of these scientists were white. Almost none of them were black. (I don't actually have data on this; I'm just making an educated guess.) By the 1980s, when I was going to school, some of the scientists were Asian. Some of them were from South America. I went to school with kids of Chinese descent, Indian, Pakistani, Argentinian, Korean. Some of them were first generation Americans and first generation English speakers; others were as purely American in accent, mores, and tastes as any kid in the room. But still, almost none of the scientists, and ergo none of the scientists' kids, were black.
So you've got two incompletely overlapping Venn diagrams of race and class. The upper and middle classes are mostly white and Asian. The lower class is white and black. There were very few Hispanic kids, very few Native American.
I can name the four people I knew of African descent who were not lower class (or, perhaps more accurately, chose not to adopt the markers of the black lower class--I don't have actual economic data). Two of them were from Trinidad. The white part of my schools' population was much more evenly divided, but the two groups were very distinct1; the scientists' kids and the native kids. You could tell them apart by how they dressed, what courses they took, how they sounded.
And here we are back around again to the redneck girls and the black girls. I.e., the lower class girls. Who wore a lot of makeup and dressed in various versions of what the 80s considered "provocative" clothing. Who didn't take AP classes. Who spoke Black English or the mid-South dialect (which is what Mildmay's dialect is based on). Who were confrontational, aggressive, who shouted and laughed like hyenas in the halls.
I didn't know how to talk to those girls. We had no language in common. Even when the redneck girls tried to be nice to me ("You could be so pretty if you'd just wear some makeup."), it was like chimpanzees trying to communicate with orangutans.
And, you know, a lot of it was class difference. Some of it--with the non-Caucasian girls, obviously--was race. (As I managed to articulate in the comments to my previous ibarw post, I was brought up in the belief that talking about race, in any context, was just excruciatingly impolite, which meant that I felt automatically uneasy and guilty--and therefore tongue-tied--in the company of African-American girls.) But a lot of it was the gender/geek axis. Because these lower class girls performed their femininity in a way that made me feel like I'd just beamed down from Mars. (The black girls also made me feel like I'd beamed down from Mars, but for them it was mostly in passing. I never felt like it was worth it to them to bother with me. I didn't know quite what to do with the girls of my own class and race who performed femininity in a femme way, either. But the hallmark of class difference is decorum; the middle class white girls, who had picked on me in elementary school, had mostly become quiet and polite by junior high. And they were in the AP classes with me, so didn't have quite as much room to talk. Not that there wasn't peer pressure to conform to the standard of femininity, but it wasn't open, aggressive attack.) And they--the lower class white girls--used that as a weapon. When they picked on me, it was for being a geek, for not wearing makeup or shaving my legs, for not having a boyfriend. For failing to conform to the standard of womanhood that prevailed across class and race boundaries in the piranha tank environment of junior high.
I forget Patricia Hill Collins' exact phrasing (and my copy of Black Feminist Thought has gone scudding off into nowhere), but essentially she says that race, gender, and class are all interconnected. You can't talk about one without talking about the other two, and any attempt to do so will result in misrepresentation and the suppression of truth. And I think I've proved her point. I started out talking about race, which led almost immediately to class, and finally worked its way around explicitly to gender.
You'll notice I didn't talk about boys at all, in this whole long post. That's partly because, at that stage in my life, boys were pretty much uniformly the enemy--although I can't remember the black boys EVER picking on me.2 The white boys did (both middle and lower class), and in the same way the redneck girls did. And partly because I don't know how things worked for the boys, because they had football, and that made things very different. (On the girls' side, black girls played sports. Volleyball, basketball. Middle class white girls played soccer. Softball teams were more racially diverse (though I think perhaps socioecononically homogenous), but those were also mostly church league--which is a whole 'nother social dimension of which I wot not. But sports for girls did not bring down social barriers.)
I'm also talking almost exclusively about white/black race relations. Partly because I'm American, and we're obsessed. Partly because the Asian kids were either fully assimilated into white American culture, or were working hard at it. It was the black kids who were struggling to assert and maintain an independent identity--publicly and as a group, anyway. I'm sure the Asian kids were fighting their own battles. (And, yes, the black kids who were middle class, or passing for middle class, spoke standard English; although I think some of them code-switched, I don't have any personal memories distinct enough to confirm that.)
You'll also notice that my perspective wavers back and forth between the adult and the child. As an adult, I can talk about the economic, racial, historical, and social factors that conditioned the piranha in the piranha tank. As a child, I can only talk about who picked on me and about what. And about how I felt.
As an adult, I can also be grateful that I am no longer a child, and that difference can be talked about instead of used as ammunition.
Like Bear said, This is bigger than our own hurt. And that's the difference between the child's perception (for in the child's perception, my hurt is the whole world) and the adult's perception.
I'm glad to be an adult; I'm glad to be able to see farther than the confines of my own skull.
So now I'm going to hit Update Journal, and see what false givens--where I'm still not seeing farther than my own skull--y'all point out in what I've said.
---
1One of the things that made high school SO MUCH BETTER than junior high was that some of the class and race boundaries started breaking down. It was possible to have friends who weren't Just Like You.
2Except for one. And he was the extrovert natural-born stand-up comedian type who couldn't open his mouth without being funny at someone's expense. His teasing of me even became kind of affectionate, and I certainly don't remember him with the same feelings of dread and frustration and anger that I do certain other people.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 06:10 pm (UTC)There's a lot of peer pressure among faculty members to move to one of the two semi-suburban enclaves where your kids will pretty much only go to school with other professors' kids until the 9th grade, when they finally have to make contact with the "town" (i.e. poor) kids. Thus far we have resisted this pressure, but who knows, we really need to buy a bigger house next year....
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 06:21 pm (UTC)It's interesting how completely (determinedly, even) oblivious to class issues and how they interact with racial issues in the southern US people from outside the area are--even when they're aware of them in their own area of the country they seem uncomfortable about associating the two issues with each other. When I try to explain that there's a different angle on these things in eastern Tennessee, in the middle part of the state, and in Memphis, non-Southerners seem entirely oblivious--just as pointing out the differences between rural western Tennessee and the city of Memphis, or between eastern Mississippi and the Delta goes right by them.
Which is to say, in a very lengthy and unclear way, yes, you're right, there's always a lot more to it that just one thing, and if you try and treat it as just one thing you get stupid on yourself.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 06:32 pm (UTC)As I read your comments I kept trying to guess what AP classes might be. Appalacian Appreciation? Arithmatic Practice? What are they?
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 06:41 pm (UTC)I went to college with insane amounts of AP credit.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 07:14 pm (UTC)As to the Confederacy, it's easy to say that from our vantage point, but you have to remember that the North was trying to abolish slavery in a constructive manner. There were various arguments about how to do it-- the one I thought would have been gentlest economically (and possiblest politically, therefore) was to render it no longer hereditary-- but the Southerners were the ones who wouldn't accept any legislative solution. Even the election of a moderate who only proposed to restrict slavery's further spread was enough for them to get snooty and say, "We're gonna take our marbles and go home." Blame the South, not the North. And afterwards-- the North had just lost over a quarter of a million men to Southern pride. I can't blame them for feeling vengeful.
As to being humane to the slaves, yes, it would have been better to educate them and help them into jobs and what have you, but remember that this was an era of tiny government. An era when the income tax and massive government spending to solve social problems were radical ideas. And that's without bringing race into the picture; vast numbers of Northerners were of limited vision when it came to what being human meant, and as to what was possible between the races.
Race and class and gender are only interconnected in the sense of identity, in the sense that everyone has one of each (at least one), and they aren't unique in that among human characteristics. Which generalizes the statement down to uselessness. What I mean is, you should be more specific about what you mean, in that.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 07:44 pm (UTC)I said that the abolition of slavery wasn't their only motive, and that the aftermath of the war wasn't handled very well. I am trying to avoid the easy out of pinning the blame on a convenient donkey, since the region I'm talking about was not the region making the Confederacy's decisions--nor did it share many of the reasons for those decisions. (Remember what I said about the Free State of Franklin?) So blaming "the South" doesn't actually tell us anything about conditions in eastern Tennessee. Saying that Reconstruction didn't work does. Because that explains why the area is still economically depressed.
I also didn't say I didn't understand WHY the North didn't do a very good job. Because sure, there are all sorts of reasons. But, again, the Northerners' good reasons do not change the lousy Southern economic conditions. And it's not just the bad white people getting punished either. The black people are suffering just as much--more, in most cases. That's why it matters that the Civil War left the South devastated. Not because the white people didn't "deserve" it (although I'm very leery of mass moral judgments like that), but because the former slaves got left utterly in the lurch. (Cue share-cropping, the rise of the KKK, the Jim Crow laws, etc. etc.)
I am not, in case you are confused, defending the South. I'm just not valorizing the North.
---
It's easy to say that everyone has one of each: race, class, and gender. But the feminist movement of the 70s and 80s was dominated by middle class white women who, in their arrogance, presumed to speak for all women, as if women of color, or working class women, or working class women of color could simply be subsumed into white middle class womanhood. (And this is only an example in which gender has been privileged. There are other discussions in which class and gender have been ignored in favor of race, or race and gender have been ignored in favor of class.) So, sure, everyone HAS one of each, but whether they are able to force a space in which they can speak from a subject-position fully informed by their race, class, AND gender is a very different question.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415924847/qid=1153251158/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-2562449-9968925?s=books&v=glance&n=283155). She says it better than I can.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 07:46 pm (UTC)The neighborhood I live in now has Hispanic people (all of whom would be "white" where I grew up), black people (whose skin colors range from the palest of the pale to a fairly deep chocolatey color), white people (who range from pale to a nice medium brown), and Asian people (pale to a medium brown). If I look at a typical dark haired, golden skinned person, I have no idea what culture they belong to unless they're dressed in a way that is distinctive for that culture. A woman in a sari is probably Asian. A boy in a skullcap is probably white. A girl with beautifully braided hair is probably black. Even there tho, I'm just guessing. I don't *know* that I'm getting the culture right.
If I get to observe someone for a while, I can usually read their social demeanor well enough to identify their culture. I'm always embarrassed about that tho, because I'm a social incompetent, and I can only really code switch between middle class white and middle class black cultural modes. It's so hard to be polite to people if you can't give the right social signals.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 07:55 pm (UTC)I stopped dead in my reading when I hit this phrase. I haven't read the rest of it yet. I just had to say, oh yes honey, and weren't we the bleeding cows.
I'm so sorry your experience was like that.
MKK
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 08:33 pm (UTC)You can be poor and not be dirty. You can have a *good* job, say at the bank or the plant and still have a trailer that's falling apart and 6 kids from 6 different men, or be drunk on your porch every night shooting squirrels.
White Trash, for us is an insult to white people from white people.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 08:45 pm (UTC)And, yes, it's a judgment passed on white people by white people. It's the class equivalent of a racial slur.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 08:57 pm (UTC)Personally, I don't know any black people that are as stupid ass trash as some of the white people I try not to know. Or Mexican people. Not saying there aren't any, but that I don't know any.
Does it become racism if I only feel comfortable slurring someone of my own race?
Is it racism if I'd rather have Indian or Mexican neighbors rather than white middle class Mormon ones?
(In the general mode of discussion of racism this week...)
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 09:33 pm (UTC)Both true. Though I think there's a universal tendency to demand that those in power be better in control of their passions. Or since no one controls their emotions, better in control of their reactions to their passions. And just as an aside, "wasn't handled very well" by the standards of the day isn't the same as the same judgment by modern standards.
the region I'm talking about was not the region making the Confederacy's decisions
Which decisions are you talking about?
nor did it share many of the reasons for those decisions
On that point, we differ-- trying to secede from the secession shares that spirit of overweening independence vigorously, which as near as I can tell was the primary motivator of most of the South.
the Northerners' good reasons do not change the lousy Southern economic conditions. And it's not just the bad white people getting punished either. The black people are suffering just as much--more, in most cases. That's why it matters that the Civil War left the South devastated. Not because the white people didn't "deserve" it (although I'm very leery of mass moral judgments like that), but because the former slaves got left utterly in the lurch. (Cue share-cropping, the rise of the KKK, the Jim Crow laws, etc. etc.)
The North's goal was not to improve the southern economy. They might have been tired of the South being in power-- the South having dominated the federal government for most of the country's existence, due to the 3/5ths clause-- or they might have been distrustful of Southern abuse of power. But even aside from those, even before the Civil War the South simply wasn't remotely as rich as the north because of the changing nature of national economies, which no one very much understood, due to industrialization. But anyone can tell the difference between black ink and red. Did the South reinvest what profits they got in education, technology, industrialization? No, they were party people. They spent their slavery-based profits on their lifestyle, and both races reaped the whirlwind.
I don't doubt you're right about the feminist activism you speak of, but the fact remains that everyone can speak better from the positions circumstances establish for them than others. Some, in full flush of accomplishment and confidence, over-generalize. That doesn't mean that black feminists have a superior perspective because they're black, or that female poverty activists have a superior perspective because they're female. They're just different. No less valuable than others, true, but no more valuable, either, and what good does it do to say that gender, race and class are all connected unless they are more valuable? Or to express it a different way, everything's connected. Why focus on these?
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 09:36 pm (UTC)Rather like Winston County as mentioned in To Kill a Mockingbird, assuming the two aren't actually overlapping items.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 09:38 pm (UTC)Where did you grow up, and where do you live now?
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 09:45 pm (UTC)THOSE decisions. The ones you were talking about.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 10:29 pm (UTC)I grew up in Hummelstown, PA, and went to school in Middletown and Harrisburg. I now live in West LA, so my neighborhood here is like a more balanced blend of the cultures I'm familiar with from back home, with the addition of a few I don't know as well.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 10:36 pm (UTC)I don't think it's a class equivalent; a racial slur is a racial slur, and as you noted in the original post, it's difficult to talk about race, gender, or class singly. Inevitably, a discussion of one will draw in the others. In the case of the phrase "white trash", it's not merely a white-on-white slur, but an implication that the people in question are engaging in behavior stereotypically associated with lower-class blacks...thereby extending the slur still further by essentially affirming other racial stereotypes.
IMHO, "white trash" is a term which neatly encapsulates much of what is wrong with the discussion of race/class/gender in this country. There's no way to use the phrase literally without it invoking shadows and ghosts of prejudice present and past.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 10:54 pm (UTC)I meant, it's a derogatory comment across class boundaries the way a racial slur is a derogatory comment across race boundaries.
... oh dear, that doesn't make any sense either, does it?
You're right. I was oversimplifying.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-18 11:17 pm (UTC)As I grew up in a racially homogenous area back east before moving to wonderfully diverse CA, I've seen that the intent behind terms like 'white trash' exist even in the absence of marked minorities. The phrase I heard while growing up was usually a variant on 'living like animals.' That phrase was a loaded term that had to do with standards of behavior - e.g., the person who was on his/her nth spouse, or committing John Updike's "breaking [of] the sumptuary laws," et cetera. Interestingly, the delta between the standards of behavior of prosperous farmers whose land became huge houses and suburban corporatocrats was surprisingly wide. The farmers were often about proven ability, while the corporate middle-class tended to have received wisdom about race/class/gender/income/et cetera.
Re: just chiming in (long, personal, probably dull)
Date: 2006-07-19 12:03 am (UTC)Which may just mean that I'm remembering wrong.
There are some very fine gradations of derogatory here, between "white trash," "hillbilly," "redneck," "hick," etc. etc. I used "redneck" in my post as a kind of shorthand because that's how I would have classified them if you'd asked me when I was thirteen.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-19 04:54 am (UTC)Thanks for sharing this, very insightful.