Originally published October 16th, 2016, on my previous blog.
I was frustrated with the lack of racial nuance that went into examining 45’s victory. The con man won a plurality of white folks in the nation. Yet our major media outlets were seeking to understand his rise without exploring what role race had in giving him electoral momentum.
Our blind spots regarding rural America are both accidental and incidental. Rural America is structured in a way where it has always been portrayed as white. I can forgive anyone who grew up on a diet of Westerns and other American myths. But the illusion is intentional. It obscures how the West really was pursued. These blind spots ignore Manifest Destiny. And it ignores the insidious force that southern Americans, in the 19th century, foisted upon American expansion- the spread and entrenchment of slavery.
Adam Server’s recent article in the Atlantic explicates a lot of the ideas I was trying to do in this essay. Support him and give it a read!
David Wong from Cracked took a shot at explaining the rural-urban divide in electoral politics. Republicans maintain a stronghold in flyover country. Democrats control the coasts, and generally control the cities of the states where there is a significant black population.
Wong is right about several things. There is a culture divide that causes myopic cultural views between rural and urban Americans. The economic decline of rural areas makes the suffering one sided; while effete urban diletantes can hold their views and a middle class job, the rugged people of Middle and Southern American are in dire straits as their jobs—based on factory, farming, and manufacturing work—disappears. Combine cultural divide with economic restlessness, and you have a firm recipe for a strong backlash against movements such as #blacklivesmatter. “Aren’t we suffering too,” asks rural America?
Wong is earnest and data-driven. He also makes a mistake. While he does make lip service of black people living in the small town he grew up, he neglects to clarify the context in which they lived. For the Dead and the Dying is not a political blog. I will choose to make it one, however, when doing so serves to clarify the context in which #blacklivesmatter operates in. A lot of what he gets wrong is evidenced in electoral data and the history of our nation. His political vision is of one where black people don’t have an impact on the historical development of rural areas.
The idea of “manifest destiny” first appears in the historical record in 1839 through writer James O’Sullivan. Americans began spreading westward, with slave owners bringing their human property alongside them. The Civil War ended their transport of human cargo. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which essentially provided government subsidies for people stealing the American West from the indigenous. Black people, as it has been throughout American history, were cut off from this pilfering. The current historical result is best expressed through data:
Despite the whitening of rural America, people of color have always lived there. A deep misunderstanding of segregation is that is a natural behavior. People, it goes, will see common skin color and band together. This belief is illogical. Segregation is an unnatural behavior. It is always the result of government policy, financial denial, and monstrous pilfering. In this nation, white supremacy has always influenced the decisions Americans had made regarding who their neighbors were.
So in regards to government policy, black folk saw a selective administration of justice in rural areas—a lack of representation in juries, chain gangs for minor offenses, and extrajudicial executions in the form of lynchings that local governments allowed to go without prosecution. People of color were denied the credit they needed to buy and support their own lands; Manifest Destiny was ultimately a white idea that fueled the movements of white families. And if the previously mentioned practices were not enough to keep blacks separated from whites, then naked stealing was used to complete the fence of segregation. Sharecropping was built on dishonest devaluation of black labor in order to enrich white pockets. Blacks also paid their taxes. In exchange, they were denied the right to vote and suffered from a lack of protection from the state they paid.
Rural America is shaped by white supremacy. I know that there is an African region encoded deep in my DNA. But the South is the only ancestral homeland I know. In a sense, a significant arc of my life has been me returning home. I am descended from the four million men and women held to bondage here on the eve of the Civil War. My forbearers, upon earning freedom, worked—without reparation—to drink from this planet the sweetness of their labor. And I am the son of a woman whose parents fled their homeland to avoid having their work garnished by white people who used their sweat to live in political and economic calm.
The pain rural America is feeling is real. Given that rural towns were dependent on factories and mills, the closing of these jobs mean real economic suffering. But we must be wary of writers like Wong, who focus on one set of colors—red and blue—to explain American politics and rural life. We are now witnessing the rise of a madman who, in his slouching toward Bethlehem, has animated the white supremacist core of rural life in America. An America that was integrated beyond the point of tokenism (Wong writes “I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they passed” to explain the difference between his blacks and the ones rural America fears) would be better able to resist the con artist from New York.
Instead, we are left with two voices of different colors. White voices, amplified by rage at their loss of inheritance—the jobs of their mothers and fathers. And black voices, rendered invisible in rural towns like Helena, making an increasingly detailed argument for reparations.