Part of this diary was originally published on June 9 at West Virginia Blue.
My connecting train was late tonight. It was hot as hell and I struck up a conversation with three young men, two black, one white, at the station about the heat and the lateness of the train. When we boarded, someone warned us the next car down didn’t have air conditioning working so I went up to the second deck and all the way to the end seat where I could stretch out. The other three followed me up and I had the end seat facing them as they sat sideways.
The man sitting closest to me, an African American in his 20s, was muscular with a tattoo of a flaming skull on his left bicep with “Protect Me From Evil” written around it (the skull not the bicep). He pulled out a book, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father. His friends also began reading their books too though I could not see the titles.
We all four get on the train home at the same stop and then catch the connecting express train home (express – there’s irony on days like today). So I knew they were going into West Virginia too.
I knew he was talkative from our conversation at the train station so I didn’t think he’d mind me interrupting him. I asked him if he liked the book.
He told me he did and what an amazing life Obama has led. I asked him if he voted for him in the primary and he laughed and said he did. “There weren’t enough of us,” he said. I laughed too and told him I had as well.
We talked some more. He and his friends work at the same company. He delivers copiers and does maintenance on them. Since I had argued with people throughout the day on Daily Kos about racism in West Virginia, I asked him what his experience had been. He had moved out here from Washington, D.C., where he said reverse racism is the norm where people in some neighborhoods get angry if a white person walks down the street. He said he was hassled at a store once where he ordered a sandwich at 10:30 at night and the clerk said they had stopped selling sandwiches for the evening but the person ahead of him had just ordered a steak and cheese. But he said he also was hassled more because of his race when he lived in the city.
He told me he thought some people in West Virginia were racist. I asked if they were more so than any place else and he thought about it and said he didn’t think so, that there were more uneducated people in West Virginia who saw racism more as part of their heritage, but there was racism all over.
We talked about the primary election and I told him I thought it had more to do with people being more familiar with Hillary Clinton and of associating her with the `90s when they might have done better economically. He said that sounded about right. He said there are plenty of people who would never vote for a black man just as there are many who would never vote for a woman either. Where he works in Maryland, he encounters people he suspects are racist, but they’re better educated and don’t reveal it because they know it’s not good business, he said. But he said you could tell from the way they react. We then had a good discussion on classism and racism and how the two entwine there and in West Virginia, an adopted state for both of us.
I told him it bothered me that West Virginia is constantly portrayed as a backward, redneck state. He said it bothers him too, but he’s used to it because he grew up in D.C., where people have a very negative view of the city and how to this day people bring up Mayor Marion Barry’s crack arrest and people would say he must have crack on him since he’s from D.C. But he said he’s come to like many rednecks. He said there are a lot of rednecks in West Virginia, but many of them aren’t racist. He said they’re just redneck in their lifestyle because it’s their heritage or because they lack social skills or education.
He then said something that surprised me. He said the racists in West Virginia are very polite. They were raised with bigotry, but they also were raised with good manners and while that seemed contradictory to me he said it isn’t. They might not like black people, but if you treat them with respect, he said, they’ll treat you with respect. If you needed help, they’d go out of their way to give it, but they wouldn’t shake a black person’s hand or have dinner with him.
Our conversation went on for a while. I never got around to asking how he could tell someone is racist if they act polite, but it’s probably something intuitive which is really deduction at a subconscious level.
I would have liked to have talked to him about whether he had volunteered for the campaign, but as we shook hands as he departed at Duffields he’d see me tomorrow.
I broke out my laptop and began to write down the conversation while it was fresh and before my stop at the end of the line.
I’ve been called naive for defending Appalachia. Despite claims by some to the contrary, I’ve never denied racism exists here. I’ve encountered. it. But I’ve encountered it just as much in the regions outside of Appalachia where I’ve lived.
When I dated an African American woman in Ohio in 1983, I walked into a Denny’s with her late at night. Every eye turned towards us and every conversation stopped. All that was missing was the sound of a needle scratching across the turntable. I’ve been to counter demonstrations at KKK crossburnings in Maryland and Pennsylvania and a NeoNazi/Klan rally in Harpers Ferry. I’ve seen racism and done my best to counter it. But the truth is those who express bigotry towards any group based off preconceived, negative stereotypes exist everywhere.
The Washington Post today had a story on race and Obama based off a national poll that shows what I’ve always believed and said.
Despite claims by many in the mainstream media and some front page bloggers at Daily Kos about Obama’s so-called “Appalachia problem,” the poll shows what I’ve said all along:
As Sen. Barack Obama opens his campaign as the first African American on a major party presidential ticket, nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
In West Virginia 21 percent of the voters in the Democratic primary said race was a factor in their decision, including a significant number of white voters who picked Obama.
About a fifth of whites said a candidate’s race is important in determining their vote, but Obama does no worse among those who said so than among those who called it a small factor or no factor.
Nor are whites who said they have at least some feelings of racial prejudice more or less apt to support Obama than those who profess no such feelings.
Putting several measures together into a “racial sensitivity index” reveals that these attitudes have a significant impact on vote preferences, independent of partisan identification. Combining answers to questions about racist feelings, perceptions of discrimination and whether the respondent has a close personal friend of another race into a three-part scale shows the importance of underlying racial attitudes.
Whites in the top sensitivity group broke for Obama by nearly 20 percentage points, while those in the lowest of the three categories went for McCain by almost 2 to 1.
A similar pattern holds among Democrats. Obama scores more than 20 points better among nonblack Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents in the “high” group than he does among those in the “low” group.
Obama has some convincing to do among the 29 percent of whites who fall into the scale’s lowest category. (Twenty-one percent were in the top grouping, 50 percent in the middle.) Almost six in 10 whites in the low-sensitivity group see him as a risky choice, and a similar percentage said they know little or nothing about where he stands on specific issues. Nearly half do not think his candidacy will alter race relations in the country; 20 percent think it will probably make race relations worse.
I wasn’t surprised by this.
Quite a few experts on race and politics outside of Daily Kos expressed similar thoughts:
Al Cross, of The Rural Blog of the Institute of Rural Journalism and Community Issues and columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal:
Journalists from around the world continue to write about Barack Obama’s “Appalachian problem,” based on his single-digit percentages in some Central Appalachian counties and exit polls showing that more than a fifth of white Democratic voters in Kentucky and West Virginia said race was important to their vote and more than four-fifths of those voters supported Clinton.
…Such stories imply that race was the main reason Obama lost the two main states of Central Appalachia. They ignore the fact that he made only one campaign stop in each of them, that Hillary Clinton’s lunch-bucket speeches spoke more to local needs than Obama’s high-flown rhetoric, and that the Clintons had strong followings in both states while Obama was not well known. As I said in my fortnightly column in The Courier-Journal yesterday, if Obama asked one of the black mayors of overwhelmingly white towns in Kentucky, “They might tell him that when folks know you, they’re willing to vote for you. When you’re a silhouette or a cartoon, they’re not even listening.”
Prof. Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, expert on racial politics in
The Guardian:
The difficult truth is that Appalachia is unusual mostly because many people here are willing to openly talk about what some of their fellow citizens are secretly thinking. In exit polls of the recent primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia, one in five Democrats confessed to pollsters that race was a factor in their voting choice. ‘West Virginia and Kentucky were just more honest than other parts of the country. A lot of other people know it’s not socially acceptable to mention that sort of thing,’ said Professor Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and expert on racial politics.
Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the Century Foundation, the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institution, author of “Why the White Working Class Still Matters” and coauthor of “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class.”:
Salon: So what does it mean then, when a white voter tells a pollster that race was “important” in choosing one candidate over another? How many answers are contained in that answer?
Teixeira: I think if we clarify what the question actually was it helps clarify how much it might mean. The question was, was it one of several factors, the most important factor or not a factor, right? The larger group was the people who said it was one of several important factors and basically they lumped the most important factor folks in with the several important factors, so that can be a little deceptive. So what does it mean when somebody says it’s one of several factors they considered? Does that mean they otherwise would have voted for Obama but they’re racist [and] they voted for Hillary? I think there are a lot more benign interpretations and positive answers to that question. It’s certainly the case that whites who responded who said it was one of several factors were likely to favor Hillary over Obama, but I think you have to be careful about the interpretation you make about that relationship.
…a lot of it’s cultural overlay on the race issue and in fact, people tend to label anything that’s correlated with race about race where it actually could be about lots of other and broader things. And in particular the Democratic Party has a sort of image in certain areas of the country among certain voters, particularly downscale voters, that’s somewhat unfavorable. There’s a certain cultural distance there, a sense of an elitism in the national party that Obama probably connects to in their minds. And they felt that Hillary connected less clearly to that. So is that race or is it culture or is it both?
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University historian, contributing editor at the New Republic, author of “The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008.”:
At some level, this all becomes sheer speculation. We don’t have individual voters saying why they voted this way particularly, it’s all aggregates, and you have to try to put it together. But I do think that to the extent that the media line about Clinton’s racist voter support has tended to be, at least among the pundits that I’ve read, concentrating on, particularly in the Rust Belt states, and particularly among, there are euphemisms for it, low-information voters, we all know what that means. The data don’t support that contention. That’s all. And why upper-middle class voters would suddenly be turned to Hillary, I don’t know. It could be any number of things, but I think it’s sheer speculation to say it’s based on Jeremiah Wright or racism or anything else.
…Appalachia is the exception. Because they’re voting for lunch-bucket issues. They always have. And to a certain extent for national security but that’s not the issue here in this primary. They went for Hillary not for the racial issues, they went for here for the reasons they said they did.
I think it’s a question of perception. I think the perception is that, this is actually holding this Sirota theory intact, you can hold that intact, but you can’t then assume that all the whites in Appalachia are Southern racists. Which some people have assumed.
…But I don’t think that it’s driving it. There’s no empirical evidence that it’s driving it, that’s for sure. Whereas, West Virginia has, going back to the New Deal, probably going back to the Civil War, when it became West Virginia … This is the least racist part of the South. But it was historically rather poor, when mining got going — I won’t give you a lecture on American history. But this is the part of the South that has been least driven by race among white voters, rather than the most.
Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies:
The legions of pseudonym-laden online posters who follow in political punditry’s wake are less restrained in describing the shortcomings of Sen. Clinton’s Appalachian supporters. They suggest it has to do with her voters being racist, toothless, shoeless, and prone to marrying their cousins. In short, they characterize these “special” Democrats in much the same terms they used in quieter times to describe Republicans.
… When the country needs iconic war heroes like Alvin York or Jessica Lynch, mountaineers fill the bill. If, periodically, this rich nation needs people to pity, poverty-stricken hillbillies make excellent poster children. And if backers of the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee need to explain why their preferred candidate is not connecting with downscale, rural voters — a demographic that was once key to Democratic electoral success — Appalachia can again answer the call. Obama supporters and members of the media can place the blame for his poor fortunes not on the candidate or his message, but on the moral failings of those benighted mountain people.However, the unnerving truth for the erstwhile party of Jefferson may be that Appalachia, for all its legend and lore, is not that different politically from the rest of the small-town and rural parts of the country where 60 million of us live.
…Yet there is plenty in the numbers to give Obama heart, starting with the 9-point deficit that he and Kerry have in common five months out from the general election. When Kerry was down 9 in rural counties, he had a commanding lead nationally….
Surprisingly, Obama has already achieved the same standing in the polls that Kerry enjoyed when things were going well. And for Obama, this comes after weeks of relentless news coverage of his ex-preacher and after the senator’s own costly “those people” moment when he was caught at a private fundraiser using broad stereotypes to characterize small-town and rural voters. (They are bitter. They cling.)
What our polling also shows is that rural communities are experiencing measurable economic distress, especially with the out-of-control price of fuel. Rural voters express concern over the mounting cost of healthcare and of the Iraq war. They are also measurably displeased with the country’s direction. On the issues, there is clearly prime territory for Obama to seize….
How Obama fares in rural America may, in the end, have to do with whether he shows up. In politics not showing up and losing are kissing cousins. Obama made three visits to West Virginia. In Kentucky, he limited himself to appearances in the state’s two biggest cities, Louisville and Lexington. He didn’t come to my part of the state, or try to make any friends in rural areas.
Prof. Ron Eller of the University of Kentucky, author of “Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: The Industrialization of the Appalachian South”:
Newhouse News correspondent Jonathan Tilove even suggested that Sen. Barack Obama has an “Appalachian problem” that goes beyond race to the peculiarities of “Appalachia’s whites and the Scots-Irish who settled there and forever branded its culture.”
Popular stereotypes and misreading of Appalachian history have long provided a convenient excuse to ignore Appalachia or to justify public and private attempts to bring the region into the cultural mainstream. Thus, the argument is offered that Clinton’s appeal in Appalachia should not be taken too seriously since mountain voters represent those “other whites” whose heritage has led them to be suspicious, pugnacious and a little less civilized than the Anglo-Puritan whites of the Northeast.
Sen. Barack Obama could not possibly succeed among these highly individualistic, uneducated and unrefined mountain whites whose ancestors resisted slavery and Southern nationalism during the Civil War. This independent spirit, suggest the pundits, will lead the hillbillies to vote for Scotch-Irish Appalachian John McCain, born in Appalachian Mississippi.
Such characterizations of Appalachia not only obscure the historical diversity of the region and project a static view of human culture but also ignore most of the recent scholarship on Appalachia that contradicts the idea of Appalachian “otherness” and attributes its history and economic problems to political struggles that have shaped the rest of the nation.
Far from being the repository of Scotch-Irish culture, ignorance born of geographic isolation or backwardness nurtured by anti-modernism, contemporary Appalachia is a much more diverse and historically complex place….
For blue-collar voters in Appalachia, economic concerns, not Appalachian identity, shaped their decisions at the polls. Job insecurity, rising food and gas prices, and uncertain access to health care and education turned Appalachian voters toward the more working-class message of Hillary Clinton, especially among women who occupy the center of the modern mountain economy. Perhaps because of the race issue, Obama conceded West Virginia to Clinton, who was able to use the local Democratic political machinery to her advantage.
Jeff Biggers, of Huffington Post:
How the media loves its hillbillies.
Makes me wanna holler: The hand-wringing aftermath of the recent presidential primaries in Appalachia — from western Pennsylvania, North Carolina, West Virginia and Kentucky — says more about the media’s prejudice and misperception of the Mountain South than any insights into the voting ranks and their racism or religious narrowness….Take hillbillies, on the other hand. Dating back to the 1850s, when George W. Harris created the character of Sut Lovingood, the “durn’d fool” with his “brains onhook’d” from eastern Tennessee for a New York newspaper, the media has obsessed over hillbillies, as if they have cornered the market on provincialism or racism in America. From bloggers on the liberal Daily Kos to untold television interviews, this same obsession has reared its ugly head in one commentary after another, blinding the writers from any historical truths about Appalachia.
…In West Virginia (and Kentucky), on the other hand, disregarding the fact that the Clintons have had a several decades-long relationship with southern Democrats in West Virginia, that Bill Clinton’s folksy southern accent still goes down among the aging electorate like molasses, that Sen. Barack Obama ran a poor operation and did very little campaigning in the state and mainly invoked his Illinois coal state credentials in an anachronistic pitch for votes, the media preferred to dwell on the region’s perceived legacy of backwardness. In truth, Obama blew it in Appalachia; Hillary reaped the rewards of the Clinton legacy.
Still, most reporters, exclusively interviewing older voters, went out of their way to find the most outrageous examples to confirm their hillbilly-biased pronouncements.
Del Ali, pollster, Research 2000:
Obama should listen to that point of view, rather than accept the conventional wisdom that he’ll never get support in rural, white America, said professional pollster Del Ali of Research 2000 in Maryland. “It would be smart of him to visit, to go to Appalachia and say, ‘What I’m offering is closer to your interests … you’ve got nothing in common with trickle-down economics or oil companies; I care about you,'” Ali said. “I’m surprised he didn’t do more of that before the primary.”
MANCHIN: Well, you hear this, and I have heard this from West Virginia and Kentucky and these types states which we call Appalachia, but, you know, which we had a story in the paper today, which was this really something that a young African-American female staffer of Obama’s was working in West Virginia and she was concerned because she didn’t know, just what she’d heard. And her car broke down, and … not only that help her fix the car, the family lent their car for her to continue on her campaigning. They got to know each other.
…
HEMMER: You know, as you talk about that, if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, can he win in your state in November, governor?
MANCHIN: I truly believe he can. I can tell you, the people in West Virginia are totally committed to change. We have to change the direction of this country for this –
HEMMER: What does it mean when Hillary Clinton wipes him out by 41 points two weeks ago?
MANCHIN: Well, I mean, listen, first of all, Bill Clinton is a very, very popular ex-president in West Virginia, who is still beloved as she is very popular, and she – the whole family worked extremely hard here. It’s just campaigning that paid off, it was pressing the flesh, you know, and face to face.
… He spent quite a bit of money, but they enjoyed the time and also the relationship they’ve had with the Clintons. It had nothing to do with race. And people keep talking about that. It’s just so wrong.
So why do so many West Virginians also describe the state as being more backwards than others? Because that’s one of the dangers of stereotyping any group.
You can find people in any minority group who have bought into the stereotypes about their people. You see it among some in the African American communities, in the Chinese communities, etc., so why should some of those from Appalachia be any different?
I was glad to have the frank talk on race with my new train friends. I’m going to invite him and the others to the next Drinking Liberally in Martinsburg. (Second Friday of each month at the Peking across the street from the Berkeley County Democratic headquarters. 8-10 p.m.)
The occasional late train can do a world of good.
