A role for the Black Lives Matter movement when police kill white people?

To draw attention to bad things happening to white people is decidedly out of fashion these days.  To do so risks communicating an "All Lives Matter" message, and that is ill advised in most progressive circles in this period when Black Lives Matter has been revived--appropriately, in my opinion--in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis Police in late May.    

So I was surprised to see Jack Healy's front-page story yesterday for the New York Times dateline Sedalia, Missouri, population 21,287.  The headline in the print edition that landed in my driveway is "In Rural Towns, Similar Chants to Find Justice."  The online headline is a little different, "A Family Cries 'Justice for Hannah.'  Will a Rural Town Listen?"  And here's the subhead, which highlights the rural context: 

People in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, but victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard.

Neither headline nor the subhead mentions race, however, which I'd argue is a fairly critical piece of the story--even more central to my mind than the rural angle.  This paragraph, about the young Sedalia woman who was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy appears deep in Healy's story:  

Ms. Fizer and the deputy who shot her were both white, a common dynamic in shootings that occur in overwhelmingly white, rural parts of the country. Black and Hispanic people are killed at higher rates than white people in rural areas, but the demographics of rural America mean that about 60 to 70 percent of people killed by law enforcement there are white, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers.

To me, its placement feels a bit like burying the lede.  

The lede the editors went with, which doesn't mention race, follows: 

Seven weeks had passed, and still there were no answers. So once again, a small cluster of friends and family gathered in the leafy courthouse square and marched for Hannah Fizer, an unarmed woman shot and killed by a rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.

“Say her name! Hannah!”

“Prosecute the police!”

Their chants echoed protests over police killings in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta and beyond. But this was no George Floyd moment for rural America.

Though people in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard. They say extracting changes can be especially tough in small, conservative towns where residents and officials have abiding support for law enforcement and are leery of new calls to defund the police.

Hannah Fizer's mother, Amy, commented (in a statement that echoes one of my own mother's favorite expressions):   

It’s like pulling teeth.

Amy Fizer also explains that she and Hannah's father have not been been interviewed or kept abreast of the investigation into Hannah's death--and that the Pettis County Sheriff, Kevin Bond, has not revealed to them the name of the deputy who killed their daughter after stopping her on the way to her night shift at an area convenience store.  The deputy claimed that he "met with verbal resistance" from Hannah Fizer and that he suspected she had a gun.  Subsequent investigation revealed no gun.  

This is the sort of story I've not been expecting to see in national media for the reason I led with in this post:  this story draws our attention to the phenomenon of law enforcement--including white law enforcement, even in (or is the point especially in?) rural areas--killing white people. 

And so the story raises the question:  Where are white victims of police violence in the Black Lives Matter movement?  Should we acknowledge them in the context of that movement?  Or would acknowledging those deaths be tantamount to saying the forbidden "All Lives Matter"?  What are the political, social and cultural implications of not acknowledging them?  An earlier event that took up this conundrum, this one from 2015 in South Carolina, is here.  

We saw a partial response to these questions, I guess, a few weeks ago when Donald Trump answered a journalist's question about Black Americans being killed by police by saying that "more white people" are killed by cops than black people.  Here are some Tweets by  journalists that I captured just after his  comment:  

And here are two of my Tweets about the matter then:

The New York Times responded to Trump's comment with this story by Jeremy Peters:  

Mr. Trump added to his long record of racially inflammatory comments during an interview with CBS News, in which he brushed off a question about Black people killed by police officers, saying that white people are killed in greater numbers.

Mr. Trump reacted angrily when asked about the issue, which has led to nationwide protests calling for major law enforcement changes.

“Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?” the interviewer, Catherine Herridge of CBS News, asked the president.

“What a terrible question to ask,” Mr. Trump responded. “So are white people. More white people, by the way.”

Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police over all, people of color are killed at higher rates. A federal study that examined lethal force used by the police from 2009 to 2012 found that a majority of victims were white, but the victims were disproportionately Black. Black people had a fatality rate at the hands of police officers that was 2.8 times as high as that of white people.

Of course, what Trump said is technically true.  So were the clarifications by the media.  I call this the "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" problem.  Multiple accurate assertions can be made based on available empirical data.  The media choose to highlight one or the other.  In doing so, they drive wedges between folks who have a lot in common:  both people of color and low-income, low-status whites (who are arguably also people of color) are vulnerable to police misconduct.  Indeed, people of color and low-income whites are vulnerable to lots of bad stuff.  

I'd like to see these vulnerable folks banding together across racial lines and not to be put into a contest--or conflict--with each other.  Wouldn't we be better off, at least occasionally, to do what Healy and the New York Times have perhaps done/kinda' sorta/implicitly laid the groundwork for?   Cross-racial coalition building, that is.  It brings me back to a question I've been mulling for a long time, in this context and others:  Wouldn't all parties who have a beef about policing--parties of all colors/races/ethnicities--be better off joining forces rather than strictly competing to say who has it worse?  wouldn't we be better off not engaging in what Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie calls "the oppression Olympics"?  

It seems these days that lots of folks, including many non-whites, are skeptical that anything law enforcement do that is "wrong," "inappropriate," even in violation of the constitution, is attributable to anything other than racism or grounded in racial difference.  But don't the data from this Healy story belie that assumption?  Even the data Trump implicitly invoked in his ham-handed comments a few weeks ago?

On a somewhat different note, this story out of central Missouri reminds me of the movie "Winter's Bone," set in southwest Missouri, and the scene where the county sheriff pulls over Teardrop.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, then see the movie. Some prior posts about that movie are here and here.  

I'm also thinking about the movie "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri," set in a fictitious Missouri town.  That movie features plenty of racism by local police, but also law enforcement failures in relation to the investigation of a local teenager's death, that of a young woman who was raped before she was murdered.

The Healy report wisely addresses two other issues that loom large in rural contexts:  the higher rate of gun ownership and the lower rate of availability of mental health services.  Regarding the former, the story cites David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who says

the prevalence of guns may explain why cities and rural areas have nearly equal rates of law enforcement killings even though murders and violent crime rates tend to be higher in cities.

More than half of the people fatally shot by rural officers were reported to have a gun, according to a seven-year tally by Mapping Police Violence. Ms. Fizer was among the roughly 10 percent who were unarmed.

And then there is the issue of body cameras, technology and resources.  I published this in 2014, and it was controversial in the U.S. but has been cited widely in Australia and New Zealand.  One of my points about rural socio-spatiality is that if you are going to police vast rural areas effectively, you're going to need technology and resources.  In this case, the Sheriff claims not to have had enough of both to do something else:  hold law enforcement accountable by downloading, sorting and storing body cam footage.  

It is tragically ironic that this story out of Sedalia was published on the same day that another victim of crime in a Missouri small town committed suicide.  Daisy Coleman killed herself yesterday, as Amanda Arnold reports in The Cut:  

Daisy Coleman, the survivor at the center of the 2012 Maryville, Missouri, rape case and whose story was later featured in the Netflix documentary Audrie & Daisy, died by suicide on Tuesday evening. She was 23 years old.

* * * 

Coleman became the subject of national attention in 2012, when she, then 14 years old, attended a party where she blacked out from drinking and was allegedly raped by 17-year-old Matthew Barnett, a senior football player who had familial ties to a former Republican state representative. Before dawn the next morning, Melinda [Daisy's mother] found Daisy, who was wearing just a T-shirt and sweatpants in below-freezing weather, passed out on their doorstep. A hospital exam later confirmed Coleman had been raped, which led to Barnett’s arrest. He ultimately faced few repercussions, however: He received two years’ probation but was never convicted. Meanwhile, Coleman endured relentless victim blaming, and her entire family was harassed. People were “calling me a bitch, a whore, and a slut every single day,” she wrote in Seventeen. One Fox News guest suggested Coleman had “expected” to get raped. Melinda claimed she was fired from her job at a local veterinary clinic over the scandal.

The ruthless bullying took a grave toll on Coleman, and in 2014, she was hospitalized following a suicide attempt; it was not her first. After recovering, she went on to advocate for survivors of sexual assault.

Maryville, population 11,972, is in far northwest Missouri, on the Iowa state line. Interestingly, both of these cases attracted the "intervention"--official or not--of professionals from Kansas City, the regional center. In the case of Audrie and Daisy, a Jackson County prosecutor was brought in to investigate local law enforcement and prosecutorial handling of the case. In the Sedalia matter, a Kansas City police officer who lives in Sedalia is challenging Pettis County Sheriff Bond in the upcoming election. 

And that takes me back to some Facebook comments by Sheriff Bond about the Sedalia protests.

Do you want this to continue and cause irrevocable harm to our community?  Are you willing to allow Pettis County to become the test project for some social justice experiment for rural America?

The use of "social justice" is interesting there, since the right uses it as a pejorative term for the left:  The sheriff also suggested that outside agitators are sowing "social chaos."  Even Hannah Fizer's father invokes similar concerns, as Healy summarizes:

But [Mr. Fizer] counted himself as a conservative Republican and worried that the protests in Sedalia could be co-opted by left-wing outsiders — a pervasive, but largely unfounded fear in small towns after Mr. Floyd’s killing.

Reminds me of similar concerns articulated by my mom about her community in nearby northwest Arkansas.  I wrote this about the "outside agitator" trope, and here's another piece about so-called "antifa busses," which are a hoax.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

The real reason Trump won: Misogyny

In an attempt to make sense of the current state of the democracy, Former President Barak Obama returned to the political spotlight in full force last month and made this comment about the current administration:

It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical.

(Watch the full speech here). It has been 648 days, 6 hours, and 28 minutes (but who’s counting?) of this circus that is the current political climate and, unfortunately, things are only getting stranger. Take, for example, Trump’s outlandish suggestion that he can abolish the existing right to citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants. Clearly, our current president has not read the Constitution. This truly bothersome when recalling that Trump’s predecessor was a Harvard educated professor of constitutional law. So, where did our country go wrong?

The media likes to blame the outcome of the recent election on the Democrats’ loss of the white-working-class ("WWC"). The former President, however, disagrees:

You know, this whole notion that has sprung up recently about Democrats need to choose between trying to appeal to the white working class voters, or voters of color, and women and LGBT Americans, that’s nonsense. I don’t buy that. I got votes from every demographic. We won by reaching out to everybody and competing everywhere and by fighting for every vote.

If Obama is right, where does that put commenters like Esdall and Teixeira who fervently claim the lack of appeal to working-class whites is where Democrats went wrong? Maybe our former President is too optimistic or simply denounces identity politics, or even wants to build coalitions so this has to be part of his "party line." Whatever his angle, however, he is technically correct—the last administration’s strategy of appealing to all voters was successful for two terms. So, where did the Democrats go wrong?

Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, suggests that the Democrats’ failure to appeal to the forgotten American underclass was the primary issue. The Atlantic opined that fear of societal change and immigration policies motivated the WWC to support Trump. Senator Tom Cotton blames the loss of WWC voters on the media’s criticism of Trump’s WWC-esque characteristics (like eating McDonalds). I don’t buy it. Rather, I think the WWC’s support of Trump (and the Republican Party in general) is revenge based. To them, Hillary represented a liberal, highly educated, New York dwelling, feminist elite. Could the WWC get behind a Black president so long as he goes to church and has a family in the traditional sense? Yes. But a powerful, pantsuit donning woman? Absolutely not. Simply, the white-working-class and America in general was not ready for a female commander in chief.

But don’t take my word for it. From what I have gathered through notable WWC scholars such as Matthew Schmitz and Joan C. Williams, the WWC support traditional family values: e.g., where men are the bread winners and women are the caregivers. Clearly, Hillary is a threat to these values. Although she is married in the biblical sense (i.e., to a man), her marriage has been anything but traditional. And, in my opinion, running for president 8 years after her husband’s term is the most feminist revenge on Bill (for his infidelities) that Hill could procure. Not to mention she was appointed Secretary of State following her tenure as first lady and made a political name for herself separate from her husband.

Yet, Hillary’s successes are often used against her. As feminist legal scholar Joan C. Williams comments:

Hillary Clinton […] epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Just like that we are back to subjectively judging women based on their clothes. Hillary’s affinity for pantsuits, common practice use of a personal server, and criticisms of Trump are powerful moves which would all be justified—if only she were a man. Yet, the fact that she is a woman puts a certain spin on otherwise neutral factors. How is challenging Trump’s fitness for office “condescending” yet calling Hillary a “nasty woman” is not? It is clear that this country’s problems with sex, gender, and male-female relations are worsening, and I believe they played a much larger role in the recent election than many think.

If the white working class won’t support Ocasio-Cortez because of a $3,000 suit, why did they elect Trump?

After winning an upset victory against Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could make history as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. So, of course it is only fitting that there is major controversy over her clothes. Yes, you read that correctly: her clothes.

For some background, Ocasio-Cortez is a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist with aspirations

to create an America that works for all of us—not just the wealthiest few,

according to her campaign page. Ocasio-Cortez runs on a platform that prioritizes the needs of working families and seeks to implement pro-working-class-policies such as Medicare-for-all, free public universities, and a guaranteed job program. The young politician frequently describes her own background as working-class—pointing to her Bronx upbringing, her mother’s occupation as a housekeeper, and her immigrant family’s economic troubles.

Ocasio-Cortez could be the working-class leader the Democratic Party needs to finally appeal to white-working-class ("WWC") voters, but an outfit choice has apparently aligned her with privileged elites instead. In a photo-op with Interview Mag last month accompanying a conversation with an editor, Ocasio-Cortez is shown wearing a sharp emerald blazer (Gabriela Hearst $1,990), matching trousers (Gabriela Hearst $890), and black pointed-toe heels (Monolo Blahnik $625). Photos of Ocasio-Cortez in the roughly $3,500 suit standing next to New York construction workers quickly prompted an uproar in the conservative web-space, many naming her a hypocrite.

These commenters appear from their profiles to be of the WWC demographic:

Is Ocasio-Cortez more of a limousine liberal than a socialist? . . . She’s wearing a more than a month’s salary for most Americans…and she’s going to lecture us about income inequality and why we should trust her and her ilk with our money. No—hell no. - Matt Vespa, Town hall

[S]ocialists looooove money. . . . Same goes for the hot new socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She's everywhere now as she runs for a New York seat in the U.S. House. And with that comes money — and bling. - Joseph Curl, Daily Wire

No, she's a real socialist. This is what socialism is. You tell the people that they deserve more, and those stinky 'rich' people aren't paying their fair share. Then you join the ranks of the elite, bu[y] expensive clothes, lake houses, Audis, etc., and you're set. This is socialism. This is literally what it is. America First, Reddit

Popular conservative activist Charlie Kirk questioned Ocasio-Cortez's allegiance to the working-class on Twitter:

a) The alt-right doesn’t seem to understand the concept of magazine shoots

b) You don’t get to keep the clothes, duh

c) I don’t “pretend” to fight for a Living Wage & Medicare for All. I do it.

d) Get used to me slaying lewks because I am an excellent thrift shopper pic.twitter.com/Nd2m6WoCxF

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) September 15, 2018

Kirk's tweet received 16,105 retweets and 37,677 likes, and although he does not purport to speak for the WWC, many may find Kirk's argument compelling. Ocasio-Cortez's outfit choice was also critiqued on prime time television. In a segment on Fox News show Fox and Friends, hosts Katie Pavlich and Pete Hegseth mocked Ocasio-Cortez for her 'expensive tastes.'

Pavlich started by saying: The rising star of the Democratic Party has expensive tastes for a socialist. For a photo shoot for Interview Magazine. Her pant suit — appropriate — retailing more than $2,800 alone. And the shoes $600 bucks.

As the studio gasped in shock and awe, Hegseth chimed in: It's tough being a socialist. It really is.

Pavlich then added: I mean I want a pair of $600 shoes. I think she should redistribute…hypocrisy at its best.

As Ocasio-Cortez pointed out in her response to Kirk, however, the clothes weren’t even hers—as with all magazine shoots, the outfit was borrowed from the designer for publicity purposes. But viewers of Fox News—who are primarily white and many working-class, CNN reports—will probably stop the inquiry at was was aired on Fox and Friends and align her with privileged elites.

Ocsasio-Cortez—who almost lost her family home to foreclosure after her father’s death, went to college on student loans, and currently lives in the Bronx on a working class salary—should certainly be considered working-class. Like members of the WWC, Ocsasio-Cortez

grew up seeing how the zip code one is born in determines much of their opportunity.

She has more in common with the WWC than any wealthy Republican politician, but it seems that the commentators above will look for any minuscule reason to disregard Ocsasio-Cortez as a privileged liberal. By bringing attention to Ocasio-Cortez's expensive clothes (which, again, were borrowed), conservative media paints the self proclaimed working-class champion as someone who, instead, cannot possibly relate to the WWC.

Instead (and oddly enough), it seems that the WWC identifies more soundly with Republican figures like Donald Trump. Tom Cotton, U.S. Senator from Arkansas, claims that when the liberal media makes fun of Trump's hair, his orange glow, the way he talks, his long tie, and his taste for McDonalds, the WWC somehow sees this as insulting them.

What I don’t think they realize is that out here in Arkansas and the heartland and the places that made a difference in that election, like Michigan and Wisconsin, when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way we look, and the way we talk, and the way we think.

Apparently the WWC are quick to overlook Trump's taste for $17,000 Brioni suits and the fact that he has never been and never will be working-class (See Trump's $413 million inheritance from his father here). Although Trump may pretend to understand the struggles of the working-class, his policies have certainly done nothing to alleviate them.

Unfortunately, the divide between the Democratic party and the white-working-class is larger than ever. It is this animosity that pushes the WWC toward uber-wealthy real estate moguls and away from candidates, like Ocsasio-Cortez, who understand their plight.

For a discussion on the role of gender in the animosity between the WWC and Democratic party, see a related blog post here.

A damning commentary on how northern elites/academics see the rural, white South

Adam Kirk Edgerton published a powerful essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week.  The title nicely sums up his points--and speaks volumes in doing so:

What's Wrong with Being from the South?  Just Ask an Academic in the North.  

In short, northern academics (and I would say northern elites more broadly) exhibit enormous know-it-all type hubris that casts the South as not only monolithic, but monolithically toxic.

Like Edgerton, I grew up in the rural South.  I left nearly three decades ago and for 19 of the intervening years have been an academic in the West.  Based on my experience as one in whom both southern accent and southern identity linger, I'd say the word "West" could well be substituted for "North" in that Chronicle headline.  I've written some about the phenomenon and my experiences here.  I hold myself out as an ally for progressive causes, but progressives are typically (at least) a little suspect of me. 

Edgerton, now a PhD student at Harvard, writes of his journey through academia, beginning as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina.  A gay man who dressed in pastels and white linen, a favorite teacher summed him up favorably and then asked how he had "escpae[d]" the rural community where he grew up.  His professors judged not so much him as they judged his community of origin; he was viewed as an anomaly by those who assume the worst of his prior neighbors and friends.  Things got worse when he headed north, into more elitist territory.  Edgerton writes:

In the well-educated Northern imagination, the rural South is a vast, forbidding wasteland of poverty, prejudice, and despair.

That kind of crass regionalism creates well-earned suspicion of ivory-tower elites. The stereotyping works in both directions. Each sustains the other, leading to electoral results that help neither the professors up north nor the pig farmers where I grew up. Regionalism creates openings for populists to exploit and worsen these divides. These attitudes pit rural against urban, college-educated against non-college-educated. If those of us in academe are truly so smart, we ought to be the ones taking the first step toward bridging this divide.

Unfortunately, the opposite is occurring. In the age of Trump, anti-Southern attitudes seem to have crystallized and worsened throughout higher education. Any Trump-voting area, in fact, seems to be fair game for ridicule. These attitudes undercut the efforts of those seeking to advance the rights of marginalized groups in regions of the country where evidence-based scholarship might be needed the most.

* * * 

It is strange to me that so many academics cannot see when they show prejudice against the rural, the religious, and the less formally educated. We are trained to recognize systematic bias in terms of race and gender — but we remain too often unaware of our geographic prejudices. These prejudices are casual and rampant, and undercut the credibility of much good work. Too often I find myself in academic settings where the white working-class phenomenon—the Trump-voter stereotype—is taken as fact at the expense of more evidence-based conversations about the suburban affluent, where many academics grew up and Trump voters are also concentrated.

Edgerton's entire column, beautifully written, is well worth a read in its entirety. My current law review article, which makes many similar points, is here.

Edgerton's focus on this North-South divide brings to mind the words of Prof. Arnold Weinstein who does a series of Great Courses lectures on American literature. Weinstein, of Brown University, says this (which I've had transcribed) about a scene from Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, a scene between a "Northerner" and a "Southerner" in a Harvard dormitory:

Now Shreve, you may remember, is Canadian, which is another way of saying, he’s a Northerner. And like many Northerners, I can speak to this teaching from a Northern university, coming from the south, having taught Faulkner to audiences of students who were predominantly from the North. For the North, the South is one grotesque place – it certainly was, at least, at the time Faulkner was writing – it’s a circus! And uh, you’ll have phrases like “it’s better than Ben Hur,” which is what Shreve will tell Quentin. Or there will be other references as well, to the South as a kind of, a really odd place. “Tell me about the South,” Quentin says, what he keeps hearing up in Cambridge: “Tell me about the South.” “What’s it like there?” “What do they do there?” “Why do they live there?” “Why do they live at all?”

Uh, the South is exotic, unreal, like Mars – and, some of the oddness, the quaintness, the extravagance, the quirkiness, of the South – is in the narrative framework, is in Shreve’s questions, it doubtless comes from Faulkner’s own experience living up in the Northeast, and, the beauty of the book is, Faulkner puts this squarely in the middle – he deals with it. So that, whatever you as a reader, particularly a Northern reader, an incredulous reader, as a reader that wants to guffaw and say “this doesn’t make any sense, what kind of crazy people are these?” it’s already happening in the book, it’s right in front of your eyes.

So this story of Sutpen, who is Faulkner’s central figure from the Civil War, a plantation owner who was the novel’s tragic hero, or tragic center, I should say, he’s a pretty weird type, for Shreve, as I said Shreve says “it’s better than Ben-Hur!” Shreve can’t get over the way that everybody is related to everybody in the South, everybody is Aunt this, Uncle that.

Now what I want to say is, this conversation between Shreve and Quentin, between a Northerner and a Southerner, is more than just a kind of clever frame for containing the story, for getting the story out. Because you could say that, you could say that, “well it’s just a device, let’s get to the real stuff,” for example, this is during the Civil War. It’s much, much more than that. It’s more intricate, and it’s more interesting than that. Think the way I represented it – the conversation between a Northerner and a Southerner – can you see that at the dialogue level – at the storytelling level – Faulkner sets out to replay the Civil War. He’s going to once again, test what kind of understanding, what kind of relationship, what kind of conflict, takes place between Northerners and Southerners. So that the telling of the story is constantly to be thought of as in subsets, a kind of commentary on the story, or is a way of re-imagining the story, as a way of perhaps getting out of the tragic determinism of the story.

And so, in this Harvard dormitory, something very important is going to take place. We’re going to see a paradigm of Northern/Southern relationships.

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Edgerton's essay also brought to mind this op-ed, published in the New York Times earlier this month, by Alabama native Alexis Okeowo.  The headline is "No One Really Understands the South," and she opens with an anecdote of a black friend from Chicago who who asked her "Why do black people still live in the South"?  :

My friend was viewing the Deep South through the lens that popular culture and most of the country outside the South also use — the same stereotypes I heard when I left Alabama to go to college in the Northeast.

I also liked Okeowo's attention to attachment to place and the power of home:

I’ve long seen a strain of thinking that residents of rural areas, with their failing infrastructure, closing health centers and diminishing jobs, should simply leave, pick up and move to cities for more opportunities and a higher standard of living. Why stay in a place that is falling apart? Or that has a history of oppressing people who look like you? But over a family’s generations in one place, the idea of home solidifies, becomes unshakable.

I cannot help wonder if Edgerton and Okeowo can be apologists for the South in ways I cannot because of their other identity characteristics.  Do Edgerton's gayness and Okeowo's blackness insulate them from some of the suspicion that I, a straight white woman, evoke among progressives?

Lastly, Edgerton's comment also brings to mind a comment by Helen Gurley Brown, long-time editor of Cosmpolitan magazine, who once said of her Arkansas upbringing, "I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror." Gurley Brown had apparently crossed over to the other side--that of northern elites.  Maybe her emotional and cultural migration was entirely voluntary, or maybe Gurley Brown felt social pressure to disown the South, in the same way class migrants often feel pressure to disown their families of origin.

Cross posted to Legal Ruralism.