White trash in Percival Everett's new novel, The Trees

The novel, The Trees, out next week, was featured on National Public Radio this morning, and author Percival Everett's discussion with NPR host Scott Simon intrigued me because it implicated both rurality and, more prominently, race and whiteness.  Here's an excerpt from the interview: 

Special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are the big-city heat from Hattiesburg. They're with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and they're in the small town of Money to investigate the murder of two men in the back room of the same shotgun-style house - one, a white man who's disfigured in a way so gruesome we can't tell you without a trigger warning, if you please; the other, a Black man, seems to just walk out of the morgue.

Simon observes near the end of the interview:

SIMON: I've got to ask you. I enjoyed the book a lot. So many of the white Southerners in this book are not just bigots. They're obese. They're dumb. They smell, as you write, memorably, of one, of excrement - and you don't say excrement - Aqua Velva and pimento cheese, which is an awfully clever phrase. And with no apologies made for white bigots, are you stereotyping white Southerners?

EVERETT: Welcome to club. Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

EVERETT: I am, in fact. How does it feel? That's my question. Yes, I'm not fair in this novel. It's not a novel about fairness. In fact, after I wrote the first page, my admission to my wife was, well, I'm not being fair, and I'm not going to do anything about it.

This left me wanting to know more, and then I found this by Christian Lorentzen on Book Forum.  I'll just excerpt a short quote here from the commentary titled "Hillbilly Effigy": 

Not much present in The Trees are white liberals or leftists. The novel isn’t about them (us), unless perhaps it’s meant to flatter them with a vision of their redneck white-trash cousins getting a comeuppance at the hands of cunning and ruthless Black assassins (spoiler: the Black corpse is not the real killer, nor is it a ghost) and their Asian counterparts, avenging their own victims of lynching. Everett has had his go at white liberals elsewhere, most notably in Erasure, his satire of the publishing industry and the Quality Lit Biz. The Trees is looser and more freewheeling than that novel, Everett’s masterpiece.

Prior to that is this, also touching on class and whiteness:

Most of the white characters in this novel are guilty: even if they are merely the descendants of the perpetrators of lynchings, they are unrepentant racists (or “know-nothing, pre–Civil War, inbred peckerwoods,” as one character puts it), frequent users of the N-word (with the hard r), stealers of livestock, or members of a pathetically diminished Ku Klux Klan. The racists are present all the way up the chain of American power.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

Is "class" about culture or economics?

Here is an interesting exchange about that question from "The Argument" podcast with Jane Coaston, interviewing Matt Taibbi and Michelle Cottle of the New York Times Editorial Board.  The topic of this issue, "Is Fox News Really All that Powerful?," dated June 30, 2021.  The first comment is from journalist Taibbi.  

If you ask what is Fox, who do they represent? They represent a lot of people, but apart from that, you can’t really say they’re backing a major swath of the institutional power in this country as you might have 20 years ago, or during the Bush years, when Fox News was what you watch to see what the people who are getting us into the war in Iraq were thinking. That’s not so much the case anymore.

I think there’s been a shift in terms of the political picture in this country, and it’s very much expressed by, for me, the censorship issue.

Jane Coaston

Michelle, what do you think Matt is getting right and wrong about this intersection of power. In my view, wealthy people tend to support whatever will keep them wealthy.

Michelle Cottle

I don’t think you can lump everything together. And I don’t think it works just as purely an economic proposition, especially because populism in this country may have economic roots, but the way it plays out in politics is not economic. It’s kind of ethnonationalist. What Trump was pitching was not an economic populism, that’s not where his policy —

Matt Taibbi

That’s not true.

Michelle Cottle

— that’s not where his policies went. What he was doing had a certain economic flair to it. But when you look at what really motivates people, it was the immigration issue. It was the, they’re coming for your kids issue. It’s — they’re destroying the American way of life issue. So it gets beyond economics pretty quickly.

Jane Coaston

And I would say — I wrote a piece a while back that, essentially, Trump ran as one thing and governed as another thing, and ran as kind of someone who could be all things to all people type of candidate, and then governed basically as Mitch McConnell.

Matt Taibbi

Well, I covered Trump’s campaign, so I was at his speeches. And it’s absolutely not true that there was no economic component to his address in 2016. It was a huge part of the picture. Obviously, race and immigration were central issues for Trump. There is absolutely no doubt about that. And he played on some of the worst instincts of the electorate.

But there were enormous similarities between the Trump movement and, for instance, the Bernie Sanders movement. And I heard people who I interviewed over and over and over again responding to all kinds of things in Trump’s message. I heard Trump argue against the antitrust exemption for health insurance companies. I heard him going after the press. The elitist press was a huge part of his presentation.

Michelle Cottle

That’s not economics. We’re talking economics —

Matt Taibbi

It’s a class issue.

Michelle Cottle

No, no, we’re not talking about class and culture, because the cosmopolitan —

Matt Taibbi

I’m talking about class.

Michelle Cottle

Well, we were talking about economics, and that’s different. His pitch in 2016, as Jane points out, was not how he governed, and it’s not how he ran in 2020. So he pretty quickly discovered that the key to maintaining his popularity wasn’t to actually provide a huge tax cut for the struggling people. It was to tell them that the immigrants were coming for their jobs.

Were working-class white and rural folks responsible for the Capitol riots last week?

Over the past four years, rural voters have drawn enormous attention--and enormous responsibility--for the presidency of Donald Trump.  Ditto working-class whites, people like coal miners, for example.  Now, however, in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the media are waking up to the fact that many of the insurrectionists were neither rural nor low-income.  Indeed, the media are waking up to a fact I've been trying to draw attention to for some time:  lots of rich folks voted for Trump, and they were prominent among the folks who led the raid on the Capitol last week.  We're learning more and more about them because (1) they are starting to be arrested and (2) the dead among them are being identified. 

This story from the Los Angeles Times provides a good overview of who the rioters were.  The headline is "A broad cross section of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, arrests show. Now what?," and Kevin Rector, Chris Megerian and Anna M. Phillips report.   Here's an excerpt:  

The reality of the Jan. 6 attack, captured in affidavits and court filings in dozens of criminal cases, is that the crowd included not just fringe radicals but also a broad cross section of President Trump’s supporters — people with office jobs, kids and mortgages, and otherwise respectable public reputations.

Among those identified and charged with crimes by law enforcement as participating in the insurrection were municipal employees, former members of the military, social media influencers, police officers and a school therapist. Also charged were a data analytics company’s chief executive and a two-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer from USC.

They came from across the country. A West Virginia state delegate livestreamed himself alongside the rioters. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said one of his officers — who resigned Thursday — had “penetrated” the Capitol building and was expected to face federal charges soon. Two Virginia police officers have been charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

Law enforcement officials are alarmed by the varied backgrounds of the pro-Trump intruders and say it can be difficult to prevent attacks and uncover dangerous motives when extremists hide behind the veneer of normality.

The New York Post story about a Dallas real estate agent who flew a private plane to the riot has gotten a fair amount of attention.   Note that the framing by Jennifer Taub, who re-tweeted the story, implies that Trump voters are homogeneous by highlighting the topic of socioeconomic class based on one very rich rioter.  That is, she questions the economic anxiety or economic distress of all Trump voters by noting that this Trump-inspired rioter is under no economic distress.  

What follows are some Tweets that further illustrate the point that these were not just--and perhaps not even primarily--working class white voters.   

Here are two other stories about relatively affluent folks who participated in the Capitol riots, this one about a CEO from suburban Chicago and this one about a man who owns a carwash in suburban Georgia.  Finally, here's one by Connor Sheets for Pro Publica about a rioter from Huntsville, Alabama who appears to have been living a middle-class existence; he died of a heart attack during the events in Washington, DC.  

Some nevertheless blame working-class white and rural voters, while others see the Capitol riots as vindication of sorts for the working-class and rural folks who've been widely blamed for Trump's presidency.  Here, I respond to a journalist who is ignoring some important facts about poverty on the day after the riot. Interestingly, she grew up and now again lives in the same county as the Gravette, Arkansas man widely photographed with his feet up in Nancy Pelosi's office, the one now in federal custody; however, she went away for an Ivy League education and is now back working as a reporter for Facing South.  Generally, I am a fan of her work, but her argument that there is no "economic anxiety" is an unhelpful one that will alienate many who are, in fact, suffering economic distress:  

Screenshot taken January 7, 2021

Here's more of that unhelpful framing, which I've not yet responded to, from Amy Siskind, who leads The New Agenda.

Screenshot taken January 15, 2021

Siskind went down this path after the Charlottesville riots, too, suggesting that event proved racism on the part of Trump supporters, to the exclusion of economic anxiety.  I wrote about the problem with that framing here.  What's lost in that framing, obviously, is that not all folks who voted for Trump--not nearly all of them--marched in Charlottesville or on the Capitol last week.  It also has the very unfortunate effect of dismissing the economic pain of many Americans who voted for Trump, just as journalist Olivia Paschal does. 

Here are some more Tweets (along my responses to some of them): 

Screenshots from January 8, 2021

Sarah Smarsh is the author of Heartland:  A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.  

Screenshot from January 14, 2021

Screenshots from January 12, 2021

Finally, here's a screenshot of data I've shared frequently in recent years; it's from the 2016 exit polls, broken down by income.  It shows that it is, in fact, those who might be called the "petit bourgeoisie," those who've gotten a leg up on the poor folks around them, who are most likely to oppose social safety net programs and support Trump.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On "Hillbilly Elegy," the film, and cultural and geographical divides in the United States

I published this today in The Conversation, about the new Ron Howard/Netflix film, "Hillbilly Elegy," based on J.D. Vance's book by the same name.  Here's an excerpt:

I admit to delight when I read professional critics trashing the film, which is based on J.D. Vance’s widely praised memoir detailing his dramatic class migration from a midsize city in Ohio to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School. I was expecting the worst based on my dislike of the book, and these reviews confirmed my expectations.

But once I saw the film, I felt it had been harshly judged by the chattering classes – the folks who write the reviews and seek to create meaning for the rest of us. In fact, the film is an earnest depiction of the most dramatic parts of the book: a lower-middle-class family caught in the throes of addiction. 

Everyday viewers seem to find the film enjoyable enough – it has solid audience reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

So why the big gap between the critical response and audience reaction? Could it be yet another sign of the country’s steadily growing class divide?

I want to be clear that I didn't see the film depicting rural in any sustained or meaningful way.  Middletown, Ohio, Vance's home town is not rural by any measure.  Indeed, it's not even technically Appalachian.  But about the first 10 minutes of the film take place in Jackson, Kentucky, the Vance Family's ancestral home.  That's Vance's real claim to "hillbilliness," and I don't dispute that a certain hillbilly culture followed his family into the Rust Belt.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Joe Biden as elite and/or elitist? That's the GOP's new "party line"

That's the line Republicans are pushing these days, as outlined in this Washington Post story by Toluse Olorunnipa, "Republicans lob accusations of elitism at ‘Middle Class Joe’ — a sign of the upended politics of populism."  Here's an excerpt:

President-elect Joe Biden, a state-college graduate who was once the poorest man in the U.S. Senate, is facing accusations of elitism from Republicans after defeating a billionaire incumbent with an Ivy League degree — a sign of how the politics of populism have been upended and redefined by President Trump.

In recent days, Republican lawmakers have sought to describe Biden’s early Cabinet selections as well-heeled and well-pedigreed but out of touch with the kinds of problems facing everyday Americans.

After Biden won the presidency in part by claiming a larger share of college-educated suburban voters, some of his GOP foes see his early moves as an opportunity to brand him as an elitist president catering to the nation’s coastal professionals at the expense of its heartland laborers. The burgeoning dynamic underscores how the battle over populism is likely to animate the nation’s politics even after Trump leaves the White House and is replaced by a man who has called himself “Middle Class Joe.”

As my mom would say, surely "this is the pot calling the kettle black."  

How higher ed helped flip five states (and other economic spins) on the 2020 election

Here's today's story from the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Audrey Williams June and Jaquelyn Elias: 

Higher education has increasingly become a marker of partisan identification. Among white voters especially, a college degree has come to be seen as predictive of voting patterns. And counties with flagship institutions in them have increasingly swung toward Democrats in presidential elections.

What did the presence of a college in a county say about how that county voted in 2020?

To answer that question, we zeroed in on Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the five states that moved from Donald J. Trump in 2016 to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, and looked at what happened in the counties that had colleges in them. Here’s what we found.

Trump won most of these counties.

In those five states, 136 counties include four-year public or private nonprofit colleges that have at least 100 students and, in normal years, in-person classes. Trump carried 87 of them, while Biden took 49, according to unofficial results.

This is but one bit of class-based analysis I've seen so far on the 2020 election.   

Here's a story by Benjamin Fearnow for Newsweek, "Trump Counties Make Up Just 29 Percent of U.S. Economic Output, 2020 Election Study Shows."  This story, too, focuses on the link between class and political affiliation.  Here's an excerpt: 

Counties won by Democratic President-elect Joe Biden make up 70 percent of all U.S. economic output—or gross domestic product (GDP)—a new post-election study finds.

Biden has repeated the phrase "there are no blue states or red states, just the United States" in several appeals to President Donald Trump's voters since being named President-elect Saturday. But the more than 75.6 million votes Biden won in the 2020 election led him to victory in nearly all of the country's top 100 most powerful local economies. Meanwhile, Trump voter counties make up less than one-third of the country's economic output, a Brookings Institution study said. The president's unsuccessful re-election bid hinged on his touting of the pre-pandemic economy. But his railing against urban areas as "crime infested" rather than centers of American wealth only allowed him to amass more rural county voters.

"Trump's losing base of 2,497 counties represents just 29% of the economy," the post-election analysis co-authors found.

Finally, here's a piece from the New York Times Upshot, "Election Showed a Wider Red-Blue Economic Divide."  Jed Kolko reports.  Here's the lede:  

Local voting patterns in the presidential election showed a narrowing of several traditional divides. Preliminary vote totals indicate that the partisan gap of urban versus suburban places shrank, along with the traditional Democratic advantage in heavily Hispanic counties. Whites and nonwhites are now in somewhat greater alignment in how they vote.

That makes the resilience of the economic divide all the more striking. In fact, the gap between red and blue counties in their education levels, household incomes and projected long-term job growth did not just persist; it widened.  

And here's a paragraph that hints more at the salience of both education and geography, in particular the exurbs--or certain types of them. 

More educated places, which leaned strongly blue to begin with, voted even more Democratic in 2020 than they did in 2016. Highly educated Republican-leaning counties, like Williamson County near Nashville and Forsyth County near Atlanta, have become rarer with each recent election.

Read the full story for more.   

The Washington Post ran this shortly after the election, "How independents, Latino voters and Catholics shifted from 2016 and swung states for Biden and Trump."  The story is by Chris Alcantara, Leslie Shapiro, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Brittany Renee Mayes.  I was intrigued by this graphic screenshot below) in particular, because it sums up so much about the incomes of voters for the respective candidates, and how those of differing income levels moved in some different directions in 2020, compared to 2016.  In particular, it shows that people with incomes over $100,000 moved into Trump's camp by 7 points and those with incomes between $50K and $99K, the income group that supported Trump by the widest margin in 2016, moved to Biden by 11 points: 

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that "Counties that experienced more job losses during the first wave of the pandemic voted for Biden."  Here's an excerpt:

The counties won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. experienced worse job losses, on average, during the initial wave of pandemic layoffs than the counties where President Trump was strongest in his bid for re-election.

After the worst of the downturn in April, many of the most affected red counties recovered far more swiftly than blue counties did. By September, as unemployment fell nearly everywhere, blue counties were more likely to have higher unemployment rates.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

"White Trash" in Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

This excerpt, from Bill Bryson's 2007 memoir of his 1950s childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, is one of the best depictions I've read of "white trash," though it doesn't actually use that term.  Note the "white trash" hailed from either Arkansas or Alabama, southern places essentially indistinguishable from each other and associated with such hoi polloi.  

The only real danger in life was the Butter Boys. The Butters were a family or large interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

In between times they would menace us. Their specialty was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn't, or possibly just didn't, speak. (It was never clear which.)Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.  

The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys. Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

I waited for what seemed a decent interval and then said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

“But you'll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It'll be just as boring for you.”

“Don't care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a longtime before adding: “Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, some-times inadvertently. It wasn't even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae. It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M.C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy, Poontang sissy,” he said.

‘Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

‘What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

In case you didn't figure it out, Bryson referred to his childhood self as the Thunderbolt Kid. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Including working-class whites in stories about failures of the coronavirus economy

Two in the New York Times caught my attention in the last few days.  The first was this one, really a photo essay, by Brenda Ann Kenneally, documenting food insecurity, from New York to California.  It features two families, primarily, one black and one white, and the headline is, "America at Hunger's Edge."   It reminded me of this 2013 story out of Dyersburg, Tennessee, in which Sheryl Gay Stolberg showed both black and white families relying on food stamps. 

The other story is Eduardo Porter's feature on service workers, who have been badly hurt by the coronavirus shutdown.  It's "The Service Economy Meltdown."

As I have written in my scholarly work, it's important that the media depict poverty of all colors.  Conflating poverty and low-income/precarity struggles with blackness is bad for economically struggling folks of all races and ethnicities--including non-Hispanic whites. 

On "class exploitation," in Korean Oscar-winning "Parasite"

Here's a screen shot I took today, which pretty much says it all:

See this film if you have not already done so.  Class is absolutely its center. 

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. 

Cross-race coalition building in the wake of George Floyd's killing

In an earlier post on Legal Ruralism, I referenced the Rednecks for Black Lives piece on Medium, dated June 4, 2020.  I'm returning to it today and quoting it here because it speaks to what I've been working on for a few years now:  How to build cross-racial coalitions among low-income and working-class folks.  The piece was written by Beth Howard, who self-identifies as a "hillbilly and a redneck," saying she grew up in "rural Eastern Kentucky."  After recounting some details of the economic suffering and its consequences, e.g., food insecurity, inability to see a doctor or pay for medicines, in Appalachia and the rural South, Howard writes: 

We’re told to blame Black folks, immigrants, and people of color for our suffering, keeping us fighting each other instead of rich folks, corrupt politicians, and big business who are busy padding their wallets. Too many times we’ve believed these lies. But we don’t have to believe them anymore. We can make a different choice. 

Poor and working class white folks showing up alongside Black folks and people of color demanding justice is actually exactly who we are. For decades the label “redneck” has been thrown at us to degrade us but it’s time we reclaim it. The term redneck actually comes from the nation’s largest labor uprising, the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, when a multiracial group of 8,000 miners fought coal company operators to unionize. ... maybe more than anything [the uprising] created power in the multiracial solidarity of poor and working people. The miners were called rednecks because of the red bandannas tied around their neck to indicate they were union.
Billionaires and the crooked politicians who keep them in power know they are outnumbered when Black, Brown, and white working people come together. That’s why they try so hard to divide us.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

The working class and coronavirus (Part IV): The pressure to go to work when sick

Here's a report by Holly Bailey, out of Lone Tree, in southeast Iowa, for the Washington Post.  The story centers on a 64-year-old woman with COPD, who was working in a convenience store when the coronavirus news caused her to seek an unpaid leave in early March, before there were many cases in Iowa.  Her doctor didn't provide a note excusing her from work, so her request was denied.  Not long afterwards, though, she was furloughed, as coronavirus moved to center stage in mid March.  The question now is whether vulnerable workers like her will be required to return to work or lose their unemployment benefits, as Iowa seeks to reopen. 

Last week, Iowa joined a growing number of states that have started to reopen amid the pandemic. Although there was never an official statewide stay-at-home order, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) eased restrictions in 77 of the state’s 99 counties, allowing restaurants, gyms, churches and other businesses to open at limited capacity, even as coronavirus cases in the state continue to rise.

On Wednesday, Reynolds signed a public health order allowing the partial reopening of businesses beginning Friday in the state’s 22 remaining counties, including retail stores and enclosed shopping malls, as long as they operate at 50 percent capacity

* * *

Iowa Workforce Development, which oversees the state’s unemployment system, has announced some exceptions to the policy, including for those who have been sickened by the coronavirus or have been advised by a doctor to self-quarantine because they face a higher risk of becoming ill.

But in a news conference last week, Beth Townsend, the department’s executive director, said the onus would be on workers to prove that their employment situation would put them at risk of getting sick. “It takes more than a mere assertion by the employee to establish this to be true,” she said.

The working class and coronavirus (Part III): Meatpacking

This is not actually a "rural" topic, nor is it one limited to the white working class, so I have avoided treating it as such and writing about it on these blogs.  But after weeks of following outbreaks of coronavirus in meatpacking plants, I've decided to collect many of those stories here, along with datelines, in no particular order.  Well, no particular order except that I have to start with this Washington Post coverage of comments by the Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this week.  Justice Patience Roggensack, in the middle of an oral argument about the constitutionality of the governor's stay-at-home order, responded to data about the high rate of infection in Brown County (whose county seat is Green Bay):

These were due to the meatpacking, though. That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.

Many people on Twitter are calling this racist, though I've not seen any data on the racial make up of those who work at the JBS meatpacking plant in Brown County.   Others called Justice Roggensack's comments "elitist" and "classist," which they no doubt are.  My favorite comment on Twitter came from Prof. Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas Law School who commented that the Chief Justice said "the quiet part out loud."  Ahem.

Here's a great overview of what is happening in this coronavirus era, with the meatpacking industry overall, from Adam Clark Estes for Vox/Recode, from May 8:

This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the meatpacking industry hard, as some of the worst virus outbreaks in the United States have occurred in the tight, chilly confines of meat processing plants. Standing elbow-to-elbow, workers there — many of them immigrants, in already dangerous roles and making minimum wage — are facing some of the highest infection rates in the nation.

Sick workers mean meatpacking plants are shutting down, and these closures are contributing to a deeply disruptive breakdown in the meat supply chain. The vast majority of meat processing takes place in a small number of plants controlled by a handful of large corporations, namely Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings Inc., and Cargill Inc. More than a dozen of these companies’ beef, chicken, and pork plants closed in April, and despite an order by President Trump to reopen the plants, managers fear that doing so will put lives at risk so facilities continue to close. There have been nearly 5,000 reported cases of workers with Covid-19 at some 115 meat processing facilities nationwide. At least 20 meatpacking workers have died.

Here's a Politico story about how Alex Azar, Secretary for Health and Human Services, blamed the high incidence of coronavirus in meatpacking plants on workers' "home and social" conditions.  An earlier Buzzfeed story reported similar blame-shifting by Smithfield re: the Sioux Falls outbreak.

A Smithfield pork processing facility, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, population 154,000, was one of the earliest meatpacking outbreaks reported.  Reports on the outbreak there are here, here and here.  Don't miss NYT's "The Daily" Podcast interviewing a woman, born in South Sudan, who worked at the plant and was diagnosed with coronavirus after she was quarantined following a co-worker's diagnosis.  But one poignant aspect:  when she was put on quarantine, she was told she would be paid for 40/hours a week during that period.  But she could not get by on just 40/hours week wages because she'd been working and earning an average of $500/week in overtime.

A Cargill pork and beef processing plant in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, population 25,340, is the subject of this Bloomberg story and this NYTimes story from a few days ago.

A Tyson plant in southwest Georgia was featured in this post from early April.

Meat and poultry processing plants in Nebraska (Grand Island), Colorado, and on the DelMarVa peninsula have also been closed temporarily.

Today, The Oregonian covered an outbreak of coronavirus at a seafood packing plant in Astoria, Oregon, population 9477.

There are no doubt many more outbreaks I've not picked up on or am not highlighting here, such as in Dodge City, Kansas, the Texas Panhandle, and "deep East" Texas.  As with nursing homes and jails/prisons, these packinghouse outbreaks show up as dense spikes on charts and tables tracking where the coronavirus hotspots are.  They look particularly "oversized," if you will, when they occur in areas with small populations.

Post-script:  Big New York Times feature May 10 out of Black Hawk County, Iowa, population 131,090, which includes Waterloo.  Here's the lede, which has the county sheriff playing a role I would not have expected, while Tyson Foods plays the villain part just as expected:

On April 10, Tony Thompson, the sheriff for Black Hawk County in Iowa, visited the giant Tyson Foods pork plant in Waterloo. What he saw, he said, “shook me to the core.”

Workers, many of them immigrants, were crowded elbow to elbow as they broke down hog carcasses zipping by on a conveyor belt. The few who had face coverings wore a motley assortment of bandannas, painters’ masks or even sleep masks stretched around their mouths. Some had masks hanging around their necks.

Sheriff Thompson and other local officials, including from the county health department, lobbied Tyson to close the plant, worried about a coronavirus outbreak. But Tyson was “less than cooperative,” said the sheriff, who supervises the county’s coronavirus response, and Iowa’s governor declined to shut the facility.

A week later, Tyson sent a text message to employees:

Waterloo Tyson is running.  Thank you team members! WE ARE PROUD OF YOU!

Please read for yourself the rest, reported by Ana Swanson, David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Postscript from ProPublica on June 12, by Michael Grabell, Claire Perlman and Bernice Yeung.  The headline is "Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking Companies Fought Health Agencies Over COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their Plants."