Slate--Here Comes the Hillbilly, Again: What Honey Boo Boo really says about American culture.
A concise article that touches on the classism of the hillbilly stereotype and its history as a source of middle class American entertainment.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/08/here_comes_honey_boo_boo_and_the_history_of_the_hillbilly_in_america_.html
"The hillbilly figure allows middle-class white people to offload the venality and sin of the nation onto some other constituency, people who live somewhere—anywhere—else. The hillbilly’s backwardness highlights the progress more upstanding Americans in the cities or the suburbs have made. These fools haven’t crawled out of the muck, the story goes, because they don’t want to."
"This idea that the hillbilly’s poverty is a choice allows more upscale Americans to feel comfortable while laughing at the antics before them. It also pushes some people to embrace the stereotype as a badge of honor."
(snip)
"And hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of “that kind” of person. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “It is comforting to think of racism as species of misanthropy, or akin to child molestation, thus exonerating all those who bear no real hatred in their heart. It’s much more troubling to think of it as it’s always been—a means of political organization and power distribution.”
(more at link)
What this article does not do is point out the ways that contempt for the Southern poor has allowed their oppression and exploitation, a longstanding historical phenomenon that is most undeniable in the Appalachian coalfields, but by no means unique to that area.
I'll repeat: images like this one:
Or this one:
Or this one:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Nai6j0Wb_4c/SmTasoRa3EI/AAAAAAAAAWo/UcCYTzrdRsw/s400/Hillbilly%2Bbrothers.bmp
...(all of which I have seen on this and other progressive websites), serve no purpose except to define a group of people as subhuman and contemptible, by virtue of the very markers of their marginalization--poverty, substandard housing, poor education, lack of access to healthcare, few economic opportunities--while ignoring the historic orchestrations of business and government leaders to maintain this level of ignorance and destitution.
Disgust for "hillbillies" allows the middle and upper class to point to a contemptible "other," responsible for the racist, sexist, and regressive nature of our country's political order, despite the actual powerlessness of the people to whom such contempt is directed. To justify such classism through the comfortable assumption that people who look like this and live like this must deserve their fate because they "vote against their own interests" only extends the stereotype further. "Hillbillies"--generally defined as the poor whites of the South, especially the mountain south--are as diverse in their political and religious beliefs as any other social group.
And lest you think objection to these stereotypes is just over-zealous political correctness, addressing a crime for which there are no victims, I will point to the ways that the historic perception of Appalachian peoples and cultures is destroying lives, communities, and ecosystems today. The image below is of Judy Bonds, a native Wests Virginian, the daughter of two generations of coal miners, who turned into one of the fiercest activists against mountain-top removal mining after the stream that ran through the property her family had lived in for eight generations, where her grandchildren played, became choked with dead fish, and blackened with waste from a Massey Energy mine.
To see and hear Judy was to see and hear the very kind of person targeted and identified by the images and TV shows above as a subject of ridicule and contempt. A West Virginian ex-waitress was hardly a figure to be taken seriously, and outside of the anti-MTR movement, Judy was virtually unknown despite her tireless efforts and her boundless wisdom. And when she died of brain cancer in January of 2011 , like so many others who live in the coalfields (rates of cancer, like those of poverty, are particularly high in the towns and counties where MTR is practiced), almost nobody outside the movement, and perhaps a few relieved coal company CEO's, noticed or cared. The nearly 150-year exploitation of her region, and the poisoning and blasting of a group of people many in America view as disposable, continues.
= new reply since forum marked as read
term originated) and I say "Pennsyl-tucky," but it's not because I think Pennsylvanians are hillbillies. It's because of the state's make-up. You have two, modern cities on either end of the state and lots of rural farmland in between.
I never thought of "Pennsyl-tucky" as a derision.
In all honesty I know that I can paint a certain picture about this issue and about the kinds of people that live here. A lot of people in the mountains and coalfields would probably disagree with the way I see things, both historically and at present. But the point for me is that I know so many people who are from this area, who love this area, and who are both hurt and misrepresented by some of the broad brushes with which it gets painted (and I count myself among them), that I feel compelled to present their side of things.
